My latest column (& a reading list on diet culture)
My latest column is now live. It’s about my relationship with my body, disordered eating, fat phobia and trying to rid my life of toxic messaging around diet, weight, health and fitness. I worked hard on this one so I’d love it if you gave it a read. As part of my research, I read a bunch of great articles . Here are some of my favourites:
This paradigm shifting piece about obesity by Michael Hobbes
“We all have to do our best with the body that we have…and leave everyone else’s alone.”
Everyone needs to read this piece about the bizarre, racist history of the BMI.
This newsletter has been very helpful for me. (start with this one)
I argue, in the piece, that media outlets ought to develop updated style guides for reporting on diet, fitness and health. Here are two examples from Quartz and Self. There is also specific advice for reporting on eating disorders.
Kate Manne argues against fatphobia in philosophy:
“We praise arguments for being muscular and compact and criticize prose for being flabby, flowery and, implicitly, feminine.”
“Anything you needed to do to survive was ‘good for your health”
“My weight has probably occupied 50 percent of my thinking for my entire life. I am on a diet now. I just lost eight pounds. I want to lose 15 more.”
“I continued walking and stopped in front of a diner and watched through the window people eating cheeseburgers and French fries and talking gigantically. All these people, I looked at them as if they were speaking Mandarin or discussing string theory, with their ease around their food and their ease around their bodies and their ability to live their lives without the doubt and self-loathing that brings me to my arthritic knees still. There’s no such thing as magic, Taffy. I shook my head at the impossibility of it all, and sitting here writing this, I still do.”
