130: Can We Stop Abusing Fat People? (w/Aubrey Gordon)
Well jeez. What can we say? We're totally honored to host and learn from Aubrey Gordon, author and co-host of Maintenance Phase. She gives us the rundown on anti-fat bias, its links to racism, the soft eugenics of the BMI, the insincere "concern" of the slender, and the intellectual and moral dead end of "being fat is a choice." We also get into some psychothinalysis. Oh yes we do.It's super inspiring to interview someone with a deep command of crucial material, plus the ability to pivot in startling directions, plus the skill to listen as fluently as they speak, plus all that warmth and welcome and empathy and accessibility. Thanks Aubrey! Show NotesYour Fat Friend websiteWhat We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat“You Just Need to Lose Weight” AND 19 OTHER MYTHS ABOUT FAT PEOPLE—PreorderMaintenance PhaseCorrection section: The NHS was limiting care for fat people and smokers *before* the pandemic (The Guardian), but backed off of that stance *during* the pandemic (NYT) before naming weight loss as one of its primary COVID strategies (Time Magazine).
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This is the most requested crossover episode that I have seen in our two and a half years of existence.
The Maintenance Phase Conspiratuality crossover.
So thank you so much, Aubrey, for joining.
We are so excited to have you.
Overjoyed to be here.
Thank you all so much for reaching out.
This is a treat.
Awesome.
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We'll see how that goes.
I like the platform, but there doesn't seem to be much going on there yet, but we'll keep Plugging away at it.
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As of this episode, we are also an Apple Podcast subscription service where you can access The podcast, the bonus episodes for $5 a month.
And then we have some other layers at Patreon as well where you can get live streams and bonus videos.
And I just want to say before Matthew talks about tomorrow's live stream briefly, that in the United States here, it is Thanksgiving.
So if you celebrate, hope you are having a great one.
Yes, and if it is Thanksgiving where you are, because, I mean, things change.
We are intending to drop this on Thanksgiving, but if that's what happens, then it's tomorrow that I'll be hosting our second live stream at 2 p.m.
Eastern, and this is part two of a discussion series on the absolute basics.
It's based on a seminar that they let me give at U of T a few weeks ago.
It's called Conspirituality 101.
So, episode 130, Can We Stop Abusing Fat People?
with Aubrey Gordon.
Aubrey, welcome to the show.
We are so honored to speak with you.
Huge fans of Maintenance Phase.
We love the show.
We love your work.
Especially, I mean, it's all things together, science journalism, cultural criticism, and also just listening to your amazing rapport with Michael Hobbs is such a joy.
So, thank you so much for being here.
Oh, thanks for having me.
And likewise, it's such a treat to be here.
I'm just over the moon about it.
So, I have to say that I was moved to tears several times when going through what we don't talk about when we talk about fat.
Derek dove into the galleys for your upcoming book, You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People.
When is that coming out again?
That one's coming out on January 10th.
Thank you for asking.
Okay, great.
So, we're going to be going back and forth between these two books and we're going to direct our listeners to your amazing body of work through the show notes.
But in this discussion, we want to try to walk a thematic line that I think will Introduce our listeners to you while also filling in some substantial gaps in our own reporting and analysis so far in this great era of body fascism.
So, here's what we know and then we'll ask you all the questions about how we got here.
So, first of all, I think we have established, we've understood that fat people have been cruelly targeted since the beginning of the pandemic.
Some of the most vicious attacks that we've seen have come from wellness influencers who saw a new and urgent opportunity to market their existing weight loss and purification scams.
We have seen that anti-fat bias in wellness culture has a history that dates back to the fascist roots of physical culture.
In which fat is a sign of immorality, decadence, modern disease and decay, and in which losing weight is associated with shedding sins and purifying the nation.
We've seen that people who are really drawn into this type of fat phobia are vulnerable to all kinds of disordered eating, but especially in our demographic to something that's called orthorexia.
And then finally, none of the conspirituality influencers we follow are fat, and we just don't think that they could be, given their messaging and their demographics.
So does that all sound familiar to you?
I mean, I would say, yes, it sounds familiar.
And I would say there's also a real underlying sort of undercurrent of And sort of roots in anti-blackness in anti-fat bias, right?
That quite a bit of what we see now and sort of our perceptions of fat people have come about.
I think the sort of theory amongst sociologists is that that has come about largely as more overt bias on the basis of race or class has sort of been pushed a little bit further below the surface, was for a minute, and is now back above the surface.
Hello, it's above the surface again.
That we just sort of offloaded a bunch of those biases onto fat people as almost a shorthand of a way of talking about communities of color and poor folks in particular.
Because when you can pathologize or medicalize fatness, it will cover over the more clearer sort of aspects of discrimination in those former discourses that are still there, but as you say, rising up again.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That's all I was going to say, is just like, check mark, yeah!
Yep!
Well, I thought that we could start with language and the basics of what we're talking about when we use the words we're speaking.
And I wanted to note that, like, except when I was, I think, seven years old in 1978, making fun of fat kids, I'm ashamed to say, because that would have targeted people like you and I think people like Derek, I haven't used the term fat so freely before this preamble to this episode and that's because of your work.
So why is this such an uncomfortable term and why does that mean that we should use it?
So I would say fat is a really uncomfortable term for a lot of people in the way that Right.
talking about our bodies is really uncomfortable for a lot of people, right?
I think particularly for people who are not fat, it's not a common experience to have someone ask you
what words you use to describe your body because mostly your body isn't being described, right?
Right.
When you are not a fat person, you're part of this sort of invisible perceived majority
that's actually a minority, but okay.
We're sort of not asked to give voice to what our bodies look like.
For fat people, we are also not asked, but those labels are applied pretty freely, almost exclusively without our consent, right?
I just went to a car dealership recently and had a conversation with a fat dude at the car dealership who was talking about how his customers really constantly and colleagues call him big guy all the time while they're patting him on the back and sending him away from a sales call.
Right.
So you're like, oh, got it.
So it's not just a neutral term that someone else is using based on my body.
It's coming paired with this behavior that is telling me something about how I'm being perceived.
As a fat person, I don't really ever get to decide what those words are, right?
People just sort of apply those to me.
And most of those are words that they think will spare my feelings, like, you know, chunky or fluffy or curvy or more to love or whatever else, right?
And all of those things to me signal that this is a person who's really uncomfortable talking to a fat person or being around fatness, right?
Right.
That that actually signals sort of the opposite of what they think they're signaling to me.
And I think the word fat in particular has quite a bit of baggage.
