The harmful systems we're all part of.
Diet culture and dealing with feeling like there's no ethical anything under all of this.
This talks about eating disorders. Use your best judgement. I love you.
As I tenderly rinse out a glass jam jar - which this time I will not keep because I have an entire cupboard that contains leaning towers of metal lids and rows of glass vessels of various sizes and, if we’re honest, lingering smells - I think about a handful of things.
This first, of course, is “are we sure this one isn’t a keeper?”
The second is “I hope that glass is actually recycled as easily and often as I’ve been made to believe.”*
And the third is “it’s kind of wild that I didn’t eat jam for like a solid six years.”
It wasn’t just jam. There were long - like, really long - periods in my life where I didn’t eat butter (or a vegan butter alternative like this absolute GOAT) or peanut butter or most cheese or sandwiches made out of two pieces of bread, or nuts of any kind, or almost any sort of dessert unless it was really socially necessary. It was terrible. It made me miserable (and I mean that both as an adjective for me and for the way I was to be around).
And that is because of Diet Culture.
Diet Culture - an all-encompassing term for a system that is deeply harmful, wildly lucrative, essentially hereditary, and actively steeped in racism and colonialism - is a sort of folie au deux. Except it’s a madness held not by just two people, but instead, by millions and millions. It’s a shared psychosis, a fever dream that a lot of people are finally beginning to wake up from.
It’s system that touches almost every element of our lives, from housing to entertainment to finances to our health, and one that I was not only abused by, but deeply entrenched in - and, even more embarrassingly, a cog within.
I’ve been thinking about this for years, but it’s been on my mind a lot since I absolutely tore through Aubrey Gordon’s new book. Gordon, who is also the co-host of the indispensable podcast Maintenance Phase, has been, for years now, patiently explaining the nuances of concepts like internalized fatphobia, health and weight bias, and the many misconceptions about “obesity-related illness” (and there are so, so many). In her most recent book, Gordon is specifically parsing the myths about fatness that we all believe, in no small part because of Diet Culture.
And once again, I am forced to confront all of the ways that I have, in my life, perpetuated Diet Culture, both as a writer and as a person who experienced a sort of Stockholm Syndrome to the system. And that’s hard because it really sucks when you’ve been a part - even if just a small part - of something deeply hurtful or harmful. But also, we’ve literally all been part of a system that is deeply hurtful or harmful. Whoever we are, whatever we do, if you live and breathe in our society, you have been part of a bad system.
Hello, my name is Hanna, it’s been three years since I was actively in my eating disorder, and for decades, I have perpetuated Diet Culture upon myself and others
(Hi, Hanna)
It’s not flattering to admit, but I think it’s helpful to assess the concrete ways we’ve been part of harmful systems. And for me, most recently, it’s been my compliance (and, at times, complicity) with Diet Culture. As a young person, I was active on pro-eating disorder websites and would watch any episode of Intervention that dealt with disordered eating. I can still quote lines from the 2006 documentary Thin, which the New York Times called a more “passive-aggressive” version of ‘“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for women.” I absolutely participated in harmful conversations with my online peers, served as an “example” for my flatmates, gave terrible advice to co-workers, and then, even when I was somewhat healthy and could eat with any semblance of normalcy, continued to carry the mantle by engaging with a loathing of my body that can only be called Eating Disorder Lite. For close to a decade of recovery (or, more realistically, “recovery”), I was still steeped in the cultural norms of fatphobia, healthism, and the idea that thin bodies - and thus, thin people - are just better.
Over the course of my writing life, I’ve collected pay checks for some things I’m not proud of. I was paid for a short period of time to consult with a campaign in favor of a sugar tax, which is something I am actually categorically opposed to but I was very, very poor at the time and couldn’t really pay rent from atop any kind of high horse. I’ve quickly and joylessly excreted blog posts about calorie counts on restaurant menus and what “100 calories of bread looks like.” I’ve praised “body positivity” while also actively dieting (is it still a diet if it’s literally a disorder?) and using plus-size models encouragement of what not to be.
This isn’t meant to be a confessional. I’m not looking for absolution. This is the kind of undoing work that is never done - it’s one tangled knot of yarn that is wrapped around and around our limbs and our torsos and our necks and we just loosen a little bit with each essay we read and each reflection we allow ourselves. I don’t tell you all of this because I need to be made to feel better. I tell you all of this because some of the most important work we all can do right now is to point exactly to all the times were were caught up in or actively participating in a system that made other people feel worse.
It’s absolutely vile the things I’ve thought - and even written about - with regard not only to my own body, but the bodies of others. And I take full responsibility because my own pursuit to be able to eat a normal sandwich like a normal goddamn adult somehow didn’t include unpacking of what I was so mortally afraid of until like, a couple of years ago.
Like at no point in all the work I did to live in my body as it is, to accept my genetics, did I actually stop to ask why the idea of gaining weight was a hill I would literally die on. At no point did a therapist or anything else just say “ok, so you get fat. See what happens” or ask “what do you think will happen if you gain weight and why does that matter so much to you?”
