Aubrey Gordon: On Freedom from Anti-Fatness
November 30, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. Aubrey Gordon is here, we’re so excited. Aubrey Gordon is an author, columnist, and co-host of the Maintenance Phase podcast, which Abby and I love. She’s the author of the New York Times and Indie bestseller, You Just Need To Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, and What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, which rearranged my brain on a molecular level. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Vox, Self, Health, Glamour, and More. Aubrey is also the subject of the new documentary film Your Fat Friend, which is just wonderful and explores her journey from anonymous blogger to bestselling author and activist. Welcome, Aubrey.
Abby Wambach:
I’m such a big fan, it’s redonkulous.
Aubrey Gordon:
Are you kidding me?
Abby Wambach:
No, I am not kidding you.
Aubrey Gordon:
Okay, the 2015 World Cup is the reason that I watch soccer. That’s it.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
That’s it. Yeah. So just like, “Hey buddy,” I’m flipping out a little bit to be talking to a series of living legends in this conversation. What a joy, team.
Abby Wambach:
What a joy.
Aubrey Gordon:
What a joy.
Abby Wambach:
And you live in my old stomping grounds. I used to live in Portland.
Aubrey Gordon:
Portland!
Abby Wambach:
Glennon and I were driving down the road a year ago-
Glennon Doyle:
A long time ago.
Abby Wambach:
… and we were listening to-
Glennon Doyle:
Maintenance Phase.
Abby Wambach:
Maintenance Phase.
Aubrey Gordon:
What?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Aubrey Gordon:
Great. Thanks, team.
Glennon Doyle:
Aubrey, I know a lot about you, okay? So we’ll start there. But I know you’re a soccer fan-
Amanda Doyle:
In a totally non-creepy way.
Glennon Doyle:
No, non-creepy way. I knew you were a big soccer fan and so I think told Abby, “I think she might like us because of you,” so I’m really excited.
Aubrey Gordon:
I like you because of both of you.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, okay.
Aubrey Gordon:
Right? I think I was listening back to episodes, this is a common practice. I’m sure you do this when you go on podcasts-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
… that you listen back to other episodes to get a little refresh. And I was listening to your sort of critique of body positivity and loving your body and I was like, “Oh my God. I have landed at exactly the same conclusion, but for entirely different reasons.” It’s very fascinating. I find it really refreshing to have someone just talk about there are challenges in having a body, period, the end. I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to be in my body and just leave it at that. And I get there from a place of it’s a very different experience as a fat person. Rather than having the main challenges be in your own mind and brain chemistry, to have those challenges be reinforced by people who know you and love you and you see all the time.
Aubrey Gordon:
That they’re sort of demanding a disordered relationship to food and to your body, and that’s the price you pay as a fat person in the world. There’s a famous quote from Deb Burgard, who’s been working on these issues for a long time, that says essentially, “What we diagnose in thin people as disordered, we prescribe in fat people,” so we’re requiring disordered eating behaviors of fat people. We expect them to eat as little as possible. We expect them to be seen hurting themselves in order to become thin, and anything short of that is unacceptable. But for the same reasons me, “loving my body,” quote, unquote, doesn’t really change how all those other people act. Right? That’s still an external world to me that I can’t just manifest through The Secret or whatever. That’s not a possibility for me.
Glennon Doyle:
When I’m reading your work, I feel like for the Pod Squad, I just want to say that I see you in all your work, in Maintenance Phase, in the new documentary, which is pew, it’s like to me, you are very much like you’re a teacher to me like Alok is for gender or Dr. Yaba Blay is for race, or Ocean Vuong has been for me for masculinity. To me, it feels like I consume your work in two different ways. That you are pointing things out in the world that make being a fat person excruciating out there, not the body, but the reaction to the body. So making the world safer for fat people, and then you’re pointing out this hierarchy like Yaba does with race that is hurting all of us. So it’s like undoing a cultural thing over here for everybody, while clearly your first priority is always making the world safer for fat people in the meantime while this hierarchy is erased. And so I just see you as just an incredibly important teacher in the world.
Aubrey Gordon:
Oh, buddy, back at you. This is incredible. Thanks.
Glennon Doyle:
Your book, just one of those books that just my brain just, I was like, “Oh, she’s fucking me up,” in the best way.
Aubrey Gordon:
So I’m so curious about that stuff. For you, as someone who’s been very public, very vulnerable in multiple states of diagnosis and recovery and all kinds of stuff, I’m curious about how all of that is landing for you because it is a really different experience to walk through the world as a fat person, and I think when we talk about bodies, we end up talking about body image. We end up talking about how you feel about your body and not how other people interact with it, how systems and institutions interact with it, and what that means for what you have access to. It’s a very internal, inward-looking conversation that we usually have, and I’m just super duper curious about how all of this is landing for you, what’s popping up for you? All of it.
Glennon Doyle:
I have just an interesting experience because I feel like it’s the same as queerness for me. It’s like, “Well, I am that in my house, but I suffer none of the consequences out in the world.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Totally, same, same. My gender presentation means that people think that I am a straight person and that doesn’t mean I don’t experience homophobia, but it does mean that I experience way less and way pronounced stuff. I can go into any bathroom and be just fine. Nobody’s going to give me the side eye.
Abby Wambach:
They do me.
Aubrey Gordon:
Absolutely. Yeah, totally. Sorry, buds.
Abby Wambach:
No, it’s okay.
Aubrey Gordon:
It’s a super different thing.
Glennon Doyle:
So in the documentary, your fear is you’re going to go from anonymous to public, which has its own host of just terrifying things, but you say your biggest fear is that people actually won’t want to have this urgent, important conversation. So to start off with because I heard that as your fear, and so I want to start off by saying we will have it and what is it?
Aubrey Gordon:
Let’s do it. It’s happening right now, today. We’re fixing it. It’s going to be done.
Glennon Doyle:
We have 50 minutes, so if we could just fix it by the end.
