The Unbearable Whiteness and Fatphobia of “Anti-Diet” Dietitians
A censored image of an instagram post from a well-known “anti-diet dietitian’s” page. (Cred: Me)
In the midst of working on this essay, a fellow member of a Health At Every Size Facebook group posted about an encounter with a popular dietitian on Instagram. This dietitian has branded herself as an anti-diet dietitian and body positivity advocate. She has over 50k followers. She sells courses on how to kick one’s dieting habit that cost $250.
This group member politely commented on this dietitian’s post to explain that their frequent posting of “before and afters”, complaints about being unable to celebrate her own weight loss, and pictures with “stomach rolls” (like in the image above) contributes to the falsehood of fat bodies being “before” bodies and exacerbates the hypervisibility of privileged, straight-sized people in the body liberation movement.
Her comments were deleted and she was blocked.
She then attempted to engage this dietitian through a private message from her main account in hopes that that would be more effective. She was sympathetic to the difficult task of owning up to one’s privilege, but emphasized that one cannot be “anti-diet” without engaging with body positivity as a space for fat people. She received an incredibly hostile response in which the following and more occurred:
The dietitian said that she is “not causing harm” and if her “journey” “harms you or anyone else….it’s not [she] that has internal work to do.”
The dietitian stated that she was trying to cultivate a “peaceful space” and comments pointing out the problematic nature of her posts do not “spark” that.
The dietitian claimed that “researchers, like [her] mentors in [her] doctoral program built this movement… not social justice warriors” and that individuals who want her to check her privilege “are taking things to a place where it divides people and it’s just not necessary or effective to get people to shift their views.”
This is not an anecdote, but the whole story.
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As Stephanie Yeboah once told Jameela Jamil (who then stole her words):
“[Body positivity] stems from the fat acceptance movement, which is more political than anything, [and] was created as a safe space for fat women to celebrate themselves as no one was celebrating us or seeing us — and all our interior amazingness — for what we were. Now it’s used as a marketing term and has forgotten about the very bodies that created it…”
Stephanie is not alone in her assessment. For Wear Your Voice magazine, Briana Hernandez interviewed Rochelle Brock, a body positive photographer. When asked about what she didn’t like about the body positive (BOPO) movement, Rochelle said the following:
“While the BOPO movement is getting a lot of clout, people who don’t fit the ideal norm — [people who are] bigger, rounder, blacker — are getting the shit end of the stick… Smaller, hourglass-shaped women are banking off of the term, and unfortunately, a lot us are getting left behind or ignored completely when decisions are made.”
Plenty of others have also criticized the appropriation of the body positive movement by people who do not face oppression on the basis of physical “abnormality”. Skinny women taking pictures in bikinis to preach about how others should accept their bodies. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and every advertising scheme like it.Describing weight loss as “self love”. These are just a few examples of how body positivity has been reformed to serve many different desires, all of which are represented in the grift of many “anti-diet” dietitians.
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Dietetics is the science of how food and nutrition affect our health. Dietitians work in many different areas, including health communication, food safety, and improvement of nutritional quality of manufactured foods. Many dietitians design and sell individual therapies intended to help people deal with health issues through specialized diets. (These individuals are the focus of this post.)
As I’ve written before, science has always said that fat people do not belong in any worthwhile vision for the future of humankind. As such, dietetics has always been a worthwhile eugenic tool to craft a “better” human race.
Dietetics as a field has served as an important avenue through which women have fought for access to training in medicine and the sciences. It was a favored career among white, middle-class, Protestant women in the 1900s and was bolstered by wartime activities that made nutrition an important specialization in the US military. However, as the status of dietitians rose and they sought to formalize their field by creating professional associations and scientific journal publications, the overt Whiteness of the field became solidified. For example, white female dietitians often wrote journal articles linking diseases and deficiencies to the specific dietary practices of racial and ethnic groups; these functioned to assert their superiority over women of color attempting to find success in dietetics, as well as further the associations between Protestant Whiteness, health, and prosperity.
This is just one part of a wide legacy of oppression. White women have always promoted eugenics alongside white men who are just as eager to “preserve” the white race.Gertrude Davenport, wife of famed eugenicist Charles Davenport, was one of the first to ascribe degeneracy to the biology of socially unacceptable (read: immigrant) mothers. Her contributions to eugenics have long been overshadowed by the legacy of her husband, as well as shrouded by her reputation as a progressive feminist. Adept at performative frailty and feminized victimhood, white women manage to contribute to the systemic oppression of “social undesirables” and simultaneously force their way into liberatory spaces.
Dietetics as a profession doesn’t look too different from its origins. According to the Commission on Dietetic Registration, 93.9% of currently registered dietitians are women. 81.1% of currently registered dietitians are white.And, as I mentioned, white women have long been agents of racism and anti-Blackness. What happened to Emmett Till and George Stinney Jr. and Black Wall Street were all caused by white women. As Ezinne Ukoha brilliantly wrote, the audacity of white feminism is the core of white supremacy.
