Whose fault is your body?
Whose fault is your body?
All the food on the shelf was engineered for your health.
Body Type brings you insights, essays, and guidance about body image and body culture from me, Mikala Jamison, an independent journalist who has been through big body changes and worked inside the wild world of the fitness industry.
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When I was the fattest I ever was, it was my fault and it wasn’t.
I chose to ignore exercise. I chose to secretly binge eat three thousand calories in a sitting several times a week. No conditions or genetics had anything to do with it. I got to be the size I was, with high blood pressure and high cholesterol and prediabetes by age 21, because of the actions I was taking, the choices I was making, and the food I was eating.
I also was shamed throughout adolescence for being a relatively bigger girl before I was ever really fat, so I ate a lot because food was comfort. I went on diets at my mom’s and my friends’ and the culture’s behest from the time I was 12, which only caused me to binge eat when I could no longer take the restriction. At school they taught us that bread, cereal, rice, and pasta were the foundation of a healthy diet. They served us sad lunches with overcooked vegetables, so I snacked when I got home. I went to parties and friends’ houses where the offerings were Dunkaroos and Lunchables and CapriSuns and Airheads and Fluffernutter sandwiches and Ellio’s frozen pizza and what, was I not supposed to eat it? Was I, as a sixth grader, supposed to ask for a chicken breast and broccoli instead? Was I was supposed to not develop a taste for hyperpalatable food deliberately calibrated to make me obsessed with it?
I made myself fat, but the world I lived in did, too.
Watch this video all the way through1:
Why is anyone fat?
Is it because they habitually eat in a calorie surplus over the long term? OK, sure, but why do they do that, really? Is it because they were raised on a carbohydrate- and fat-heavy diet that dilutes the protein their bodies need, driving them to eat more calories to make up for the discrepancy? Is it because they eat a lot of ultra-processed foods, which cause them to gain more weight than people eating whole food diets of the same nutrient composition, for some reason? Is it something to do with their genetics making them more likely to eat more or hold onto body fat? Is it hormones?
Don’t worry if you don’t know — the world’s top researchers studying obesity don’t know, either, per a 2022 New York Times article. They posed the hypotheses in the previous paragraph but reached no real consensus. What they do know:
“No presenter argued that humans collectively lost willpower around the 1980s, when obesity rates took off […]. Not a single scientist said our genes changed in that short time. Laziness, gluttony and sloth were not referred to as obesity’s helpers. In stark contrast to a prevailing societal view of obesity, which assumes people have full control over their body size, they didn’t blame individuals for their condition …
The researchers instead referred to obesity as a complex, chronic condition, and they were meeting to get to the bottom of why humans have, collectively, grown larger over the past half century. […] And their theories, however diverse, made one thing obvious: As long as we treat obesity as a personal responsibility issue, its prevalence is unlikely to decline.”
A 2015 article in The Atlantic, Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s, points to a large study with a similar conclusion:
A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.
Researchers hypothesize this could be due to chemicals in our environment, prescription drugs linked to weight gain, and Americans’ changing microbiomes. They echo what Jesse Welles sings in his tune: A person’s fatness, insofar that it is a problem to them or anyone else, is not entirely their fault.
To be clear: No one is inherently morally at fault because they’re fat. People make content and write books and give talks about how their fatness isn’t a problem, physically or emotionally. Good for them, truly. As someone who spent the 10 most formative years of my life as a fat woman in America, though, I know I’m not alone in saying that being fat can be a significant life problem. Not only because of weight bias, stigma, and discrimination, but in my case also because of the aforementioned health problems, and:
… I also gained like 30 pounds in half a year from binge eating and my size directly impeded my ability to do something that is the cornerstone of my physical and mental heath: Exercise.
As I wrote in that piece, I’m not that interested in arguing about whether fatness is “healthy” when what most people care about day to day is how difficult their lives are, and being fat can make life quite difficult. I’d much rather pass on the experience, knowledge, and skills I have to help people have an easier life, body-wise, via sane, safe, sustainable methods of habit change and body recomposition if that’s what they’re interested in doing.
I’m also not interested in doing what some people in modern body discourse spaces seem hellbent on doing: entirely rejecting the notion that their choices and behaviors have any influence at all over how their bodies feel, perform, and look. Yes, maybe it was easier to be leaner in the 80s; yes, there are complex factors outside of our control that can contribute to making us fat; but as I wrote in the opening paragraphs about myself, I hold multiple truths — some things to do with my body are up to me and some aren’t. I believe most of us have more power than we realize to focus on the things that are.