Amanda Doyle:
We’ll do this in the first 30 minutes, and then we can spend the last 20 talking about like-
Glennon Doyle:
If it makes you feel better, Yaba fixed it in 50 minutes about race and no pressure, but Alok did fix it for gender. So…
Aubrey Gordon:
Absolutely. We can do hard things within the format. Yes. So I would say, listen, we have been in a constant state for 30 to 100 years, depending on who you ask, of talking about fat people. We’ve talked about fat people as being a cost. We are sort of in a constant state of talking about how much fat people cost our healthcare systems and employment and so on and so forth. We are in a constant state of scapegoating fat people, we are in a constant state of ogling fat people. We have whole news stories where the B-roll footage is just headless torsos of fat people. It’s very literally dehumanizing us on screen. And there’s also research attached to those media representations that show that when people see photos of, quote, unquote, “headless fat people,” with a news article, even if the news article remains the same and the image changes to be someone with a face and/or who’s not holding a McDonald’s bag, that folks have a totally different response to the entire news story.
Aubrey Gordon:
And after seeing more stigmatizing images, they’re more likely to report not only increased anti-fat bias, but also increased personal dislike of fat individuals that they meet after that. So it’s a really tricky conversation to get into because it’s a really challenging bias that almost all of us hold. At a time when many other biases have either been plateauing or dipping, anti-fat bias has been ramping up, and that means that fat people get paid up to $20,000 less per year than thin people. Fat women and thin women, that’s a big divide. It means that in 48 states, it’s perfectly legal to fire someone from a job or deny them a promotion just because you think they’re too fat. All of these things we’re setting up in systems and structures all around us, and we’re doing all of that while only talking amongst thin people about how terrible fat people are. This is an issue where thin people are still seen as the experts on fatness. It’s really weird and backwards, and we for sure wouldn’t do that with a lot of communities. Right?
Glennon Doyle:
So true.
Aubrey Gordon:
That’s a really weird framework to use. It feels like in amongst all that, part of what makes this super urgent is that we do have folks who are dealing with body dysmorphia and eating disorders regardless of their size, and our cultural defense against that is to go, “It’s fine. You’re not that fat,” which implies that if you are my size, I’m the person who’s always that fat. When people are like, “You’re not that fat, don’t worry about it,” they’re like, “You don’t look like this lady.” Our cultural response to that is to sort of imply that if you are fat, that behavior is warranted. It would be okay. If you were fat, that’s an okay way to treat someone who’s fat, but you’re not fat, so don’t worry about it.
Aubrey Gordon:
So the solution that we’re proposing to folks is that you align yourself with thinness, you distance yourself from fat people. That’s what keeps you out of the line of fire, rather than saying, “What if we made the whole world a safe and affirming place for fat people to be, and you wouldn’t have to worry at least about the social and institutional parts of that?” That would take away so much of that stress as well. It’s a real case of our fates are intertwined and instead of acknowledging that reality, we tend to again turn inward into our own experiences and rely on biases that have been fed to us now for decades.
Glennon Doyle:
And so we get it in terms of other things. I love all the ways you talk about, when you’re in the soccer stadium and you say, “There’s no jerseys for fat people here,” or something, and then what does the woman behind you say? You’re talking to your friend about fat, and she taps you and says, “Oh, you’re not fat. Don’t say that about yourself,” which when you’d switch it, so say I’m in line with Abby, and I would never say this because our marriage would implode, but if I was like, “That woman’s attractive or something”-
Abby Wambach:
Oh my God.
Glennon Doyle:
… I’m sorry, I should have used a different example.
Abby Wambach:
It’s terrible.
Glennon Doyle:
If I were like, “I’m queer,” if the lady behind me tapped me and said, “Oh honey, don’t say that about yourself,” why do we not think when we say to someone, “Don’t say you’re fat,” we are implicitly saying, “Fat is bad, don’t say bad things about yourself”?
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah, absolutely. Again, my favorite example of this is, I’m not, but if I said, “I’m Canadian,” and someone went, “You’re not canadian, you’re smart and you’re beautiful,” you’d be like, “What did you think about Canadians? What is your deal?” We’re sort of all telling on ourselves about our attitudes toward fat people all the time without really reckoning with how that lands for those fat people. We sort of talk about fatness as a specter without realizing that roughly two thirds of Americans are fat people. So most of the people that we’re saying that kind of stuff to and in front of are feeling personally implicated in some way in that conversation, and if we don’t think about how those messages land, we’re going to keep reinforcing those distances and reinforcing the message that being fat is really a terrible thing to be. It’s a character failing, it’s a moral failing, it’s a health failing. It’s all of these different things.
Glennon Doyle:
How did we get here? Just real quick. You got eight minutes.
Aubrey Gordon:
Just like nutshell.
Glennon Doyle:
How is this all rooted in racism? Because you make it very clear that 80% of us, that we should stop calling it fat phobia because then that is an identity you can reject. “I’m not fat phobic,” as opposed to it being a bias inside of us that I think you say until and unless we work on, will be in us.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
So how do we get here?
Aubrey Gordon:
So how we got here, I think a couple of things. One, as you noted, anti-fat bias is deeply historically rooted in racism, but also in ableism. So in the 1800s, we see laws that are called the Ugly Laws. Not enough people I feel know about these.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I don’t.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. So I believe the first big city to pass ugly laws was San Francisco, wah-wah. Bummer, San Francisco. They were laws that essentially said, “It’s too upsetting to have disabled people, disfigured people and fat people out in public, so you’re required to stay at home. You can go out and get things and come right back. You can do little errands like that, but you need to be telling folks that you’re just going for this one thing and then you’re going back. You’re not going to be out in the world. There’s an understanding that you should not and cannot be out in the world.”
Glennon Doyle:
Holy shit.