In my own anecdotal experience, there's not data to back this up, this is just me reflecting as a person, the people who I have known who are most hurt by the word fat are people who have not been fat.
And people who are fat are used to being called fat, right?
And we're like, yep!
Totally.
You got me.
Here I am.
I'm a fat person.
I don't know what to tell you, right?
There's only so much you can use that against someone when it really is who you are.
I think part of the reason that fat is such a hurtful term for people who have not been fat is that it's a gesture toward the ways in which they know fat people are treated.
And it's a gesture toward a sort of social Status of being written off and being sort of pushed to the side and being, you know, not somebody to really talk to but someone to be grateful that you don't look like them, right?
That that's sort of the main role that you play.
There's an amazing point that you make that we'll get to later about the fact that it's also a kind of shadow of a potential future that the thin person Let's move on to the terms obese and overweight.
We're going to come back around to that in a section that I've titled Psychothenalysis.
But let's move on to the terms obese and overweight.
How should we orient ourselves in your view towards these terms?
Yeah, so again, language is real heavy.
Lots of people have lots of feelings about it.
Proceed accordingly, right?
Right.
These are my own personal sort of feelings about these words and what I've heard from other fat folks over time.
Obese and overweight are two words that I think, again, people who have not been fat and are not fat think of as being sort of neutral medical terms.
The idea of medicine as being neutral is easy if the treatment that you have received feels neutral.
And I think for a lot of fat folks, going to the doctor's office is some of the most pronounced and virulent anti-fat bias that we face comes actually at the doctor's office, right?
So it's worth knowing that that's already loaded with all of this whole history of doctors, you know, in my case, like refusing to examine or treat me, right?
Or not having equipment that supports your body and asking you to go to a veterinarian hospital to get weighed in.
Right, like really profoundly humiliating experiences that are designed to hurt folks.
That's the context that that's bringing for me as a fat person is all of those rough times.
I think it's also worth knowing Both of those terms have been popularized by the Body Mass Index, which is just a hot pile of garbage that we'll get to in a minute.
There's also just straight up denotations to those terms, right?
Obese, the original Latin meaning of obese means to have eaten oneself fat.
Yeah.
Right?
So there's already a judgment built in.
You did this to yourself, man, right?
It's sort of built into the concept of being obese or obesity, right?
And overweight on its face says there's a right weight for you to be and you're not it, right?
Like there are just straight up judgments sort of built in at every level.
What I would say to folks who are like having a little bit of a galaxy brain moment right now is the only thing you need to know is that you probably don't need to describe other people's bodies as much as you think you do.
And if you do, just ask the person you're talking about how they describe their body and use that language.
Look at that.
There will be fat people that you encounter that, like me, really enjoy and embrace the word fat and think of it as a neutral descriptor, like being tall or short or blonde or black haired or whatever, right?
And there will be people who really have a hard time with it.
And really, the only thing to do if you want to be mindful of folks' boundaries is ask them what those boundaries are and then stick to them.
It's one of those things that feels like rocket science and then deeply is not.
You know what I mean?
At the risk of carving a path through rocket science, you track three language paradigms from fat phobia, through body positivity, through to fat justice.
So I'm wondering if you can give us the lightning round montage of those three.
Sure, I would say, so I'm just gonna take them right down the line.
Okay.
If that works for you.
Good, good.
Fatphobia is a concept.
Different folks have different words for it.
Other people will say fatmysia.
I say anti-fat bias or anti-fatness, mostly because phobias are real psychological conditions that real people have.
Oh, right.
And like, that's not what's happening when people are being jerks to fat people.
And I don't want to put that on anybody else, right?
That's not what's going on there, right?
And because I think quite a bit of the sort of disparate treatment that fat people face doesn't necessarily come from a place of fear, but from a place of control, often, right?
Anti-fatness, I would say, is the web of sort of beliefs and policies and practices that keep fat people sort of pushed to the side, off on the margins, and that make it harder for us to meet our most basic needs.
Like being treated with dignity, but also like accessing healthcare and keeping your job and really baseline things like that, right?
Body positivity lives in a little bit of a different neighborhood.
Body positivity is something that I think is largely referred to as a movement.
It's a very conflicted movement space currently and has been for about the last decade, I would say.
It originally sort of sprung out of fat activism and it started to catch on Initially, it was sort of formulated as a movement for justice for people whose bodies put them on the margins, particularly fat folks, and particularly fat black people, right?
We're really sort of at the center of the early days of body positivity.
Until we started to see corporations like Dove and Halo Top start to use body positivity in their advertising, which was the biggest stage that movement had ever gotten, right?
Was from people who didn't really know what it was.
And they sort of started talking about it as, you know, this is your chance to feel good about your body.
So body positive spaces became sort of flooded with people who were not necessarily on the margins, people who were not necessarily invested in a movement for justice, but people who just wanted to feel better, and people who hadn't really thought too deeply or interrogated their own beliefs about how they feel about fat people, right?
So, as body positivity sort of exploded in this moment, you got more and more people who did not wear plus sizes, who were not fat people, and who started to sort of claim ownership over body positivity as a movement, while saying things like, I'm body positive as long as you're not obese.
Or, I'm body positive as long as you're healthy.
Or, I'm body positive as long as, insert other barrier here, right?
Which sort of categorically cut out the very people who had created the movement.
So I think where we're at now is that quite a few of the fat folks that I know do not consider themselves body positive just because of sort of how all that has gone and because it's really painful to keep going back to a space where you just are gonna get hurt again and again, you know?
It's amazing what capitalism does with cooptation.
Absolutely.
I mean, it's bonkers.
That was like rocket fuel.
Right.
To sort of blowing up that space.
Right.
And then lastly, you mentioned fat justice.
That is a term that I sort of proposed in my first book.
And what I was trying to get at was, it feels like when I talk about sort of fat folks experiences with people who are not fat, that they are eager to find where their experiences align.
And that very quickly turns into, Their own experiences and needs overtaking the original conversation about fat people, right?
So it felt really important to talk about things in a way that was explicit that this is about fat people, right?
It's not about thin people feeling better about their bodies.
It's not about these other things.
What I was trying to get at with the concept of fat justice was what it would look like to have a movement that was focused on addressing the specific harms and the specific needs faced by fat people.
Things like going into a doctor's office and making sure that they have an exam table that will hold your body up and that they will actually see you there.
Or ending the practice, there are a handful of medical offices in the U.S.
that set a weight limit on the patients that they will see, right?
That strikes me as something that should not be allowed, and yet here we are, right?