One of those is how much hyperpalatable2 food we eat. That’s what Jesse’s song is about, and what the researchers in the articles I linked mean by ultra-processed foods. These are foods that have tons of salt, sugar, and saturated fat, what we think of in the U.S. as “junk food.” The subtitle of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Moss’ book, Hooked, is “Food, free will, and how the food giants exploit our addictions.” Anahad O’Connor writes in The New York Times:
Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease. Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs. The book draws on internal industry documents and interviews with industry insiders to argue that some food companies in the past couple of decades became aware of the addictive nature of their products and took drastic steps to avoid accountability, such as shutting down important research into sugary foods and spearheading laws preventing people from suing food companies for damages.
I was a binge eater of foods like these for many years of my life. I was these companies’ most valued customer. I’ve spent years rewiring and analyzing (alongside professionals) my relationship to food and appetite. My binge eating disorder and resultant high body fat was fueled by many internal and external factors, and one of those was the same thing I believe is keeping Americans locked in bad relationships with food, the binge-restrict cycle, and battles with their weight: Incredibly abundant access to hyperpalatable food.
Back in 2022 I wrote a post about junk food and a Bon Appétit package of stories claiming that “junk food can be good to us, too,” and can be a source of “pleasure, indulgence, and even community.”
Junk food, I wrote, can be good for us in a spiritual sense. I stand by that. A few hearty handful of Cheez-Its or a late-night diner milkshake with friends have brought me great pleasure and comfort many a time. Junk food can also be good, in a way, for people who have limited access to more nutrient-dense food — they have to eat something, and junk food still has life-sustaining calories and some degree of nutrition. But I reiterate: That doesn’t make hyperpalatable food good for us in a physical sense. Nutrition is just nutrition. We need macronutrients (protein, certain fats, complex carbs) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) to function well, and some foods have more than others.
Why I rail against too much hyperpalatable food isn’t because I don’t eat it sometimes or think anyone should stop eating it entirely3. I rail because, as Jesse’s song makes plain, we are being well and truly fucked by the American system that has engineered, mass marketed, and made spectacularly abundant the kind of food that is more likely than any other to annihilate your ability to nourish yourself and make your life harder. I’m no scientist, but I do believe, like Jesse, that it’s this kind of food that’s behind so many Americans’ increased body fat, resultant health problems, and more difficult lives, and it’s not their fault that it’s so addictive and easy and cheap to get.
I’m especially angry because mainstream body culture is touting intuitive eating as a more productive personal health approach, but intuitive eating is impossible when your palate and hunger and fullness cues have been annihilated by food that is like meth for your appetite. Americans will not learn to eat intuitively until they do a bit of the very thing intuitive eating demands we don’t do: Restrict. Cut consumption of hyperpalatable foods down by a few servings a week. I’m not only talking about the junk food we associate with gaining weight. Many “diet” foods — protein pop-tarts, Atkins bars, “healthy” ice creams, etc. — “have characteristics of enhanced palatability,” per a researcher quoted here.
Restrict, in this context, means restrict to some degree the food that’s keeping you in the pocket of companies who employ people in lab coats to make things taste more intense than our great ancestors could have ever dreamed of, which in turn is making you sick and unintuitive about food. That’s not the same as telling you to restrict your overall calories for weight loss at any cost.
Reducing the consumption of these foods will be uncomfortable. I know from experience, though, that swapping a donut for a bowl of oats with some dark chocolate chips thrown in, or a pint of raspberry cheesecake ice cream for yogurt with frozen berries, gets easier the more you do it. You start wanting the donuts et al. less. Then, the magic happens — you learn when you do really want a donut and how it feels to savor it, instead of feeding the vicious craving cycle its ingredients have engendered.
I think this restriction will be less uncomfortable if we let anger — or at least a sense of, I don’t know, justice — fuel it. Jesse’s song makes me angry because it reminds me of the forces behind so many of the problems we’re facing: people who would zoom a Jet Ski atop a sea of consumers who were sick and dying from their products if it meant getting to their private island faster. These foods make our lives harder, so I’m furious at the people responsible. I’m interested in fighting the real enemy, so to speak. Not eating as many of their bullshit products feels like a means of resistance.
Regarding exactly why so many people in this country struggle against higher body fat and associated problems, as I have, we don’t have a lot of solid answers. We don’t really know yet what’s going on with microbiomes and hormones and drugs. But I think we know what’s going on with the food — it seems quite obvious that the more we eat hyperpalatable food instead of nutrient-dense food, the less nutrition we’ll have and the fatter we’ll be. If we don’t like that, we do not have to buy what they’re selling as much as we do.
