Dr. Caleb Luna @chairbreaker, on fat embodiment & divesting from constructions of health
Culturally, we are taught that we can control our health based on our individual choices, including eating habits. As part of this, body size gets conflated with or becomes a shorthand for health, with thinness becoming synonymous with good health and fatness with poor health. To control this, we are taught that eating a particular diet and regular exercise will automatically produce a thin body, and, with that, health.
This is false, for a few reasons:
1. There is no universally healthy diet. People have allergies, preferences & individual needs based on unique conditions. Some people need to eat more meat, some are allergic to nuts or berries, some bodies can’t digest lactose. Food is also culture, & the compulsion to standardize our diets into one model flattens human difference and imposes white supremacist foods & eating habits as the standards the rest of us should ascribe to.
2. There is no diet and exercise regime that is guaranteed to make you thin. Diets have a 95-99% long term failure rate. Exercise has many benefits, including increase in strength, mobility, stamina, flexibility, stress relief, connection to body, and more. But the conclusion it will make you thin is a lie from the diet industry to aspire to white supremacist beauty standards. It fuels the diet industry to make people feel like failures when diet & exercise don’t produce the thin bodies we were promised.
3. Illness is innate to the human condition, & many people who structure their lives around diet culture will still contract viruses, develop cancers & other conditions. There is no diet or exercise regime that is guaranteed to prevent illness or injury.
4. Body size is largely genetically determined. It can be influenced by food intake, but bodies hold what is called a set point that is nearly impossible to change long-term, without extreme & unhealthy measures. Our genetics also determine how we are racialized. Body size is one of many factors in this process, which includes skin tone, body hair patterns, height, body shape, and sizes & shapes of eyes, nose, & mouth. This is all race science; ascribing to these metrics of health through diet and fitness culture is also white supremacy.
There are steps we can take to take control of our individual holistic health, based on whatever goals they may be, but the idea we have complete control over our health is false. The notion that we can & should take ownership of our health comes from Enlightenment thinking that separated body from mind and man from nature. This epistemology teaches us that our bodies are projects that can and should be controlled and shaped through our actions in order to demonstrate our cultural values (allegiance to white supremacy). This is used to organize society into good subjects, who ‘take care of themselves,’ and bad subjects, who don’t. We don’t have dominion over our bodies; we are in relation with our bodies, and with each other.
In the U.S., we live in a deeply unhealthy society founded on anti-Blackness, Indigenous dispossesion & settler colonization. This is bad for the health of all of us. The emphasis on health as the result of individual choices that can be evidenced through the body is a distraction used to pit us against one another as good and bad subjects. Fat, sick & disabled bodies are viewed as failures of the project of self care and, as such, less deserving of resources. This also shifts responsibility to take care of one another, or for the State to take care of its citizen subjects. This is white supremacist & colonial thinking. We are all in relation with one another; we all have responsibilities for one another’s well-being.
Finally, disabled people have let us know that we can become disabled instantaneously through accident or illness; in fact, it is a part of life. If we live long enough, we will eventually become disabled in some way. The emphasis on health devalues disabled people, whose bodies will never achieve these standards. This construction of health is a value of white supremacy, colonization & capitalism: we are expected to be healthy under colonial metrics only to be productive workers for longer. We need to divest from settler formations of health if we want all of us to truly be free.