The idea of Fat Justice was to get at, like, what would it look like to really stay focused on these particular things and figure out how to make life Less harmful and less hurtful for fat people, right?
Now, Matthew brought up orthorexia a little while ago.
We did an entire episode on that because I suffered from it for 15 years.
I've talked openly because I grew up overweight and I was bullied, so that's what Matthew was referencing before.
I went through the opposite of that, which was I worked in fitness for a long time, I worked as a health journalist, and I had a real hatred for fatness due to what I had experienced.
And it has taken me a long time to come around to understanding that, in fact, from teaching 8,000, 9,000 fitness classes, some of the worst health outcomes I saw were from very skinny people who often were suffering from their own disorders.
So, one of the things I definitely fell for in my health journalism days was one of the myths you bring out in your upcoming book, which is the idea that we're in the middle of an obesity epidemic.
Going by BMI, I am at the border of overweight now because the measure just doesn't make sense for people.
Across the board, it doesn't make sense.
Yep, it's bad.
I actually wrote an article four years ago and I quoted you when you were just going as your fat friend before you released your name, so that was very eye-opening to me about that process.
Thanks, buddy!
Yeah, totally!
And on a recent episode you made the point that no one's ever died of obesity, yet you're also aware like with many health issues it's a component of health problems that work in conjunction with other markers, yet we've isolated it as this prime driver of poor health.
So how do we battle the idea of the obesity epidemic and try to educate people about what is really going on with that term and maybe with BMI?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think this is a question that I think floats around fat activism quite a bit, right?
Is this question of sort of like, but what about the health stuff?
But tell me about the health stuff, right?
And I think it's worth spending a little bit of time on because I think it's not quite the right frame.
Because, for a couple of reasons.
We have done, I don't know how many hours of show now at this point on the BMI and the obesity epidemic and the constructed nature of those that are roads that lead directly back to white supremacy, directly back to eugenics and directly back to corporate profit interests, right?
Beyond that, beyond the like, hey, straight up, get your facts, everybody.
The question of like, but what about your health comes to me most frequently, not in doctor's offices, not in healthcare provision settings, but when I have set a boundary with someone about how I want to be treated as a fat person.
So, for example, if someone has been talking to me at length about how terrible their life would be if they got fat and how they can't get any fatter or their husband is going to leave them or they're going to lose their job or they're going to be disgusting and no one's ever going to talk to them again, I will say it is not uncommon for me to say, Hey, I don't actually want to hear about how my body is your worst nightmare.
Like that's like not a thing.
I get that this is a real thing that you're going through and I just can't be the person to process it with you, right?
Or alternatively, people will get really insistent about diets or workouts and sort of start proselytizing a bunch about how I really just need to try keto.
And did you try it hard enough?
And did you do it right?
I don't think you did it right.
If you didn't lose weight, that's probably on you, right?
That's another place where I might like, Set a boundary and go, Oh, I don't want to talk about this with you.
I'm good.
What that's often met with is I'm just concerned about your health.
And I know that there's a lot of like health issues that you might face.
And I think this is another place where it behooves us to step back and go, boy, unless it's your job.
To tell me about my health.
I think that there is this sort of social expectation at the moment that discussing fat people's health is fair game to do in any setting, in front of any audience, with sort of no real notice, no real consent, right?
That just wouldn't happen, right?
If my neighbor said, hey, you're parking in front of my driveway every day, I wouldn't be like, but I'm doing it for you!
Right?
That's like a weird thing.
That's a weird response to have to that.
Like it's in service of you because you clearly can't take care of yourself.
So I got to do it for you.
Right.
I think the answer here about sort of like, how do we remove this as from our thinking as sort of a primary driver of poor health is much more a question of how do we remove health from our criteria for treating people well and treating people like people.
Yeah.
Like, how do we get off of the idea that I need to know what your resting heart rate is in order to, like, respect a request that you've given me or to, like, be nice to you, right?
Like, it's a little bit bizarre.
So, like, I think both there is a whole science conversation and health and wellness conversation to have there, absolutely.
And on top of that, I would say this is one of those things where I think we can spin our wheels a lot about something that doesn't really have a big effect, and when it does, it's a pretty deleterious effect, you know?
Aubrey, you know, I didn't, this wasn't something that I was thinking about before meeting, but listening to you, I was expecting you to answer, Derek, with, you know, here are some good things that journalists can do, and this is This is what policymakers should do.
But you didn't.
You instinctually go towards the interpersonal and the sort of deep psychosocial structures that keep this series of judgments in play and create all of this sort of internal tension, but also abusiveness that is directed towards fat people.
And I really appreciate the focus on interpersonal I mean, those are some of the most powerful things that were quite shocking, actually, for me as never having been a target of that kind of abuse to realize how free people feel to comment or to judge or to make assessments or to have any thought that your body is any of their business.
It almost feels like this could be a workshop topic or something like that.
People are doing DEI stuff.
This could be some kind of social movement around interpersonal connection as well.
Is that happening?
Yeah, absolutely.
I would say that is a conversation that has been going in fat activist spaces for quite some time.
Much of that conversation is much more focused on How fat people can deal with this thing that is just sort of going to be an onslaught.
Yeah, right.
And I would say there's less currently there's some but less currently that is sort of around guiding people who aren't fat to to do it less.
Right.
But yeah, absolutely.
I would say that conversation is definitely happening.
And I'll say like, listen, On this question of journalists and policymakers, which I'm also like totally extremely down to talk about, let's do it.
I would say the other thing to consider on this sort of conversation about fatness and health is something that my co-host Michael Hobbs brings up often, which is that I think it's his sort of personal litmus test for a moral panic is what do we not need evidence to believe?
Right, right.
And I would say most people don't need evidence to believe that fat people are going to die, that it's going to be our fault, that we're going to have terrible diseases, and that it's their job to correct us and to take care of us when, again, they believe that we can't take care of ourselves, right?
Which again is just the overwhelming sort of preponderance of data that's available shows us that your weight is not actually strictly within your control, that a minority of people are able to lose and sustain major weight loss, right?
And that for many of us, it's like really not that simple, right?
Anyway, I would say like on this sort of question of what journalists and policymakers can do, I think the first stop is consider your sources, right?
Actually look at instead of sort of reading news reports like early in the pandemic, we got a wave of news stories about the purported link between body weight and COVID.
Those were all based on pre-publication papers that had not been peer reviewed.
That was not generally acknowledged much in the reporting, and as we know, many folks just read headlines, right?
Right.
If something feels enticing to you to believe about fat people, I think it's worth looking under the hood of that.
