Transcript
Use with ChatGPT / Claude Auto-scroll A
The hosts open the episode, introduce Aubrey Gordon's new book, and explain that they will focus on a few myths not already covered on the show. They frame the book as a concise, research-based resource for readers and listeners.
am I taking us in are you taking us in I'm taking us in because it's your it's your book here we go that's my it's my tagline uh welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that doesn't talk about mythswhen we talk about fat okay I'm trying to blend your first book and your second book my two I don't know if I got mouthfuls of titles19 when we myth about fat I'm Aubrey Gordon I'm Michael Hobbs if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com maintenance phase you can also subscribe on Apple podcasts if that's easier for youand you prefer you should also listen to Mike's new show if books could kill and today Michael we are talking about a book that I wrote yeah usually when you say that about my little podcast I'm like andyou should pre-order aubry's book but we're approaching the stage where you can just like order order aubry's book yeah we're releasing this a week before it comes out into the world so if you uh are so inclined you
can pre-order it for folks who are unfamiliar pre-orders matter a great deal to the success of a given book so if you're looking forward to a book I would strongly recommend pre-ordering it just in general you guys ifaubry's on the New York Times bestseller list she gets to put that in her LinkedIn bio for the rest of her life so I'm acutely aware that poor Aubry has spent the last month doing press for the bookcast every question about it like 300 times and she's been telling me how sick she is of answering all the same questions and giving the same Spiel so I'm gonna try really hard like not to pitch you anylike softball questions that you've answered a billion times but I will say I spent the Christmas holiday reading Aubrey's book and really enjoying it actually I say actually as if I was like surprised but like no of course
it's like wow her book is actually pretty good and this lady actually knows how to string together a sentence but it's just a really good primer of a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the showit's a great overview of sort of where we are on this issue it's obviously extremely well written extremely well researched people have this idea that it's like you're just gonna have to feel guilty when you read books likethis but it's actually like super fun to read super easy great airplane read I don't mean that in a mean way I was gonna say a future topic on if books could kill given the rest of my careerI do not mean that meanly I think on this episode we're not going to go through the entire book because a lot of it is stuff that you've covered on the show before there's a chapter about why the
BMI sucks and there's a chapter about why calories and calories out sucks and various other things that we've already covered in the show so for this episode we pulled out a couple of the myths that we kind ofhaven't covered on the show to like dig deeper into them yeah absolutely and I will say I think that you know a bunch of the sort of chapters in this book it's 20 short chapters are things that ourlisteners have requested of us a number of times right yes that people have said okay I know you made this whole like whatever three-hour Arc about the BMI and the Obesity epidemic but can you give me five pagesthat I can hand to my doctor yeah yeah yeah or can you give me you know like a little packet that I can give to my family to tell them why they need to lay off my little brother
about his size right this is all that this is the like short form here's the research here's what you need to know and here's sort of some ways to either fully debunk some of these myths or to addsome much needed nuance and complexity yeah and like history to them it's equivalent of like sending your dad a link in the group chat be like I don't have time to explain this to you Justin Bieber is bunkI'm done here's the BMI stuff it occurs to me that we haven't actually said the title of the book yet the title of the book is you just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat peopleyes it sure is you can pre-order it wherever you get books uh you can also find a compilation of Links at aubrygordon.net myths although considering it's your second book I'm livid that it wasn't called too fat Too Furious
They unpack the myth that fat people are emotionally damaged and eat their feelings, tracing its history through family beliefs, Weight Watchers, and the ACE study. The discussion emphasizes how trauma, anti-fatness, and individual experience are often flattened into a simplistic explanation for fatness.