Aubrey Gordon:
It’s gnarly, right? Then in the ’20s, we start to get state eugenics boards. Those last until the ’80s in the United States, and that is very prominent. Almost every state in the country had a eugenics board. Oregon’s was actually one of the last to be dismantled. So we’re having these active conversations about what kinds of people are, quote, unquote, “dragging our society down”? At the heels of that eugenics movement, we start to get a big freak out about body size and we start to get testing on the BMI. Have you all talked about the BMI on here?
Amanda Doyle:
We have.
Glennon Doyle:
We love it, Aubrey. We feel strongly about it. We think it’s a real legit system.
Amanda Doyle:
We have established it as complete horse shit. We’ll find that episode and we’ll link it here.
Aubrey Gordon:
Great. Perfect.
Amanda Doyle:
But historically, total bullshit.
Aubrey Gordon:
We can skip all that. I think the headline to know about the BMI is that it was designed for white men who were in the French and Scottish militaries in the 1800s, so if that’s not you, uh-oh. It’s never been meaningfully tested or adjusted in any real way to account for the fact that we know, it has been proven time and time again, that this categorically does not work for Black and brown people. This is something that actively incorrectly predicts health risks. And even amongst white people, the people that it was sort of designed for, its high watermark of being able to, quote, unquote, “detect obesity,” which is a very funny phrase to me, is 50%. That’s the most accurate the BMI gets, is about half the time it’s right about who’s fat, who’s not. Right?
Abby Wambach:
That’s so fucked.
Aubrey Gordon:
Because you get The Rock in there, and if you’re just dividing weight by height, The Rock is going to seem like a fat dude. And that doesn’t tell you anything about their age, it doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not that’s a person who’s medically transitioned. It doesn’t tell you anything about that person’s health history or their family history. Right? It is just this person looks too fat for their height. That’s what we’re doing with the BMI, and again, deeply, deeply rooted in racism. That leads to a redefining of, quote, unquote, “obesity,” which historically just meant the fattest 15% in any given group was considered to be, quote, unquote, “obese.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Turning that into a disease over and above the objections of scientists at the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization and interpreting that disease as being an epidemic, implying that fat is contagious. We’ve seen stories like this, that if you have fat friends, you’re more likely to be fat yourself, so steer clear of fat people. It just sort of kicks off from a social place, bounces back into a medical place and then kicks back out a bunch of social values that reaffirm where we started, which is just sort of going, “Fat people seem pretty gross. Yeah?” That’s essentially what we’re doing here.
Glennon Doyle:
So the thought in the air is people should not be fat, and so what they should all be is on diets. So if you’re a diligent fat person, you will constantly be on a diet.
Aubrey Gordon:
If you’re a good fatty, absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, So can you talk to us about diets and how they work, and why you have a collection of diet books in your house, which makes me so happy, and also tell us about a couple of your favorite titles?
Aubrey Gordon:
One of them is The Serpent Beguiled Me and I Ate the Heavenly Diet for Saints and Sinners.
Glennon Doyle:
Does that not say it all?
Amanda Doyle:
Oh, he didn’t have a chance.
Aubrey Gordon:
There’s also Your Body, His Temple. Help, Lord. The Devil Wants Me Fat, with a sort of scary picture of a banana split. Weird.
Glennon Doyle:
Terrifying.
Aubrey Gordon:
More of Jesus, Less of Me.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh my God, help us.
Aubrey Gordon:
Wait, there’s two more. This one’s not a diet book, but it is the slogan that appeared on the cover of every issue of Physical Culture, which was the first sort of workout magazine in the US, and the slogan was Weakness is a Crime. They would put that on every issue of the magazine, and in that magazine, they would also be making arguments about why immigrants were ruining the United States. Very clear connections between refining your body and being a, quote, unquote, “master race,” very clearly. It’s bonkers.
Glennon Doyle:
So these are the scriptures upon which-
Aubrey Gordon:
The scriptures.
Glennon Doyle:
… the religion of anti-fatness is based, right? You can have your Bible study, you can all get together and study these books. And, in fact, diets don’t work. This is not the reason to not do that. But as an aside, correct?
Aubrey Gordon:
Categorically, absolutely. So listen, the term diet has fallen out of fashion, and all of the diets now are leading with, “We’re definitely not a diet.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
“We just tell you to subsist on extremely limited calories every day and tell you that if you don’t, you will never lose weight.
Amanda Doyle:
Wellness is really our thing, but wellness feels like torturing yourself to death.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. Don’t you feel well now?
Amanda Doyle:
So well.
Aubrey Gordon:
I’m super stressed out about every meal. Don’t you feel well? So when I’m talking about diets, what I’m talking about is includes things like cleanses and detoxes and any of the ways that people might adjust what they’re eating in order to lose weight. If that’s a thing that you’re doing, then that’s what I’m talking about here, restricting what you’re eating in order to lose weight. What we find is that regardless of the diet, whether it’s low fat, low carb, paleo, keto, whatever, diets all follow a pretty similar pattern, which is that folks lose weight pretty quickly for two to three months, it plateaus by six to 12 months, and then they regain that weight and usually up to 30% more within five years.
Aubrey Gordon:
What that means for me as a fat person is that every time I have gone on a diet, I have absolutely lost weight. I’ve lost considerable amounts of weight, and when that diet is over, I end up fatter than I was before. And that is absolutely part of the origin story of my body, that I have dieted and dieted and dieted, and each time I have wound up fatter than when I started. And there’s a little bit of research that sort of backs that up. They actually did a long-term study where they followed people who had been on the TV show The Biggest Loser for years after being on the show, which you’re making a sound that makes me think we might be on the same page about The Biggest Loser.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, what a fucking nightmare. We watched that shit and-
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like Romans in the Colosseum.
Abby Wambach:
We can only cheer on a group of people if they’re trying, actually torturing themselves to lose the weight. That’s when we can get behind a fat person, is if they’re in actual-
Glennon Doyle:
Pain and dehumanization.