Waving a red flag.
Mm-hmm.
Just checking in with yourself.
Go find the original study.
See that it's a study of like 12 people, as is often the case, or that no one's reviewed it or that it's paid for by Novo Nordisk or Weight Watchers, right?
Like there is just real baseline sort of fact-checky kind of stuff that folks can do to just pump the brakes a little bit on this stuff and sort of, you know, get to the bottom of what's really going on and how big their response should be to a new news story.
In your book, you also write about one of your myths is weight loss is the result of healthy choices and should be celebrated.
You open talking about Adele.
I remember when she posted that photo, and you're right that a number of people initially celebrated her weight loss, yet some people were also upset that she lost weight, and then the SNL skit didn't do justice to the struggle she was having, which was a shame in my opinion.
It's so tough to navigate when some people just want to lose weight, period.
There doesn't necessarily have to be all these cultural stigmas, health outcomes.
There's such a wide range of why people would want to.
So in your view, what's the line between understanding that nuance that some people just want to lose weight compared to the ways that the culture stacks that against them in so many ways or promotes them in such a way to be like, oh, you did it.
Now you're going to be fine for the rest of your life.
Yeah, totally.
I'll start with the Adele stuff, which is, I think a lot was made out of a handful of people going, oh no, we lost another fat role model.
What I felt and what I feel often is when I see a fat celebrity that has lost weight is that you only get to reach a certain level of celebrity until you are pressured into really significant weight loss and maintaining that, right?
That it feels almost like clockwork that You know, Adele gets famous and then after a fashion has to lose weight.
Rebel Wilson gets famous and after a fashion has to lose weight, right?
That these celebrities, one after the next, after the next.
Right.
Gets to a certain level of visibility and is likely dealing with untold levels of anti-fatness from the public, from journalists, from every side, right?
As a fat person, it's really thrilling to see a fat person sort of ascend and become a public figure and rise to fame and be loved and all of that sort of stuff.
And it also feels really lonely when that second part happens and they lose a bunch of weight and uncritically accept congratulations.
For having a body that they didn't have before.
Yeah.
Like who were they before?
Who, who were they before?
Totally.
Totally.
So like, yeah, that's what I would check folks on is I think there's this idea that's like, some people think you should, and some people think you shouldn't.
And I would say, I don't think it's that anyone is saying you shouldn't do what you want with your body.
Body autonomy, bodily autonomy is at the core of, Every fat activist space that I have ever been in is your body is yours to do with what you wish.
I'm not here to tell you how to live your life or what size to be or what shape to be.
And I also hope that you won't do that to me.
And what we also know at the same time, this is the both and of it all, right, is that Belief that someone's weight is entirely within their control is one of the top predictors of bias against fat people.
Right.
And people who are most invested in losing weight themselves are also people who are most bought into that belief that they can and should control their bodies in this particular way.
That's a tricky link, and I don't know how to resolve it, right?
And again, I'm hardline on the, I'm not going to tell you what to do with your body, but I'm also a pretty hard line on, I don't want you to tell me what to do with mine, right?
And that's, I think, one of the primary challenges that I face as a fat person just in day-to-day life is, People at the grocery store commenting on what I'm buying or people at the gym telling me how to work out when I used to go to a gym, which I don't do anymore because yikes, it's terrible in there.
That kind of stuff is directly linked to their own dieting behaviors.
I don't know how to support their autonomy while also preserving mine.
That's what I would say.
It feels like a really tricky thing that I just haven't untangled yet.
Well, that level of nuance is tough for me because having taught for so long in yoga, but also in cycling and different like high intensity fitness classes, like I would have extremely thin people telling me how they need to lose weight.
And I would just, you know, my mind would blow up.
And then I would have people who were larger and were just like, I just, you know, I just want to lose 10 pounds.
I want to look a little better.
There wasn't a real thing about it.
But, and so, and you hinted before, it's almost like you were saying there's no nuance on social media.
Generally speaking, it's not the best place for nuance.
Yeah, totally.
I'm constantly battling that in terms of how to even address these topics.
And that's why I find maintenance phase so valuable, that you pick off one at a time.
And then looking at it holistically, you have a catalog.
But then, depending on where people find the entry point, they could get triggered in different ways.
It's very tough.
For sure.
Yes, absolutely.
I think we generally try to be mindful of like, Hey, we're going to talk about calories in this episode or Hey, this is a rough one team.
Uh, I think we edited down, uh, we did an episode on fat camps, which I am a kid who went to a fat camp.
Uh, they are some real misery factories.
I don't recommend it.
I think my original like content warning for that one got edited down from like 20 minutes of me being like, I'm so sorry in advance for everything I'm about to tell you.
It's just a real horror show.
I apologize.
So like, yes, it is like a real, like, take care of yourselves when you listen, because there can be tough stuff in there.
Absolutely.
Let's talk about BMI.
Let's bring that one in because I think that's one of the most enlightening aspects is knowing where it comes from.
I know you've done an entire episode on it, but if you can give the 101 here just for people to understand where it came from and why it's bullshit, that would be very informative.
Yes, absolutely.
I'm going to nutshell this one as much as it can be nutshelled.
The BMI was originally invented in the 1800s by someone named Adolf Kütle.
Oh, it's been a minute since I've practiced that pronunciation.
There we go.
Kütle.
There we go.
Got there.
It is essentially just a ratio of your weight to your height.
That's pretty much all it is, which means it's not very accurate for predicting body fat.
Right.
Um, I think particularly people who are not fat really love to say like the rock is obese using the BMI, which is true.
And also not the most harmful thing.
Is that it's calling the Rock Fat, right?
The BMI was developed using data from military conscripts in France and Scotland in the 1800s.
It was designed as almost a statistical tool for understanding population trends and for figuring out what the average sized person was, which Kutle believed was the ideal person that we should all be aiming for.
Which was a white man.
Which is a white man and no one else, right?
It mostly sort of sat on a shelf for a few decades until American life insurance companies were looking for a way to standardize charging fat people more for health insurance or charging people differently based on their body size, right?
And that's when the BMI really came back with a vengeance.
And got sort of folded into our medical system.
It's worth noting that it has never been adjusted for use on anyone who's not a white cis man, right?
That's just never happened.
We know for a fact that it leads to inaccurate health projections for pretty much every community of color, black folks, indigenous folks, everybody.
Except for white people.
And the high watermark of effectiveness of the BMI is that it quote unquote predicts obesity about 50% of the time in white people.
Usefulness and accuracy of it goes down from there.
