January 4, 2020 • 37 mins
In this classic episode, we look back to Kjiersten Gruys, who went a year without looking in a mirror to readjust how she looks at her body. So how does losing weight for health compare to losing weight to meet beauty standards? Is intentional weight loss a feminist choice or feminist fail?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
It is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff I've
never told to your Protection of my Heart radio is
how stuff works. I believe this is coming out in
a new decade. Yes, yes, And so the topic we
(00:25):
chose because it is resolution season for this this classic
episode is actually something we've talked about a lot before
on here, and we've struggled with a lot. Is dieting
anti feminist, right, And this comes on the coat tails
of another ad that calls a lot of controversy so
much the Peloton ad where a husband gives his very fit, wire,
(00:49):
very fit, very appairly, very surprised wife, yes, a two
thous dollar exercise bike and she like spends a year
working out and then gives him a video that thanks
him at the end of the next year. It was
that terrified face she has apparently that's resting scared face.
Scared face. Uh, you definitely have heard of that. I'd
be shocked if you hadn't. The company lost almost a
(01:11):
billion dollars and talking one day. She has become famous
and has even done a Gin snatched her up and
got her to act on a gym commercial. So yeah,
this whole idea of dieting and can you do it
when we have all of these standards around how women
should look and how does that interact with feminism and
(01:31):
health and just something we're still kind of thinking on,
and I know a lot of listeners are thinking on
and again, as you're going to be bombarded with I've
already gotten it, like the he joined this gym, or
here's this juice clans or or here's these vitamins or
whatever it might be that people are trying to sell
(01:53):
you so you look a certain way for your New
Year's resolution, have this body right exactly. So we thought
you would play this classic episode on dieting and whether
or not it's anti feminist, So please enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(02:18):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline,
and today's topic came um from the co host of
Pop Stuff, one of our fellow How Stuff Works podcast Tracy.
She came up to me one day and she said, Hey,
I've got an idea for stuff Mom Never Told you
You and Caroline should tackle whether or not dieting is
(02:44):
anti feminist because uh, and I was like, hmm, that's
a that's a good idea, because the more I thought
about it, the more complicated the answer to that question
quickly became. Yeah, everybody has opinions on what you should
do with your diet, right because on on the one hand, um,
you know, you can argue from the choice perspective of
(03:07):
feminism that well, if you choose to diet, and in
terms of dieting, we're talking about like the typical like
caloric restriction in order to lose weight and saying like,
if that's your choice and that should be fine, and
then other camp saying no, dieting should not be practiced
(03:27):
because it only I guess goes in like feeds pun there,
it only feeds the male gaze. You're only getting thin
for ultimately paternalistic reasons. And then some people saying you
shouldn't even look in the mirror to begin with. You know,
there's a lot of and and in a good way.
(03:49):
There is a lot of um fat acceptance going around
right now and that definitely needs to happen. But then
like it just starts, it can be over welming though,
if you just want to answer that question of dieting
right because when Kristen and I were talking about this topic.
We were emailing back and forth about it, and I
(04:09):
told her, I was like, I feel like I'm going
down the fat rabbit hole here because you start reading
You're like, Okay, diets gender seems pretty straightforward, right, No,
not not at all, because yeah, you can read the
statistics on you know, who's dieting, how much are they dieting,
Does it work, does it fail? Um? But then you
start getting into well, if you diet, you're not a
(04:33):
good woman. You're you're being bad at being a woman. Basically, well, yeah,
you're buying into this system, the patriarchy. But then there's
people who say, well, I'm just gonna eat whatever I
want and I'm not going to let the doctor way
way me way myself, you know, at the doctor's office,
because that's body fascism. There's a lot of like extreme
(04:54):
resistance to the idea of diets. And while I could
go on a tangent about how I diets are stupid
and if you want to take care of your body,
you should, and you should just make a lifestyle change,
like a lifestyle diet, the capital d diet of paying
attention to eating wholesome foods, exactly. But I'm not going
to tell you that you should do that. I'm not
(05:16):
going to tell you that you should lose weight or
not lose weight based on whether you're a woman, a man,
a feminist and anti feminist, whether you're a child, someone
who lives in another country, whether you're a puppy. I
don't know. And it's not just like saying no to dieting,
but you know the type of weight loss program they
want to go to. But one thing I think that
(05:38):
that we can go ahead and establish is that there
are a lot of companies making a lot of money
off of a fat phobia, of all of this diet
marketing um that goes on. For instance, uh, the US
diet and weight loss industry produced over sixty billion dollars
(06:02):
in revenue in two thousand eleven alone, So a lot
of us are buying into it. And then I mean,
we could just tail spin off into conversations about whether
or not processed diet food is really all that good
for you. But it's big. The marketing is mostly targeted
two women. I believe it was in two thousand eleven
(06:22):
that weight Watchers launched its first campaign toward men and
Sociological Images, a great blog they should totally check out
if you haven't before. Uh did a comparison of a
typical weight Watchers at targeted toward women. That's just like, oh,
you know, you're you're gonna look so good eat these
(06:44):
small portions of food and I'm not trying to diswait
watch And I also know that plenty of people have
had success from that system, and that's totally fine. But
then when they had an ad for their men's launch,
it was like, you know, get on weight Watchers and
you're like a man. It was still very you know,
there was obviously it was obviously saying you know, hey,
(07:07):
we know that dieting is more this thing for for women,
but look, you can retain your masculinity and still do it.