so we have chosen a couple of the specific myths to pull out and unpack let's start with the emotional eating myth this is myth number nine fat people are emotionally damaged and cope by eating their feelings yeah thistends to be one of the explanations for fatness that is like one step better than like they're all lazy and that's why they're fat right it's like no no no it's not that they're lazy it's that like somethingup happened in their past totally so it sort of sounds sympathetic yeah but it's like an inch below the surface it's like oh they're all like wretched creatures who are eating because they have to totally it seems quoteunquote better and nicer but what it is is pity right based on your appearance I can tell you're emotionally broken yeah yeah this one emotional eating was like a big one in my upbringing in the 80s and 90s
it was like a really sort of prevailing model it has weirdly come back it's a big deal on Tick Tock these days sort of the idea that fat is quote unquote like trauma trapped in your body and youneed to release the trauma I'm curious about for you this like emotionally eating stuff have you heard this before where have you heard it the most are there sort of like common sources of it in your life actuallythe main source of it is my mom one of her main struggles was emotional eating so for me that actually became like one of the templates that I used to understand fatness when I was younger and like mymom was the only person who I had ever heard talk about fatness so I was like okay some people do this and I also I I've never been an emotional eater but I'm a board eater when there's nothing
else going on and there's something in the fridge like I will eat it whether I'm hungry or not and so the idea always sort of felt true to me that there's some connection between your mental state and youreating habits because I was using two people as uh as examples well this must be true an N of two yeah and they're not even the same thing but two people doing different things I mean I think you'retouching on something that feels really important here which is there are lots of reasons that people eat right sometimes you eat because you're hungry sometimes you eat because you're at a birthday party and there's cake and what youdo at a birthday party is you eat cake sometimes you're bored sometimes you're sad sometimes you want to feel connected to home if you're far away from home so you want to eat some comfort food that reminds you
of your home yeah there are lots of reasons to eat food and we have decided because we are so hung up on this idea of people not getting fat we have decided that only some of those reasons areokay but even the ones that are okay are like a little suspect even if you're really really hungry you should be really careful about what you eat and how much and blah blah blah right right I appreciate yousaying it's your mom as sort of a major source of it I feel like my mom and her friends are also a major source of it for me yeah and I think some of this stuff is a littlebit generational because one of the biggest Champions was the founder of Weight Watchers Gene neidetch who we've talked about on the show a little bit yeah and you have a great section your book about her too she essentially
said when she was a kid if she had a fight with one of her friends or if she couldn't go outside because it was raining or she didn't get invited to a birthday party or she was upset withsomeone in her family her mother gave her a piece of candy to make her feel better and she talked about that sort of growing into a broader set of behaviors like buying mallomars to eat in secret right toto eat sort of in private away from other people she was talking about that in the 60s and 70s which is long before any Eating Disorders were really in the diagnostic and statistical manual which is the sort oflike Manual of you know mental health disorders as determined by the American Psychiatric association right I was really surprised to learn that they were only added to the DSM in 1980.
yeah absolutely and binge eating disorder which I would say is like some of the behaviors she's describing yeah that sense of Shame around eating that sense of eating in secret all of that kind of stuff this was themost widely available framework at the time when Frameworks around Eating Disorders were not really present right there was another boost for this sort of framework around emotional eating in the medical world in the 1980s around the adverse childhoodexperiences study yeah I was going to ask you about this yeah yeah have we talked about the ace study the most detailed description of it I've ever read was in your book I have to explain it so basicallythere was a doctor named Vincent felidi who was working for Kaiser Permanente in San Diego in the 1980s he was running a weight loss clinic for Kaiser Permanente that clinic used what they called supplemented absolute fasting which is
basically just Octavia or optifast you know it's like one of those diets that is an extremely calorie restricted diet we're talking starting people on between 400 and 800 calories per day Jesus fat people who went to his Cliniclost a lot of weight in the short term but shocker the only stories that I was able to find from people who went to that clinic are stories of people who regained significant amounts of weight so at onepoint in the 80s this doctor famously ran into one of his patients and saw that she had regained a real considerable amount of weight in a very short period of time in a matter of months she had regainedquite a bit of weight and he sort of asked her what happened there's not a lot of detail on this conversation so when I read about it I'm like this is probably a terrible conversation yeah yeah your doctor