Abby Wambach:
That they’re dehumanizing themselves so much so that they are crying, throwing up, pissed. It’s just not fucking cool.
Aubrey Gordon:
Well, and a core mechanism of that wasn’t fat people doing it to themselves, it was two terrible thin people-
Abby Wambach:
That’s so interesting.
Aubrey Gordon:
… saying things to them like, “I don’t care if you come out of here in a body bag.” That was the message of a show like that. Regardless, there was a longitudinal study that followed up with people who’d been on The Biggest Loser. Only one of them was able to keep off the amount of weight that they had lost on the show or anything approaching that, and that required-
Abby Wambach:
One?
Aubrey Gordon:
One. One, one, one. And other folks, they measured their metabolism and how many calories they burned per day and found that as a result of this extreme caloric restriction, that had permanently altered their metabolisms and made them burn dramatically fewer calories just from being alive, keeping the lights on every day, like hundreds of calories less per day, which means that the next time you try to do that, it’s going to be much, much, much harder to lose weight.
Aubrey Gordon:
And that actually, probably if we had just been like, “Oh, it seems like this is the size of body that I have, how about I just hang out here?” That none of that health damage happens necessarily in the same way. And a bunch of the health impacts that we associate with fatness, things like diabetes, things like hypertension, all of these ongoing chronic health issues are as strongly, if not more strongly linked to weight cycling-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, exactly.
Aubrey Gordon:
… than, yeah, to just being a fat person. But fat people tend to have those more because we are the people who are under the greatest pressure to lose weight, not just to feel okay and get social affirmation, but to get a job, to be able to access gender affirming care or any basic surgeries. Different surgeons will set different thresholds for what your BMI needs to be in order for them to operate on you. We’re talking about people getting really basic needs met or not met as a result of this thing. And it’s all built on a weird house of cards that is this diet industry that I would say is on the order of big tobacco in terms of just-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
… really selling us a bill of goods. Really selling us a bill of goods.
Glennon Doyle:
Goods. And it reminds me of very much I come from evangelical Christianity, which was a good time-
Amanda Doyle:
Do you have that book More Jesus, Less Me?
Glennon Doyle:
Probably.
Aubrey Gordon:
Listen, there are more we didn’t get to, team.
Glennon Doyle:
Sin is Fat, God Forgot.
Aubrey Gordon:
God Forgot was a real one.
Glennon Doyle:
But it very much reminds me, it’s not the same, but it makes me think of after I came out, after we talk, the Christian people who would say to me, “But queer kids have a higher level of depression and have a higher level,” and I’m like, “But it’s not their queerness, it’s you motherfuckers. It’s you.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Absolutely. I believe it’s 92% of fat people say that they experience anti-fatness every day, and that that comes from their families and their friends and the people that say that they love them the most. Things that people who are not fat have been taught are encouraging to fat people and helpful to fat people are all just ways of calling us fat, like, “Hey, do you want a gym buddy?” That’s not a thing you’re generally offering to your thinner pals. Uh-oh. “Oh, have you thought about wearing this? It’s a little more slimming on you.” All of this sort of stuff that is like, “I’m helping,” is all designed to make fat people look thinner, appear thinner. That’s our pathway to success. And it’s also designed to make thin people feel like they have done and good things to earn the bodies that they have-
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Aubrey Gordon:
… regardless of what those things are or not that they’re doing or not doing. It’s a really tricky thing. So when you say it’s a hierarchy that hurts us all, it really is a hierarchy that hurts us all, that it pulls thinner people away from their relationships to fat people in a really meaningful, intense way that I think many folks don’t even really clock is happening.
Glennon Doyle:
And the culture uses fat bodies. It’s like when you see a woman who speaks out and then gets … I’m from the Christian world, so crucified publicly.
Aubrey Gordon:
Totally. Dope.
Glennon Doyle:
And then we all are like, “Okay, she’s getting fucked,” but in our bodies we’re scared because we know that that’s a warning to the rest of us to stay in line.
Aubrey Gordon:
Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
So the culture uses those pictures of just bodies with no heads being used as a symbol of scaring everyone else to stay in line. Were all part of the same shit.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. I used to work near Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, which is a big open town square sort of space, and would sometimes go there to get lunch, and I stopped when I realized that that is where most of the news companies in town were filming their B-roll of fat people. And this is a very real fear of mine that I’ve had for a long time. I can’t handle seeing a torso walk by and being like, “Oh my God, that’s my shirt. Oh my God, those are my nails. Oh my God, that’s my whatever.” And I think this has just become so much part of the background noise of this conversation that I don’t even think people really realize what a horror show that is to watch as a fat person, that those people are being filmed without consent. They’re being put up straightforwardly as a freak show to be like, “If you’re not careful, this could be you,” and it’s really exhausting to be the moral of the story all the time. You know? It’s really exhausting.
Glennon Doyle:
And talk to us, I want to talk about concern trolling-
Aubrey Gordon:
Oh, sure.
Glennon Doyle:
… because in a culture where everyone’s been taught that this isn’t healthy, so the reason you get to say stuff about this person, I feel like the wellness world is self-concern trolling because everyone that I know that’s on a juice cleanse-
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. Geez, Louise.
Glennon Doyle:
… or any sort of cleanse, and I would just say the people I know, my friends, I’m not saying everyone, the people I know are saying, “It’s because I want it for my health,” but I know that’s not why they’re doing it. I know they’re doing it to lose weight. So we’re just saying health, but we mean-
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. Listen, people say, “I want to get healthy,” as a way of saying, “I want to lose weight.” So the assumption is a fat body can never be healthy and a thin body is always a healthy body, which you and I both know from very different ends, that’s not true. Right?
Glennon Doyle:
Correct.