It's the same reason why diet coke exists and has
like a nice font and a lot of times in
the commercials that is held by you know, a thin
woman who's watching a shirtless construction worker, and then Coke
(07:28):
zero exists in black Anda. You know, why don't men ever,
Why aren't there ever men in yoga commercials? Because they're
all eating man witches on their man diet. Yeah, there
is no hungry woman brand of frozen dinner, which maybe
I should start. Maybe I don't know why. That just
(07:48):
made me so sad hungry woman dinners. It's just yogurt, guys,
guess what surprised now? And on the front there's like
just a cartoon picture of a woman like staring digit
holding a spoon, staring dejectedly into her bowl. It's just
a frozen yogurt and salad. It's no dressing goodness a
(08:08):
single cherry tomato. Well, let's get into some research because
the sad thing too about this whole uh dieting question
is that there is a seed that is often planted
very early in little girl's brains, especially that they do
(08:30):
need to change their shape. Yeah, we're so screwed. Um.
The aversion to foundness starts very young. This is a
study from the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology that found
the existence of negative attitudes toward overweight people in kids
as young as three. Yeah, and that also that's that
(08:52):
study also found that both boys and girls will adopt
this fat is bad mindset at um. But at the
same time, overweight preschoolers also demonstrated stronger stigmatism. So it
starts to compound because they are aware of of this
um fat phobia in our culture. Yeah, and you know,
(09:15):
playing off of that, these whole these attitudes about weight
can be passed down from moms to daughters. This is
a British Journal of Clinical Psychology study from July. It
found that mothers of high restraint girls basically that means
high restraint means they practice a lot of high restraint
behaviors as far as food goes and calories. So mothers
(09:36):
of high restraint girls reported more between meal snacking and
fasting than comparison mothers. They also rated their daughters attractiveness
significantly lower than other mothers. There are a lot of
um like moving parts in the study that they looked at,
like family dynamics when the mother has food issues and
the daughter ends up inheriting those food issues from her
(09:57):
mother because it's kind of a learned behavior. This happened.
I mean, I don't think that I have terrible food
issues or anything, but I watched my mother diet throughout
my childhood. She wasn't even big, but I watched. I mean,
I went to she'd take me to weight watchers. I
sat in the lobby at the Nutral system building in
the strip mall, Like, I went to a lot of
(10:18):
diet related activities with her. Do you think that that,
as a result kind of increased your version toward dieting,
like seeing that endless cycle. It could be because it's
not like she would go to weight watchers and come
home and be like, you know what, that was great.
I feel really good about myself. You know, I met
a lot of women who were also struggling, and I'm
(10:38):
going to press forward or Okay, I went to neutral
system and I picked up my great meals. No, she
would come home and complain about the meetings, complain about
how hard it was, complain about how terrible the food was,
and cardboard and all that stuff. So I was just like, oh,
why would you want to do that. I'll have another
cup of ice cream plays thanks mom. Uh. Yeah. And
I would also be interested to see UM if they
(11:00):
expanded that study population from I mean, it makes a
lot of sense to to look at that mother daughter relationship,
but I am sure that it can criss cross from
fathers to children, UH sons as well. Especially we're seeing
that more and more now with UH younger boys having
similar kinds of body image issues. As we would typically
(11:22):
associate with younger girls. Um, and you mentioned the highly
restrained activities like I eat, lots of portion control going on,
and uh. In that same issue of the British Journal
of Clinical Psychology, there was a study tracking the rise
of dieting and childhood, childhood and adolescence and it was
(11:44):
looking at nine year olds and fourteen year old girls.