who was sort of in charge of your weight loss sees you and has some expression on his face or says something awful and then and then you've got to explain that like oh right I wasn't starving myself anymoreyeah yeah I started eating food like a human I was eating so I I with these programs I never know like what did you expect yeah to happen of course when somebody eats like one-fifth of what you needto live they lose weight and of course when they go back to eating normal amounts of food they return to their previous size I don't everyone is like oh it's just colors and calories out like oh it's thesecond law of motion or whatever yeah okay then what the did you think was gonna happen well so here's the interesting thing that feels like a pretty good obvious conclusion to me that did not feel that way to
Dr Fellini it's so weird to me he asked this patient sort of what happened as they were talking she said that A co-worker had expressed interest in sleeping with her and that really flipped her out she disclosed alsothat she had a long history of childhood sexual abuse for Dr felidi this was not evidence of like hey maybe my clinic is built on a foundation of sand right like maybe this lady doesn't need to lose weightmaybe losing weight is not the thing maybe that's not what we should focus on he took that as you know what actually I haven't taken trauma histories from my patients at my clinic so he went back to hisclinic and took trauma histories from all of the patients who were there at the time most of them had experienced major traumas and for 55 percent of them that included histories of childhood sexual abuse that prompted him to
start work on the adverse childhood experiences study it is one of the largest scale trauma studies in the United States to date and the core the sort of origin story of that study is it's because all these fatpeople couldn't lose weight and that's why we need to figure out what's going on with people's trauma I'm like boy oh boy oh boy wouldn't it be great if we found another road to giving a about what happenedto people right as kids yeah that has made them like have like a bunch of really tricky life experiences and has made things harder than it needs to be like would it be great if we could just careabout people for the sake of caring about them and not being like that person looks real fat how do we make them unfat oh I guess they have some emotional stuff right yeah yeah yeah but also this sort
of extremely anecdotal origin story becomes sort of a real bolster to this idea that fat people are fat because we are emotionally damaged right do you have a sense of what actually explains such a high percentage of thepatients had sexual abuse in their past here's my guess and this is genuinely a guess for folks who experience childhood abuse it is much easier to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with you that you need tofix in order to be accepted by other people and my guess is that that includes weight loss right whether or not trauma makes people fat I would argue there are lots of fat people for lots of reasons someof whom have experienced major life trauma some of who haven't just like thin people imagine yeah yeah right but to tell you the honest truth I don't know and I don't know that anybody does what's weird is that
like this this seems like a relatively easy thing to I guess debunk of just like you could do long like detailed qualitative surveys of fat people and thin people and then compare the percentages like it it it justseems like this explanation is like Galloping forward on like pretty thin data I think you're right that the data that this one is writing on is very thin and I think this is a case of the Michael Hobbscheckpoint question of like what do we not need evidence to believe right and we don't need a lot of evidence to believe this one because most of us are already pretty biased against fat people so if you saythat fat person is fat because there's something deeply wrong with them a lot of people are like yeah that checks out yeah there are also ways to complicate this one right like if we're talking about like the role
of trauma in fat people's experiences we got to be talking about the experiences of anti-fatness which is traumatic as hell right if you urgently need medical care and you try to seek it out and a doctor won't provideit to you or tells you to come back when you've lost weight that is a pretty traumatic experience family rejection on the basis of your body size starting from really young ages including forced dieting is traumatic as hellwe have heard from a number of listeners who at very young ages like five six seven their parents would Place padlocks on the refrigerator or cupboard doors so that they could not access food yeah that's abuse so theidea that there is some trauma outside of anti-fatness that needs tending to but we definitely don't need to talk about the trauma of anti-fatness is a place where we culturally really tip our hand right we don't really care
about the trauma part we care about the fatness part well there's also this this sort of weird instrumentalizing too because the idea is that like okay they're not fat because they're lazy they're fat because they're emotionally eating fineso what we need to do is we need to deal with the emotional eating and then they'll lose all the weight yeah but even when people change their eating habits they oftentimes don't lose that much weight right becausetheir bodies have this kind of higher set point so what happens then yeah totally like there are people that struggle with emotional eating and there are people that sort of get it under control and they don't become thinpeople and that's also fine right the core problem that this is seeking to solve is that there are too many fat people in the world so people who opt into this Frame as a world view right I'm not
