A Tractable Population
by Arielle Juliette. Approx 10 minute read
With the holidays underway and the inevitable talk of "good and bad" eating behaviors that ensue plus the recent passing of a historic election season, I'd like to take some time to discuss diet culture, the physical effects of restriction, and how it takes our power and ability to change our corner of the world for good from us. Before we begin, there is a trigger warning for this article that I discuss my own history with an abusive relationship and disordered eating. If you wish to skip the details, look for the line of asterisks **** that will signal the beginning and end of that section.
To begin, what exactly is "diet culture"? Author and registered dietitian Christy Harrison has an excellent definition.
"Diet culture is a system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.”
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that intentional weight loss fails more than 95% of the time.
Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.”
Christy continues with a discussion on what she calls “The Wellness Diet”:
“Diet culture doesn't just mean “being on a diet,” because you don't have to follow any sort of official diet to be caught up in the culture of dieting.
Moreover, some people may eat in a way that they refer to as a diet for legit medical reasons (e.g. diagnosed celiac disease, diabetes, etc.) and not actually be engaging in diet culture (which, I should add, is very rare and hard to do, since diet culture has its tentacles all up in the medical field).
I've worked with hundreds of people who think they're not dieting, but when we dig into their relationship with food, they realize that they're pursuing “wellness” or “health” in a way that looks veeeeeery much like a diet. That's a form of diet culture that I call The Wellness Diet, and it's rampant in the 21st century. “Clean eating,” detoxes, cleanses, the overuse of elimination diets, carb restriction, gluten phobia, “ancestral” diets, and performative health all fall under the umbrella of The Wellness Diet. The weight-stigma aspect of diet culture may be de-emphasized in some iterations of The Wellness Diet, but the moralization and demonization of food is front and center.
There are many other forms of diet culture, too. It's a sneaky, shape-shifting thing that robs people of their time, money, health, happiness, and so much more, which is why I've nicknamed it The Life Thief. It can be hard to spot, and yet in Western culture, it's everywhere."
Whew, that's a lot to digest, right? And just a heads up, being against diet culture doesn't mean never eating vegetables, never exercising again OR being anti-health. Because the pursuit of thinness and health are so intricately linked in our society, it can be hard to hear "anti diet" at first and not hear "anti health". That's a whole other article, and if you want to know more about it, I definitely recommend checking out the movement called Health At Every Size and the resources I include at the end of this article.
So now that we have an understanding of diet culture, lets talk about restriction. Restriction can take many forms, from restricting caloric intake to restricting food groups to mental restriction, IE feeling like we should or should not eat a certain type or quantity of food. Again, this could be a whole article unto itself, but right now we're going to talk about caloric restriction.
Possibly the most famous experiment on restriction, and one that could not be repeated today due to ethical concerns, is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment that occurred in 1944. Conscientious objectors to WWII were given an alternative to military combat service to participate in a year long study on semi starvation and the rehabilitation of starvation. I’ve edited much of this information down for brevity, but I highly recommend looking into this experiment further if you find this compelling.
According to the American Psychological Association,
"The [men of the study] spent the first three months of the study eating a normal diet of 3,200 calories a day, followed by six months of semi-starvation at 1,570 calories a day...The men were required to work 15 hours per week in the lab, walk 22 miles per week and participate in a variety of educational activities for 25 hours a week."
Not terribly far off from a modern day diet, right? In fact, most diet programs recommend caloric restriction well below the limits of this experiment.
Taken from this article in Refinery 29 on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment,
"Instantly, the men reported a decline in both physical energy and personal motivation. Keys and his fellow researchers noted an overwhelming apathy among the subjects, punctuated by paradoxical periods of irrational irritability... Food became the sole source of fascination and motivation. Many men began obsessively collecting recipes ("Stayed up until 5 a.m. last night studying cookbooks," wrote one). They found themselves distracted by constant daydreams of food...They guzzled water, seeking fullness. Some took up smoking to stave off hunger and others chewed up to 30 packs of gum a day until the laboratory banned it. Meanwhile, all other elements of life seemed to fade into mere background noise. Over and over again, the researchers reported indifference and boredom when it came to personal development and basic socializing. "Budding romances collapsed" and sexual desire evaporated. At parties, the subjects found conversation both difficult and pointless. They all preferred a solitary trip to the movies, adding that, while they could recognize comedy, they never felt compelled to laugh anymore. "In a store, when shopping, they were easily pushed around by the crowd," the research team reported. "Their usual reaction was resignation."