And yes, they're they're dieting, and that's not to me,
that's not surprising at all, especially for the fourteen year olds. Yeah,
but it is sad to think, like, I'm trying to
think back to myself as a nine year old, and
I think, to me that just now was of course
sounds so young, like oh my gosh, you're such a baby,
like go play on the sandbox or whatever. But I
(12:05):
remember being ten and writing in my diary like I'm fat,
I don't feel good about myself, you know, stuff like that.
So it is terrible to know that, like our cultural
prejudices are seeping into children's brains. Yeah, and those and
those girls who are dieting would express lower body esteem
(12:26):
and discontent with their body build, and they would have
certain already even at nine and fourteen, they would have
trouble spots that they would point out. And I remember,
I remember similar things, you know, looking in uh A
Delia's catalog and those girls thighs did not touch. My
thighs touched and I hated and I was yeah, and
(12:47):
it's that same age range. Yeah, well there's you know,
we we mentioned that there's also issues with boys. This
is not just contained two girls and their dieting problems.
Uh A Record study found that similar to women and girls,
boys were more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies
when they were relatively heavy and had low self esteem. However,
(13:11):
while weight status is usually the primary predictor of girls
body dissatisfaction, there's more at play for boys. It's kind
of different. It appears that, according to the study, psychological
factors like self esteem may be more es central to
boys body perceptions, whereas typically all it takes is girls
just looking in the mirror and looking at everything around
(13:33):
them and starting to mentally compare um. And I mean
you also have to take into account when we're talking
about these kinds of gender differences, the beauty myth differences
in the and this is in big old air quotes,
ideal body shape for a woman compared to an ideal
body shape for a man. A lot of times, Um,
(13:56):
you'll have more men can like complaining of being underweight
because they don't have that that muscular V shape that
is idealized in masculine culture as opposed to you know,
the thin, whispy feminine shape. Although can you really I mean,
I don't know that it would have been constitute feminine
at that point when you get when you get so
(14:19):
so bonesy about it right, well, you know you you
talked about the difference between what men and women want
to attain as far as that ideal body shape. Um,
and that just goes right along with an October two
thousand five study in the journal Sex Roles that found
different motivations behind are potentially health compromising diet behavior. So
(14:40):
we're not talking about like having a healthy routine at
the gym and a healthy like I'm going to eat
a salad with dinner kind of thing. We're talking about
health compromising having a hungry woman dinner, having a hungry
woman dinner and just crying, I'm gonna drink tears with
dinner tonight, honey. Um. Yeah. They found that in their
sample of this study. The majority of men in the
(15:01):
study sample were overweight or obese, but they were more
likely than women to be satisfied with their bodies. What's
up with that? Well, I think it's it has to
do a little bit with um different psychologies that it
mentioned that, uh, men don't consider they don't label eating
a lot of food at one time as binging in
(15:23):
the same way and then and they also have more
of an aversion to fur into something as as dieting.
You know, it's not it's not. It doesn't seem like
it's quite as uh, this is good food, this is
bad food. Yeah. Well, they also point out that, uh,
as far as the motives behind the unhealthy behavior, men
were more likely to engage in unhealthy like crash diet
(15:46):
stuff if they were heavier, So like, Okay, i'm heavier,
I'm going to try to lose weight, whereas women wanted
to look thinner. They wanted to look much thinner than
even the infrequent dieters did. So women it was more
about appearance, looking a certain way. Men were just like,
I'm kind of heavy, I should lose weight. Well, and
this would be a good time to point out this
(16:07):
this theory, uh, that was written about in Salon in
April two tholeven by David Saroda, and he was talking
about fat guy privilege and essentially saying that there is
a double standard in the demand for physical perfection from
women while bigger dudes, yeah whatever, you're just a big guy. Hey. Yeah,
(16:31):
and one that I think of all the time. Well,
because this is something I think about all the time.