going to take away from anyone their own diagnosis of their own relationship to food or to their own body or whatever if this resonates with you totally that's fine the trick is this has become our predominant way ofviewing fat people and I would say it is one of the most overtly judgmental myth addressed in this book right right it is the belief that you are fat that needs to be fixed and it's your own faultright right it's not just that your body is wrong it's also your brain and heart right it also doesn't actually do anything for people who are struggling with emotional eating I mean this is a framework that really resonatesfor some people right including my mom but also it's like applying it to every single fat person is just so reductive and like I'm just going to assume that you were abused as a child because of your size
right it's like oh it's so reductive and so gross and also like deeply invasive right deeply invasive if you're wrong it's garbage right and you're revealing a bunch of assumptions about that person if you're right it is somean it's also garbage right yeah and I think like look I think here this is a place where we get into like really tricky territory because there are people for whom this resonates and those are also people wholearn to see fat people as failed emotional eaters who didn't get it under control right right so like even for the people for whom it resonates it is worth interrogating where that comes from what it allows you tobelieve about yourself and what it allows you to believe about people who are fatter than you like this is what I honestly think my mom is like quite good at partly because she listens to the show she's like
I've struggled with emotional eating my entire life some other people haven't and like some people are fat because of medications and some people have been fat their whole lives and like totally some percentage of fat people do strugglewith emotional eating but like I have no idea what that percentage is don't go around assuming that about fat people totally but also I always try to affirm my mom's like explanation for herself just because it doesn't seemlike it's my place to like for sure take it away from her for sure I mean I think like listen what you're talking about is the kind of Behavioral stuff that I'm like that's really useful to check inwith yourself and go right this is my experience it's not other people's experience and reminding yourself of that frequently feels like a really helpful tool for this kind of stuff right the trick is most people take this position
and treat it as sacrosanct and therefore I think this means my behavior is unassailable because I know what's going on with me yeah that's a really good point to me that's like a big part of the take-home Pointhere is like for any of this stuff for a diet for a an exercise practice for an emotional framework for understanding this stuff reminding yourself in a really constant way that your own experience could be really different fromsomeone else's and you've got to create the space for them to speak from their own experience while you speak from yours is really important stuff and not doing the deeply human thing that most of us do most ofthe time which is assuming that the thing that we're doing and the thing that makes sense to us is at the center of other people's world too yeah it is funny to me that like one at least one
third of this show is us just reminding people that like what is happening with you and your body is not what is happening for other people and their bodies for sure well and also like there is an expectationthat fat people owe everyone else an explanation for why we are the size that we are oh yeah that's a really good point and if your explanation meets muster which it won't then I'll leave you alone right likethat's sort of the cultural script here and for thin folks when they're asked for an explanation of their body it's always what's your secret how did you do it yeah yeah God I don't know man it's a grimplace to live where even the people who think they're doing you a favor want you to explain why you look the way you do dude yeah okay I'm gonna move us on to I don't like gaining weight but
I don't treat fat people differently because it feels like we're already sort of there and then I'm gonna take us back to glorifying obesity to close on is that okay transition us do do a do a Deft transition
The conversation shifts to the claim, 'I don't like gaining weight but I don't treat fat people differently,' and examines how people misunderstand their own biases. They discuss research on body surveillance, social stigma, and the ways fat people are expected to justify their bodies.
leave that in the part where you don't do it get us get us there somehow so we've been talking about sort of this idea of emotional eating and the Frameworks that we use for ourselves and I think thereis sort of a Kingpin version of this there's like the mega version of this which is the phrase I don't like gaining weight but I don't treat fat people differently right is this a phrase that you've heard beforeI've mostly heard it from you this is like your biggest pet peeve I hate it I feel like so much of the show is like me subtweeting specific people and you sub tweeting specific people yeah yeah yeah yeahand I feel like this is one like this must be one that you have heard from actual people numerous times I have definitely had multiple friendships in my life where I realize part way through that I am actually
a project to the person that I'm talking to ah yeah dude people will try and slyly sneak in things like do you ever think about going to the gym um they oh are viewing me as like a fixer-upperlike I'm a house they can flip right and that makes them feel like a good person who's doing something good for a person right who they fundamentally see as like kind of wretched do you know what I meanlike a hard luck case almost all of the people who have been that person in my life would say with a great deal of certainty that they treat fat people no differently than thin people now I just feelsad like I want to give you a hug but City the part of this one that I really want to push on is the but I don't treat fat people differently Parts yeah yeah if you don't want to
