Dieting Keeps Us Sedated.

The return to 90s fatphobia isn’t coincidental (in my opinion)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the rise in diet culture content and the fact that we are fully back in 2000s era fatphobia. Thinness is absolutely trending again, and I can’t open the clock app without being inundated with videos about GLP1s or before and after videos or videos about why we should be walking fifteen to twenty steps a day. I feel like we are watching the contents of a future documentary about how an entire generation of women developed eating disorders. It’s truly overwhelming. 

And if it’s not videos about weight loss, it’s videos about the ridiculous state of our world – the war on women’s reproductive rights, the upcoming election, the genocides happening in Palestine, the Sudan, and Congo, Project 2025, global warming, the economy, inflation, the cost of groceries and on and on and on. 

It’s mental whiplash, becoming increasingly more difficult to keep up with or even attempt to process. Every day, there’s part of me that wants to be tuned in because there is no liberation in vacuum and then part of me that feels hopeless. The hopeless part wants to simply dissociate and dig my head in the sand.

This got me wondering. Is there a correlation between that ever growing sense of hopelessness and the rise in diet culture?

How when we feel out of control – as I would argue most of us are feeling, at least to some extent right now – is often when we feel most called to diet culture. Because in a world where everything feels just out of our grasp, our bodies feel like the one area where we can have dominion over ourselves. 

As I discuss this at length in The Body Liberation Project, the times that I personally feel most called to fat loss or dieting is when other things in my world feel out of control. When I’m emotionally out of sorts or going through a particularly difficult time, especially when I’m in a situation that I can’t personally control, diet culture rears its deceptive head, promising that it can be the solution to all my problems. 

I’ll be damned if everything doesn’t feel extraordinarily out of control right now. 

In addition to that, I’ve also been pondering the fact that an untamed woman is a dangerous woman. A woman who stops using her energy towards the shrinking of her body or towards trying to reach other societal standards of beauty is a women who has energy to put towards fucking shit up. 

In the book, Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, she writes the following:

“Destroying a woman’s instinctive affiliation with her natural body cheats her of confidence. It causes her to perseverate about whether she is good or not, and bases her self-worth on how she looks instead of who she is. It pressures her to use up her energy worrying about how much food she consumes or the readings on the scale and tape measure. It keeps her preoccupied, colors everything she does, plans, and anticipates. It is unthinkable in the instinctive world that a woman should live preoccupied by appearance this way.”

I continuously reference the article written by the New York Post in November of 2022, entitled “Bye-bye booty: Heroin chick is back”, announcing that the thin, heroine chic body of the 90s was back in style. And yes, I realize that the New York Post is trash, but it still signalized an important cultural shift. 

With the rise in body positivity, bolstered by the COVID19 shutdown and the rise in inclusivity post George Floyd, we enjoyed a couple of years where it deceptively appeared that perhaps we were moving into a new era, one that was kinder, gentler, and more accepting of all bodies. 

But since then, as with the decreased interest in antiracism, body inclusivity seems to be just another passing trend. A cash grab by companies who were interested in popularity and profits, versus systemic change. 

In just the past few months, multiple companies, including Miaou and Loft, have announced the end of extended sizing, and other companies including Old Navy and Reformation, have stopped carrying extended sizing in stores. 

Regardless of my disdain for it, pop culture and celebrity culture play a huge role in what’s trending and that includes bodies as well. Over the past year, we have literally watched celebrities from the likes of the Kardashians to Mindy Kaling to Oprah shrink right before our eyes. Trust me, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, however, I do believe that keeping us focused on our bodies is by design. 

“The times in history when women have made the greatest political gains—getting the vote, gaining reproductive freedom, securing the right to work outside the home—have also been moments when standards for “ideal” beauty became significantly thinner and the pressure on women to adhere to those standards increased……this serves both to distract women from their growing political power and to assuage the fears of people who don’t want the old patriarchal system to change—because if women are busy trying to shrink themselves, they won’t have the time or energy to shake things up. It’s hard to smash the patriarchy on an empty stomach, or with a head full of food and body concerns, and that’s exactly the point of diet culture. —

Christy Harrison, Author of Anti-Diet and The Wellness Trap

The return to 90s fatphobia and the obsession with female thinness coalescing with an ever increasing attempt to roll back the rights of women, both reproductive and marital, isn’t coincidental in my opinion. I think it’s intentional. 

They want us distracted. They want us to keep making ourselves as small as possible – literally and figuratively. They want us immobilized. They wanted us sedated. They want us to do anything and everything besides take our power back. 

And dieting accomplishes all of that.

Because what would happen if millions of women stopped being preoccupied with our appearances? If we turned our collective rage towards the systems that have subjugated us for hundreds of years? If we took back our collective power? If we stopped being obedient?

It would really fucking powerful, and that’s exactly what scares the hell out of the likes of the far right – the Trumps and the JD Vances of the world, hence their doubling down on the narrative that women who are childfree are miserable, cat ladies who have no stake in America. 

Maybe the real problem with women who are single and childfree is that we have too much time, energy, and mental space to fight against systems. To disrupt the status quo. To demonstrate that life won’t end if you choose to buck heterosexual norms. To fight for all women to have the right to choose what they desire for themselves – whether that be marriage and children or joining the ranks of the single cat ladies. 

We’re not insulted by their remarks, but they are, in fact, fearful of us and everything that we represent — women exercising their freedom.

There is social capital attached to thinness and so this conversation is nuanced, but despite that, the truth remains that being the smallest and most snatched version of yourself simply won’t save you.

None of that matters if we have no rights left. None of it matters if fascism takes over.

Being thin and pretty won’t save us. 

Untangling ourselves from the grips of diet culture, especially in the age of social media, is no easy feat. But for me personally, I’m working towards it every day.

I don’t care about being a pretty woman. Or a thin woman. Or an agreeable woman.

I want to be a radicalized woman. An untamed woman. A dangerous woman.