Aubrey Gordon:
That’s functionally false. Concern trolling is a really tricky thing because we’ve so effectively collapsed the entire concept of health into this one number that is just your weight. And honestly, even if we did that with your resting heart rate, even if we did that with your waist circumference, even if we did that with, I don’t know what, your T-cells, focusing your entire health on one number is going to lead you down a super weird path. And that idea of the entirety of health being encompassed by weight is so alluring because it makes it seem like our biases are scientific. Right?
It makes it seem like because of the science and because the doctor said so and because it’s blah, blah, what everybody knows.
Aubrey Gordon:
Being fat in itself is seen as a health condition now, so people can say, “I’m doing it for my health,” and they can genuinely believe that and still have aesthetic and social concerns as the main things that they’re trying to solve. And that shows up with fat people in the form of concern trolling. So we all know what trolling trolling is, it’s just saying terrible things to get a rise out of somebody. Concern trolling is doing that, but in a way with a furrowed brow, like, “Hey, I’ve been really worried about you. I’m really concerned about your health. I’m really concerned that you’re going to die. I’m really concerned that you aren’t going to be around for your kids,” that I don’t have.
Aubrey Gordon:
“I’m really concerned about all of these different things,” becomes another way, both for thin people to tell fat people that they’re going to die and it’s going to be their fault, which is an extremely gruesome, gnarly thing that we have seen with queer people and with trans people for ages, and it becomes a way of a thin person getting to engage in an interaction that reminds them that they have succeeded where fat people have failed. So there’s both a price that fat people pay, and there’s also a reward to thin people, which is you get to remind yourself, “I did it, and you can too. I get to be the teacher in this moment. It’s my noblesse oblige to teach you how to become more like me, which is the right way of being. It’s the right way of looking.”
Abby Wambach:
This is upsetting me because I feel like I’ve done this throughout my professional soccer career. You know what I mean? And I feel like this is just me trying to take some accountability because as a pro athlete, I have to in my mind believe that I am superior in order to do it. But I think that this is just really helpful for even somebody like me to be very cautious and conscious and aware of how I’m expressing myself because I’ve said that before. “If I can do it, you can do it.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Totally, totally. Which in fairness, by definition, you have done a lot of things that other people have never done.
Glennon Doyle:
Exactly. Leave us alone, Wambach.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah it’s not true.
Aubrey Gordon:
By definition, legendary soccer. It’s like I could not play in the World Cup. That’s not in the cards for me. According to the National Institutes of Health, someone my size has less than one-tenth of 1% of a chance of attaining their BMI-mandated weight. That’s not in the cards for me. All the science is real clear, I’m not going to become a thin person, and I super appreciate that.
Aubrey Gordon:
And I also think the world of professional sports seems like a really, really different world in the same way that the world of professional dancing seems like a really particular world in relating to your body, and in I would imagine coaches relating to your body and talking about your body, and talking about what it can and can’t do and how it needs to look in order to do those things and all kinds of stuff. That’s a little pressure cooker. I appreciate the taking accountability part, and I also feel like boy, if that’s where you’re living, I don’t know how you would get any other message. Right?
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
This might be totally not true, but the BMI, I don’t think I’ve ever thought, I knew it was a group of white men that was, but I didn’t know it was military-based. Was there any intention there to create not identity of a healthy body, but was there any goal to create the perfect soldier as opposed to-
Aubrey Gordon:
No, it’s somehow darker than that.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, great.
Aubrey Gordon:
It’s somehow darker than military rhetoric. So the BMI was created by a statistician, sociologist and astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet from Belgium. He was trying to put Belgium on the map. He felt like they really got left behind in the enlightenment, and he was like, “We got to make a big play, team.” And his way of doing that was by constructing something that he considered to be the ideal man. And he thought that the ideal man, the ideal person, the ideal human would be the average person of all of these traits. Now we think of the ideal as being elevated above the rest. He’s talking about what if we could create a society where everyone’s kind of the same and they’re all aiming for this middle average thing?
Aubrey Gordon:
So the only data that he had access to and the only people who were gathering data about weight and height at that point was the military, and that was the data that he had access to, which means you’re mostly getting white people, you’re mostly getting men. You’re exclusively getting men, you’re exclusively getting white people in these things. And his argument was that if we could all aim for that middle body type, whatever that mean was in his calculation, we should also aim for the middle of morality. We should aim for the center. He was big centrist in a lot of ways.
Aubrey Gordon:
That concept of the ideal man became the foundation for eugenics. His work was drawn upon really, really heavily by Sir Francis Galton, who looked up to him a great deal, who was the father of Eugenics in the UK. From there, the BMI in particular sort of sat on a shelf for a while until American insurance companies around the turn of the century we’re looking for ways to charge some policyholders more, and the BMI offered a way to standardize amongst insurance companies, “This is the level of fat where we will charge you more, and this is the level of fat where we just won’t cover you.”
Amanda Doyle:
Just to really drill down on that, this has nothing to do with your health. The insurance companies were looking to make more money, so they said, “Hey, y’all, what could we possibly use? Oh, I know. 200 years ago there was an astronomer in Belgium. That seems like the most recent, up-to-date, cutting edge technology that we could rely on.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Science.
Amanda Doyle:
“Let’s go check his record, an astronomer from 200 years ago.” They get this and they’re like, “Perfect.”
Glennon Doyle:
It was like a Belgian lobbyist was right there. You’re still trying to make it.
Aubrey Gordon:
Hercules Poirot from the Agatha Christie novels was there, being like, “Hmm.” Yeah, absolutely. No, it’s nonsense. It’s nonsense, and it’s been driven by either racism or capital or both at pretty much every turn. The other thing that I would say is we get this big wave of news stories saying there’s an obesity epidemic starting around 2000, prime time for this guy when I’m in high school. What a great time to find out that you’re an epidemic, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Jesus.