... At last, the semi-starvation phase ended and the 20-week rehabilitation period began. It was during this stage that the most surprising finding emerged: Physical recovery progressed, if slowly; yet, the subjects’ mental states seemed to decline further. The plate-licking continued, irritability became aggression, and mood swings were more severe.
To everyone's relief, the subjects' moods and social behavior stabilized three months later. But when it came to eating, the men agreed they were not "back to normal." Many ate "more or less continuously" and a subgroup of the subjects continued bingeing to the point of sickness, even eight months later. At least one man was hospitalized for several days after having his stomach pumped.
"These were men who postponed their living, while they endured the awful present," writes Keys and his fellow researchers in "Men and Hunger". Many subjects continued working in public or charitable service; when asked to reflect on their participation in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, they indeed saw it as a worthy sacrifice for the greater good — as well they should. They provided invaluable data on the treatment of starving populations. It's unlikely Keys was thinking of dieters and disordered eaters at the time, yet he offered insight into those "semi-starved" people, as well.
"We were starving under the best possible medical conditions. And most of all, we knew the exact day on which our torture was going to end," said Legg, well aware that millions had no such comfort. But his body didn't know that. And our hardwired survival instincts don't know the difference between a 30-day cleanse and a famine, either. The binges, the fixation, the enduring hold of food anxiety — all these symptoms ring true to anyone who’s experienced food restriction, voluntarily or not. Perhaps the most chilling correlation: the postponement of living. How often do we put off something until we've lost the weight? That familiar inertia is obvious. But what this study indicates is that it might not simply be our desire to wait for a thinner body to start dating, take that trip, or pursue a career goal. It may also be the hunger itself keeping us at home, alone and waiting."
Does this sound familiar to anyone else? It certainly reminds me of my days of restriction. Like many in their early 20s, I found myself gaining weight as I came into my adult form and dealing with the stresses of opening a new business. Under the pressure of feeling like I needed to "look like a belly dancer", I found myself trying to lose weight in increasingly dramatic forms, all under the guise of needing to "get healthier" even though there was nothing amiss with my health at the time. After a 6 month stint with bulimia, I joined a 12 step program, feeling that I had an addiction to food.
*************** details of disordered eating start here *************************
Within just a few months, I was spending all of my time attending 12 step meetings, journaling about the food I was eating or the food I was tempted to eat, exercising past the limits of injuries, sponsoring other people in how to be more successful in food restriction, gathering and cooking an increasingly small number of foods that I didn't binge on. My hair was thinning, my skin was so dry it was nearly intolerable, my digestive system was a wreck, my thyroid was shutting down, and even though I would have told you I was free from obsessive food thoughts, it wasn't true. Food and what to eat and when and how much was the center of my world. Travel was nearly impossible without extensive planning and prepping, bringing everything with me out of a desperate fear that I wouldn't be able to find something later. I took a trip with my partner at the time and snapped at her so angrily when it took hours for us to find a place that had a meal with no wheat, dairy or sugar. Traveling out of the country was out of the question. My world was literally and figuratively small.
********************* details end here ******************************
When I was in this part of my life, I was too absorbed in the world of dieting and body modification to do something about fat acceptance, or racism, or ableism, or ageism. My life was consumed by how I looked and what it took to maintain that. I would have sworn to you up and down that I was doing it for my health, but the main motivator was the social capital of thinness. And don't get me wrong, it's a powerful motivator. Even though I hadn't yet learned about fatphobia, I had enough of an intuitive understanding to know that I never wanted to endure weight stigma. And instead of realizing the internalized dominance of that, the internal need to be better than other people on a hierarchy of bodies and how messed up that was, I turned that fear and shame inward instead of focusing on destroying the system that created a hierarchy of bodies in the first place.
When I reached a place where I could no longer maintain the 20 hours a week it took to stay thin, when I could no longer adhere to my rigid way of eating and appear to live normally, the shame consumed me. It was yet another way that diet culture and body hierarchy kept me locked within myself. At the time, my rigid food rules and routines gave me a feeling of control when I was in a chaotic abusive relationship, feeling like I was constantly flying by the seat of my pants trying to stay afloat with the walking disaster that was my partner.
But the truth was that the control I felt that food gave to me was an illusion. It was a coping mechanism, but a maladaptive one. When I clawed my way out of that mess, it became impossible to deny that all the time I spent on maintaining my weight wasn't normal, effortless or doing my health any good at all. It stopped me from traveling or even from spending the day outside of the house, from sharing a normal meal with loved ones. And it most certainly kept me from addressing the systems of oppression that still dominate our world.
