Christy Harrison Quotes

It keeps us too hungry, too fixated on our bodies, and too caught up in the minutiae of our eating regimens to focus our energies on changing the world.

As feminist writer Naomi Wolf argues, the times in history when women have made the greatest political gains—getting the vote, gaining reproductive freedom, securing the right to work outside the home—have also been moments when standards for “ideal” beauty became significantly thinner and the pressure on women to adhere to those standards increased. Wolf explains that this serves both to distract women from their growing political power and to assuage the fears of people who don’t want the old patriarchal system to change—because if women are busy trying to shrink themselves, they won’t have the time or energy to shake things up. It’s hard to smash the patriarchy on an empty stomach, or with a head full of food and body concerns, and that’s exactly the point of diet culture.

Weight stigma has been shown to pose a greater risk to your health than what you eat.

As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.

We all want to be happy, accepted, and loved, which is what diet culture promises we’ll achieve through thinness and “perfect” eating.

Your health isn’t entirely within your control, either, despite what diet culture wants you to think. Health isn’t something you can wrestle into submission by sheer force; certain circumstances beyond our control—genetics, socioeconomic status, experiences of stigma, environmental exposures—can affect our health outcomes. We can’t permanently change our body size through food intake and exercise, the way we’ve been told we can, and the same is true of our health—which, of course, is not dependent on body size. That is, even if everyone ate the exact same things and moved their bodies in the exact same ways, we’d all still have different health outcomes because of genetic differences, experiences of poverty and discrimination, and even deprivation that our mothers experienced during pregnancy. Many things contribute to health, meaning it’s not all down to personal responsibility, the way diet culture wants us to believe—not by a long shot.

Disordered-eating behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum. If you start eating to soothe yourself after experiencing trauma, for example, you’re not doing that in a culture of “Do what you gotta do to get through the day, and also let me help you process your trauma.” No, you’re doing it in a culture of “OMG YOU’RE EATING SO MUCH, YOU’RE GONNA GAIN WEIGHT AND THAT’S ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE—YOU NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT, STAT! (And PS, trauma? What are you even talking about? Just suck it up and move on!)” So even when people start eating to self-soothe, without any connection to weight or body image, they eventually end up absorbing our culture’s toxic beliefs about food and bodies. In our society at this moment in history, it’s basically impossible not to fall into diet culture’s clutches at some point.

These days, diet culture pushes the narrative that the reason we stigmatize larger bodies is because higher weight “causes” poor health. In reality, though, fat bodies were deemed “uncivilized” and therefore undesirable long before the medical and scientific communities began to label them a health risk around the turn of the twentieth century.24 Fatphobic beliefs pre-dated health arguments. In fact, through the end of the nineteenth century (as for most of human history) doctors held that larger bodies were healthier. Anyone who wanted to pursue weight loss had to go up against the medical establishment.

As important as evolutionary theory was when it came to explaining how we all came to be on this planet, it was also used in overtly racist ways, to justify the white Anglo-European male domination of other cultures and genders that had been going on for centuries. Evolutionary theory became a “scientific” way of upholding the status quo. White, Northern European women were deemed to be a step down from men on the evolutionary ladder, followed by Southern Europeans (again with the women a step down from the men), then people of color from countries that early biologists and anthropologists considered “semi-civilized” or “barbaric,” and finally, at the bottom, Native Americans and Africans, whom they considered “savages.”21

Weight stigma can contribute to health problems in a number of ways. Perhaps the most obvious one is that it’s stressful to be stigmatized for your size, and stress takes a physical toll on your body. The scientific term for this toll is allostatic load, meaning the cumulative effect of chronic stressors on multiple systems in the body: the cardiovascular system, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and metabolism. Because it looks at the entire body rather than isolated parts, allostatic load has been shown to be a more robust predictor of chronic-disease risk than other markers. And the research is clear that weight stigma has seriously detrimental whole-body effects. One study that followed close to 1,000 participants for ten years found that those who reported experiencing significant weight stigma over that period were twice as likely to have a high allostatic load as those who didn’t—regardless of actual BMI.5 In other words, weight stigma is an independent risk factor for physiological stress.

As part of their process of creating this bogus evolutionary hierarchy, nineteenth-century scientists started cataloguing the physical traits and cultural norms they saw in different societies. They decided that fatness was a marker of “savagery” because it appeared more frequently in the people of color they observed, whereas thinness supposedly appeared more frequently in white people, men, and aristocrats.

The pillars of athletics are strength, stamina, flexibility, and sport-specific technique,” says health coach Ragen Chastain. “So if somebody is worried about mobility I would suggest they look at strength, stamina, and flexibility, then look at ways to improve those things and see what happens, rather than trying to manipulate body size.” As the holder of the Guinness World Record for heaviest woman ever to complete a marathon, Chastain knows that building those athletic capacities “is something that works at all sizes, whereas weight loss is something that works for almost no one.