Aubrey Gordon:
So we start to get those news stories. That is because in 1999, the National Institutes of Health lowered their threshold for what BMIs would be considered, quote, unquote, “obese,” or, quote, unquote, “overweight.” There was a lede on CNN at the time that said, “Millions of Americans woke up Wednesday overweight or obese without having gained a pound,” which we just changed the definitions of those words. But still, when you see news stories about a, quote, unquote, “obesity epidemic,” they’ll show you a chart and it’ll show a huge spike in 1999 and 2000, which makes you think a bunch of people got really fat one year, and not that we changed what those words mean to encompass a larger group of people. Again, at every turn along the way, we’re seeing this downshifting and downshifting and downshifting to only seeing the thinnest among us as, quote, unquote, “healthy people,” and therefore deserving people.
Glennon Doyle:
Oof. Can you talk to us about thinsecurity? This was a part of your book that I was sitting and reading, and then I actually was like, “Uh,” and then I went back and then I read it again, and then I think I probably read the section three times because it was one of those rewiring of a lot of… I think it’s really important for everybody to hear, if you don’t mind talking about how thinsecurity shows up in your life and how the conflated moment of understanding the nod from the thin person like, “I get it. We’re the same.”
Aubrey Gordon:
I totally get it. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
All of that. Yeah.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah, absolutely. So I will say, one of my personal examples of this was I went to the doctor at one point, and as a fat person going to the doctor is really, really fraught. Doctors have among the highest rates of anti-fat bias. They come in preconditioned to believe, over half of doctors believe that fat people are weak-willed, lazy, sloppy, and non-compliant, which if you’re starting from that point before you’ve met a patient, the care you’re giving is not going to be great. On this particular instance, the doctor had come in and refused to touch me and refused to examine me and sent me away, which is a legal thing that they can do. And I was talking to a friend about it and I was like, “This is really messing me up. This has never happened to me before.”
Aubrey Gordon:
I didn’t even know doctors could do this, just send you away and be like, “I’m not going to see you,” and my friend was like, “I totally get it. I’m having the worst body image day.” And I was like, “Buddy, I’m talking to you about something that a doctor refused to give me healthcare. I’m talking about an institutional interaction. I’m talking about engaging with someone else. I’m not talking to you about how I feel in my own skin today. That’s not what this is.” And I spent a lot, a lot, a lot of time thinking about it. A lot of these interactions are with people that I really, really love and care about and want to give the benefit of the doubt to and figure out what’s going on there.
Aubrey Gordon:
And I realized that for this particular friend who’s been very open about having a tough body image in general, that for this particular friend, she thought about this thing so much. She thought about how she felt about her own body so much that she could not fathom that there was anything worse than that or anything bigger than that or anything outside of you that would change how you interact with your own body. So the only thing that she could hear was the thing that she already knew how to feel, which was that this is an internal brain struggle, not that again, regardless of how much I love myself, regardless of how good my body image is that day, that doesn’t change that doctor thinking I’m not a patient worthy of caring for.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s right.
Aubrey Gordon:
That doesn’t help me find a doctor. You know what I mean? It’s a totally different thing and in that moment, it felt really isolating from my friend. I felt like I was living on a different planet, that I was just sort of like, “Man, I really thought I was being clear about what’s happening here, and this person just can’t hear it.” And that’s been a really consistent challenge for me and for other fat folks having this set of conversations, is that people who are not fat are so accustomed to having conversations that center their own experiences of their own bodies that when we do something else, they’re sort of at sea and they don’t totally know how to interact with that. And it’s partly because for many folks, they haven’t experienced those barriers and they will even struggle to believe them.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
Another friend around that same instance said something like, “Well, did you say something to him? Did you do something? What did you do to make this happen?” And I was like, “I showed up as a fat person. I don’t know what to tell you.” That is all also sort of part of thinsecurity, which is just sort of this idea that no, no, the way that the world interacts with my body is the way that the world interacts with all bodies. Right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Aubrey Gordon:
It is a real struggle to get outside of that paradigm, and it comes from a super legit place. It comes from a super real hurt for a lot of folks, and it becomes a barrier in your relationships with fatter folks and it becomes a barrier to advancing fat justice and liberation in some real concrete ways.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, oversimplified, it’s like the inability to understand that some things are on the inside and some things are on the outside. Is that what it comes down to?
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re talking about something that is a feeling on the inside, and I’m talking about something that happens to me out in the world. It seems like we have kids, one of whom is Japanese presenting, the other two are white presenting. Our children understand that the child who is Japanese presenting has a different experience out in the world than the other two, and they can understand that that’s different. So if the one kid comes back and says, “This happened to me out in the world,” the other two don’t say, “I get that because I’m also Japanese.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s inside out.
Aubrey Gordon:
Absolutely. Also on a medical front, if I had a friend who was going through a cancer diagnosis, I wouldn’t be like, “Girl, I totally get it. I’m super freaked out about getting cancer. I really don’t want it, it seems terrible. I’m super scared of that.” There are so many ways-
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, yeah. There’s more levels.
Aubrey Gordon:
… to come at this that are all sort of like boy, if you sub out anything other than fat-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
… it gets real gnarly, real fast. Right?
Glennon Doyle:
And even worse.
Aubrey Gordon:
You can even hear yourself saying it in a different way.
Glennon Doyle:
And even worse because in her reaction to you, she’s not only saying, “I get it,” but also, “My getting it is fear that I will be more like you.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, listen, as a person who does this as my job, I would say 90% of any given conversation that I have on this stuff with any given individual who hasn’t been plus size, this one excepted, thanks team, is them working through all of their feelings about their body and where they came from, and doing this sort of therapy light that I’m totally unqualified to do with folks in order to get to the point where I can say, “Hey, actually, you have chairs that don’t fit me, that can’t hold me,” or, “Hey, had this really challenging experience with the doctor today.” People feel like they have to work through all of their stuff before they can even entertain what somebody else’s going through, and that again just adds to the amount of work that fat folks have to do just to be heard in a really basic way.
