i appreciate your kind but firm tough love approach, and i think it’s so needed right now. i especially love your reminder that all the people screaming about social media’s toxicity are indeed allowed to STOP BEING ON SOCIAL MEDIA!
i deleted all my social media apps a couple years ago and when i tell people that, they act like i am unbelievably brave, they wish they could do that, etc. and it’s like… you can? i didn’t have to get anyone’s permission? lol
the parasocial relationship women have with plus size/body acceptance advocate type influencers feels especially troubling, like in that NYT article you linked. if a stranger on the internet losing weight is enough to send you into a mental health spiral, there’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. i think in an effort to detach themselves from thinness, people instead attached themselves to fatness, theirs and others’, so that the idea of a body becoming thinner (intentionally or otherwise) is inherently bad, threatening, evil. but body acceptance requires fluidity because bodies are fluid! the equation is not thinness = bad and thus fatness = good, or vice versa! the point is that all bodies are different and health doesn’t look the same for each person and we shouldn’t glorify or condemn any particular type of body! you know, like actual neutrality…
“I think in an effort to detach themselves from thinness, people instead attached themselves to fatness, theirs and others’, so that the idea of a body becoming thinner (intentionally or otherwise) is inherently bad, threatening, evil. but body acceptance requires fluidity because bodies are fluid!” OMG YES. You get it. Please come write for me when I can’t figure out how to say it myself lol
your footnote six is so true lol. right now i live in a semi-rural area and it really highlights how many things are more online problems than anything else… which is kind of great news in that you can literally just log off in a way that is _not possible_ with the actual wider culture (which you can ignore or become indifferent to but cannot literally close out of).
it's definitely been a weird road for me over the past year and a half-ish because i lost about a third of my bodyweight and went from being overweight to not, and since the medical catastrophe that caused all that to happen really limits what I can eat now, I am probably gonna stay that way. but a paradoxical thing has been enjoying exercise more because it reminds me i'm still alive and can Do Stuff and i'm not trying to engage in something "for my health" but really because i would like to look thinner. so i feel like life has forced me to adopt a healthier or more resilient mindset because there's nothing i can do to change "most of my pancreas died."
This article is amazing & so supportive. I’ve battled w/ my weight all of my life. I am a Type 1 diabetic for 36 years which totally complicates my ability to lose weight. I eat less than I ever have & the scale does not budge. My dr. called me out of the blue 1-1/2 yrs. ago telling me all about Ozempic before anyone was talking about it & persuaded me to go on it. I had many reservations & in 3 months, I lost 8 pounds. But I never felt comfortable about it & I stopped. I developed a severe case of acid reflux/ GERD. Since I stopped & did some positive remedies, it is gone. Now the onslaught has hit & I have been feeling like I will be the last chubby woman standing. I was really down about it UNTIL I read your article. I’m trying to be ok with me. Thank you. I needed that & I cannot wait for your book.❤️❤️❤️
Love this. Deep sigh. I see weight loss talked about everywhere online. Can’t even escape it being around friends or only seeing friends posts online. This was a timely read for me.
I think women in general just tend to be softer. The mean personality profile of women is higher in trait neuroticism than the mean profile of men.
So men tend to “fix themselves” while women tend to “demand the world changes.”
If you look at the media for example. there are far more obese women being celebrated than men.
Every male actor is jacked and superhero actors are so juiced out that their bodies aren’t even normally attainable. Yet very few people talk about its effect on men because their first impulse is not “more fat men on screen” but “ai need to get jacked too!”
(That creates different problems though; more people using steroids and at a younger age.)
However having said all that, a culture that pushes the average person to be leaner is a healthier culture.
There is no “healthy at every weight.” In fact, the literature overwhelmingly shows that no diet is superior and what makes them effective is (adherence + ) the loss of body fat.
Getting leaner is correlated with all health markers improving.
Mankind never used to be this fat. Our bodies have been optimized to be ridiculously efficient on very few calories because for hundreds of thousands of years, we expended a lot of calories yet could barely consume any.
