Part 1: Fat Phobia is a Social Justice Issue with Dana Sturtevant and HIilary Kinavey

“We all eat for emotional reasons. That’s normal. Food is flavored with complex meanings. It connects us with our culture and our ancestry and heritage. We eat to celebrate. We eat to grieve. Food is an emotional thing for human beings. When we dumb it down to its nutritional components and see it only as a vehicle to give us nutrients, we are missing so much.” 

- Dana Sturtevant

If you haven’t yet considered weight stigma as a social justice issue, today is the day you begin. Diet culture is an insidious arm of white supremacy culture that has removed us from our bodies, from pleasure, and from our connection to our heritage. It has caused untold suffering to folks in fat bodies, impacting access to health care services, opportunities, and access to simply feeling good moving about in the world without shame and blame.

This conversation between Nicole and Dana Sturtevant and Hilary Kinavey, part one of a two-part episode, is one that lifts the lid on grief and loss. We have been fed so many lies. 

Diet culture shapeshifts when we start to catch onto its oppression. We may have given up on counting calories and tracking points, but we strive to “eat clean” and “make healthy lifestyle changes” or go paleo or do intermittent fasting…whatever the latest trend to make our own bodies more acceptable or to weaponize against folks in larger bodies. 

We learn early on that our bodies are problems to be solved, and that restricting food or eating just the right combination of nutrients will solve the problem. We are taught that there are right and wrong ways to live in a body.

Hilary shares, “People who occupy [fat bodies] are not able to function in the culture or pursue their joys, their lives, their bliss in the culture because fatness is considered something they have to resolve before they can get access to what they need.”

As Dana and Hilary share, the healthcare industry has centered “health care” around the Body Mass Index, the creation of a white statistician and founder of phrenology, a racist pseudoscience. The BMI was created not as a measurement of individual health, but as a tool to track populations for the insurance industry. The Body Mass Index has now been used for years in doctors' offices, in the field of dietetics, by the diet industry, and by professional trainers as a tool to measure health by means of body size. It’s bogus. It’s racist. 

One alternative to the conventional paradigm of food, body image, and weight-centered health care is Body Trust, a process by which we can all learn to live more peacefully and compassionately in our bodies.

As with all our social justice work, in the work of fat liberation, we must center the voices, work, and lived experiences of the most marginalized, namely fat Black queer femmes. 

We encourage you to disrupt diet culture and weight stigma in your own life by listening to the folks most harmed and developing an analysis so you can see the ways in which diet culture is expressing itself in your relationship with your body and other bodies. 

It is time to divest. As a community, let’s hold one another in generous accountability for doing this work.

In this episode, Nicole, Hilary, and Dana talk about:

• The origin story of Be Nourished

• “Healthy lifestyle” behavior is dieting behavior

• The empty promises of weight loss

• What happens when we compliment someone’s body after weight loss

• The racist roots of the BMI (see sources below for further reading)

• Our indoctrination into diet culture

• Diet culture’s focus on pathologizing foods of Black and Brown people

• White dominance in dietetics

• Weight stigma as a social justice issue

• Reclaiming “fat” as a neutral descriptor

• Beginn