It is also worth noting that, you know, earlier I mentioned like, The BMI thinking that thin people are fat is not the worst thing that's happening with the BMI.
The worst thing that's happening with the BMI is that that then becomes a barrier for fat people to access health care that they need.
So for fat trans people, surgeons will often set sort of, they'll freelance and set their own BMI limit on What sort of BMI you need to have and what weight you need to be at before they will provide what is very clearly life-saving care for trans people, right?
The NHS at the height of the pandemic in England opted to ration care for fat people if you were over a certain BMI.
And you needed a surgery that was not deemed urgent, like a knee replacement or a hip replacement or whatever, that would be denied unless and until you dipped below that BMI level, right?
So I think it's also worth noting that the BMI isn't just a flawed concept, it's now a flawed concept that is baked into policies that we're all sort of engaging with every day, and that are Pretty specifically designed to cut fat people out of really basic care, not out of a specific desire to hurt us necessarily, but out of the idea that we're sort of the most expendable and actually we could probably use a little motivation, right?
And if the doctor says you can't get surgery until you're this weight, then maybe that'll be the wake-up call you finally need.
Really seems to be kind of the logic behind it.
It is out and out eugenics, though.
I hadn't heard that about the NHS.
So, let's just repeat this.
So, the NHS set a threshold for, in triaging care, when the system is stressed, they singled out people over a certain BMI for delays in potentially very necessary, helpful surgeries.
And the reasoning was that the system was too strained and something had to go.
So fat people are literally the first on that list.
Yeah.
It was fat people and smokers.
I just looked it up.
There is.
Oh, I wish there was a way.
There's not a chat here, is there?
There is a chat.
Yes.
Oh, there is.
Great.
I'll send you the link.
Do you have the noise that you do on maintenance phase?
You have a little like.
That's it.
I can do that.
Right.
I can just do a slide whistle.
How did you have the slide whistle right there by your setup?
This is where I record.
I've got the slide whistle.
I've got the instant audience.
So we can just go.
It was fat people and smokers, right?
And this also happened in the US around COVID, that early on in the pandemic, the early conversations about what do we do if we need to ration ventilators was let's ration based on BMI.
Right.
Thankfully, that was not a policy that came into being that I'm aware of.
But that was the starting point of the discourse was we can't give it to fat people.
They're going to die anyway.
Hey, everybody.
Matthew here with a brief interruption and a correction from Aubrey, who wrote to us after recording, quote, A quick note.
After we spoke, I fact checked myself and realized I got a little turned around on my facts on the NHS stuff.
I checked into it, and it looks like the NHS was limiting care for fat people and smokers before the pandemic.
But then backed off that stance during the pandemic before naming weight loss as one of its primary COVID strategies.
And she provides sources here to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Time Magazine.
So we're leaving this in with the correction because Gordon's broader point about the eugenics implications of the BMI still holds.
And we'll put those links in the show notes.
Okay, back to Aubrey.
I mean, it's worth knowing that the guy who created the BMI was not himself a eugenicist, but his work was then picked up by Sir Francis Galton, who is Mr. Eugenics, right?
King Eugenics?
Yeah.
Who was a big fan of Cathay's and used quite a bit of his work in sort of making the case for eugenics.
There is definitely a long-standing sort of connection there.
And you specifically said that it was meant to be used in populations, not for individuals, right?
That was part of Kotele's research, right?
Yes, absolutely!
He was not a healthcare provider.
He was a mathematician, statistician, and astronomer who was best known for founding an observatory.
So, like, deeply not a doctor, right?
And absolutely never designed for use in individual healthcare settings.
That has come to us courtesy of the U.S.
of A. in the last hundred years or so.
Well, we cover a lot of astrologers who are also epidemiologists, so, you know, there's a lot of crossover.
Oh!
So fun!
So fun!
So, we have these obvious, like, structural Issues.
I mean, first of all, one of the things, just hearing the recitation of The History of the BMI again makes me realize that conspiracy theorists really have a lot to go with when it comes to thinking about institutional neglect and intellectual dishonesty.
I mean, The fact that this marker can be used and used and used and it's not replaced with anything or it takes like decades for it to be, you know, clearly questioned, really sort of smacks of a kind of neglect and incompetence that borders on almost willful.
So I can imagine, I can imagine somebody beginning to feel as though there's something intentional or at least, I don't know, something under the surface driving things.
Absolutely.
I think it's a thing that Mike and I talk about a lot sort of between the two of us about making our show is, boy oh boy, there are times when it feels like we're getting close to it's not a conspiracy if you're right.
Right.
Kind of territory, right?
And that's like not a place that we want to live.
And at the same time, I mean, the line from the data that we have to the policies that we've created is so hard to explain.
With anything other than pretty strong bias and profit motives and, you know, like things that have really nothing to do with actual fat people and our actual health.
I mean, I realized I left out one of the big beats of the BMI story, which is that in the late 90s and early 2000s, the thresholds for what were considered overweight and obese were lowered.
The lead on CNN said something like, millions of Americans woke up obese on Wednesday, and they didn't even know it, and they didn't gain a pound, right?
So I think it's also worth noting that, like, that is a move that came about at the time that a number of major pharmaceutical companies were looking for approval for a weight loss drug, and no weight loss drugs had been approved in about 20 years.
Ooh, not that long, excuse me.
No weight loss drugs had been approved in years and they were trying to figure out how to get through that approval process and I think there's some sort of anonymous reporting in the British Medical Journal tying funding from those drug companies back to the lowering of this particular threshold, which is what paved the way for us thinking about an obesity epidemic as being a real thing and not just A steady trend that's been happening for about a century and nothing big has really changed, but we're all freaking out.
Well, when we turn back to these very difficult, I mean, I think you said it very well, it's difficult to trace the line between the data that we have and the policies that are generated.
And this is why I think one of the most Incredible parts of your first book is how you put anti-fat bias on the couch.
You really showed how, as we've said, capable and eager thin people are to project fearful and shameful thoughts about fatness onto fat people.
That fat people become kind of like this green screen for every morbid anxiety.
I'm just going to quote you here because this is such a beautiful passage.
You write, The ways that thin people talk to fat people are, in a heartless kind of way, self-soothing.
They are warnings to themselves from themselves.
I am the future they are terrified of becoming, so they speak to me as the ghost of fatness' future.
They remove food from my cart as if it is their own.
They offer diet advice forcefully, insisting that I take it.
If I say that I have, they insist I must have done it wrong, must not have been vigilant enough, must not have had enough willpower.
They beat me up the way most of us only talk to ourselves, as if in a trance they plead with me, some terrifying future self.