be a fat person it's worth unpacking how much of that is socially determined right and how much of that is a result of how fat people are treated if you don't like gaining weight why if you say it'sbecause your clothes fit better what if people made clothes that fit you at a different size right yeah where you feel more accepted or you feel you're gonna have better Career Success why do you think a thinner personwould have better Career Success than a fat person right it's worth looking at the ways in which bias is baked into some of those assumptions as well but I'm not gonna get between you and your relationship to yourown body and your own size that's you stuff you get to manage it I do feel like I mean we live in a wildly fat phobic Society so the idea that somebody would be like you know whatever I'm
a corporate lawyer to be a corporate lawyer in America in 2022 I have to stay thin part of me feels like okay like that's true like the sort of the fundamental challenge of Living in America right now islike how do you live within a like super broken and unjust country like what do you do about it totally like I have had a number of people who have had weight loss surgery or gone through major dietswho have said I went to pick up my kid from school and other kids were making fun of him for having a fat mom and I'm not going to do that to my kid or my boss told methat he doesn't think I can physically do this job unless I prove to him that I can physically do that job and for him that means me being thinner yeah I'm gonna go do that thing right like now
at least we're talking about some kind of concrete external thing and you can go hey those kids shouldn't have been making fun of your kid for having a fat mom yeah like can I support you in this momentright like that calls for a different thing than just being like I'm just talking about me and I just don't like gaining weight and just leave me alone right right but listen the part of this that I wantto talk about is the I don't treat fat people differently part yeah because in my own experience with this stuff and also according to quite a bit of data most of us are bad judges of our own biasesmost of us want to think of ourselves as egalitarians as justice-minded as Fair people you know and the idea that we might be acting in a biased way feels like not only revisiting of that action right but it
feels like potentially an assault on our idea of who we are right like I wouldn't do that a bad person does that and I'm a good person good people don't have biases right yeah and what that means isany kind of feedback about this stuff then gets pushed through the filter of are you calling me a bad person right rather than you're giving me feedback on an action what can I take from that feedback and whatdo I want to do differently or not next time right well to me the weirdest thing about this is the confidence yeah like I host a podcast pretty substantially dedicated to this issue I do not go around tellingpeople like I don't treat fat people any differently that's not really for me to say I can say that I try I can say that I think about this issue a lot I can say that I talk to
my fat friends I check in but like part of living in a structurally unjust Society feels like it requires the acknowledgment that like yeah there's probably some weird toxic rattling around in my brain yeah and like walking aroundas if you know everyone in society is bad but not me just seems like the kind of attitude that is going to make you incapable of addressing that stuff when it does come up and there is some researchthat is like specific to this question right that seems worth digging into there's a 2014 study in the journal body image that looked at white women who participated in this practice that they call Body surveillance which is essentiallylike close monitoring of the appearance of your own body okay and what they found was that those white women who engaged in body surveillance who were hyper focused on the look of their own body who held anti-fat stereotypes
who held anti-fat beliefs experienced less body dissatisfaction in themselves they were literally looking at fat people and going I feel better because I'm not that fat so it's just like self-soothing by being around people bigger than you andbe like at least I'm not like her absolutely this is all coming from emotionally like a pretty similar Wellspring right of just like when I look at people who are fatter than me I feel better about myself andthe idea that you could then look at that person with such revulsion disgust maybe some pity and then treat them identically to a person who you view as being part of the beauty standard we're kidding ourselves yeah it'snot borne out by the data it's not borne out by what we know about people and how they work yeah and it's also highly unlikely because most of us treat fat people differently fat people get paid less for
the same jobs we don't get the same health care that then people get right like we aren't believed um in like very Baseline ways when we come forward with stories about you know sexual assault because the response isno one would want to sexually assault you yeah so when someone says Ah that's everybody else but not me right feels like really self-protective thinking to me rather than let's solve the problem of anti-fatness kind of thinking thisis one that we have to dig into because one of the main accusations of this show and of like fat activists writ large is this thing that always comes up that is like fat activists think it's fat phobicto work out they think it's fat phobic to lose weight this is something this is like one of the main arguments that is used to discredit people who are trying to build a better world for fat people this
one I have encountered way less than you have oh God I people will not shut the up about this to me but listen you you live on like reply guy Twitter
you're absolutely correct
from reply guys I'm like yeah yeah most of the fat activists that I know are deep Believers in body sovereignty right which is the idea that your own body is yours above all else and it is your decisionhow you want to interact with that body period so when someone says they all think it's fat phobic to lose weight that is Shadow Boxing with a made-up idea in their own brains right or more likely hearing athin person go I heard they think it's fat phobic to you know what I mean like it's like a game of telephone with no source code it's like totally Peak simulacra to copy with no master I think it'slike this this fear among members of the majority kind of like how people freak out about like word choice like you can't even say this anymore yeah instead of thinking about how acceptance would affect members of the minority
they think about how acceptance would affect members of the majority right and if we're nicer to fat people I'm not going to be able to go to the gym anymore we're gonna have to be meaner but also Ithink it's deeper than that like related but like I'm gonna take it like if we're getting in an elevator we're going down a level or two which is they are afraid that people will stop thinking of their bodiesas an accomplishment yeah yeah quite a bit of this body image research includes sort of this idea that thin people feel like they need space to like speak negatively about their own bodies and talk about how fat theyfeel and overwhelmingly in that research when fat people are included they overwhelmingly return to this one phrase which is if you're fat then what do you think of me right so I think it's also worth like thinking about
this stuff through that lens of like whether you mean to or not the social introduction of this set of conversations about how you're trying to make your body smaller at every turn sends a lot of messages to alot of people and that constitutes treating fat people differently do you remember like me and you have done a number of press interviews together where people will like almost explicitly ask us for permission to be like trying tolose weight it's fascinating we've done a number of interviews like this there's one in particular where afterwards I remember it with sort of chilling Clarity we were both like ah that felt weird it felt so bad and afterthe interview I just like put my head down on my desk yeah yeah and just like laid it there for a while and then I got the little like notification that you were calling and you were like what
the was that and I was like I don't know it was fascinating it was so rough but it comes up like a lot right yeah which is sort of this belief that if we're going to talk about theDignity of fat people someone's going to tell you at some point that your desire to lose weight is messed up and anti-fat and actually you can't do that anymore right because one of the first places that some folksbrain goes is like don't take my diet from me it's like you're gonna tell me I can't do CrossFit anymore totally I I will also say neither one of us gives any shits whatsoever whether you do crossword
They explore the internet accusation that fat people are 'glorifying obesity,' including Aubrey's own experience with public shaming and the vague meaning of the phrase. The hosts argue that these reactions are really about discomfort with visible fatness and the double standard that glorifies thinness.
retweet if you agree you hate that I know you hate that um should we talk a little bit about glorifying obesity yes the glory let's talk about the glory glorifying obesity is one of those things that shows uplargely in Internet comments right that's sort of where it lives the most in my own experience and there is one year where glorifying obesity had a real banner year and that was 2019.there were three big splashes on the internet all distinct from one another all of which sort of culminated in this big Crescendo of accusations of some fat person glorifying obesity yeah and it was usually for things like beingphotographed in a place right there was one of the examples in your book is is lizzo appearing on the Jumbotron at like a Lakers game or something yep she wasn't glorifying or promoting literally anything she she went to
sports she was glorifying and promoting the Lakers yeah but like listen this is also one that will be recognizable to any fat person with any social media presence right if you have ever posted a picture of yourself asa fat person eating a meal going to the beach working out wearing clothes liking the way that you look right there's a decent chance that either you have been accused of glorifying obesity or you're a strong candidate tobe accused of glorifying obesity right right usually a pretty incurious freaked out and angry place let me read your live Journal story okay this was this is something that you included in this chapter actually do you want todo it uh sure if you have the paragraph handy if you have the excerpt let me text it to you sure sure it's funny to be texting you a paragraph of yourself very weird territory as a fat person
I have repeatedly been accused of glorifying obesity even before my life as a minor public figure early on in my life on the internet I posted a picture of myself in a new bathing suit on live Journal Iwas 18 years old and had found a swimsuit I liked it had a halter with a sweetheart neckline and a short ruched skirt compared to my thinner Piers bikinis my one piece was conservative bordering on Dowdy but foronce I felt comfortable I took my photograph in the full length mirror in my dimly lit bathroom then posted it to live Journal my account was public not because of any desire for attention but because it did notoccur to me that a teenager with under a hundred followers would draw detractors but in the days that followed faceless commenters descended one described in detail their revulsion at having to see my thighs and upper arms another commented
