BODY POSITIVITY’S BIG FAT LIE:
[Tristan Justice and Gina Bontempo, the authors of Fat And Unhappy: How “Body Positivity” Is Killing Us (and How to Save Yourself)] discuss politics very little, but the unspoken context of their book is the growing politicization of fitness. “Getting fit is great—but it could turn you into a rightwing jerk,” read the title of a June piece published by a Guardian columnist. Kennedy’s endorsement of President Donald Trump brought an entire army of crunchy moms over to the Republican side—no small thing, if a recent report from the New York Times is to be believed. The health of future generations seems like something the left and the right can come together to support, but the food industry and pharmaceutical industry seem to find ways to coopt this vision nearly every time.
Justice and Bontempo are far from the first authors to point out what’s wrong with nutrition in America. They cite research from Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet; Robert H. Lustig, author of Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine; and Gary Taubes, author of Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It. Where they start to tread new ground is their reporting on “toxic” body positivity, defining it as a movement that “seeks to eliminate the emotional toll of obesity by demanding the rest of the country normalize and even glorify excess weight.” Justice was even denied a press pass to attend Philly FatCon, a 2023 gathering of pro-fat activists including Joy Cox, author of Fat Girls in Black Bodies, and Sonalee Rashatwar, known online as “The Fat Sex Therapist.”
“The point of the conference was the promotion of far-left activism on social justice, and the organizers placed obesity at the center of it…. None of the conference speakers on the all-women lineup built their profiles by raising the red flag on obesity. They all made money on raising the white one,” Justice and Bontempo write.
So who’s funding the body positivity movement? All it takes is a little digging to realize that when skincare brand Dove launches a “Campaign for Size Freedom,” it’s actually acting in the interest of parent company Unilever, one of the top ice cream manufacturers in the United States. Companies like Dove act in tandem with fat-positive activists like Virgie Tovar to get the stamp of approval from this new social justice spinoff. Unfortunately, average Americans using social media unknowingly encounter this propaganda. They’re bombarded with videos from dietitians funded by the food industry who recommend soda and packaged snacks but never restricting unhealthy foods. In fact, some of the influencers who dole out health “advice” online refuse to even classify foods as “good” or “bad” because “diet culture, fatphobia, and systems of oppression have created false hierarchies of food” (yes, this is a direct quote from a so-called nutritionist cited by Justice and Bontempo).
The schizophrenia during and immediately after the coronavirus pandemic was pretty astonishing, particularly from sources who should (and do) know better:
Shot: Why Are People with Obesity More Vulnerable to COVID?
–Scientific American, June 24th, 2021.
Chaser: Scientific American looks at the racist stigmatization of black women’s bodies and obesity.
—Twitchy and your humble narrator, December 28th, 2022:
