Some More News - SMN: Weight Obsession Is Ruining Everyone's Health

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Hi. In today's episode, Katy Stoll looks at America's obsession with weight, how social media has made this obsession worse, and how we can be more empathetic and mindful of the pressure our peers feel to maintain a specific weight. This episode is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/some... SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here:  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqego... Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-mo... Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews  Go to https://HELLOTUSHY.com/MORENEWS and use promo code MORENEWS to get 10% off plus FREE shipping on your first bidet order. Go to https://eightsleep.com/MORENEWS and save $150 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. That's the best offer you'll find, but you must visit https://eightsleep.com/MORENEWS for $150 off. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.

Hi! Welcome to show. It's me, Cody, your vivacious and healthy news boy. Here's some news. I can taste blood right now. Cody, Cody, what is this? What did you do? I was skiing, which is something I love to do. And I was run over by, I can't legally say who I was run over by. But let's just say that it's a famous blonde actress with a health brand who was in Iron Man. Oh no, Leslie Bibb ran you over? I always thought she was shifty.

Okay, get up. Go on. I'll host the episode. Really? Yeah. Is this a trick? Did you poison my bandages? No, no tricks, okay? I just, I care about you. Go on, off you go, come on.

Thank you. Yeah. I got it, it's okay. Okay, yes, okay, you go on. You get out of here, you go on. You get out of here. You scamp. Yeah, walk away, idiot. Now Katie's in control.

You dwindle while I grow. Good morning, cuties. It's time to talk about the newsies. Normally, I'm only brought on to talk about quote-unquote woman issues, like when we cover abortion. So it's nice to have my very own episode without Beardo involved. You know, I heard all of that. You can see me right here next to you.

Hey! Here's some news. Getting the perfect beach bod for summer. Mother lover! Are you serious, bro? The one full episode I hijack? Okay. Okay, then. Making lemonade. Making lemonade. Hi, everyone. Gosh, I am so happy to see you. And can I say, you are looking great. Have your elbows lost mass? It's looking like your flesh is molecularly arranged in a way pleasing to society's standard of the month. And wowza, have you done something with your adipose tissue? But you know, you really should try this new diet and exercise regimen. It's proven to make

your bones more supple and fuckable. Don't you want fuckable bones? You see, while you may have thought that as there are 7.8 billion humans on earth, it might be okay for our corporeal bodies to be a variety of shapes and sizes. Well, according to social media algorithms, you're wrong. There is actually only one correct human shape. And we here at Some More News have gathered data across all social media platforms, run a statistical regression analysis, and found the optimal human shape according to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Roblox. Okay, are we ready? Running the analysis. And here it is. And here it is. Stunning.

I love this look for her. Is this really the episode? Our obsession with weight hurts everyone. Hey, okay, yes, that's more like it. See, what we did there was a bit. Cody's not the only one who gets to do bits. Anywho, if you hadn't noticed, every day we are being flooded with content online and on television and billboards,

all advertising health, fitness, and desirable body shapes, but also self-confidence and body positivity, but also perfect skin, no cellulite. And hey, also, you should have high self-esteem and love yourself. And aging is sort of cool, but not cellulite. There are so many confusing, contradictory messages about health and wellness and beauty and basically what you're supposed to do with the pounds of meat that is your human body. So that's the episode for today. Fitness culture, fat shaming, and the turd realm that is the internet. And besides it all being extremely confusing and mentally damaging, the thing people often don't mention about fitness culture and fat shaming is that it's also extremely harmful for your physical health. It's bad on every level, all of it. And it's not limited to people who present as female. So this is not some quote unquote woman's issue. In fact, this hurts everyone.

And while none of it's new, the internet and social media specifically have made the problem extremely worse. Facebook knows that their engagement-based ranking, the way that they pick the content in Instagram for young users, for all users, amplifies preferences. And they have done something called a proactive incident response where they take things that they've heard. For example, like, can you be led by the algorithms to anorexia content? And they have literally recreated that experiment themselves and confirmed, yes, this happens to people. That is Frances Haugen, or as Mark Zuckerberg's army of laser robots know her, Target Acquired, who went on to explain that Facebook has actually done its own internal research and specifically found that their algorithm was increasing eating disorders, especially in teenage girls. They knew, but they

did not care. Because money is very green and yachts don't just buy and staff themselves with exotic lemurs trained to be butlers. Haugen attests that Facebook not only knows their algorithm leads to eating disorders, but Facebook has specifically been studying this phenomenon themselves. According to internal presentation slides obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's own research literally states, 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. And we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.

What the documents and Haugen's testimony make clear is that when Facebook came across a conflict between stacks of cash and human people, it, according to Haugen, consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of their own profits. And it's not just Facebook's own studies finding this connection.

Researchers at multiple universities and in multiple studies have found that increased time spent on Facebook is correlated with an increased incidence of negative body image and disordered eating. But hey, gotta keep those eyeballs on the screen and those fingers scrolling. Otherwise, you'd miss out on a chance to buy a monthly subscription to receive small briquettes of quinoa-flavored dried tree bark that'll cleanse your toxins, make you thin, find you love, and heal the psychological damage dealt to you by the health site you're on for only $150 a week. But as I already said, social media is basically a giant magnifying glass for already existing issues in our society. For years and years, advertisers have capitalized on making people feel bad about themselves and have used shame as a powerful marketing tool. Cue the montage. The stout person, woman, or man finds it difficult to dress attractively. montage. until the AIDS plan taught me how to take off weight and help keep it off. Who'd ever think I could lose weight while watching TV?

I was fat, and that's when I decided to go to Jenny Craig. Body fat increases from having kids, stress at work, lack of exercise, and poor diet. Now liposuction is a surgical procedure that removes this body fat. Want to fit into the latest clothes by summer? You can do it. With just one breath, Lumen tells you what you're currently burning for energy, carbs, or body fat. I was at 298 when I started Noon. Rock bottom. Real rock bottom.