scornfully about how a whale could think she looked cute but most elevated their complaints to social issues accusing me of glorifying obesity I was confused it was confusing I was a recent high school graduate writing regularly about mylife my crushes School my mental health the only people who reliably read what I wrote were close friends how could I be glorifying anything so first of all I need the live Journal archives I want to read yourfan fiction dude yes I want your thoughts I think it was like two days ago that I got I've had the same Gmail account since time immemorial okay my personal stuff and I got an email from live Journalthat was like it's your anniversary and it was there was like big multi-colored letters being like 20.Oh it's been adorable 20 years since you started your goddamn line journal what what happened to it after like I imagine this made you start like posting differently or just like it's like the first experience of realizing that
you're like public on this platform and that like the public is watching yeah I mean I just locked my account after that and oh really yeah I just I put it on private um and I think on liveJournal it's called friends only thank you it should have been friend zone like I don't I don't know how long it was before I posted another picture but it was a long time to me this is like thewhole thing where it's like what people are getting mad at they're they're mad at having to see a fat person who's not like apologizing to them for the way that they look but like people's brains don't let themrealize what's going on right they're like no no it doesn't bother me that somebody else looks away that I don't approve of it's like no no this is her motivation this is what she's trying to do or like
this is this is the impact that she's going to have on the world and the whole thing is basically just like reaching for any reason for you to justify your really gross emotional response yeah it's totally an emotionalresponse and it is an emotional response that gets elevated to a level of like this needs to be a societal concern and it elevates a picture of like a fat person at a pizza parlor into some level oflike political agenda right even if that fat person is not espousing any political agenda at all right right it's the fact of a photograph of a fat person who's not like inside a Weight Watchers meeting Center or runningaround a track and crying I guess right like I don't know what it also feels like really weird on a couple of fronts one nobody really defines at any point what it means to glorify obesity right it is
this total floating signifier that sounds really damning and people can just reach up into the ether and grab it and pull it down and apply it to whatever they want slap that on whatever they want glorifying something meanspublicly praising it right I would love if we publicly praised some fat people some more and I think there is this little like Rube Goldberg machine that kicks off in the brains of people who have this level ofdiscomfort which is if there are images of fat people not actively trying to lose weight or suffering in the world then people who are not currently fat will think it's okay to get fat and will start getting fatright and people who are fat will never get thin as a result of this one photograph on Instagram I guess the idea is that like the reason fatness became more prominent in the 1980s is that like there there
started to be photos of fat people yeah we horrified it too much Michael the 80s is when we got Dom DeLuise Bob Hoskins that's what did it this is also why I always feel a little bit weird aboutdebunking the how Health stuff on this podcast because it's so obvious that the health stuff is a cover for people's feelings right because even if it was 100 True every single fat person is unhealthy fine everyone regardless oftheir health status gets to post a photo on Instagram and be like I felt cute yeah every everyone gets to do that without people being ghouls in their mentions and also like listen then let's ask the underlying questionwhich is I'm sorry you think it's okay to treat people like garbage if you think they're not healthy right right you're just gonna go around bullying people with chronic illnesses and disability like that's your stance like it's okay
that I'm doing this because I think this person is unwell in some way like Jesus Christmas get a hold of yourself the funny thing is like the the best counter argument to this is all of the ways thatSociety does in fact glorify thinness yeah totally I mean listen this goes back to our like no one should be drawing any conclusions about anyone else's Health based on the way that they look yeah and no one shouldbe basing their treatment of strangers on their perception of that stranger's Health right period that includes people of all sizes that includes people of all abilities that includes like across the board I mean I think the other thingthat I would say about all of this is like spot the on about us glorifying thinness all the time we got an email from a listener at one point who was like I'm a very thin person I'm constantly
trying to gain fat and there is like not any real resource around that other than just like you know the extremely weird actor interviews that are like to gain weight for this role I just melted a pint ofice cream and chugged it or whatever right she should be going on Instagram and looking at photos of happy fat people because that just induces fatness in others you're fat now yeah Thermo thermonuclear just oh I'm fat againI've looked at two photos I put the heart and now I'm fat I mean I don't ever anymore say anything to people who make accusations about glorifying obesity because they're telling me who they are speaking of people who
The episode closes by dissecting a Piers Morgan segment attacking a plus-size model and the panel around her. They highlight his hypocrisy, the cruelty of the exchange, and the show's next planned topic before wrapping up.