The reason humans sweat (the only ones to do so) is because we used to chase after animals until they died as a result of their body temperature rising too much while we could maintain it by sweating.
The reason humans store fat is because that way, we could store excess calories and use them if we couldn’t get calories at a later time.
Our bodies function poorly on a sedentary lifestyle with a constant surplus of nutrients in our bloodstream.
In fact, exercise is so healthy (only superseded by sleep) that if you were able to put the benefits in a pil, no one would believe you. The list of benefits due to exercise are incredible. (As are the benefits of caloric deficits in order to get to a lean body.)
Because mean women’s personality profile tends to be higher in agreeableness than men, they’re more susceptible to the moralistic fallacy than men: “the world ought to be like this therefore it is.”
So they’ll have a reasoning process like: “It should be healthy to be overweight, obese, or morbidly obese and people shouldn’t judge therefore it is healthy to be overweight, obese, and morbidly obese.”
However, physics doesn’t care about our ethical framework. There’s simply what is.
And what is, is that it’s healthier to be lean. So on average, this is probably a net benefit to society although it would be worth thinking about intervention that can help prevent eating disorders.
1. The invention of hyper-palatable foods (foods that are so delicious it’s easy to overeat).
2. How readily available those foods are.
3. Hunger is not correlated well with fullness. The body doesn’t have a kcal tracker that says “you need 2K Kcals and you just had them so you’re full. Instead, you keep eating until the body is satisfied (which is a multi-variate process).
All these things work against us in our modern society where hyper-palatable foods are readily available throughout the entire day.
i appreciate your kind but firm tough love approach, and i think it’s so needed right now. i especially love your reminder that all the people screaming about social media’s toxicity are indeed allowed to STOP BEING ON SOCIAL MEDIA!
i deleted all my social media apps a couple years ago and when i tell people that, they act like i am unbelievably brave, they wish they could do that, etc. and it’s like… you can? i didn’t have to get anyone’s permission? lol
the parasocial relationship women have with plus size/body acceptance advocate type influencers feels especially troubling, like in that NYT article you linked. if a stranger on the internet losing weight is enough to send you into a mental health spiral, there’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. i think in an effort to detach themselves from thinness, people instead attached themselves to fatness, theirs and others’, so that the idea of a body becoming thinner (intentionally or otherwise) is inherently bad, threatening, evil. but body acceptance requires fluidity because bodies are fluid! the equation is not thinness = bad and thus fatness = good, or vice versa! the point is that all bodies are different and health doesn’t look the same for each person and we shouldn’t glorify or condemn any particular type of body! you know, like actual neutrality…
“I think in an effort to detach themselves from thinness, people instead attached themselves to fatness, theirs and others’, so that the idea of a body becoming thinner (intentionally or otherwise) is inherently bad, threatening, evil. but body acceptance requires fluidity because bodies are fluid!” OMG YES. You get it. Please come write for me when I can’t figure out how to say it myself lol
your footnote six is so true lol. right now i live in a semi-rural area and it really highlights how many things are more online problems than anything else… which is kind of great news in that you can literally just log off in a way that is _not possible_ with the actual wider culture (which you can ignore or become indifferent to but cannot literally close out of).
it's definitely been a weird road for me over the past year and a half-ish because i lost about a third of my bodyweight and went from being overweight to not, and since the medical catastrophe that caused all that to happen really limits what I can eat now, I am probably gonna stay that way. but a paradoxical thing has been enjoying exercise more because it reminds me i'm still alive and can Do Stuff and i'm not trying to engage in something "for my health" but really because i would like to look thinner. so i feel like life has forced me to adopt a healthier or more resilient mindset because there's nothing i can do to change "most of my pancreas died."
This is a fascinating POV on the parameters around self-perception. Thanks for sharing :)
I love this so much! Thank you Mikala. Looking forward to your book.
Thank you Veronica!
this was great. I’m so excited for your book
thank you :) prayers up that I actually sell it!