Glennon Doyle:
Can you talk to us about eating disorders? Because there’s a moment in your documentary where you say you struggle with eating disorders or struggled, I don’t know if it’s current, but you said, “There’s literally nowhere for me to go to get help.” I thought, “Oh my God.” Can you just talk about that, the difficulty?
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll start with a couple of structural things and then I’ll talk about the personal stuff. The structural stuff is, folks may or may not know this, that in order to qualify for a diagnosis of anorexia, you have to have a, quote, unquote, “underweight BMI,” and if you don’t, if you’re a fat person who is exhibiting all of the behaviors and experiencing all of the health risks of anorexia or bulimia, you will be considered to have atypical anorexia. That’s a new diagnosis, and it just means you’re anorexic but you’re fat. What that means, because there’s a separate diagnosis, is that some insurers will not cover atypical anorexia, but they will cover treatment for anorexia nervosa.
Aubrey Gordon:
It also shows up in research world, in eating disorders world, that the research that we have into eating disorders until the last two or three years has categorically excluded anyone who has a BMI of over 25. So anyone in these sort of overweight or obese categories, we have not been studying eating disorders in them because we already presume that’s not possible, and if it is, it’s probably good for their health. That’s the overwhelming message, is that disordered eating is a health solution for fat people, so we have a whole world that thinks that eating disorders don’t exist in fat people because it has never asked fat people about their experiences with eating disorders, again, until pretty recently. There’s a researcher named Erin Harrop out of Colorado who’s doing incredible work around this.
Aubrey Gordon:
But that’s the context that you’re stepping into is the diagnosis excludes you, the research excludes you, which means the clinicians have all been trained on bodies that are not yours and on a pathology that they believe can’t necessarily be applied to your body. And like any other healthcare providers and like any other people on the planet who’ve been living in this sort of garbage discourse, they are also folks who have picked up the lessons of anti-fat bias from media, from culture, from all of these places. And I just can’t tell you the number of fat people that I’ve talked to who have checked in for eating disorder treatment and been put on calorie restricted plans for their food in a recovery center. I cannot tell you the number of people who have been laughed out of an eating disorder treatment facility by saying, “It looks like you haven’t missed a meal in a while.” Once again, not only is it a rejection of you don’t need treatment, it’s a reification of everything that led you to that place.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Aubrey Gordon:
This is the very person who’s supposed to help you is now telling you, “Nice try, fatty. You don’t qualify.” That’s a really terrible position to be in. I can’t remember the precise numbers, I believe it’s people who wear straight sizes, so people who don’t wear plus size clothes, when they seek eating disorder treatment, on average it takes them two to three years to access treatment to get to the place where they’re able to acknowledge it, able to seek out treatment, all that kind of stuff. For fat folks, it takes 10 to 16 years. Right.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s your life.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yes. That’s your life, that’s your kids growing up. That’s your kids growing up with a parent in an active eating disorder that is untreated. That’s your life, that’s your access to healthcare. Again, we’re talking about a disease with a really high fatality rate. We’re talking about eating disorders that are likely to kill people and often do.
Amanda Doyle:
And if they do in that circumstances, they say, “Well, they were fat. That’s why they died.”
Aubrey Gordon:
Totally. They were just trying really hard. We don’t see it as an eating disorder, we see it as someone who’s really trying and we applaud that. When I was at the height of my own eating disorder, all I was getting were compliments.
Abby Wambach:
Goddammit.
Aubrey Gordon:
Right? That’s it. It’s only reinforcement. That’s cultural. That’s in eating disorder centers, that’s in the research. That’s everywhere. I am like a weird unicorn that shouldn’t exist according to this entire field, and that’s to say nothing of the incredible whiteness of the field, and white supremacy in the field. That’s to say nothing of the wild ableism in the field. There’s lots of stuff to dig in on there, but I just have known enough fat people who have gone down the path of treatment, I don’t know that I know a single one who has checked in to a residential treatment center and has not come out worse than when they started.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Aubrey Gordon:
That’s a really, really, really tough pill to swallow and it’s a hard position to be in. Based on everything I know, I can’t fathom checking into a center and not having it make my eating disorder worse.
Glennon Doyle:
Still, not a single place.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
I think that all of the health things, doesn’t it also become the access to health, all the medical people are saying, “Oh, fatness is a health risk, and then you go in as a fat person to get medical assistance, but then the research says that then all the doctors say, “It’s because you’re fat,” and then they miss diagnoses and then they don’t actually examine you because they say all your symptoms are for that. If there is any data to show that fatness is comorbid with these other things, a huge percentage of it has got to be because they won’t look at anything past fat to actually diagnose you and help you.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yes, absolutely. There have been a couple of big stories about this. One was a woman in British Columbia who wrote her own obituary for the newspaper and was like, “I’m dying because I was fat, and because I went to a bunch of doctors and they missed my cancer and they said that I needed to go lose weight, and that’s why I’m dying. So I just want to tell you that’s why I’m dying. That’s my obituary. Bye.” There’s another one, a person named Rebecca Hiles, who started to seek healthcare in college because she was experiencing severe shortness of breath and they said, “Well, that’s just because you’re fat and you’re winded all the time, so you need to go work out and lose weight,” whatever. She got that for I believe eight years, and at the end of that eight years, found a doctor who discovered a massive tumor in her lung. She had lung cancer that was untreated for all of this time.
Aubrey Gordon:
So these are the sorts of stakes that fat folks are experiencing, and then to have that minimized into something that is not not a trial, which is sort of your own mindset about your own body, but it does feel like missing the boat completely when folks are like, “I totally get it. It’s so hard to have a body. Don’t you love Lizzo? She’s so confident,” and that’s sort of the sum total of the conversation and there’s not really a room to go, “Hey, wait a minute. People who look like me die because of stuff like this. People who look like me don’t get healthcare because of stuff like this.” And then we go, “Oh, look at how unhealthy they are.” We don’t go, “Well, wait a minute. We haven’t been treating them and we haven’t been diagnosing them, and we’re discriminating against them a lot. Whoops.”