One of those ads was for a brand called AIDS, which, let me tell you, did not catch on. And of course, we are now hearing about Ozempic, the drug that will apparently make all food gross and give you the ability to read minds. But we'll talk about that later. But yeah, over the past 150 years or so, we've been pretty obsessed with weight. And while some of these weight loss ads seem antiquated and body positivity and neutrality are gaining more acceptance, this is basically the same playbook as what we have on social media. Except now, we also get to feel bad about staying indoors during a massive global pandemic, I guess. Because while the world literally burned down around us, we understandably turned to banana bread for comfort. And it didn't take long for the hashtag pandemic body backlash to take hold,

ruining even the simple pleasure of distracting yourself with food that, God forbid, tastes good. The people have gained an average of one and a half pounds every month during shelter in place orders. Dr. Jennifer Ashton has much more on this. And what tips do you have for people who found themselves in this situation? Well, Amy, spring is a great time to try to get this back on track. Yes, time to get rid of those pandemic bodies, people. And no, I'm not talking about the dead bodies of the nearly 7 million people who died of COVID. I'm talking about our still alive bodies that are not in the exact optimized shape, according to the algorithm. Can I get one of those

algorithmically approved bodies again? Goals. While getting back into shape after a world-changing pandemic seems like twisted priorities, on its face it doesn't sound horribly damaging. And if people on Instagram are sharing stories of exercising and eating healthy, is that really a problem? There's a lot of debate on the internet about the concepts of fat shaming and fitness culture that's often extremely hard to wade through. Which is weird, because the internet is usually so good when it comes to discourse. You get extreme opinions on both sides of this topic, and it's generally hard to talk about without pissing off at least one corner of the internet. We're sensitive about our bodies, and we don't like the idea that we're doing

something wrong. But a lot of that contention has to do with the tools we have when discussing these things. Stuff like BMI, or body mass index, and also calorie counting, and the capitalistic need to have 700 different diet plans. And then there's the talk of the obesity epidemic that often gets no real analysis. Rarely does the news talk about things like food deserts, where people simply don't have access to healthy options, or how eating well is often really, really expensive. Or perhaps everyone's different, which means that being healthy actually looks different

for different people. In short, the tools we use to talk about this stuff are wrong. And when you combine those wrong-ass tools with the danger and prevalence of eating disorders, the messages we're being sandblasted with on social media can often get extremely ghoulish. And very often content promoting eating disorders can masquerade as health and wellness accounts peddling strategies for sustainable weight loss. So let's say someone opens Instagram and searches for healthy recipes. Thanks to the algorithm, you may soon find yourself inundated with what I eat in a day posts.

On the surface, this might seem harmless, but now suddenly you're sitting there and you're thinking, wait, how many calories do I eat in a day? And then a few hours later, you're browsing your discover section, looking for videos of unlikely animal friendships, and you start seeing posts such as this one, which claim to show you how to consume fewer than 1200 calories a day. And boy, that number sounds low. Perhaps it's bullshit. More on that later. But because the algorithm has determined that enough people have searched for 1200 calorie diet, it'll be splashed all over your feed. And then people start searching for 1200 calorie diet because it's all over their

feed. And the cycle continues like two sphinxes caught in each other's gaze for eternity. Or like two butts farting into each other for eternity. Do we have a graphic of that last one? No. Well, get a graphic then, obviously. Right away. Please. Anyway, unlike most of the internet, we're not here to make you feel bad about your body. And that's going to go both ways. People are free to do whatever they want with their bodies, assuming it doesn't harm others. What

we are going to talk about are the tools that I mentioned because they do harm others. They are misguided and often insidious, especially when it comes to the internet, because the way we talk about fitness ultimately leads to some really dark shit. No, not like your stool is dark, although I bet that can happen with certain diet pills, but whatever. I don't need to explain that any further. You understand me. And so instead let's talk about some myths

surrounding weight loss after these ads. Oh, hell yes. Katie doing the ad breaks now. Cody's dead. I'm literally lying on the floor right next to you this whole time. Hey there folks. It's almost the 4th of July and you know what that means.

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Just one click of a button and you can protect all your devices. So what are you waiting for? Visit expressvpn.com slash more news to get three extra months free. That's expressvpn.com slash more news. Expressvpn.com slash more news. Expressvpn.com slash more news. Freedom is an American tradition, like pool parties, fireworks, and chasing down an experimental graffiti artist named Sewer Cats. I'm gonna get you, Sewer Cats! Hello, entire internet! Let's talk about wiping butts. Until now, civilization has relied on using the fur of rabbits to clean themselves after using the bathroom. At least, I'm pretty sure that's why I have so many live rabbits in my bathtub.

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ones with the whiskers and claws, right? Okay, and we're back. Cody's dead forever, and I'm running the show now. If that upsets you, then here's a graphic of a beard you can print out and tape to your monitor. If you recall, with your cellulite-free brain, we were talking about the tools often used for fitness goals. Stuff like BMI and specific calorie counts and other ways we set beauty and diet standards that, spoilers, is harmful hogwash. Like acid-laced hogwash. Wouldn't wanna wash my hog with that! Let's start with the myth of the 1200 calorie diet. 1200 is a number you will become well acquainted with if you dip your toe into the bubbling sludge that is online diet culture. There's even a subreddit with over 400,000 members dedicated to not exceeding 1,200

calories a day. If you're a woman, it's everywhere. On Instagram, there are over 100,000 posts tagged with hashtag 1,200 calories. The same goes for TikTok, where videos that share 1200 calorie meal plans get tens of thousands of views and likes. Many of these posts also share hashtags like healthy or fitness, implying that this number isn't just about weight loss, but being a goal for peak health. And it's not just social media. Recently, the weight loss app Noom came under fire for recommending 1,200 calories to female users, which is very, very messed up. Because, double spoilers, this number is wrong. Is the right number 69? I know.