Because when a therapist asked “why does gaining weight make you cry?” I would say “because no one will love me” and then she said something like “we both know that’s irrational” and then we just…moved on?
No one ever addressed the mammoth, shitty system that had taught me that gaining weight would literally make me unloveable.
And seriously, there are good reasons to be afraid of fatness. Because it has real, tangible costs. As Gordon wrote for Self in 2021:
A 2011 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology hypothesized that women in the U.S. and Germany would experience “a negative weight-income relationship that is steepest at the thin end of the distribution.” Their findings generally confirmed that hypothesis, even among individuals whose weight changed over time. And anti-fat bias can even show up in the workplace before we do. According to MIT researchers, managers who believed they would be training a fat worker “had lower expectations about the trainee’s success and work ethic prior to training.”
…Fat people have hair-raising stories about discrimination in health care, in reporting sexual assault, and even in trying to board an airplane. Those dynamics are often replicated among fat people too. Smaller fat people (those who are only slightly larger than standard, straight sizes) experience some benefits of thinness through their own proximity to it. As more retailers expand their selection of clothing to include plus sizes, for example, those retailers overwhelmingly focus on the smallest plus sizes, increasing access to clothing only for those fat people who are nearest to thinness.
This is what’s so virulent about Diet Culture. It is designed to divide people in much the same way that class warfare is. By keeping bodies weak and people afraid and also by creating a clear scapegoat - a boogieman who could be any of us if we let ourselves go - Diet Culture is a highly useful tool in the capitalist arsenal.
In her book, Nothing But My Body, queer sex worker Tilly Lawless wrote the following:
“I could couch my insecurity in the rhetoric of 'eat the rich', but I would rather analyse what it is of theirs that I both hate and want. The stability, the entitlement, the good seat to watch the world burn from?”
This, I think, is the question we have to ask about these systems we take part in. Not only “why are they beneficial to trap us inside of?” but also “what is it about this toxic promise that we were so willing to be trapped?”
Because it’s not just Diet Culture, right? It’s law enforcement and, specifically, the police state. It’s the anti-homeless (and racist) rhetoric on NextDoor that goes uncorrected - or it’s our own temptation to call the police on someone who we simply find “sketchy.”
It’s the systems around our jobs - when we work for companies that treat us well but abuse others. It’s the systems around our forms of entertainment - the sports that use up the bodies of young people of color, the films that we know are directed by abusive men and produced by their abusive friends.
It’s our homes with gas stoves that we bought with blood money from those jobs and fill with objects we buy with next-day delivery from a company we know is awful to workers and the planet but also so very convenient. It’s our patronage of grocery stores that we know are union-busters because they have the good peanut butter.
It’s our gas-powered cars, our computers built by tiny hands, and every little piece of plastic we don’t pick up on the side of the road.
And it’s the weird little ways we find ourselves absolutely obsessed with when we think they can help. Washing out our recycling with the hope that maybe, just maybe, this one won’t end up in the ocean. Cutting the six-pack ring in case it does. Trying to take personal steps to reduce our carbon footprint - only buying second hand clothes! Being a vegetarian! Having two kids or fewer! - while knowing full well that giant corporations, the ones who really have the ability to make salient change, are changing their logo on Twitter during Pride month and not much else.
These things can make us feel paralyzed with feelings like eco-guilt and anxiety, knowing that we might possibly be taking part in a bad system. But I’m here to say that it’s liberating to acknowledge that you are in a bad system and find the ways you can take it apart in your own right.
We all have to make choices every day, and those choices are often between two bad options. Because that’s the way harmful systems are - they’re a cancerous growth that makes it impossible to actually live your values every day.
We’re all part of shitty systems because this *gestures around* is a shitty system built on further, smaller shitty systems. But that doesn’t make us shitty people. What makes us shitty people is when we participate in shitty systems without ever examining our own roles. What makes us shitty people is when we keep not just perpetuating shitty systems, but defending them, even when they harm us and those around us.
I will continue to buy things in not-plastic every chance I get. I will continue to rinse out and recycle my glass jars that I no longer need and keep and reuse the ones I do. I will also keep eating jam and tell other people to eat jam because an obsession with thinness is fucked and it’s designed to control you.
And if I ever put any of my bad body shit onto you, I want you to know that I am sincerely, deeply, very sorry. I could make an excuse about being harmed by that system myself, but there is no excuse. You didn’t need that.
xoxo HBO
Some further reading on these topics :
I’m currently reading the book “Work Won’t Love You Back” and I cannot recommend it enough.
Literally anything from Aubrey Gordon and Your Fat Friend.
Speaking of harmful systems, here’s a good piece about the way that center-left “journalists” are being very useful to Republicans and transphobes in general.
Related, lest you were thinking that maybe the attacks on trans kiddos and drag queens don’t concern you, let’s discuss how these are the canaries in the coal mines of social control. If you have people in your life who are using these bills as an issue to rally around, maybe have a conversation with them!
And don’t forget, I have another newsletter that actually makes me money (I keep this one free because it feels weird to charge for my feelings?) and you can find that here.