The Origin of Fat Phobia and Diet Culture

Thinness and its correlation to health seems to be a common theme that is tightly woven into Western culture. In today’s climate, dominated by social media, we are bombarded with Instagram and TikTok posts about losing weight, dieting to be thin, and “before & after” pictures. Even through personal experience, my thinnest was never my healthiest. In fact, when I was at my lowest weight, my life was layered with cycles of binge eating and purging, extreme restriction, various dieting tactics, and inadequate hydration. Now, 20 pounds heavier, I would consider myself the healthiest that I’ve ever been; my hormones have stabilized and my routine blood work panels have never been better. However, based purely on aesthetics, I received the most external compliments when I was at my thinnest. Little did everyone know, I was suffering inside. Mine certainly wasn’t a healthy body to be modeled after. But I had a phobia of getting “fat”, instilled in me by my mother, which was probably instilled by her mother, and so forth. However, this phobia wasn’t due to wanting to be healthy necessarily. If that were the case, myself and others would certainly go about it differently. Therefore, I wanted to answer: where exactly did our fear of being fat come from? And how did diet culture begin?

Praising the Thick

History tells us that there was once a tradition of praising larger bodies. Although actual bodies have changed very little throughout history, the idea of attractiveness and health has been modified a great deal. From the 16th century up until about the 18th century, the general standard of beauty was to look “physically substantial.” In fact, being thin often corresponded to poverty, old age, and weakness. Not only was it looked down upon from a physical perspective, but also from a spiritual one, suggesting moral inadequacy. Thin people even went as far as to wear bulky garments underneath their clothing in order to mirror the subjects of Peter Paul Rubens paintings.

“Fatness” and its Correlation to Racism

Looking back, we can point to an avalanche of evidence that the genesis of fat-phobia was not based on actual health concerns. We can see a change happen in the 18th century when Europeans were hard-pressed to figure out a way to properly separate themselves from those they had colonized and enslaved. While skin color was once a clear distinction, the lines were blurred due to rape and generations of biracial breeding. Therefore, the concept of “control” was introduced. Europeans began to falsely spread that Africans were sexually charged beings who loved food and were too fat. In order to draw a clear contrast, Europeans marketed themselves as having self-control. This also perpetuated the fallacy that due to being in control, Europeans had the liberty to manage not only themselves and their diets, but their slaves. Colonists, therefore, needed to be slender and watch what they ate as to not fall into the category of those who were glutenous and unable to control themselves. This European concept took hold in the United States in the mid-1800’s and thus the movement for “thinness” began. Thinness continued to perpetuate and spiral into a form of racial domination and religious elitism.

The Introduction of “Diets”, Control, and Sylvester Graham

In the 1840’s, a man by the name of Sylvester Graham created an abstinent diet for women. This actually appears to be the first instance of what we consider to be modern-day “dieting” in America. You may recognize Sylvester’s last name from a common household snack, the graham cracker. This original cracker, eaten by his followers known as the “Grahamites,” consisted mostly of coarse graham flour.

Sylvester experienced a great deal of sickness as a child and it can be inferred that due to this, he became obsessed with the idea that “bad food” was the cause of his and the rest of humanity’s suffering. He also firmly believed that by controlling people’s food intake, it would control their sexual desires, thus turning them morally superior. It was believed that there were “excitatory” foods, such as spices, which would lead to illness, sexual excess, indigestion, and overall secular disorder. After meeting and winning over a clergyman by the name of William Metcalfe, who established the first vegetarian church, Graham was able to tout that his dieting ideals were backed by God. Now promoted as a puritanical diet, Graham pushed his bland diet on white Americans, enticing them to be morally and racially superior.

Banting & Kellogg

Other diets began emerging post the founding of “Grahamites.” In the 1860s, a new diet was introduced by a man named William Banting, which featured large quantities of proteins and fewer carbs (think today’s Atkins). “Dieting” was referred to as “banting” during this time and it drove white, upper class men to partake in extreme anti-fat discourse. The word “slob” emerged and a very strong wave of disgust against the obese continued.

Another player in the dieting game was John Kellogg. Kellogg invented cornflakes in 1894, a cereal we still see stocked on shelves today. He believed in “biologic living”, which essentially equates to preventative medicine. This included abstaining from alcohol, team, coffee, chocolate, and tobacco. He avoided meats and only allowed grains and vegetables. He also believed in getting adequate rest, exercise, going outside, with a proper diet being at the crux of it all. A healthy vessel for God, if you will. While this doesn’t seem all that bad on surface level, Kellogg also co-founded the Race Betterment Foundation, which attempted to create a eugenics registry. He did not support racial mixing and was in favor of sterilizing mentally defective persons. He was heavily influenced by his faith and the ideals of purity. Cornflakes were invented to prevent masturbation; it was marketed as a non-excitatory, calming food. Kellogg believed that neglect of the colon was a sin and sex was a sewer drain for the body.

It sickens me that I actually partook in the Special K diet as a 15-year-old girl. Not only because I was 15-years-old and felt the need to diet, but also based on the racist and misogynistic foundation of Kellogg’s. In retrospect, this diet was solely an exercise of control, not one to become healthier, as I find it extremely doubtful that a cold bowl of cereal three times a day provides the necessary nutrients your body deserves and needs.

In Conclusion

Do we see the extreme parallels of these baffling examples of dieting to today’s diet culture? We are still driven by an erroneous idea, backed by a patriarchal medical model, stating that females need to exercise control in order to stay thin. Fat equates to laziness, gluttony, and an inability to control what we put in our mouths. In fact, many of our diets are fighting our body’s organic mechanism to keep an equilibrium. We are cutting out food groups (see Atkins, Keto, Paleo), which feels more like a test to see how much self-control we can demonstrate with little regard for our actual health. New fad diets, created by white males, continued to pop up throughout the 19th and 20th century. And while many people in the 21st century are blind to the sexist, religiously intolerant, and racist history of “diets”, the motivation and beginnings of these new dietary fads seem to be eerily similar.

Falling prey and losing so many years of my life to the toxic diet culture that we Americans still hold so very dear infuriates me. What infuriates me even more is that modern medicine has perpetuated these very false ideals. The medical community receive implicit teachings that fat equates to unhealthiness, which is certainly not always the case. Health is layered and nuanced and has so much more to it than just your BMI. However, it’s a real issue that medical shaming occurs based on size and people who are larger often receive inadequate healthcare. Take this under consideration: if I were to eat a big meal tonight and tip over on the BMI scale from 24 to 25 and go into the doctor’s office tomorrow, would I be shamed for being overweight? Was I healthy yesterday, but somehow not today?

Weight is controlled by a multitude of variables and isn’t as simple as moving more, eating less. On top of it, there are variables that we have zero control over (genetics, for example). Furthermore, the more you diet/restrict and try to move from the equilibrium that your body wants to stay at, the less leptin your body creates. Leptin is the hormone that signals your body to be full. The more you produce, the more full you feel. During dieting, Leptin levels fall rapidly and summon profound changes in energy balance and hormone levels. Low leptin levels induce overfeeding, especially for high glucose/sugary foods, and suppress energy expenditure, thyroid and reproductive hormones, and immunity.

I feel there is still the expectation to hijack your body to fit some ideal that is touted as being healthy, but it’s just a lie. So eat when you’re hungry. Move your body when you can. And do what you can to fight against toxic diet culture and fat phobia.