Tag weight loss dieting:

(Re)examining Fat Stigma through Black Women’s History

Posted on by Ava Purkiss

Through my research on black women’s exercise and fitness culture from 1900 to the 1930s, I discovered a little-known history of black fat shaming. While I expected to find that black women engaged in exercise for general health, I never imagined that some black women would craft their exercise programs for weight loss and at the same time participate in fat stigmatization. My surprise stemmed from common-sense assumptions about black people’s fat acceptance and flexible standards of beauty. Popular culture, academic studies on body image, and news outlets help to perpetuate these assumptions. R&B and Hip Hop is known for celebrating black women’s voluptuous bodies, including Drake who rapped famously he likes women “so thick that everybody else in the…

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Sugar is the New Fat. The “Sugar Conspiracy” and its Essentialist Vision of the Natural Body

Posted on by Tanja Robnik

In 1972 John Yudkin, a physiologist, nutritionist and founding member of the Department of Nutrition at the Queen Elisabeth College in London, published a book called “Pure, White and Deadly – The new facts about the sugar you eat as a cause of heart disease, diabetes and other killers.” Since the late 1950s, Yudkin’s research had pointed to a connection between coronary thrombosis and sugar consumption, and he had argued against common ideas of fat causing obesity and problems like coronary heart disease. However, Yudkin could not make himself heard against the powerful voice of the sugar industry and of other scientific evidence pointing the finger at another suspect, so that Yudkin’s ideas vanished and “low fat became the new…

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The Ninety-Five Percent: Fighting Neoliberalism and Fatphobia Together

Posted on by Anna Mollow

Eighteen years ago, in an article titled “Losing Weight: An Ill-Fated New Year’s Resolution,” the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine took the US American medical establishment to task for its promotion of weight loss dieting. The editorial noted that, for most people, permanent weight loss is not possible; and, they observed, evidence suggesting that dieting confers health benefits is “limited, fragmentary, and often ambiguous.” When this editorial was published in 1998, it was already old news that diets don’t work. For decades, fat activists had been pointing out that the medical literature shows diets to have a failure rate of 95% or higher. What’s more, diets make people fatter over the long term, and repeated attempts to…

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