The reality is that 1,200 calories is generally the absolute bare minimum that a sedentary average height assigned female at birth adult must eat before risking malnutrition. And some doctors believe that number is already far too low. In fact, 1,200 calories is the bar by which researchers of eating disorder measure pathological dietary restriction in female anorexia nervosa patients. In other words, these diet plans are literally suggesting you hurt your body. So where did that number even come from? Some kind of science? Actually, no, it was the Victorians. Those stuffy, repressed, child labor loving weirdos.

According to medical historian Louise Foxcroft,200 calories was calculated in the late Victorian period as a method for weight loss for women, which, might I remind you, is the same period where we shoved children in narrow coal shafts and literally deformed women's skeletons and rearranged their organs with corsets. So it's a tad weird that almost 200 years later, that completely unscientific Victorian number is being propagated on social media. People will share images of small, likely insufficient meals for the day, trying to stay under this random, not medically sound number. In fact, so much of our understanding about health and weight comes from wacky dead people who had a lot of weird hangups.

Also, if they knew so much about health, why are they dead now? Check and meet. Hey, speaking of things created by silly dead losers, we should talk about BMI. You've probably heard of the BMI or body mass index, a set of numbers that can magically diagnose your health based on your weight to height ratio. It's an extremely common metric that even doctors use. So you would assume that it was invented by modern scientists using modern science, or at the very least, a really smart dead person.

But it isn't. Amazingly, the body mass index is not scientifically accurate at all. More like bullshit ass indexed. Oh, sick burn, monkey. Let's get drinks later. My relationship with the title monkey is way healthier than Cody's. So in order to tell you why you shouldn't care about body mass index, I guess I need to tell you what it is.

BMI is defined by the CDC as a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of height in meters. BMI is an inexpensive and easy screening method for weight category, but it does not diagnose the body fatness or health of an individual. In other words, BMI is a crude measure of body fat based on a ratio between height and weight. That's it. It doesn't take into account bone density, your musculature, genetics, or if you have a coato. It's just a ratio. And for that reason,

it's not at all a direct measure of body fat. In fact, many professional athletes are considered clinically obese based on the BMI scale because it cannot distinguish the weight of muscle from the weight of fat. You know it's a great scientific tool when it can't distinguish between two completely different types of body tissue. So where did it even come from? The term BMI wasn't adopted until 1972. Before then, it was known as a Quetelet's Index. It was invented nearly 200 years ago, back when they

really understood the body and never just made things up. Its creator, Adolf Quintelet, was an academic who studied astronomy, mathematics, statistics, and sociology. He collected data on rates of crime, marriage, mental illness, mortality, and was very influential in the social sciences. He also was an avid painter and spoke several languages. That's a lot of different topics. He had his fingers in two late tarts, which means all the pies. But you know what's odd? That I didn't mention medicine or anything like that. Yeah, this is because Quiddelit was not a physician, nor did he study medicine. In fact, he was best known for his work aimed at identifying the characteristics of the average man, who, to quittle it, wasn't average at all. The average man

represented a social ideal of the perfect big, big quotes, normal man based on an average of measurements, which honestly is always right, coming from guys whose sideburns are clearly trying to strangle them. And if all of this sounds pretty eugenics-y, well, congratulations, you are correct. Kudelet never intended for his ratio to be a measure of health. He was intent on finding the perfect man, and he did so by predominantly measuring, big shock, white men. And that's it. Not even white women. And when I say measuring, I mean literally measuring. With a ruler, one assumes.

One piece of data he collected, for example, was the width of Scottish men's chests. He then used that number to find a bell curve of data where the peak was considered ideal. He then used that number to find a bell curve of data where the peak was considered ideal. In his potentially captivating book, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties, I don't know, I won't actually read it, Quidlet wrote, If the average man were completely determined, we might consider him as the type of perfection, and everything differing from his proportion or condition would constitute deformity or disease or monstrosity. And I think this is important to highlight because this is where everything goes wrong or even more wronger.

Quiddle literally took data that has nothing to do with an individual's health and only included Whiteman and looked at the peak of the bell curve and labeled it ideal. Not average or even normal, but ideal. And then everything over his ideal became overweight and everything under it became underweight. For everyone, everywhere, all over the world. And eventually, for some baffling reason, Quiddelit's index would snake its way into public policy. Starting in the late 1800s, insurance companies began creating charts to determine risk and weight so they knew how much to charge you for your health insurance. That's it. That's how we got BMI. From a weirdo racist eugenicist who measured a bunch of Scottish dudes, and he was a weirdo racist eugenicist to be clear, Quiddalit was also instrumental in co-founding

the school of positivist criminology, which is the belief that criminals are born, not made. As in, that people are born inherently bad and will inevitably become criminals. That's who we trusted to create the metric by which we measure our health. And I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't. Brave stance. The BMI is a great example of how when people talk about racism and sexism being systemic, they mean that it is literally baked into every system in a way we may not even notice. Because the standards for a handful of white men don't

really apply to everyone. And it's wrong and systemically racist for us to expect that. For example, a large 2003 study published in JAMA found that higher BMIs tend to be more optimal for black Americans. And in fact, for black men, quote, obesity appeared to be associated with a slightly increased life expectancy across much of the moderate obesity range for the older age group 60 to 70 years. This study found differences in terms of how BMI impacted longevity when they separated the data by race, age and sex. It's important to note that the study does not answer the question of why exactly they found this difference. For instance, whether this is due to differing diet, lifestyle, or genetics. It's complicated. Which is why you can't just measure people and call it a day.