But it is it's like you see in all these sitcoms,
like a guy like Kevin James paired with what's her name,
the teeny tiny lady who plays his wife on that show,
and but that's okay, Like that's socially acceptable, big funny guy,
big funny people whatever, paired with little teeny tiny women.
(16:54):
We'll even think about, um, John Goodman and Roseanne Barr
on Rosanne and like John Goodman was, you know, he's
awesome and he's a hilarious big guy. And then Roseanne
always was getting like bodies snarked for being a bigger
woman and her, you know, she was portrayed as more
of you know, an old crab, and it was related
(17:16):
in a way. I mean, it's partially just her her
comedic style. Uh, but I think it was a lot
to do with that, with that double standard, because we
don't you know, it's not as much of an okay,
passable thing. Yeah, it's not a liability for men, yeah,
to be really big like Chris Farley. Obviously everybody loves
Chris Farley, big guy, whereas female comedians or female actresses
(17:40):
don't get that same consideration. It's like, oh, I just
see your weight first. And perhaps that's why, as sorta
points out, of the commercial weight loss industries, clients are female,
and uh, probably weight watchers waited so long to even
target men because they haven't seen them as a via
a bowl um demographic. But I have a feeling though,
(18:04):
we're going to see more of that as the beauty
industries has started pay far more attention to getting stoking
the fears of men. So welcome to crazy town, fellas. Yeah,
join us soon, hungry man dinners will be justice said, um.
(18:26):
But yeah, so you know, we've touched on issues of
like how it's more socially acceptable for a guy to
be big a woman should be small, but somehow with
ginormous boobs and hips and all that stuff, unrealistic expectations. Yeah,
so on that it sounds Like what we're saying now
is with this question of whether or not, uh it's
okay for a woman to diet, and can she still
(18:47):
be like a liberal minded, pro woman, pro equality gal um. No, right,
you know we we should just abandon all of that
and not buy into this culture. But then, but then
it's also I can tell you that I feel better,
(19:11):
I have more energy, I am friendlier in general when
I am I'm not not dieting necessarily, but I'm eating
well and exercising and probably am slimmer than I am
when I'm not well. That is part of the Is
(19:33):
it more feminist to take care of yourself on a consistent,
you know, lifestyle basis, or is it more feminist to say,
screw you, you guys are making me feel bad about
my spare tire. Yeah, And also like, uh, you know
you don't want to It's like your a cog and
that giant machine and you don't want to comply. So
(19:55):
let's let's let's first touch on some arguments out there,
because some women certainly say, like the dieting is a
huge feminist issue because it has to deal directly with
our bodies and how we relate to the world. Yeah, Well,
Janna Ficken and Esther rothbloom In even had a great study,
(20:18):
a great analysis that looked at the prices that women
pay as a result of weight based discrimination. Basically that
being overweight affects a lot of aspects of women's lives,
whereas men don't receive. They're not on the receiving end
of that same type of discrimination, which would probably go
back to that quote unquote fat guy privilege that I
(20:41):
mentioned earlier, and so as a result, and this was
something that was initially um written about in nineteen seventy
eight by Susie Orbach in the book Fat as a
Feminist Issue. They argue that because women are held to
higher standards of thin thinness and suffer greater penalties if
they don't meet that thinness ideal, then yes, this is
(21:04):
a feminist issue and we need to nip it in
the bud right. They are also argue that it's a
feminist issue because it ties into the workplace. Uh. They
looked at several different studies about you know, a fat
woman wouldn't be hired whereas a fat man would have
no problem, or people expressed prejudice like well, I don't
(21:25):
really want to work with a fat woman. And so
this study about like people who don't want to work
with fat women. Um, they were rated negatively on supervisory potential,
self discipline, professional appearance, personal hygiene, and ability to perform
a physically strenuous job. And that's crazy to me because
all these uh, these people in the study, the raiders
(21:48):
that they were rating written descriptions. It's not like they
were looking at someone in front of them and judging
whether that person could be a good boss. But it
just kind of blows my mind that you would rate
someone negatively on supervisory potential because they're overweight. Yeah, so
that's a big argument that, like, you know, if people
don't want to work for or with overweight women, then
(22:08):
that is a feminist issue. Yeah. There's also um an
interesting sexual orientation tie in as well that was written
in the written about in the journal Sex Roles in
October two thousand eleven by Abigail Saggy and Um. She
talks about how, uh, with fat activism like the whole