This article is amazing & so supportive. I’ve battled w/ my weight all of my life. I am a Type 1 diabetic for 36 years which totally complicates my ability to lose weight. I eat less than I ever have & the scale does not budge. My dr. called me out of the blue 1-1/2 yrs. ago telling me all about Ozempic before anyone was talking about it & persuaded me to go on it. I had many reservations & in 3 months, I lost 8 pounds. But I never felt comfortable about it & I stopped. I developed a severe case of acid reflux/ GERD. Since I stopped & did some positive remedies, it is gone. Now the onslaught has hit & I have been feeling like I will be the last chubby woman standing. I was really down about it UNTIL I read your article. I’m trying to be ok with me. Thank you. I needed that & I cannot wait for your book.❤️❤️❤️
Thank you so much, T! I'm really overjoyed that it was helpful to you.
Love this. Deep sigh. I see weight loss talked about everywhere online. Can’t even escape it being around friends or only seeing friends posts online. This was a timely read for me.
I'm glad it resonated!
I loved this article Mikala, your advice is golden. Can’t wait to read your book!
Tysm Isabelle!
I saw Julia Claire’s tweet yesterday and it gutted me — realizing that it’s not just me, many are feeling this. The complicated times continue…
They do indeed
https://youtu.be/Gj5uEr0Lh-k?si=ZNkI_-esrsR8EQTr
Wanted to pass along this video about ozempic, I feel like this youtuber’s values align with yours. And mine :)
I think women in general just tend to be softer. The mean personality profile of women is higher in trait neuroticism than the mean profile of men.
So men tend to “fix themselves” while women tend to “demand the world changes.”
If you look at the media for example. there are far more obese women being celebrated than men.
Every male actor is jacked and superhero actors are so juiced out that their bodies aren’t even normally attainable. Yet very few people talk about its effect on men because their first impulse is not “more fat men on screen” but “ai need to get jacked too!”
(That creates different problems though; more people using steroids and at a younger age.)
However having said all that, a culture that pushes the average person to be leaner is a healthier culture.
There is no “healthy at every weight.” In fact, the literature overwhelmingly shows that no diet is superior and what makes them effective is (adherence + ) the loss of body fat.
Getting leaner is correlated with all health markers improving.
Mankind never used to be this fat. Our bodies have been optimized to be ridiculously efficient on very few calories because for hundreds of thousands of years, we expended a lot of calories yet could barely consume any.
The reason humans sweat (the only ones to do so) is because we used to chase after animals until they died as a result of their body temperature rising too much while we could maintain it by sweating.
The reason humans store fat is because that way, we could store excess calories and use them if we couldn’t get calories at a later time.
Our bodies function poorly on a sedentary lifestyle with a constant surplus of nutrients in our bloodstream.
In fact, exercise is so healthy (only superseded by sleep) that if you were able to put the benefits in a pil, no one would believe you. The list of benefits due to exercise are incredible. (As are the benefits of caloric deficits in order to get to a lean body.)
Because mean women’s personality profile tends to be higher in agreeableness than men, they’re more susceptible to the moralistic fallacy than men: “the world ought to be like this therefore it is.”
So they’ll have a reasoning process like: “It should be healthy to be overweight, obese, or morbidly obese and people shouldn’t judge therefore it is healthy to be overweight, obese, and morbidly obese.”
However, physics doesn’t care about our ethical framework. There’s simply what is.
And what is, is that it’s healthier to be lean. So on average, this is probably a net benefit to society although it would be worth thinking about intervention that can help prevent eating disorders.
Forgot to mention to import variables:
1. The invention of hyper-palatable foods (foods that are so delicious it’s easy to overeat).
2. How readily available those foods are.
3. Hunger is not correlated well with fullness. The body doesn’t have a kcal tracker that says “you need 2K Kcals and you just had them so you’re full. Instead, you keep eating until the body is satisfied (which is a multi-variate process).
All these things work against us in our modern society where hyper-palatable foods are readily available throughout the entire day.
Two important* can’t edit typos on phone