So, to recap, BMI as we know it was created by a racist eugenicist, does not take into consideration anyone other than white men, has caused a lot of damage, and is an almost useless tool for getting a full picture of an individual's health. It's bad science, which is probably why the American Medical Association is finally advising doctors not to use it when assessing health and obesity. It's also why, while a higher BMI can correlate with disease, it also isn't really a predictor. According to Dr. Lindo Bacon, a nutritionist based in California, people considered normal weight based on their BMI can also suffer from diseases like diabetes and heart disease, which are typically associated with excess weight.

Quote, I think that this has been one of the most damaging tools in medicine today because what we know is that it's a very poor predictor of health and that, for example, there are many people that are in the overweight and obese categories that live long, disease-free lives. That brings us to the obesity epidemic, which plays off of BMI data. Starting in the 80s, the obesity epidemic is basically a blur of questionable data, a lot of mixed opinions, and a complete failure to properly address health in the country. For example, in 1999, the CDC warned of a dramatic increase in the rates of obesity from 12% in 1991 to 17.9% in 1998. Except in 1998, the federal government issued surprising new BMI metrics and adopted a new definition of obesity, which lowered the threshold overnight. So, you know, perhaps that had

something to do with it. The CDC also originally said that the obesity epidemic killed 400,000 Americans per year, but those numbers were overestimated, probably by a lot. In 2005, an epidemiologist and senior scientist at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics published a meta-analysis looking at the year 2000 and found that they could only find a link between 100,000 deaths in obesity, one-fourth the amount previously calculated. The study also found clinically overweight people on average had a longer life expectancy than people in the normal category. So combining both the overweight and obese categories resulted in around 26,000 excess deaths per year. For perspective, almost 43,000 people died in car accidents in 2021. That's not to say we shouldn't care just because the numbers of deaths are lower than

what was previously reported. And for the record, there was a backlash to this study. But despite a backlash, it was backed by the CDC as well as the recipient of a CDC Science Award. Now, I'm not here to say being overweight doesn't have health risks, nor am I going to hand wave the entire obesity epidemic. After all, to be fair, that study found that overweight people live longer because overweight people also happen to be middle and upper class people, meaning that if you have money, you can afford better health care. So there's a lot of variables here. And that's actually my point,

that the tools we have are extremely flawed because they don't take in any variables at all. You see, the majority of obesity research is driven by the dogma of energy in, energy out, or a belief that the cause of obesity is an energy imbalance of calories consumed and calories expended. But like BMI, that's a really oversimplistic view on the matter.

And in fact, there is a growing community of scientists who are actively speaking out against that idea, saying that obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel partitioning. It's complicated. And much like Adolph Quiddleit, I am not a scientist. But unlike Adolph, I'm also not a eugenicist, nor do I have stupid sideburns. So I support proactively looking at the situation without stigmatization. And so whether or not people gain weight because of genetics or hormones or lack of access to good food, and whether or not the obesity epidemic is actually an epidemic, what's very clear is that our search for solutions was fundamentally flawed. Because

for whatever reason, we decided that obesity was a consumer choice instead of a health issue. We decided that obesity was a consumer choice instead of a health issue. The culture that emerged from the alleged obesity epidemic is called a weight-centered health paradigm, or WCHP. It sounds like the California Highway Patrol's body-shaming department, but it's actually an approach that focuses specifically on weight and not overall health and well-being. And understanding that we live under a WCHP is key to understanding why we struggle with both obesity and eating disorders. After all, whatever your view of the obesity epidemic, it hasn't been solved, has it? Clearly, we're not doing a good

job addressing it. And that's because we created a culture that looks at fatness as a catch-all problem, the singular deciding factor for health. In recent years, there has been increased criticism of this paradigm, such as this review written by public health professors Dr. Lily O'Hara and Dr. Jane Taylor. In it, they outline how the WCHP results in discrimination, how different pillars of society such as social media and the medical field propagate it, the real-life consequences it has on people's lives, and calls for a paradigm shift that takes into account a variety of factors and instead focuses on health and well-being.

In other words, we took these very flawed tools, body mass index, obesity statistics, skewed mortality rates, and created a fundamental misunderstanding of why people are different sizes. And then we built our entire strategy around stressing the importance of weight loss. Just a single number where we decided that if that number is lower, you are automatically more healthy. And then we put the responsibility of making that number lower squarely on the individual, even if that number was never the problem in the first place. It was a system designed to not only fail, but fucking devastate the health of everyone trying to meet an often impossible standard.

Kind of like capitalism. See, I'm like Cody, I can hate money too. Speaking of money and hate, we're going to talk about exactly where all of this leads after the ad break. Because, let me tell ya, it doesn't lead to a good place. Just a little sneaky peeky for you. You know, good sleep is like a big warm jacket made of wiggling puppies, in that both are important to have for a job interview. Yeah, sometimes the puppies run away, but that's why you need really strong but humane tape. What was I talking about?

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8sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Mate. Hey, we are back. And Cody is still, well, he's still just laying next to the desk. Possibly dead.

I'm in so much pain. Why is nobody helping me? R.I.P. little guy. So, we talked about the myths of weight loss and fitness culture. 1,200 calories, the BS, BMI, the obesity epidemic, and how all these figures and tools led to this idea that a person's entire health boiled down to their weight. The reality is that it actually depends on a lot more than that.