body acceptance campaigns, lesbians have been disproportionately active and outspoken
(22:33):
in the fat rights movement, and she quotes British activist
Charlotte Cooper Um talking about how while fat women typically
internalized quote social messages of being second class, fat queers
are quote a little bit more advanced, and that we
are able better able to reject homophobia or question assimilation
(22:55):
um and then going on to another essay in the
Fat Stuff He's Reader from two thousand nine, there's an
essay by s. Bear Bergman, whom identifies as transgender UM
and it's often perceived as a man two thirds of
the time, and Bergman is is larger and and talks
(23:17):
about how before um identifying as transgender and uh and
dressing as a woman, there was so much humiliation associated
with being overweight, but being perceived as a big guy,
it's completely gone away. Yeah. Bergman was writing about how
when being perceived as a woman, she would be followed,
(23:39):
like people would be yelling at her. Even described an
instance where in a restaurant, you know, she would ask
for butter or something and they would be like nah,
they would conveniently forget to bring it. Whereas when identifying
as a man, he was treated like, hey, dude, you're
an awesome guy. You're funny, you're great, Like nobody looked
(24:00):
askance when he was shopping for clothes at the store,
whereas as a big woman, people are like, oh my god,
look at that woman shopping for big clothes. So again,
it seems like things might be stacking up in favor
of saying no dieting. That's we're just buying into this
(24:20):
horrible system and we need to change that, right, But
there's still, uh, there's still another side of that argument.
And Kirsten Grus knows about this firsthand. She is a
sociologist and she's also writing a book that's coming out
in spring of two thousand thirteen called Mirror, Mirror Off
(24:42):
the Wall that documents the three sixty five days she
spent not looking at herself in the mirror. And she
wrote a post for society Pages dot org talking about
how she is she's a recovered anorexic and that process
made her a feminist, but now she wants to lose
(25:06):
some weight and she is incredibly conflicted about it. Yeah,
because the whole thing is like, Okay, well, I found
myself at an uncomfortable weight for me personally, and you know,
I'm in I'm in kind of tricky territory because as
of recovering anorexic and someone who considers herself a feminist, like,
am I allowed to lose weight? Will people judge me?
(25:29):
Will it be dangerous? Will be bad for me? And
so she says, given the patriarch patriarchal bargain of weight loss,
being radically anti diet as a political stance doesn't always
fit comfortably as a personal stance, right because I guess
the way that it has been framed. Unfortunately, because of
all of the fat phobia and the thin privilege that
(25:53):
exists in our culture that we don't want to support
when it comes down to our personal choice of perhaps
wanting to lose weight, perhaps wanting to go on a
diet um for instance, Emily McCombs um, who is an
editor over at exo jain dot com, or a post
about how um she diets because she has an unhealthy
(26:15):
relationship with food and she needs that kind of structure
or else there will be a tailspin. And that's simply
how it's going to have to be. It doesn't make
her less of a feminist, but for her, that's what
works best. But then other people say, don't use choice
feminism as a cop out, you know, just acknowledge. Call
(26:36):
a spade a spade and say yeah, at some point,
like we are just buying in but you want to diet. Yeah.
I mean there was the argument that just because you're
a woman and you're doing something doesn't make it feminist.
But that's okay, because it's really not anybody else's business
what you're doing with your body or your weight, whether
you're eating right and exercising or not. Yeah, I just
(26:58):
wonder if, um, I don't know, if we're we're too
I don't want to say if we're like too concerned
about it, because obviously body image, having nine year old
dieting that is, that is not a sign that we
are in a healthy place as like a collective um community.
(27:18):
But if if I am stressing out over you know,
choosing to be choosier about my food for a little
while because I put on more weight than I wanted to,
then should I feel some kind of feminist guilt? I
don't know that that's a good sign of things either,
(27:39):
you know what I mean. That's why this, uh, like
we said at the beginning of this podcast, answering this
question was perhaps more complicated than than we thought it
would be. Yeah, well, I mean it's an issue of
control uh Aerial stallings of an alternate dot Org wrote
that when you buy into the idea that thinking about
food makes you a victim of the patriarchy, there's a
(28:02):
certain loss of control. So there's a potential loss of
control everywhere, because you're gonna lose control as a feminist,
or you're gonna lose control as a thin person or
as a fat person, or as you know, someone who's
worried about the patriarchy and what society wants from us.