Aubrey Gordon:
It’s a real tough one. The medical stuff is really difficult and intractable, and there is a little bit of data that suggests that people who are attracted to healthcare provision programs are more likely to exhibit anti-fat bias to begin with, and that the process of going through that schooling only increases their bias against fat people. So it’s a real big systemic rat’s nest of stuff to disentangle and as a fat person, it feels like a monolith with no cracks in it. There’s no way in for me there. It’s really, really tough. It’s really tough.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m wondering if it’s okay with you if we play this one voicemail because I used to be an elementary school teacher, and I always think I don’t really understand something until I can figure out how I’d say it to an eight-year-old. You know what I mean?
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
And I just think this question is from somebody, I think it’s a parent who’s trying to figure out how to approach something with her kid.
Aubrey Gordon:
Yeah. Let’s do it.
Glennon Doyle:
I love in your book how the end is this vision of what it would look like if fat people had equal access to healthcare, all the things we’ve been talking about. So I always think if we’re going to start, let’s start with the kids because the adults are so fucked anyway. That’s why I used to teach Sunday school. I was like, “Just give me the newbies because it’s so hard to undo everything else. Let’s start fresh.” So if we were going to start fresh with this love bug, let’s hear from Holly.
Holly:
Hi, my name’s Holly and I’m 41, and I’m calling because I’m just so sad in this moment. My eleven-year-old daughter is away on a trip with her grandmother, and today I got text today that I will try and condense. The first one, “A lady said something really mean to me at a store and now I’m really sad. She said I’m fat and not to eat so much. It really hurt my feelings because I didn’t think I was fat. Why did she say that? I can’t stop thinking about it. Now I feel like I’m fat.”
So as I talked her through all of this and we discussed what, quote, unquote, “fat,” looks like anyways, she asked, “But if I’m not fat, then what does she see? I felt pretty, but now I feel yucky and I don’t feel comfortable anymore.” She is an eleven-year-old child who hasn’t even started puberty, and she’s the shortest in her class and her body is just what it is supposed to be in this moment. But what do I say to my beautiful girl? Why is fat bad and why do I feel like I have to tell her she’s not fat to offer support? How do I keep her safe from this status?
Aubrey Gordon:
That’s such a tough one. That’s such a tough and real one. With questions like these, I always feel hyper aware that parenting is an extremely singular experience and it’s not one that I am having. So take all of this with a grain of salt that this is someone who does not intimately know the day-to-day of parenting, and understands that that’s a super different experience of the world in a lot of ways. I will say I have a niece and nephew to whom I am very close, and we have had similar conversations to this one, and I think in those moments I feel myself tempted to say, “Everything that person said is wrong. Everything that just hurt you is incorrect and you need to put it out of your head because they’re wrong and they’re just trying to be mean to you,” and usually how that comes out for people is saying, “You are not fat. Don’t listen to them.”
Aubrey Gordon:
The message that sends to that kid, whether we intend to or not, is that if at some point they gain weight, if at some point they become a fat person, even if they aren’t now, that they can expect that kind of behavior and that that’s an okay way to be. I would think instead about talking about, “How do you think she was trying to make you feel? How did it make you feel? I hear you saying you don’t feel pretty, and now you feel fat. Do you know pretty fat people? Have you seen some pretty fat people? Can you be pretty and fat? Can you be smart and fat? Can you be all of these different things and fat? Do you know fat people that you like? What are they like? Isn’t it weird to say that saying someone is like fat person is an insult? That’s weird. That person’s great. Why wouldn’t you want to be like that person?”
Aubrey Gordon:
There are reframes that we do around this stuff all the time with kids, and this is one of those opportunities. My niece at one point had a friend who was saying, “I’m so fat, I can’t wear anything,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but would also call other people fat. And my niece was like, “I don’t know how to engage with this because every time I try and come at this conversation, she just goes I’m just talking about me. I’m just talking about myself.” And so we had to do a bunch of unpacking of, “When she says you’re fat, what’s she really trying to say? She’s trying to say you don’t belong here. She’s trying to say that you’re being rejected. She’s trying to say all of these other things.”
Aubrey Gordon:
“That’s bonkers because fat is just a body type. That’s all that is, and if someone’s saying anything to try and hurt you, that’s probably something to disregard. If someone’s motivation is just to hurt your feelings, that’s probably not a great interaction to put a lot of stock in.” I think it can be that simple. I don’t know that it needs to be a whole lot more than that, but also you are road tested parents, so tell me what you think. Tell me how that lands and tell me how did these conversations play out in your house?
Glennon Doyle:
We solely look to people who don’t have children to give us parenting advice because nobody else has any fucking marbles left. So I think that that was absolutely beautiful and definitely online with how we try to talk to our little babies. It’s beautiful. Aubrey, you are doing world-changing, mind-blowing work that just, it is past time for. I am just grateful for what you’re teaching.
Aubrey Gordon:
I really appreciate that, and likewise. I feel like you all are modeling a kind of conversation here that is actually open, actually relaxed, actually anticipating change in folks and expecting that as a natural part of things, whether it’s on this stuff or on gender or on race, or on eating disorders or on any number of things. It’s such a wonderful thing. It feels like we live in a political context where vulnerability is less and less possible every day, and to be in a space where that’s the lead is a really lovely little privilege, so thank you for having me. This is a joy.
Glennon Doyle:
We love you.
Aubrey Gordon:
This is a joy.
Glennon Doyle:
You’re fantastic. Thank you, Pod Squad. And Aubrey, please, please, please, if you ever want to come back, just please tell us because we will-
Aubrey Gordon:
Oh my God.
Glennon Doyle:
… want to have you come back. Anytime you have a free hour, just please.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Aubrey Gordon:
Fantastic. I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
Bye, Pod Squad.
Abby Wambach:
See you next time.
Glennon Doyle:
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