Some people can be larger than others and still be perfectly healthy. But even if weight is a factor in health, a lot of that might have to do with income and access to healthcare and affordable healthy options. It's a big, complex situation with no hard lines and a lot of systemic issues to address. So naturally, we as a society ignored all of that and decided that it was the fault of the individual. Bizarrely, we decided that shame was the way to go, which isn't

just cruel, but illogical on several levels, especially with how we relate the concepts of weight and health to the concept of beauty. To start, there is just no natural state for attractiveness or beauty. And what I mean is that the standards of beauty and health have changed over time when it comes to weight. While doctors have been giving people the general advice not to overeat and to exercise since the Greeks, fatness has had all types of varied connotations throughout history. Some negative, but many positive. In certain societies, obesity was seen as a privilege of the upper classes and was considered beautiful, as demonstrated by the Rubenesque female nudes. And if you Google Rubenesque female nudes right now,

you will see that this is very much still the case. It's all porn. It's all porn! I don't... I don't know what I expected. Anyway, beauty standards have always changed throughout time, throughout culture, throughout space and the multiverse, and now the metaverse, I guess. If there is one thing I know, it's that beauty standards always be changing. Eyebrows themselves have gone through overwhelming amounts of fads. The unibrow, for example, was once considered beautiful and is maybe having a well-deserved comeback,

but honestly, it's hard to keep track of what the fuck we're supposed to do with our eyebrows. We retweeze them? Oops, not anymore. Let them be bushy. Not that bushy. Shave them up. Draw them back in. Wait, what are you doing? Have you lost it? Grow it back in. No, not like that. Vertically. Grow them vertically. Make them look cool. Okay. Perfect. You get the point. It's hilariously arbitrary. Powdered wigs, foot binding, high hairlines, that brief moment where David Copperfield was really sexy. And so it's odd that anyone would act shocked or offended at modern body positivity movements or think that there's one set standard of what beauty looks like. Seems like, well, it seems like something a dipshit would think. I know this

is an unpopular viewpoint, but it turns out that it's not the world's job to change its standards of beauty to meet the fact that you are significantly overweight and it is very unhealthy for you to be significantly overweight. The standards of beauty did not change enough to now encompass people who are at least 75 to 100 pounds overweight. Thank you for the demonstration, Ben. Ben pretty much flaunts every single bad tool in his videos about this. He also claims that the standards of beauty did not change before saying literally the opposite and that skinny people are oppressed, actually. And you can see this throughout our public culture right now. People are being punished for losing weight.

That's how insane our quote unquote tolerant moral regime has become. Anyway, that's one of the reasons that fat shaming is completely illogical. But the bigger reason is that it's also just ineffective and counterproductive. America specifically, but also most of the world, has created a sort of cruel funhouse for overweight people to navigate. At the same time as creating food that is addictive and appealing, we shame people for finding it addictive and appealing. Here's a photo taken in the US in 2007 that perfectly captures this tug of war. One side pushing for an extremely unhealthy product, while the other side blames you for wanting that product. And more than that, it implies that being overweight is a tragic

failure, which it turns out is what a lot of these types of ads do. Instead of encouraging eating healthy food, a great deal of these weight loss campaigns focus on the disgust of being obese. For instance, these ads from the League Against Obesity present the idea that a kid wanting to grow up to be a fat astronaut, firefighter, or pilot is just ridiculous. That framing means their fatness is the object of ridicule. Same with these fat can't hide ads that ran in Germany. Instead of promoting the idea that healthy choices improve your life, they are saying that unhealthy choices make your life worse. They're saying, you better do this or else, which not only fat shames people, but makes healthy eating seem like a chore you have to do in order to not get fat.

You might notice that this is similar to anti-tobacco ads, which use disease and death as a threat. But much like addiction, obesity isn't a choice. And so imagine if they did this with any other medical condition. And so imagine if they did this with any other medical condition. Imagine if, to encourage people to get prostate checks, they put out ads shaming people with cancer. Would that feel productive? If they ran TV ads where someone dies of a disease and then everyone points and laughs at them at their funeral and then their widow bangs the priest right there on the gravestone. What about that? And because we have decades of ads framing obesity as a shameful

failing of the individual, that very silly idea has leaked into everyone's perception. Make no mistake, people are discriminated against because they are seen as overweight. Despite what health expert Ben says, many people report being treated disrespectfully due to their weight, being called names and insults, being considered lazy or out of control. You can also, apparently, be fired for being fat. Amazingly, this bias is especially prevalent in medicine. A 2015 study published in the National Library of Medicine found that many healthcare providers hold strong negative attitudes and stereotypes about people with obesity, and that providers who evaluated patients who were obese were more likely to rate the encounter as a waste

of time and indicated that they would spend 28% less time with the patient compared with those who evaluated normal weight patients. If fat shaming was really about being concerned for people's health, why does it seem like the results of fat shaming typically negatively impact people's health? It's like when people are upset at seeing fat people in ads for athletic gear. Like, what is it? You don't want fat people to be able to comfortably exercise? If fat shaming is all about health, then why do people get snarky and rude when fat people are leading an active lifestyle? You see how this is a fun house?

How society creates this inescapable maze for overweight people filled with contradictions and ridicule? and ridicule. This mad hatter logic where you're simultaneously shamed for being overweight, advertised cheap and unhealthy food, and turned away by the doctors all at the same time. And that's probably why fat shaming not only has very real and traumatic effects, but doesn't fucking work and actually leads to more unhealthy behavior. Instead of motivating people, fat shaming just makes a person feel terrible about themselves, causing them to stress and to be less likely to take care of their health. So basically, it makes it harder for people to manage their health both physically and mentally and does nothing in the so-called war on obesity. But let's be honest, fat shamers like Ben Shapiro probably don't really care about people's health.