Just as I can look back at my fatter self and not entirely blame her for the problems she had with her body, I don’t entirely blame anyone else for theirs. I agree with researchers who say obesity is a complex and chronic condition. I don’t believe it is entirely a matter of personal responsibility, and agree that its prevalence is unlikely to decline without wide-ranging systemic changes to our food system, infrastructure, education, and so much more that feels so out of reach.
But I also believe that these same systems have a vested interest in making us feel disempowered and without choice. They want us to fall in line with whatever yields them the greatest profit. I believe we have the power to tap out more than we do. I believe we can choose more frequently to eat in a way that has less to do with the moral panic around obesity rates and has more to do with what I find most crucial: Coming closer to a way of eating that enables us to truly connect to what nourishes us so we can thrive. That just doesn’t happen when we’re eating mostly lab-calibrated junk food.
Jesse ends his song with the refrain: All the food on the shelf was engineered for your health / so you’re gonna have to take the blame.
Of course he’s saying is that we don’t have to take the blame. The state of things is not our fault. But I do think we have to do something, and rejecting the offerings of those who have no interest whatsoever in our well-being is a good place to start.
What do you think? What role does “junk food” play in your life? Do you agree or disagree with my assertions? Take it to the comments …
I hope I don’t have to tell you it’s satire, but, you know … just in case.
More explanation, from my 2022 post: Many foods we classify as junk foods are hyperpalatable. They feature a combination of refined sugar, trans fats, high sodium, and simple carbohydrates. They are engineered to make us eat more, even when we’re not hungry. This includes many “diet” food products—corporations count on you buying more, whether for indulgence or ostensible moderation. You’re not wrong, bad, or gluttonous for liking these foods, because that’s how humans work; we evolved to prioritize high-calorie, energy-dense food when it was scarce. In the past, though, available energy-dense foods were fruits or animal meat and marrow, not low-nutrient snacks. Now, this food is available everywhere. We become “addicted” to it in the sense that it makes us feel a next-level high from levels of sugar, fat, etc. that we didn’t encounter for millennia. Now, it’s easy to consume it constantly, so we do.
One of the things that has been great for my relationship with food is eating a simple fudge popsicle several nights per week. I don’t entirely cut myself off from having a treat like that, but it falls into the 20% of the 80/20 split by which I loosely abide. They’re 100 calories and made of milk, cream, sugar, cocoa, and vanilla. They don’t make me feel sugar poisoned, they don’t make me crave another four of them. Eating something like this for dessert instead of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food is what I’m talking about — it’s simply a matter of reducing the volume of hyperpalatable food in your diet over the long term.
this is one of my favorite posts of yours, and i love all of your posts. you really have an incredible ability to see both sides of an issue comprehensively, cut through the bullshit, and write your way to a middle ground in a thoughtful, kind, and insightful way. this type of analysis is lacking in all areas of modern society, but i do think it may be particularly sparse within the intersected web of food, diet, weight, and exercise.
i love the reframe of eating less hyperpalatable food as an act of resistance and an act of true self care! we’ve been in a phase where “eat what you want and as much of it as you want” is the ultimate pushback on diet culture and body shaming, and not only did that essentially eliminate personal accountability from the equation, but it also gave Big Food the most incredible opportunity to capitalize on, as they also capitalize on the continuing food trends that ebb and flow, like high protein or low fat or low sugar.
and relinquishing that rigid control over what you eat and how much you eat IS an important part of the journey toward no longer moralizing food — it was the foundation of my eating disorder recovery in college, and naturally, i graduated college quite a bit heavier than when i entered. but the point is NOT to never regain any boundaries around how we eat, to never think “i want to eat this” and choose to ignore that desire rather than immediately give in to it. control and restriction are not inherently evil tools of diet culture! they can also be very helpful tools for every day human life!
Earlier this summer, I went on an anti inflammatory elimination diet because I suspected that my diet was contributing to mental health woes. (Spoiler alert: I was correct!) and that necessitated cutting out ultra processed foods among other things for three weeks. (It was not about restricting calories, just foods that cause inflammation.) The effect of doing so was pretty life changing because I figured out just how addicted I was to ultra processed food. But I also discovered that without UPF, I actually do have instinctive intelligence about how to eat. I started losing weight without counting calories or even being aware of it. It wasn’t until my mom said that I looked different that I even saw it. This was after years of believing that I was powerless to change my body. I was trapped in the narrative that I had no power over my body or my food. And ultimately that benefits General Mills and Yum Brands Incorporated way more than it benefits me. Even if the deck is stacked against us, I’m not going to let that stop me from trying. I can’t change the system but I can change myself. And while I still eat UPF occasionally I am no longer willing to lie to myself about how it makes me feel.