So when did you first realize that thin people were really talking to themselves?
I don't know that there was like a real lightning bolt moment, and I will say this is sort of a theory that I have, and it's one that I struggle to hold on to.
I'm having a moment lately where I'm like struggling to hold on to that as a theory.
Essentially, I think You know, there's this thing that people love to say, which is, oh, you're harder on yourself than you would be on anybody else.
And I will tell you as a fat person, that is not true.
You are not harder on yourself, right?
Necessarily than some folks can be on fat people.
People will say absolutely horrendous things to fat people that they would not say to anyone, sometimes even including themselves, right?
I would rather live in a world where this is the answer and not that the answer is just really, People really hate to see fat people that much, and they really can't control themselves or choose not to around us.
That feels like a much bleaker world to me than a world in which people are, you know, not feeling whole themselves and are acting that out.
Is that how you're struggling with this theory?
That this actually is quite empathetic, this passage?
It comes and goes in waves for me.
Do you know what I mean?
There are days when it's easier to hold on to and there are days when it's harder to hold on to.
You know, this was, I don't know, four or five years ago, I was walking to work and it was over a hundred degrees, which I am from Portland, Oregon.
I am not built for this business.
Like absolutely not.
For years and years and years throughout the summer would always wear long sleeves, not because I wanted to wear long sleeves and be so hot all the time, but because when I didn't, people would say things to me about covering up my arms and not wanting to see that and that sort of thing.
And I was walking to work this one day and I had put on a sleeveless dress because I was like, it's like 106 or whatever.
I just can't, I can't not.
Do this, you know, like I just have to.
And there was a guy standing in front of the coffee shop in front of my work and he just went, nobody needs to see that.
Amazing.
And I was like, I would love to believe that that guy is talking to himself on some level, but also there is a point where I sort of go, that's also just dirtbag behavior.
You know what I mean?
Like, that's just also a guy being a jerk.
So I think it's like, hard to figure out how to believe in a world that really does care and is really trying and struggling through that trying.
Versus, you know, in moments like that, it's hard to believe that there was any try in that guy.
You know what I mean?
It's hard to believe that that was a dude who was like, you know, wrestling with his own stuff, right?
That just feels like a straight up unprompted act of aggression, right?
It feels important to me to retain that as the center of the work.
And it is a thing I believe a lot of the time.
And there are times when I go, Boy, I don't know if this really was your best self.
I really don't know if this was you trying your hardest.
And the energy that I would spend on empathizing might be better placed elsewhere.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's a thing that I very genuinely struggle with, and I think in a lot of cases it is true.
And there are times when people make it really hard to believe.
That's what's going on.
You know what I mean?
You know, I think what's interesting that's what has happened right here is that I've picked out this passage that I think really sort of gratifies the perspective that the behavior isn't just dirtbag behavior.
Totally!
Absolutely!
I'm almost saying, Aubrey, thank you so much for writing so empathetically about what a dirtbag I am sometimes.
Or what a dirtbag I was.
I mean, yeah.
Well, it's also a tricky thing about conversations about bias, right?
Is that anytime we're talking about our own implicit or explicit biases, we're brought Front and center, face to face with our own sort of sense of ourself as good people and as egalitarians and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
And course correcting on some level means acknowledging, Oh, I don't think that was my best self.
Right.
And that's a lot to ask somebody to do.
It shouldn't be, but functionally it usually is.
Like that's like a big lift.
It seems like we should generally be better at going, Oops, I messed up.
Sorry, on to the next.
Most of us just aren't.
No, but what you did in that passage is you give us a bit of therapy, right?
Hopefully!
Show me it's working, team!
But like, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, like, again, I genuinely do think that.
I think particularly for me, there are a lot of white boomer ladies who spent their whole lives dieting, and for sure when they're talking to me, they're absolutely talking to themselves, and they're parroting things that Other people, usually women, have said to them, and they're imagining this as like a helpful endeavor, right?
And then there are guys like that guy in front of the coffee shop, hard to hang on to.
There are people who, you know, comment on what you're buying at the grocery store, hard to hang on to.
As part of the research for the first book, I was looking into the data around healthcare providers' beliefs about fat people, which are Hair-raisingly terrible, right?
Yeah.
Just really, really, really awful.
A plurality of registered nurses in the U.S.
believe that when fat people are entered into the hospital for any reason, that we should be put on, by default, on diets of 500 calories or less per day, regardless of what you came in for, right?
That's one-third the level of the calories offered to people in the Minnesota Starvation Study.
Yeah.
Most of the nurses that they surveyed for that particular study thought that way, right?
And the other one that like made it really hard to hang on to was finding common acronym amongst doctors who work in emergency rooms for fat people, which is HONDAS, which is an acronym for hypertensive, obese, non-compliant, diabetic, Alcoholic or asshole, take your pick for the last one.
Oh, really?
And that is a label that is applied on site, right?
It's used internally.
It's not generally used with patients, right?
But if your starting point is believing, I already know that you have high blood pressure, diabetes, that you're not going to listen to me and that I already kind of think you're a jerk.
Right?
Like, that's all encapsulated in that one acronym.
That's a time when it's hard to hang on to, I believe that this is something that exists within you and not within your perception of me, right?
It makes it hard to extend that kind of grace when you hear those kinds of things being said about you based on how you look, right?
Like, that's a hard thing to hang on to.
I worked in an emergency room for two years, and I would often be in the hallway.
I would monitor suicidal patients.
That was my college job.
But when you would hear the doctors and nurses talk to a patient in the room, and sometimes I'd be stationed in the hallway, and they would literally walk out of the room, and then you would hear how they would talk about that patient.
And I have no hatred.
I think healthcare professionals are amazing.
Absolutely.
There are also individuals subject to their own biases.
And when you see it up close like that, it's hard.
It's hard to take in and understand that these are people who are supposed to be empathizing with you.
Yeah, I'm guessing a number of those were co-workers that you like?
Mm-hmm.
Or on some level enjoyed, right?
And also, I would say for me personally in those moments, really hard to hang on to liken that person
as much as I know I do, right?
To hear them talk about someone who looks like me in that way.
Yes.
And with that level of dismissiveness.
I mean, I think it's like, I so appreciate your point about like, absolutely healthcare providers, totally amazing.
And like the rest of us, they are products of a culture that really seeks to push fat people aside as much as possible.
And Healthcare providers get immense amounts of technical training in how to deal with folks' bodies and zero training in how to rethink how they think about fat people, right?