Not really. They just like having someone to bully in a way that makes them feel like they're helping. They get their cake and they eat it too, which, yes, I do understand is an ironic analogy in this context. And so where does it go from here? in this context. And so where does it go from here? What I mean is that as we've talked about so far, we have this society that has completely failed at addressing healthy eating and fitness. That ignores systemic problems, has created a false metric for health based solely around weight, and decided the solution was to shame obese people and put the responsibility squarely on them. So what is it? What's the end result of

such a broken situation? Ozempic is proven to lower A1c. Most people who took Ozempic reached an A1c under seven and maintained it. And you may lose weight. Adults lost on average up to 12 pounds. Ah, yes, Ozempic. We mentioned it earlier, remember? That's what we call foreshadowing in the biz. Ozempic is a diabetes drug, or at least that was its original purpose. The generic drug name is Simaglitude, which is branded as Ozempic, Ribelsus, Wigovie, and Hingis Dingus, although Hingis Dingus is only available at pharmacies in the Smetherlands. Ozempic and its sister drug, Trulicity, both work by simulating a hormone that causes your pancreas to release more insulin, and a side effect of the drug is weight loss.

For that reason, the drug sort of blew up in the media, which has done a piss-poor job of representing what Ozempic actually does. Currently, it might do everything from creating a repulsion towards food to conquering addiction as we know it. This is why it's been very popular amongst celebrities, the wealthy, and people whose fathers definitely didn't own a share in an emerald mine. Also, they aren't a miracle. They are designed specifically for people who are fighting diabetes and as a result are also dieting to reduce their carb and sugar intake. And because they are designed for that and specifically

creating more insulin that causes your stomach to digest things slower and lower blood sugar, one side effect is that it's very easy to get nauseous or poop your brains out, which is common with most diabetes drugs. So imagine if you aren't diabetic and are simply taking the drug with your regular diet, well, then food and alcohol would suddenly feel revolting. You probably don't want to drink either. And that's probably what's actually happening because all the evidence around ozempic superpowers are anecdotal and often from people who aren't dieting.

Literally, one of the interviews says, quote, I go to my favorite restaurant and order a steak and I take four bites and I don't want to finish it. I'm like, yeah, no shit. Or rather, lots of shit. It's messing with your stomach. It's messing with your stomach. It's not curing you of addiction. I bring this up because Ozempic is being

mythologized heavily in the media, which is in turn creating a months-long shortage of the medication thanks to people scooping it up for magical weight loss. Besides creating a shortage, Ozempic has a butt-ton of side effects like the aforementioned nausea, as well as headaches, malnutrition, burps that taste like rotting eggs, surreal dreams, and others. Also, the weight loss itself eventually stops. And if you stop taking the drug, it'll stop working. People will often gain the weight back after they stop taking it.

And that's because it was never intended for people who weren't also on a diet designed specifically for diabetes. who weren't also on a diet designed specifically for diabetes. I want to be very clear. If you are diabetic or pre-diabetic, Ozempic and Trulicity will help you. They will lower your blood sugar and provided you are also lowering your carb intake and getting exercise, also help you lose weight.

And if you keep to your diet, you will also keep off that weight. But if you aren't diabetic, it's just not for you, man. It's not a miracle cure. It is a drug that people need that's being misrepresented in the media. But what stands out to me about Ozempic

and the conversation around it is that it really shows the desperation surrounding this perceived need for weight loss. That people are willing to risk a rainbow of side effects to inject themselves with a drug because they feel like they've run out of options. And this is where we get to the trigger warning stuff, because this equation of fat shaming combined with a complete failure to actually promote a healthy lifestyle means that for a lot of people, the only thing left is to develop an eating disorder.

This is where it's all heading. This is the reason our fat shaming culture has failed everyone to the point that in a lot of cases, eating disorders are treated like responsible diets. So yeah, trigger warning for this and maybe even some stuff before this. I'm sorry. This is my first time doing the whole show by myself since Cody died. I should have thought of the trigger warning part sooner. Hearing Ben Shapiro's voice comes to mind. So when most people think about eating disorders, they think about anorexia nervosa. It's typically characterized by weight loss, but clinically it's much more than that. It's extreme food restriction and or purging in a way that's harmful to the individual.

There's also bulimia nervosa, which is defined by a cycle of binge eating followed by self-induced vomiting. These are both debilitating conditions that have devastating physical and mental effects. But there are many other types of eating disorders out there that slip under the radar, like orthorexia, which masquerades as being healthy but is actually a destructive condition in which a person obsesses about every single thing they put in their bodies and makes up for eating with exercise. But since exercise and eating healthy is fine and often encouraged when not done in excess, it's easy to mistake an unhealthy obsession with health as simply being responsible and disciplined.

For this reason, people don't realize how common eating disorders really are. Approximately 24 to 28 million people in the United States suffer from an eating disorder, around 9% of the U.S. population, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. association of anorexia nervosa and associated disorders. Moreover, eating disorders are among the deadliest mental illnesses, second only to opioid addiction, resulting in over 10,000 deaths each year. For context, that's over two times the number of people who die by drowning per year in the U.S. But that doesn't count all the various long-term risks that come from punishing your body. Food intolerances, IBD, anxiety, injuries from over-exercising, and not to mention the effects it can have on your work and relationships. Eating disorders can have disproportionate effects on people who are marginalized, like