The marketization of the body positivity movement has been partially driven by white women who describe themselves as “anti-diet” practitioners. Christy Harrison, a notable “anti-diet” dietitian, describes the anti-diet lens as “anti-diet culture”. Anti-diet is supposed to be in opposition to the social beliefs that weight loss improves health, that health and fat are not compatible, that diets work, and that thinness is the superior physical and moral form. Diet culture tells us that foods can be “good” or “bad”, that bodies can be “good” or “bad”, and that the solution to our problems lays in changing our physical embodiment through restrictive eating, hyper-vigilance, and deprivation.
“Anti-diet” dietitians are described by Harrison as utilizing evidence-based nutrition therapies to hone and honor your body’s natural signals for hunger and satiety. They also deliver medical nutrition therapy needed to help people manage conditions like diabetes and celiac disease in ways that do not replicate diet culture in the care space. Except in some cases of eating disorder recovery, weight gain or loss is not a central part of anti-diet practice; it’s about learning to listen to, trust, and respect your body.
These are all good things. But how do they go wrong in the context of the body positivity movement, racism, and fatphobia?
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A collage of instagram posts from various “anti-diet dietitians” (Creator: Me)
Christy Harrison does mention that “in one of the shadiest moves of all time, diet culture even includes people trying to sell the anti-diet movement as a weight-loss method.” She is right. Diet culture is gonna diet culture. But while those individuals she’s mentioned are extremely predatory, they’re not even the ones I’m maddest at or focused on in this post.
I’m mad at the anti-diet dietitians (ADDs) that sit in their photos to show their stomach (read: skin) folds. I’m mad at the ADDs that feign eating desserts or pizza or something equally demonized for pictures that they post with captions like “no foods are bad!” or “you don’t have to work out to earn food!” I’m mad at the ADDs who say that you can still love your body and want it to be smaller. I’m absolutely pissed at the ADDs who stand in their mirrors or on the beach to display their minor bloating or the small dimples in their thighs.
They post “before and after” pictures a minute, a year, a decade apart to show how much “better” their bodies became once they “quit dieting” or to show how even svelte bodies in spandex can be less perfect if they pull their waistbands down and that no matter how many rolls they have they’re still the same fit women they always were.
The white hot rage I feel when these women tell me to flaunt my body, that I am still sexy no matter my size because they’re sexy at their size in the position they feel fattest in.
If you are an “anti-diet dietitian” and you do any of these things, brand my words into your mind:
You are diet culture.
There is no way to be a thin white female ADD and do the things I’ve described or screen-grabbed above withoutpromoting diet culture and fatphobia and Whiteness. By portraying your miniature rolls and folds as things to love despite their existence, despite the way they distance you from perfection, you are not only saying that my fat body is inherently worse than yours, but you are subliminally communicating that rolls and folds are only “okay” and “normal” and “sexy” on a body like yours — so thin, so white, so unbearably conventional. And by implying you are equally hurt by diet culture as a fat Black or brown person is, you’re just straight up lying for your own gain.
When thin white women use their womanhood to invade the body liberation space while simultaneously benefitting from Whiteness and thinness, when they violate this space to enrich themselves as anti-diet dietitian saviors who “get it” and “have been there” and can save you from yourself, they are committing a violation. They are being violent. They are hurting people in the way white women have always hurt people. And, by using anti-diet dietetics as both scientific legitimacy and a woke signal, they are protecting themselves from criticism and accountability while doing so.
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A screenshot I took of recent photos tagged with #normalizenormalbodies. See a pattern?
Many anti-diet dietitians want to normalize all bodies and feel they’re more effective if they share their own “journeys” and bare their guts for their viewers. They want to portray that they, too, are not perfect. They want their followers to know they are not models or Aphrodites just because they are unambiguously thin, just because they can hide their small layer of subcutaneous fat in the waistband of their exercise leggings. To some small degree, these goals make sense.
But forget about perfection and models. Look above at the results of my search for #normalizenormalbodies on Instagram. Look at these consecutive photos of thin white women posing on sandy beaches. Do these bodies look abnormal to you?
If you are a thin white person, your body is as normal as it gets. Clothes and public spaces and medical standards and media are made with you in mind. The bodies in these pictures do not need to be uplifted. Your body does not need to be uplifted. Body positivity is not for you.
Again.
Your body does not need to be uplifted.
Body positivity is not for you.
As Wear Your Voice’s Sherronda Brown once said, “what most people don’t understand about body positivity [is that it started in response to] white society’s fear of the racial Other.” By eschewing social demands for thinness and conventional beauty, fat acceptance and body positivity are radical. They grasp at the root. They pour gasoline on our foundational understandings of health, science, and morality and light a match. But when thin white people — thin white women, in particular — feel it is appropriate to trample these spaces to comfort themselves as they aspire to white ideals of womanhood and femininity, they are, once again, agents of destruction.
This is the nature of oppression. While you slowly die from exclusion, your only safe spaces are open to those who are always safe. They flood the doorway, take the seating, stand on it to survey the room. They build nests and nurture their own and buoy themselves where you used to find solace. Slouching and pushing out their stomachs all the while, they shout: “Normalize my body! I get bloated too! Eat that cupcake! You deserve to take up space!”
If only they’d left any for you.
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This article was bolstered by a lively discussion in a Health At Every Size group started by the very cool Molly Robbins, as well as a recent twitter thread of mine.
First published on Medium. Curated by Medium Editors in Beauty and Equality.