Like the men in the starvation experiment, it took years to recover from such restriction, and the pain of facing my own fatphobia was horrendous. I thought I had staved off my body issues and shame by becoming as thin as I possibly could. The truth was, I was only avoiding them. It was like a steroid shot, and when the steroid wore off, the pain came back worse than ever. Not to mention that I had only transformed my body hate into something else. There's a saying, "you can't hate yourself into loving yourself" and that was the case for me. I used shame to restrict and motivate me to exercise and while externally I very much enjoyed the social capital of thinness, internally I still hated everything about my body, just in new ways.
Like playing an endless game of tug of war, I very slowly released my dysfunctional behaviors around food and movement that kept me at an unnaturally low weight for my body. As my body sought to return to its set point, the shame and feeling of failure consumed me. I could barely perform and turned down paying gigs because I didn't feel I deserved to be seen. I hid myself. I diminished my voice. I felt that I had lost all my power. But eventually, I began to believe all of the things I was reading, that I could trust my body, that it knows what is the best weight for me, that thinness didn't equal health. My thyroid recovered, my gastrointestinal system returned to normal, my skin recovered, my hair thickened again. And so I delved deeper into the world of body liberation, beyond the point of body positivity. While body positivity was what I needed at the time, it's a message that has become high jacked by corporations who see an opportunity to continue selling us their bullshit. The message has shifted from fat Black women, people suffering the most from fatphobia, to thin and small fat white women, people who likely experience little to no systemic weight stigma or oppression. Loving ourselves enough to believe that we're worthy of our own self care at any time and at any size is important; loving our bodies and how they look at all times is not important and not sustainable. It's not a system for life.
The more I dug into body liberation, the more I came to see that finding acceptance for ourselves, allowing our body to do its thing and pursuing health without focusing on weight is just the start.
The next step is to abolish the system that places bodies into a hierarchy in the first place. And once you see the hierarchy of thin to fat bodies, it's impossible not to see the hierarchy of white to Black bodies, of male to female bodies, of cis to trans bodies, of young to old bodies, of abled to disabled bodies. Body liberation isn't just about tearing down diet culture; it's about tearing down the belief that any body is better or more worthy than another body. It's about creating a world where we all have access to high quality care from doctors, to equal treatment by cops and the justice system, to access to resources and well-paying jobs. Body liberation is about lifting up the bodies that are furthest from those goals first, one because it's the right thing to do and two because it's good for all of us. No body is safe until ALL bodies are safe. There's a ton of work to be done and we can't do that work until we aren't so wrapped up in our diets and appearances that there's nothing left to fight injustice.
I'm not here to tell you to stop your low carb diet or your Crossfit program if those are working for you. And I am most certainly not telling you to stop pursuing gender affirming exercise or surgery- that's a completely different ballpark and again, could be a whole other article unto itself. If these things bring you peace, stability, great! If they fill you up and leave you with room to pursue all you want to pursue in life, great! If they set you free, then you've found what works for you. Everyone has the right to bodily autonomy, to pursue any diet or body modification that's right for them.
But if any of my story resonates with you, I urge you to find freedom so we can have the time and space to rally against these systems of injustice together.
If you're looking for where to start, here are some books, podcasts, Facebook and Instagram accounts that I love:
"Anti-Diet" by Christy Harrison, plus her podcast Food Psych
"Body Respect" and "Radical Belonging" by Lindo Bacon
"The Body Is Not An Apology" by Sonya Renee Taylor
"Fearing The Black Body" by Sabrina Strings
The podcast "Body Image with Bri"
The podcast "All Fired Up"
Follow the pages "Diets Don't Work", "Health At Every Size (HAES)" "The Body Is Not An Apology" and the user Sam Dylan Finch on Facebook
The podcast "Maintenance Phase" by YrFatFriend, Aubrey Gordon
The podcast "Unpacking Weight Science" to learn about how to understand weight science studies
Follow lvernon2000, glitterandlazers, bodyposipanda, thelindsaywolf, mynameisjessamyn, theshirarose and dietitiananna on Instagram
As this election has shown, we do have power and we do have a voice when we believe we are worthy of being heard and taking up space. And we ARE worthy of being heard and taking up space. We have the power to bring equity to all in our country, but we have to have the bandwidth to do so, and for so many of us, dieting and perfecting our bodies steals this bandwidth. While this quotation deals only with women, this sentiment is true across the gender spectrum:
“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” Naomi Wolf, the Beauty Myth
Let us not be a tractable population any longer. The world needs more of you, not less. The work is only just beginning.