BIPOC, who are less likely to have their eating disorders taken seriously by doctors and more likely to go for longer periods without being diagnosed. Eating disorders also particularly affect gender and sexual minorities. Gay and bisexual men and boys have higher rates of disordered eating, and transgender college students are four times more likely to have an eating disorder than their cisgender peers. Over 30% of trans people say that attempts to change their bodies without the help of hormones has led to eating disorders. Unfortunately, people often view eating disorders as primarily a feminine problem, so much so that it has become a stereotype. But while it's true that eating disorders commonly affect women, people identifying as male account for one in three diagnosed eating disorders,

and they're likely to be overlooked due to the stereotype of this being a girl problem. And when we live in a culture where girl problems are seen as frivolous, not only does this negatively impact feminine people, but masculine people who are afraid of being punished for having a girly problem. It's no surprise then that researchers have found that men are underdiagnosed and undertreated for their eating disorders. It's almost like if we started to take so-called chick problems more seriously, we'd actually discover they aren't exclusively chick problems and everyone in society might benefit. For men, this problem is often rebranded completely. Similar to Thinstagram, which gears towards

young girls, bro science is targeted at boys and young men that disguises unhealthy eating habits or weird body expectations behind nutrition culture, weightlifting, and biohacking. Biohacking is a fad that came out of Silicon Valley. Tech dudes try to hack their own biology to become more efficient and defy age, but most of the habits they endorse can easily become eating disorders. The way that Silicon elites describe the highs from fasting are very similar to the highs that eating disorder sufferers characterize. It's just an eating disorder, but rebranded like one of those dude wipe products you see. Take, for example, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey,

who famously revealed he only eats one meal a day consisting of lean protein and vegetables, and he sometimes fasts for the entire weekend. He described his experience saying, The first time I did it, like day three, I felt like I was hallucinating. It was a weird state to be in. And the experience I had was when I was fasting for much longer, how time really slowed down. That sounds like you're literally starving your brain, my man. But since he is, in fact, a man, most people don't think twice about what he's saying.

He is celebrated for his self-control and given a platform to share his weird fasting rules, for his self-control and given a platform to share his weird fasting rules, legitimizing it as something scientific and healthy. Because men don't get eating disorders, just like men don't experience emotions, and men only like drinks that taste like carbonated gasoline. There's actually a lot of misinformation about eating disorders, one of the biggest being that it's just a chick thing. And as I keep saying, it also is really easy to confuse a healthy lifestyle with a compulsion. For example, here's David Beckham saying that his wife, Victoria Beckham, has basically eaten the same thing for the last 30 years. When I'm eating something great, I want everyone to try it you know and that's unfortunately I'm married to someone that has eaten the same thing for the last 25 years since since I've

met Victoria she she only eats you know grilled fish steamed vegetables she'll very rarely deviate away from there the only time that she's ever probably shared something that's been on my plate was actually when she was pregnant with Harper. Do you remember when it was? And it was the most amazing thing. It was one of my favorite evenings. I can't remember what it was, but I know that she's not eating it since. Look, there's nothing wrong with steamed vegetables and grilled fish. And I'm not her doctor, and they won't even let me near their property. But absent some serious medical reason to have such a restrictive diet, this would likely be considered

disordered eating. It's not really a charming story. It's pretty concerning. On the subject of sports, both men and women athletes not only struggle with eating disorders, but are often encouraged to have them. Nearly a third of boys report that they want to gain weight, and about 10% of men are taking supplements or steroids to bulk up. But it's not just an obsession with getting more muscular. Weight loss is also a problem among men. Take, for example, wrestlers and mixed martial artists who often purge to make weight classes. It turns out that can shockingly lead to eating disorders. In fact, the National Eating Disorders Association estimates that 33% of male athletes in aesthetic sports such as bodybuilding, gymnastics, swimming, and weight class sports like wrestling and rowing

are affected by eating disorders. This is because many sports like dancing, running, rock climbing, emphasize a leaner and lighter physique. That mentality is built into the guidelines of wrestling as athletes need to make a certain weight class to place themselves in the most competitive position during tournaments. This pressure to lose weight can have severe long-term health effects. Like Ryan DeBlock, a high school wrestler who nearly starved himself to death. His health declined so severely that he even had to have life-altering surgery. A lot of like gastric problems. I ended up, I had ulcers in my stomach and my small intestine. I had to get my gallbladder removed. So the gallbladder helps to digest fat, but I wasn't eating enough fat or really any fat

at all. And so it just crystallized because all the liquids and stuff that are coming out of it just solidified. So I had to get that removed. In that same clip, Ryan also talks about how he was trained to dehydrate himself so he could drop weight classes quickly and that he had no idea what was actually going on. He didn't think he had an eating disorder because that wasn't something that happened to men and he certainly didn't have someone to talk to about it. Instead, he was celebrated for losing weight fast. I cannot stress enough how common this is.

Let's take competitive cyclist Guy East who was throwing up multiple times a week to stay light. His coaches would pinch his body telling him that he was too fat. Pretty soon he was killing himself to stay light. His coaches would pinch his body, telling him that he was too fat. And pretty soon, he was killing himself to lose weight. I just remember looking into the mirror every morning and saying, I need to lose weight. I'm too fat. You know? Too fat. I'm too fat. I'm too fat. I would eat like 5,000 calories in the morning.

I'd say, okay, now I have to go ride for five hours. And if I don't, well, I'm going to gain weight. Or I could throw up. How often were you throwing up after eating? A couple times a week, you know. Sometimes multiple times a day. You didn't tell anybody? Who are you gonna talk to about it? Seriously, who was he gonna talk to about it?

The people who he was getting advice from were the people teaching self-harming behaviors. You know what pinching someone's stomach and telling them they need to lose weight is? It's called vAT shaming. And it doesn't just happen on tabloid covers to early 2000s pop stars. In athletics, it's seen as part of the profession. Body shaming has been shown to be systemic in both college and professional sports. But because professional athletes are seen as the pinnacle of health, we don't question whether they are truly healthy, both physically and

mentally. Only if they're physically injured, like bones sticking out, can we actually see the toll that sports can take on people's bodies. And speaking of invisible problems, I haven't even mentioned the biggest eating disorder out there, and that is binge eating. Binge eating is defined as recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food, often to the point of discomfort and experiencing shame, distress, or guilt afterwards, and not regularly using unhealthy compensatory measures, e.g. purging. It is the most common eating disorder in the United States. Did you catch that last bit?