I'm not aware of any healthcare provider education in the country that addresses anti-fat bias on even a baseline level.
That's not a thing I've heard of.
You know, I'm not going to spoil the sort of peak moment in what we don't talk about when we talk about fat, but I wanted to ask whether or not the doctor who actually gave you some reflection of your full personhood, if you later found out, did he do a training?
How did he get there?
Why was that a standout experience?
And how did he come to it?
Yeah, in the book I write about something that a lot, a lot, a lot of fat people do, which is you experience so much lecturing about weight loss and so much dismissal at the doctor's office that it becomes too much to bear and you just postpone care for months or years at a time to avoid just feeling humiliated in the way that that can feel humiliating, right?
Right.
If you have like, say, a mom who makes comments about your body that you don't like, imagine that being your doctor and that happening every time you seek health care, right?
Like, it's rough, man.
It's rough.
I, a few years ago, had an intake visit with a doctor who didn't end up being my long-term doctor.
It was unfortunate.
He was the intake guy.
And the doctor that I got ended up leading me astray on some health stuff, largely I think rooted in anti-fatness.
Put me on statins when my cholesterol was already quite low, which is like really not a safe thing to do.
Whoa!
Yeah, totally bad news.
So, I never really got an answer on how that person came to be.
I do know that the provider is a place that was very proud of having done a bunch of Queer and trans competency trainings and a bunch of sort of broader cultural competency and particularly cultural competency around immigrants and refugees sort of trainings.
So I think they had a little bit more of a muscle that they had built around thinking about how folks would experience care, not just how care was provided, right?
But I don't know for sure how that guy got to where he was.
He was really great and I really appreciated it.
You know, really, really appreciated it.
So there's one more myth I want to make sure we get in, because I hear this one often, which is that if you accept that people are fat, you're actually glorifying obesity.
And you've all been talking about Lizzo, and I remember just when she was recently in the news for playing James Madison's flute quite beautifully, the focus went on- Like a superstar!
The focus went on her outfit, not at the actual Senate, but actually in the concert that night.
She played it there, and there was so much banter about her outfit.
One thing I appreciated, I heard Michael say on one episode that he treats people on social media much differently than people in real life, which is important because one-on-one you can actually have a conversion experience where on social media we talked about that.
Absolutely.
Do you have any patience left when trying to tell people that acceptance is not glorification?
Well, first I'm curious about, you mentioned this is one that you're accustomed to hearing.
What do you hear or feel or interpret that message to be?
When you hear people talking about glorifying obesity, how do you, Derek, take that?
I'm curious.
If you want to say.
Oh yeah, I don't know.
I'll totally say.
It reminds me and go astray too much, but I'm an atheist and I write from being an atheist and I have religious people get mad at me.
And then, but I also think there's a lot of utility to religion.
And I think there's good aspects of the cultures that come out of it sometimes.
And then I get atheists mad at me.
Right?
So that's an example of like, when you're trying to talk about this specific topic, as I mentioned earlier, you can say that there are some bad health comes with being overweight and then some people who might be
activists get mad at you.
But then finally at this stage, that question is that you say, you know what, maybe being
overweight isn't the worst thing in the world and that you have a bias and then people say,
oh, then basically you can just let people eat whatever they want.
And the one thing that I hear often is because they're overweight, they're loading the healthcare
system which I'm paying through my taxes to then subsidize their lifestyle.
And that is the main one that I hear.
Which also, I got some bad news if those people are Americans.
Your tax dollars are not going to healthcare the way you think they might be going to healthcare.
Uh-oh.
Step one, I pay my own insurance, so that's not happening for this guy.
What I would say is I appreciate the framing around social media because this feels like a phrase that I experience almost exclusively through social media.
Like I'm struggling to remember that a time That a person with a human face said to me out of their human mouth, you're glorifying obesity, right?
Like that is a typed message as I think of it.
And I also appreciated that moment of Mike saying that he treated people on social media differently than in real life.
And I was like, Ooh, this is a life lesson that I should have learned before now, but I'm learning it now.
Good point, Mike.
I think that because I see this one predominantly through social media and because of sort of the way that it's deployed, I don't generally engage with it anymore.
And that's for a couple of reasons.
One is, as a typed message, you're glorifying obesity.
That is a message that overwhelmingly shows up in the comments of like a fat lady showing off her new swimsuit, or like somebody going to the beach for a day, or like a fat person working out, or somebody eating food, right?
All of these extremely basic everyday activities, when the person is fat, Get reconfigured as this is glorifying obesity.
I think my favorite example of that was, um, there was a plus size mannequin that went up in a Nike display in London and people lost their minds about glorifying obesity.
It was like a size 14 mannequin, which is sort of right on the cusp of plus sizes and people like, The internet unleashed its fury on this mannequin for glorifying obesity, right?
Which just shows you what clothes look like if you are a size 14 when they're being worn and not on a rack.
That's all a mannequin is doing, right?
To me, Because those are the settings that prompt that response, right?
What I take that to mean is that this is someone who is seeing an image that they find discomforting on some level, or challenging, or they don't like to see it for whatever reason.
And also for whatever reason, they can't not say something about it.
Right?
They can't not elevate it to the level of some kind of broader societal threat than just, I feel uncomfortable right now, or I didn't want to see this, right?
Which I would say most of us on social media most of the time are seeing things we'd rather not see.
I don't go in and go like, you're glorifying this backpack that I don't want to buy, right?
Like, that's just not really a thing that we do.
To my mind, the complaint about glorifying obesity speaks to a mindset of someone who is, has not given this issue very much thought, is not particularly interested in the experiences of the fat people that they're internet yelling at, right?
And is likely not very interested in like a nuanced or human discussion about this thing.
To me, it's a little bit like when I used to, I was a community organizer for a long time and I would talk to people about LGBTQ equality and people would say things like, I'm fine with it as long as you don't prance around the office.
What can you do about people prancing around the office or that sort of thing?
And I was just like, OK, so this is a person I don't need to talk to on this thing.
Right.
Like, got it.
We're done.
We're done here.
Cool.
Or like, who's the man in your relationship?
Right.
Like, I think glorifying obesity for me goes in that same kind of bucket of just like, oh, this is a person who doesn't want to have this conversation.
It always seems to come up in relation to the subject in question having pleasure or seeming to have pleasure in their existence.
So the last two examples that I can think on that impacted our world was Jessamyn Stanley showing up on the cover of a sports magazine, and Eric Trump, I think, said his bullshit, but the basic premise was This magazine and this person is glorifying obesity, and when you actually look at what's being conveyed, it is the image of a person who is just doing something that looks pleasurable to them in the world.