That’s not to say that the people who believe they have NCGS don’t legitimately have symptoms; they absolutely do. It’s just that gluten doesn’t seem to be the cause of those symptoms, whereas their beliefs about gluten do seem to play a role. “If somebody so strongly believes that something is going to be responsible for triggering their symptoms, then just that thought is enough sometimes,

That’s likely why I’m the size I am now—a couple decades of dieting,” says Substantia Jones, a photographer and fat-acceptance activist who now identifies as “a happily fat woman” but spent her youth trying to shrink her body. “Each time I would of course lose weight and then gain it back with a dividend, so I ended up bigger and bigger each time,” she says. When she finally stopped dieting and regained weight for the last time, her weight stabilized—and has not fluctuated significantly since.

In our weight-obsessed health-care environment, it’s all too easy for genuine ailments to go undiagnosed, compromising people’s health and shortening their lives, all because of their doctors’ biased ideas about body size.

The Washington Post reported in 1995 that Americans were “fatter than ever before,” and that one of the leading theories why was because “a decade of dieting mania has actually made people fatter.”56

Another extremely important factor that never gets discussed in relation to the “obesity epidemic” is dieting; as we’ll discuss in Chapter 3, intentional weight-loss efforts have been shown to cause long-term weight gain for up to two-thirds of the people who embark on them. So if the national average weight was creeping up over the years, it’s a good bet that dieting was at least partly responsible for the increase.

L’autrice explique que cela avait pour effet à la fois de détourner les femmes de leur quête de pouvoir politique et d’apaiser les craintes de ceux qui ne souhaitaient pas voir changer le bon vieux système patriarcal. Si les femmes étaient occupées à maigrir, elles n’auraient pas le temps ou l’énergie de faire bouger les choses! Il est difficile de combattre le patriarcat quand on a l’estomac vide ou la tête pleine de préoccupations concernant la nourriture ou le corps; or, c’est exactement ce que fait la culture du régime.

no food has definitively been shown to prevent disease by lowering inflammation in the human body over the long term, even if certain components in the food theoretically could.

We just don’t have enough good scientific evidence to be able to claim with certainty that a particular way of eating is the ticket to a disease-free life via lower levels of inflammation, because there are so many confounding variables.

Here are a few things that may be underlying causes of inflammation, according to a large body of research (see if you can spot the commonalities): lower social class, being divorced or separated from a partner, not having a job, being in financial trouble, having a greater number of negative interactions with other people, having people close to you struggle with their health, and being treated with disrespect or verbally threatened because of your race or your weight.27 In other words, having bad shit happen to you—especially experiences of social injustice—is a risk factor for both increased inflammation and chronic disease.

And when the true cause of inflammation is psychological distress, injustice, and yo-yo dieting, is eating more kale really going to help?

In other words, weight stigma is an independent risk factor for physiological stress.

Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. —AUDRE LORDE

I started thinking about all the things that we could be doing in the world if we had our energy back, if we had our time back from spending it on some project of trying to be a body we think we’re supposed to be—that if we reoriented all of that energy back into the world, so much more would be possible,

Anger is such an immediate source of information and holds so much wisdom. It lets us know if a boundary is being crossed, it alerts us when something is going on that is not good for us or someone else, or it lets us know that something needs to stop. If our anger is in response to something we need to say no to, it calls forward the part of us that is our own ally.

health is not a moral obligation: you aren’t required to pursue it in order to prove your worthiness. In fact, if you’ve been traumatized by the pursuit of health in the past, as so many of us have been, you might need some time off to heal—and that’s perfectly OK. It doesn’t mean anything bad about you as a person, no matter what diet culture may have led you to believe.

the reality is that applauding weight loss for anyone reinforces weight stigma for everyone.

There was a moment’s pause and Harrison drew himself up. There was a new dignity in his face—the look of a man who has conquered his own baser self. He stretched out his hand across the table.

Despite some scientific debate, numerous studies over the past twenty-plus years have shown that it’s very much possible to be “fat and fit.” For example, a 2017 study of more than five thousand people28 and a 2014 meta-analysis of ten studies with nearly ninety-three thousand participants29 found no increased risk of cardiovascular disease or death for physically active higher-weight people. Additionally, a 2021 review of the evidence found that most cardiometabolic risk factors associated with high body mass index (BMI) can be improved with physical activity independent of weight loss, and that increases in cardiorespiratory fitness or physical activity are consistently associated with greater reductions in mortality risk than is intentional weight loss.

Diet culture is trauma in and of itself,” explains Lilia Graue, a marriage and family therapist and medical doctor who specializes in recovery from disordered eating. “It threatens our most basic need, which is the need to belong. You’re bombarded by messages of ‘Your body is wrong,’ ‘Your body doesn’t belong,’ ‘Your body doesn’t conform to what we think is worthy or lovable or acceptable.’ How can you not be traumatized by that?

No; I think I want to travel. I've never seen much of the world, you know.’ ‘I should think not. It must have been an awful life for you cooped up here all these years.’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Katherine. ‘It gave me a lot of freedom.’ She caught the other’s gasp, and reddened a little. ‘It must sound foolish—saying that. Of course, I hadn’t much freedom in the downright physical sense—’ ‘I should think not,’ breathed Mrs Harrison, remembering that Katherine had seldom had that useful thing as a ‘day off.’ ‘But, in a way, being tied physically gives you lots of scope mentally. You’re always free to think. I’ve had a lovely feeling always of mental freedom.