Self help: it's not not a diet
Self help's anti-fatness problem
This week’s newsletter is about the relationship between self help and diet culture. If reading about diets, weight loss, and exercise - even from a critical stance - isn’t for you right now, please take care of yourself and skip this one.
The wording of “not not a diet” in the title of today’s post is borrowed from
over at Burnt Toast, who writes about anti-fat bias, diet culture, and problematic food trends. She’s fond of noting that many of the eating and lifestyle “choices” out there are diets, or at least diet adjacent, in all but name.Self help as a genre is deeply intertwined with diet culture. This is true even for the areas of self help that are NOT explicitly about weight loss or some kind of body transformation. As I’ve written about before, self help advice so frequently uses weight loss, exercise, and eating as examples, metaphors, and common-sense notions it’s clear that anti-fat bias is rarely, if ever, interrogated in this space.
Diet culture refers to all the ways that thinness and dieting are normalized and valorized, and fatness is demonized, in just about every arena you can think of: health and medicine, popular culture, humour, education, workplaces, and in our everyday conversations (“I walked to work so I guess I earned this donut!”). Like other deeply-rooted aspects of culture, it’s so common that its presence is taken-for-granted and mostly unquestioned. Diet culture contributes to anti-fatness, which Aubrey Gordon, author and podcast host, defines as a
Web of beliefs, interpersonal practices, institutional policies that are designed to keep fat people on the margins.
The beliefs espoused, implicitly or explicitly, within a great deal of popular self help texts do just this: keep fat people on the margins. In fact, the consistent centering of diet and exercise goals suggest that fat people shouldn’t exist at all, and that being fat is incompatible with any kind of self improvement.
I grew up (and remain) steeped in diet culture. NutriSystem and SlimFast were household words; the Jane Fonda workout was on the shelf; and every adult woman I knew was on a diet. People smoked to stay thin. Even though I’ve been straight-sized1 all my life, I learned to think of my body as never thin enough. I know I see a diet-culture distorted image when I look in the mirror.
I’ve known how fucked up this is from a young age, yet it’s still a struggle to divest my thinking from everything the Diet Industrial Complex has taught me to believe about myself and others. Interrogating my own anti-fat attitudes will be a lifetime’s work. Unfortunately, my interest in self help isn’t, well, helping.
A few weeks ago I read the book A Life Spent Listening by Dr. Hassan Khalili. This book combines memoir and self help, with the author, a psychotherapist, offering life advice gleaned from his decades of work with patients as well as his own varied life experiences.
In general I found the book to be not that interesting, and I probably wouldn’t have mentioned it in this newsletter except that I was struck by how often Khalili betrays a strong anti-fat bias. Not only does he consistently recommend weight loss and exercise, but he invents the term “emotional fat” to describe things from the past that people can’t let go of. I’m not sure why the good old term “emotional baggage” wouldn’t have sufficed! Khalili goes on to to talk about how people are “weighed down” by this fat and it makes them “miserable.” Getting rid of emotional fat makes the troubling memory “lean.” People who successfully remarry, he says, have gotten rid of the emotional fat so they can (metaphorically) “fit nicely into their new wedding clothes.”
I know that fat folks often experience discrimination and dismissal in medical spaces, with doctors frequently recommending weight loss rather than focusing on whatever specific health concern a patient has in the moment. It hadn’t occurred to me (because of my privilege) that people might also experience this attitude from mental health practitioners. It seems obvious as I think of it now. I can’t say whether Dr. Khalili ever told his psychotherapy patients to lose weight. However, his writing did make me wonder whether this is a thing that happens. Given how pervasive anti-fatness is, I have to assume yes.
Circling back to self help, there are really too many examples to count where authors writing about success, habits, relationships, and happiness default to assuming all their readers have diet and exercise-based goals. Some use their own diets and activity habits as examples; Gretchen Rubin, for example, writes about sticking to a very low carb diet because it feels good to her, but I’m not sure we can separate this from her presentation as a very thin, middle-class white woman. People of course have the right to eat however they want. I just can’t help but think that Rubin’s thinness is also a key part of her image as a happiness and habit expert.2
The overall message that one could easily take from most self help is that being fat is anti-thetical to happiness and success. Like the patient who goes to a doctor with a broken arm and is told to lose weight, the reader who comes to self help looking for tips on productivity or creativity will almost inevitably be told, either overtly or implicitly, that diet, exercise, and weight loss are central to self-improvement.
When I wrote about James Clear’s bestselling book Atomic Habits, I noted his constant use of fitness and “health” goals as examples. He references his own past as an athlete and uses elite athletes as case studies, a “habit” that positions athletes as the ultimate exemplars of disciplined, successful, habit-having people. I mused a little on why self help authors can’t help themselves from defaulting to weight loss and exercise cases. Most obviously, because in a society immersed in diet culture, anti-fatness sells. Relatedly, self help writers are themselves swimming in diet culture. Whether they consciously hold anti-fat beliefs or not, they, like most of us, haven’t really questioned the norm of thinness and the harm it does.
There’s a certain laziness to this, as well. Rather than coming up with more varied and original self-improvement goals to use as examples, advice givers just fall back on “lose ten pounds, stop eating junk food, go to the gym.” Perhaps this is also what the readership expects, and even wants. But can’t we do better?
If self help authors really want to help people, they could start by asking why it’s ok to perpetuate anti-fatness in their work. Next, they could focus on developing more meaningful ideas about the kinds of things people might want to change or improve about their lives and use these as examples for how to achieve goals, set habits, etc. Finally, and this is a long shot, they could use their platforms to actively challenge anti-fatness by reminding readers that diets don’t work, food can be a source of happiness and meaning, people can be healthy at any size, and that it isn’t the ten pounds making you miserable, it’s the oppressive system of diet culture.
What I’m reading: Tom Lake by Anne Patchett. An enjoyable story, although I’m finding the narrator kind of annoying.
What I’m watching: The Rig on Amazon Prime. I couldn’t resist the combination of Martin Compston from Line of Duty and Emily Hampshire from Schitt’s Creek.
Straight-sized means having a body that fits into standard clothing sizes, i.e. I can walk into most stores and find clothes that fit me. The deeply-flawed but still widely used BMI classifies me as overweight, so health and fitness apps routinely suggest weight loss and it’s possible a health care practitioner could, too, although this hasn’t happened to me yet. Check out this for a quick primer on BMI: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106268439
For more on the connection between thinness, anti-fatness, and white supremacy, check out the work of Sabrina Strings.
This is great, thank you. So much to think about and interrogate - both in the world and in my own head.