It's like, oh, who am I answering to today? Uh?
(28:22):
So you know in that regard, just it's like, just
eat a sandwich or don't eat a sandwich, but stop
stressing me out about it? Right? Is that a cop out? No?
I don't. I don't think that. Um, I don't think
that's a cop out at all, because if we all right,
so let's let's take it one more time, like to
the extreme other side saying like absolutely food is a
(28:45):
feminist issue. This was coming from Heather Lane Tally and
she was writing about the uh the new U s
d A guidelines. Instead of getting rid of the food
pyramid and having um my my plate, you know, the
nice little plate with it all portioned off showing you
how many leafy grains and such that you should eat,
and she says that, you know, nutrition is merely a
(29:07):
trope that employs scientific neutrality to disguise body fascism. She
went to a doctor. She refused to get on the scale.
The doctor was like what, and she was like, don't
be a body fascist. I don't. It's when we get
into we swing into that territory. That's when I say, Okay,
that's I'm gonna go ahead. And I'm fine saying that.
(29:29):
I in my opinion, that is too far because that
you can't get away from the relationship between nutrition and diet.
And yes, like I, I think it's also difficult to
make a blanket statement about whether or not dieting is
an appropriate choice because you know, some people are going
(29:52):
to finger wag and say like, you're only doing it
to serve the male gaze, not you know, paying attention
to the fact that everyone has a little bit of
a different relation chip with food. You know, some people
are stretched eaters, some people are emotional eaters, some people
are stressed non eaters. I have to pay in my experience,
I have to pay more attention to how much I'm
eating if I'm stressing and freaking out. Yeah, okay, so listen,
(30:29):
we've been back and forth about this about is it
feminist to go on a diet? Is it anti feminist
to go on a diet? Is this even a question
we're asking or should we use? Caroline said, just eat
a sandwich. You just so much to let me alone. Well,
as feminist writer and activist Audrey Lord said, caring for
(30:52):
myself is not a self indulgence. It is self preservation,
and that is an act of political warfare. And I
think Caroline may I speak for the both of us
and say that is where we stand on this issue
of dieting. I I want to take care of myself,
(31:14):
and I think you want to take care of yourself.
And you know what I mean, do what's right for yourself,
Be healthy, be happy, don't worry, be happy, right right,
It's not where it's I think you can say to
that that dieting is not inherent advocating um inherently advocating
(31:35):
for a Thinness ideal either. It's more trying to look
at it from a health perspective. And maybe it's just
also a call. It's just change our collective definition of diet.
That's what we you know, we're always on a diet. Yeah,
And I don't understand why the opposite of diet and
thin privilege and the idea of the ideal thin body,
(31:58):
Why does the opposite of that have to be I mean,
eat whatever the whatever I want and not let anyone
weigh me and not weigh myself and not be conscious
of what I'm putting in my body? Like, isn't there
a happy middle ground? I think so, I definitely think so. So. Yeah,
that's my confused two sense. Yeah, thank you Tracy at
(32:18):
pop stuff for asking us complicated question. But now it
is time to turn it over to our listeners because
I have a feeling that considering the vast number of
women who go on diets, there was also I didn't
throw the statistic out, but there was a survey. Granted
it was published by or commissioned by the Laughing Cow
(32:39):
Cheese Company, but it was reported on in the Telegraph
saying that the average woman will diet for thirty one
years of her life. And with that, that's that's who.
That's really a lot um. But for folks out there
who have grappled with this aspect of dieting, specifically for
weight loss. Want to year from you. Let us know
(33:02):
your thoughts, mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can send them, and of course you can also
head over to our Facebook and start a conversation over there.
