complex (or “Big Diet”) to the military industrial complex, Big Pharma, Big Oil, or Big Tobacco. These are all made up of powerful companies who tend to care way more about profit than anyone’s well-being, safety, or the future of the planet, and who have the resources to sway both public opinion and policies that benefit their own interests. In her book Dispensing with the Truth, Alicia Mundy calls it “Obesity, Inc.” and talks about the million-dollar funding that Weight Watchers and other groups contributed to Shape Up America!, an organization that was part of a strategy to turn obesity into a disease (!!!) so it could be “treated” by the pharmaceutical, diet, and medical industries. That’s one reason why I keep putting “obesity” in quotes. It was created by lobbyists.
Our cultural weight bias is so deeply entrenched that even the scientific community isn’t immune to it. Bias has the ability to skew the way people interpret and share data; it’s called publication bias. Results can be marginalized by the scientific establishment, or even by the researchers themselves, because they don’t fit with what is considered to be the truth at the time.22 Scientists’ reputations are at stake when they publish data, and scientists who find results that don’t fit with current beliefs have been frozen out of positions, funding, or committees.
Not only that, but most of the studies on weight and obesity that we hear about are ones that are funded by these pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies. Even ones touted by doctors and the government are funded by Big Diet. And when the results don’t tell the companies what they want to hear, the companies just ignore the studies altogether.
Drug companies also use tens of millions of dollars to lobby for the approval of drugs that have previously not been approved (because they are dangerous or simply don’t work). Drug companies also gave lots of money to medical groups and doctors so they would encourage their patients to use diet drugs.23 In the UK, the National Obesity Forum was partially sponsored by a number of pharmaceutical companies that just happened to manufacture the very drugs that the doctors were suggesting to combat the “obesity epidemic.”24 This is a huge conflict of interest, but this is a consistent phenomenon with big businesses—Big Diet is no exception.
Basically . . . Big Diet is not on your side. It never has been. And not only that, it’s all as corrupt as the oil companies back in the 1950s paying off scientists to claim that lead gas wasn’t bad for us (hellooooo lead poisoning!), and those cigarette ads kindly teaching us that most doctors smoked Camels.
I’m not sharing this information to depress you—I want to empower you. In order to break free from our fucked-up relationship to food and our bodies, we need to start seeing through the bullshit fed to us. We need to start being our own advocates, in the doctor’s office and when people start making hyped-up claims about weight loss and health. Anyone who tries to heal their eating without dealing with the elephant in the room—our own weight stigma against ourselves—will not be able to find real freedom and intuition with food. It’s all too connected.
Let’s also talk about the most important and controversial F-word in this book: fat. I am going to be using the word fat, and I want to explain why. It has become such a loaded word because we’ve believed that being fat is one of the worst things that we could be. We assume that using the word fat is automatically an insult, because people have used it as an insult for such a long time. In the 1800s, even before people had assumptions about fat people’s health, fat people were seen as “uncivilized,” but were also thought to be healthier 25 (probably because many of them were).
These days, one of the reasons that people think being fat has remained an “acceptable” open prejudice is because we think that people’s weight is fully their own fault—that their weight means something about who they are as a person, and that therefore we get to pass judgment and target them, so we feel better about our own miserable little lives.
Hopefully it goes without saying that whether people’s weight is in their control or not, treating a human being poorly because of how they look, or how we perceive their health to be, is cruel. It’s never been okay and it never will be, misinformation or not. Fat people are subjected to constant judgment and scrutiny, they get dismissed by doctors, they are passed over for jobs and used as the punch line of jokes. And we all hope that if we can just work really, really hard not to be fat, then we can avoid the misery we put them through. We can avoid being the punch line of jokes, or being called a fat bitch.
Our relationship with weight, and our deep fear of becoming fat ourselves, is one of the biggest causes of our dysfunction with food. Neutralizing the word fat, as well as the actual body type, is a really essential step in healing your relationship to food. No matter what we weigh, our fear of being fat is fucking with us all.
There are lots of fat people who are reclaiming the word fat for themselves—and unlike words like curvy and chubby, the word fat isn’t a euphemism. The word fat is allowed to be neutral. That doesn’t mean that every fat person wants to be called fat, especially since many people still use the word as an insult, but there is a world where people are self-identifying as fat and trying to take away the stigma of the word and the body type itself.
Words like obese and overweight are judgmental, medicalized words that were basically made up by Big Diet for profit. So unless I’m referring to studies that use BMI directly, I won’t use those terms either, and if I do, they’ll be in quotes.
All of this being said, I am not fat and I cannot speak for fat people. I recommend you also listen to what fat people have to say about their experiences. But for now, I am going to be using the word fat in this book. To paraphrase Hermione Granger, fear of a word just increases fear of the thing itself. I think that applies here.
Have you ever noticed how fad diets can become cultish? It took me a long time to see the parallel, because I was in the cult, and cult members never think they are part of a cult.
Whether you consider yourself religious or not, looking at the parallel between diets and religions, and the societal roles they play, can be very illuminating. For better or worse, depending on your outlook, we are generally a more secular culture than we used to be, and in a way, dieting is filling a role similar to the one that religions used to fill. For many of us, dieting has become our new religion, and food and weight have become our morality.
Looking at the positive side of religion, it offers community, structure, ritual, and an attempt at spreading kindness, love, spirituality, healing, acceptance, and charity.
On the dark side, religions have historically taken advantage of shame and dogma, and ignited our “fear of the other” and people who are different from us. People start feeling like they know the one true way. They have figured it out. OUR way is right, THEIR way is wrong. We need to convert the heathens who have yet to see the light and teach them the error of their ways.
It is the kind of moral superiority that we use to try and make ourselves feel temporarily safe. And through the ages, so many acts in the name of religion have been used as an outlet for the darkest parts of humanity. Witch burning. Holy wars. Refusing to make cakes for people whose personal lives you don’t agree with.
So how is this like dieting? Diets seem to offer health, structure, purity, safety, nourishment, nutrition, sometimes environmental responsibility, and—we all hope—a better life.
But diets feed into the exact same human fear that causes holy wars: I know the way. WE know the way, and you don’t. We are doing this right, and you are doing this wrong. We are following the moral and right way to live. This way of living will keep me safe and on the path of righteousness. I need you to hear the good word of coconut oil and follow my coconut oil path.
I don’t eat grains because