And I think that's what is so triggering.
And then the other place that it came up famously was Jordan fucking Peterson talking about Exactly.
Saying that no amount of woke propaganda can make me feel like I want to jack off in front of this picture, which is so extraordinary as a way of intruding into somebody else's pleasure.
The hatred really is about, you can't enjoy yourself.
You can't enjoy yourself.
You're not allowed to.
And there's something very deep and pathological going on there.
I really love that the Jordan Peterson comments, like, the mechanics of what he's talking about means that Sports Illustrated is waging a campaign to make Jordan Peterson, like, get into fat ladies.
And I'm like, no one's... Sports Illustrated doesn't care, Jordan Peterson!
Sports Illustrated is not thinking about you, Jordan Peterson.
They're also not thinking about me.
It's fine.
Right.
It's just a real wild one on this front of sort of like the idea of glorifying obesity and this idea of not wanting to experience pleasure, not wanting to see fat people experience pleasure.
I think it's even deeper than that, which is there is an expectation of me as a fat person that I will begin conversations by talking about what I'm doing to not be fat.
Yeah.
That I will enter a conversation by talking about, I went to the gym this morning, or I will say, oh, I can't go out to lunch with you because I'm really watching what I eat, right?
That there is an expectation of a constant performance of renouncing my own body, that people who are not fat feel like they need from me in order to not kind of flip out at me, right?
Right.
It's not even about Seeing fat people experience pleasure, although that can be part of it.
It's about the drop off of that performance, right?
It's about refusing to perform dissatisfaction with your body, refusing to kind of Talk shit about your own appearance in front of other people to make them comfortable.
That's what's not happening there.
Even before you get to the point of like pleasure or anything else.
I mean, I think the common thinking amongst fat activists or the thing that I hear most frequently amongst other fat activists is the idea that People who aren't fat get so mad at those pictures because it's what they won't allow themselves to do.
Mm-hmm.
That they have been kicking their own behinds and sort of full of self-recrimination for what they've eaten and what they've done and all of this sort of stuff, all to avoid being fat so that they can live a happier life.
And what they are finding is that instead their life is getting more and more constrained.
Oh, yeah.
And more and more sort of joyless.
That glorifying obesity stuff is a place where it feels like that frame of like, ooh, you might just be talking to yourself feels potentially useful, right?
That like, they're not mad at this fat person who they've absolutely never seen before eating a slice of pizza.
They're not mad about that.
That pizza looks good.
That person looks happy.
There's nothing to be mad about, right?
Jessamyn Stanley looks like she's getting a good stretch!
Totally!
Jessamyn Stanley looks amazing 100% of the time!
Yeah, right.
Right?
Like, totally fantastic!
That is an expression that reinforces their own investment in what they believe that they have had to do in order to remain thin.
Although, again, mostly what we know is that a lot of people are pretty much the size they're gonna be, and that it's really, really, really hard to change that, right?
So like, uh-oh, thin people, you might be doing a lot of things that you don't actually need to do.
Whoops!
Right?
Like, you might actually be on the path of an eating disorder that you don't...
Need to have in order to stay thin, you were just going to be pretty thin anyway.
You might be 10 pounds more, 20 pounds.
Right.
But like, uh, I think the sort of underlying thinking there is if you get to be happy and you're not doing, I'm not watching you do all the things that I feel like I have to do, then I'm mad at you for getting to where I want to be.
And I'm not there yet.
Right.
Does that make sense?
It totally makes sense.
It's a rough one.
Yeah, it's a lot more grim than I actually opened with in that little segment.
Whoops, sorry!
But you know, the whole, this entire, I think it comes down to a kind of radical call to a kind of self-awareness, and you really model that At the end of the book, getting pretty close to what I would call a sermon in non-dualism as you write, because after all of the concern trolling, all of the self-monitoring, all of the hyper-vigilance you're describing, all of the negative and fetishized objectification, here's what you write.
You write, I believe that I deserve to be loved in my body, not in spite of it.
My body is not an inconvenience, a shameful fact, or an unfortunate truth.
Desiring my body is not a pathological act, and I'm not alone.
Despite the never-ending headwinds, fat people around the world find and forge the relationships they want.
There is no roadmap, so we become cartographers, charting some new land for ourselves.
We live extraordinary lives, beloved by our families, partners, communities.
Fat people fall wildly in love.
Fat people get married.
Fat people have phenomenal sex.
Fat people are impossibly happy.
Those fat people live in defiance of the expectations set forth for them.
Their fat lives are glorious and beautiful things, vibrant and beyond the reach of what the rest of us have been trained to imagine.
So, speaking truth to power on this issue is now a central part of your life, and you're helping a lot of people with it.
But what I wanted to end with was the question of, in a world in which you didn't have to do this activism, what do you think you would have spent your time doing?
Oh, I would just still be in my old job!
My old job was, I was a community organizer, so not far off from this, right?
My work prior to doing this kind of writing and podcasting and research stuff was that I was a community organizer working for voting rights, for immigrant rights, for LGBTQ equality, and doing some organizing around prisons.
Part of the way that I got here was by realizing that even on issues that impacted me, I was absenting this really important part of myself and was sitting through meetings with other folks on the political left who were very seriously talking about, you know, soda taxes as a way to end the obesity epidemic.
Right.
And being in spaces with other people with whom I was entirely politically aligned aside from One of the most formative aspects of my experience of the world, right?
And I had this moment of realizing that I just wouldn't stand for that if they were talking about me as a queer person that way.
I wouldn't stand for it if they were talking for me as a woman that way.
And I was accepting a lot of things as a fat person that I would not have accepted on any other front.
And it really was time to start talking about that and setting some boundaries.
So that's where I would be.
I'd be knocking on doors.
That's what I'd be doing right now.
Talking to voters.
I'm very glad you did and are doing this work because it is such an underrepresented voice in the population.
As someone who, again, grew up overweight, I wish I wouldn't have just been called Dumbo with my big body and ears or Chunky was the nice one, right?
Yeah.
So there were no, there was no voices at that time to hear.
So I'm so glad that people now through you have a voice to speak for that.
So thank you.
Derek, you know, it makes me realize that at some point we've got to ask you the question, if you had read Aubrey's book at the age of 15, if you had had it at the age of 14, how would your life have turned out differently?
So that's another episode.
Boy, oh boy.
That's like seven episodes, my dude.
Yeah, probably.
Potentially a lot of episodes.
And maybe some of those episodes are just a therapy session.