And before we get to a couple of listening listener
letters that we have, we've got a quick message from
our sponsor and now back to our letters. I've got
(33:36):
one to kick things off from Jessica, and this is
in response to our episode a while ago on women
and NFL football. She writes, I've been a huge football
fan for most of my life, since I come from
a family of rabid New Orleans Saints fans Hohoda go Saints,
and I recently started my own small blog and Twitter
(33:56):
account to channel my obsession. At first, I was really
excited to find out that there were a number of
other female NFL bloggers out there, but with somewhat disappointed
to learn that most sites tend to emphasize the stereotypically
gendered topics of fashion, party planning, and off the field
celebrity aspects of football and players far more than the
game itself. On the one hand, I'm excited to see
a game. I'm passionate about take hold with a growing
(34:18):
audience of women, including many of my own friends, But
I also feel like the pageantry that surrounds this kind
of marketing signals that women still need a safely gendered
entry point into football fandom. Of course, can you really
blame them When you look at how the NFL mainstream
media operates and broadcasting, female reporters are always relegated to
the sidelines staring games to talk about the personal interest
side of the story, injuries and coach players sound bites,
(34:41):
while men always call and analyze the actual game itself.
I don't know that I could even count on one
hand the number of women who write about football regularly
from mainstream websites like NFL dot Com, dead Spin, and
bleacher Report. From the outside looking in, I'd say it's
still incredibly tough for smart women who know their football
to break through this arena without assuming sanctioned role from
the sidelines of a tailgate. Still, I'm hopeful that the
(35:02):
growing NFL female fan base produces a ton of knowledgeable
die hards in the long run. Baby Teas or not
uh And you can visit Jessica's NFL blog at Lady
Blitz Football dot blog spot dot com. And here's an
email from Tracy about our child Caregiver's podcast. She wanted
to share her own personal experience with the issue. She
(35:24):
said that my brother and two sisters took care of
my mother. She suffered from heart and kidney disease brought
on by lupus. My parents divorced shortly before her health
declined and our father disappeared. My mother pulled myself and
my younger brother out of school at the ages of
twelve and thirteen to take care of her. My sisters
were just old enough to work full time, and they
paid for all the bills, working long hours to do so.
(35:47):
They would help out around the house as best they
could when they were off work. My brother and I
administered her medications, including giving her home dialysis, cleaned her bedside, commode,
bathed her, cooked and cleaned, and took care of my
sister autistic Sun while she was at work. We took
care of her until her death in two thousand one,
when I was twenty three. It was extremely difficult for
(36:07):
all four of us. Thankfully we had each other to
lean on, and we're all still very close. Despite the
tremendous responsibilities we faced. With our sister's support, my brother
and I got our g e d s and went
to college. Thank you for doing this podcast. I hope
that with the support groups out there, young caregivers have
somewhere to turn for assistance. So thank you, Tracy, and
thanks to everyone who's written in to mom Stuff at
(36:29):
Discovery dot com. And like I said, you can head
over face to our Facebook page, like us and start
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You can tweet us at mom Stuff Podcast and you
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(36:51):
of articles about it at our website, it's how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M
It is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff I've
never told to your Protection of my Heart radio is
how stuff works. I believe this is coming out in
a new decade. Yes, yes, And so the topic we
(00:25):
chose because it is resolution season for this this classic
episode is actually something we've talked about a lot before
on here, and we've struggled with a lot. Is dieting
anti feminist, right, And this comes on the coat tails
of another ad that calls a lot of controversy so
much the Peloton ad where a husband gives his very fit, wire,
(00:49):
very fit, very appairly, very surprised wife, yes, a two
thous dollar exercise bike and she like spends a year
working out and then gives him a video that thanks
him at the end of the next year. It was
that terrified face she has apparently that's resting scared face.
Scared face. Uh, you definitely have heard of that. I'd
be shocked if you hadn't. The company lost almost a
(01:11):
billion dollars and talking one day. She has become famous
and has even done a Gin snatched her up and
got her to act on a gym commercial. So yeah,
this whole idea of dieting and can you do it
when we have all of these standards around how women
should look and how does that interact with feminism and
(01:31):
health and just something we're still kind of thinking on,
and I know a lot of listeners are thinking on
and again, as you're going to be bombarded with I've
already gotten it, like the he joined this gym, or
here's this juice clans or or here's these vitamins or
whatever it might be that people are trying to sell
(01:53):
you so you look a certain way for your New
Year's resolution, have this body right exactly. So we thought
you would play this classic episode on dieting and whether
or not it's anti feminist, So please enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(02:18):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline,
and today's topic came um from the co host of
Pop Stuff, one of our fellow How Stuff Works podcast Tracy.