I'm sure you did. It was on the screen and I read it out loud. Despite our cultural preconceived notions of what an eating disorder even is, binge eating is the most common ED in the United States. And it's the one that is centered around guilt and shame when it comes to food. Notably, shame and guilt are more likely to result in symptoms of an eating disorder. And researchers have found a correlation between the reduction of shame and guilt and lessening of the symptoms of an eating disorder. Shame and guilt are so tied

up in eating disorders, not just in terms of causing them or worsening them, but in even being able to talk openly about having an eating disorder. There are often many assumptions about what kind of person has or has had an eating disorder, what they look like, or even what it says about their personality. So I don't know. Can we stop? While we're not to blame for the problem, we can't actually be the solution, or at least start pushing the needle in the right direction. We can change our relationship to our bodies. We can change how we treat ourselves, how we talk to ourselves, how we talk about our

bodies in front of children, how we talk about our bodies in front of each other, how we talk about other people's bodies. You know what? Actually, can we just stop commenting on people's bodies at all? It's none of your business. And we have no idea what someone is going through. You might think that innocuous, did you lose weight? You look great, is a nice, thoughtful thing to say, but you don't know. Oftentimes when people rapidly lose weight, it's either because they're sick or went through something really hard and are struggling in some

way. All of this is important. All of it matters. For example, a little over a year ago, I went through an extremely traumatic period and I lost a lot of weight. And I started taking Prozac, which took away my appetite, causing me to lose more weight. I was sick. My hair was falling out and I was fainting on walks. And yet so many people would say, wow, you look incredible. Which I found very triggering because... Wait. Okay. Sorry.

Well, this is going to get a little bit real. So I'm just... You know what? I'm going to make a fun little segment out of it. Katie gets real. Very inappropriate. Thank you. an avid of it katie gets real it's very inappropriate thank you uh so i probably should come out say point blank that i have struggled with various versions of an eating disorder disordered eating and body dysmorphia since i was very young um i used to to joke about being sent to fat camp by my doctor at the age of nine.

But as I got older, I realized just how traumatic that experience was for me and for the countless other kids who got swept up in the obesity epidemic hysteria of the 90s. To be taught from such a young age that our bodies are bad, that we weren't allowed to take up space, that we had to be smaller. If you listen to our podcast, Even More News, you may have heard me talk around this, but I haven't publicly unpacked it because it's scary. I didn't want to be seen as a stereotype. I didn't want people to be studying my body or judging me. I debated for a long time if I even wanted to do this episode because I'm very, very aware that I am sitting here as a thin-bodied white woman, and that is a place

of extreme privilege. While I have struggled under the burden of an eating disorder, yes, my life has been negatively affected living under a weight-centric health paradigm. I do not experience the weight of stigmatization that larger bodies experience daily. But this isn't to say that I haven't also dealt with these issues. And I do think it's important for us to share our stories. The only reason I was ever able to face the reality of my disorder was because a dear friend shared with me that she had an eating disorder. When she described what she went through, I recognized myself and I felt empowered to seek help. I began a journey towards peace. And if you are struggling, I want that for you too, very much. This has been

Kate Gets Real. I'm so mad about that title. We could have used a different title. Title monkey. We're cool, but I was fucked up. While it might surprise you to hear that I have also struggled with these issues, the entire point is that it shouldn't. Because these disorders don't look like anything. And we've spent years completely skewing what it actually looks like to be healthy

and unhealthy. Using bullshit metrics and normalizing disordered behavior because everyone decided that the only thing that mattered was a number on a scale. And that's really screwed us up in a fundamental way. Because yeah, for a lot of people, weight does come with health complications. But for other people, it doesn't. And at the end of the day, healthiness doesn't look like anything specific, nor is it often in the control of the individuals, but more likely genetics or addiction or your fucking zip code. And it's wild that we've realized this with so many other systemic issues, but still act like

bootstraps pulling conservatives when it comes to weight and health. Seriously, it's ridiculous. Like, okay, watch. Hey, hey, Cody. Hey, Cody, come over here. I'll give you weed if you come over here. What kind of weed? So what if I turned to Cody and I said, hey, brokey arms, why don't you try hitting the ER? Make your bones less broken. No one's going to want to look at your crunched up arms. Now I feel self-conscious about how fragmented my bones are. Right. And is that making you feel more motivated to heal your arms? No, but it does make me want to buy products to make my arms look less broken and more fuckable. Exactly. Thank you. Oh, I lied about the weed. You can leave.

You can leave. Okay. Ah! You see how silly that is? And so imagine that, but on a worldwide scale. That's how we're handling dietary and fitness health for way too long. Imagine social media groups dedicated to shaming people for broken bones. I mean, that's actually a real thing because people are weird, but you get what I'm saying.

Imagine that kind of nonsense on television and movies and ads baked into our culture. Imagine treating other pandemic issues like long COVID like a personal failing or pushing people with illnesses to develop disorders to cure themselves. Or, very important, imagine treating something like it's a health failing when it isn't actually one, which is also the case with weight. failing when it isn't actually one, which is also the case with weight. Imagine being looked at for a second by a stranger or even a friend or a doctor and that person deciding, based on a glance, that you are unhealthy and it is your fault. It's so silly and archaic and it's embarrassing and it's hurting everyone, especially Cody. But I needed to make a point,

even if I had to pay Leslie Bibb to arrange it. Wait, what? Huh? Oh, Cody, no, no. You should really lie down. Just take a rest, little guy. Anyway, great episode, everyone. We did it. Yes, little guy. Anyway, great episode, everyone.

We did it. I mean, no one seems to care that she lost half a day of skiing. Half a day! Here we are. We've arrived at the end of the video. Thanks for watching. You go. Me go.

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