are not worth our time we're gonna be spending time with what what a segue you have a section in your book about Piers Morgan I guess it was a music video that it includes a shot of a plussize model doing like plus size model things and Pierce Morgan melted down and then like had the model on his show where he like tried to grill her about how she's like destroying Society yeah so I saw thisat your book and then I did the thing that I should never do right I went on YouTube and I was like Pierce Morgan obesity no I like looked at all the videos we have done some cursed internetsearches on this show the cursedest Piers Morgan obesity might really take the cake but like he has covered this so many times and he keeps coming back to it like one of the videos is called do plus size
mannequins promote obesity oh it's about the Nike thing the most tedious just like obvious like no they don't what the are you talking about like fat people also wear clothes so of course there are fat mannequins they promoteclothes for people to buy that's what all mannequins do but I wanted to watch a clip together I watched the clip of him interrogating the plus size model lady which was just so egregious that like I didn't wantto watch it again yeah this is one that I think is like very telling about like how most of these conversations actually play out I'm just gonna describe what's happening on screen before we press play okay we're onthe set of good morning Britain is sort of in the background on their little like screen mini Jumbotron there is an image of Tess holiday uh who is a plus size model on the cover of Cosmopolitan and then
a panel of like plus-sized people here we go yeah and the uh and the caption is is it fine to be fat here's the full Chiron developing story is it fine to be fat question mark Dr Miriam stoppardcolon if you are overweight you are unhealthy yes Meryl Streep voice groundbreaking yeah uh I am paused and ready when you are and I just ask the question at Dr Miriam yes you may Susan these lovely women hereeven though Helen's already objected to the word obese but as Pierce points out obese is technically a category when you're judging BMI is the test holiday cover actually promoting something that is not a good idea or is itI think about accepting who you are and not constantly fighting yourself okay I'd just like to say at the beginning Susanna that I think every woman has the right to be proud of her body yes and her body
is her own business
I am bothered by things like the cover of Cosmo because I think it glorifies and glamorizes and I'm going to use the word obesity if if this woman tests holiday this model have been anorexic genuinely anorexia right andshe was on the cover of Cosmo what would you say about that so it's a really it's a really tricky issue there are still because I feel the same way about size zero when when Victoria Beckham has usedthem on the catwalk I've written scathing columns right a lot I think that is equally dangerous not about being okay just anti-300 people it's about people who are dangerously underweight or overweight being glamorous in terms of somebody beingnormalized or glamorized there is huge amounts of research that proves that feeling terrible about your weight means you're more likely to put on weight and emotionally eat people who feel okay about their bodies are more likes black do
you know what I deserve good nourishing food and a workout so actually if I don't really agree with that if there is
most people either get they hear something about their weight doctor tells them something about their weight well they look in the mirror and go enough I'm getting too fast
because I had bulimia after I lost all of my way so I've been at two I've been turned into the Spectrum I've been severely overweight and then to a point where I couldn't eat and I didn't have apositive frame of mind to be in that size okay you know just just one last question to go to me I don't agree that body shaming or making someone feel bad about it what is the most effective waythat people can lose weight tell me about your uh first of all bless this entire panel of people for putting up with this level of like personal insults to their faces dude right what world are we living inbut someone's like nope that didn't happen to you nope that's not your experience and also just like I don't know man we're coming right off of the holidays and boy oh boy the like Uncle you don't want to
talk to yeah energy that is just radiating from Piers Morgan in this clip is like staggering this is so clearly shot through with so much misogyny right I know right I'm going to talk over every I'm going toask a question let someone get four words into an answer and then talk over them I mean like yeah he's just a trash sister of a guy what is so striking to me about this clip and like the15 other abysmal clips about this that I watched from Pierce Morgan show is that he always does this totally disingenuous preface where he's like well I think everybody has a right to be proud of their bodies but andthen he does the sort of boilerplate fatness is bad thing and it's like if you actually believed that that's just the end of the sentence I think everybody has a right to be proud of their body that's why
I don't speculate about the health of someone who's like a middle name I don't even know someone whose health status I know nothing about but he's doing this thing where he he he doesn't want to accept the factthat he's being unkind he's being cruel and on top of that there are Baseline fact checking issues Happening Here Right like Piers is talking out of his ass about this idea that shame will motivate people to lose weightif you did any kind of fact checking on that statement you would find immediately that that has been fully debunked and disproven yeah it's just not true on top of that there is this absolutely egregious from peers andfrom this doctor both they both reference the idea that one of the four four fat people on this panel has objected to the use of the word obesity and then they go back and use it to scribe them
yeah listen if you were introduced to someone new and they were you asked them their name and they said Thomas and you'd be like great I'm gonna call you Tommy right that's weird you're being weird right yeah likeI can just feel my blood not boiling but like at a simmer well now luckily there's like 10 more of those clips in your right hand bar God YouTube I know I just looked at the right hand barand it's like Cosmo editor defends cover featuring plus size model sir humor with a split screen between a cat person and a thin dude I got that one too so that was not worth our time but we spenta lot of time on it uh but the point is go buy Aubrey's book it's good thank you it's fun it has lots of other things to make you angry and also some happy stuff and lizzo and lizzo
lizzo makes a brief appearance we've got pre-order links for you in the show notes or you can go to aubrygordon.net myths and get it there pre-order and we will be back in the main feed next time with Michaelcan I tell you can I give you a preview oh next time we're doing Elizabeth Taylor's diet book Elizabeth takes off white diamonds that's all I know I know literally nothing else about this woman oh my God
foreign