She came up to me one day and she said, Hey,
I've got an idea for stuff Mom Never Told you
You and Caroline should tackle whether or not dieting is
(02:44):
anti feminist because uh, and I was like, hmm, that's
a that's a good idea, because the more I thought
about it, the more complicated the answer to that question
quickly became. Yeah, everybody has opinions on what you should
do with your diet, right because on on the one hand, um,
you know, you can argue from the choice perspective of
(03:07):
feminism that well, if you choose to diet, and in
terms of dieting, we're talking about like the typical like
caloric restriction in order to lose weight and saying like,
if that's your choice and that should be fine, and
then other camp saying no, dieting should not be practiced
(03:27):
because it only I guess goes in like feeds pun there,
it only feeds the male gaze. You're only getting thin
for ultimately paternalistic reasons. And then some people saying you
shouldn't even look in the mirror to begin with. You know,
there's a lot of and and in a good way.
(03:49):
There is a lot of um fat acceptance going around
right now and that definitely needs to happen. But then
like it just starts, it can be over welming though,
if you just want to answer that question of dieting
right because when Kristen and I were talking about this topic.
We were emailing back and forth about it, and I
(04:09):
told her, I was like, I feel like I'm going
down the fat rabbit hole here because you start reading
You're like, Okay, diets gender seems pretty straightforward, right, No,
not not at all, because yeah, you can read the
statistics on you know, who's dieting, how much are they dieting,
Does it work, does it fail? Um? But then you
start getting into well, if you diet, you're not a
(04:33):
good woman. You're you're being bad at being a woman. Basically, well, yeah,
you're buying into this system, the patriarchy. But then there's
people who say, well, I'm just gonna eat whatever I
want and I'm not going to let the doctor way
way me way myself, you know, at the doctor's office,
because that's body fascism. There's a lot of like extreme
(04:54):
resistance to the idea of diets. And while I could
go on a tangent about how I diets are stupid
and if you want to take care of your body,
you should, and you should just make a lifestyle change,
like a lifestyle diet, the capital d diet of paying
attention to eating wholesome foods, exactly. But I'm not going
to tell you that you should do that. I'm not
(05:16):
going to tell you that you should lose weight or
not lose weight based on whether you're a woman, a man,
a feminist and anti feminist, whether you're a child, someone
who lives in another country, whether you're a puppy. I
don't know. And it's not just like saying no to dieting,
but you know the type of weight loss program they
want to go to. But one thing I think that
(05:38):
that we can go ahead and establish is that there
are a lot of companies making a lot of money
off of a fat phobia, of all of this diet
marketing um that goes on. For instance, uh, the US
diet and weight loss industry produced over sixty billion dollars
(06:02):
in revenue in two thousand eleven alone, So a lot
of us are buying into it. And then I mean,
we could just tail spin off into conversations about whether
or not processed diet food is really all that good
for you. But it's big. The marketing is mostly targeted
two women. I believe it was in two thousand eleven
(06:22):
that weight Watchers launched its first campaign toward men and
Sociological Images, a great blog they should totally check out
if you haven't before. Uh did a comparison of a
typical weight Watchers at targeted toward women. That's just like, oh,
you know, you're you're gonna look so good eat these
(06:44):
small portions of food and I'm not trying to diswait
watch And I also know that plenty of people have
had success from that system, and that's totally fine. But
then when they had an ad for their men's launch,
it was like, you know, get on weight Watchers and
you're like a man. It was still very you know,
there was obviously it was obviously saying you know, hey,
(07:07):
we know that dieting is more this thing for for women,
but look, you can retain your masculinity and still do it.
It's the same reason why diet coke exists and has
like a nice font and a lot of times in
the commercials that is held by you know, a thin
woman who's watching a shirtless construction worker, and then Coke
(07:28):
zero exists in black Anda. You know, why don't men ever,
Why aren't there ever men in yoga commercials? Because they're
all eating man witches on their man diet. Yeah, there
is no hungry woman brand of frozen dinner, which maybe
I should start. Maybe I don't know why. That just
(07:48):
made me so sad hungry woman dinners. It's just yogurt, guys,
guess what surprised now? And on the front there's like
just a cartoon picture of a woman like staring digit
holding a spoon, staring dejectedly into her bowl. It's just
a frozen yogurt and salad. It's no dressing goodness a
(08:08):
single cherry tomato. Well, let's get into some research because
the sad thing too about this whole uh dieting question
is that there is a seed that is often planted
very early in little girl's brains, especially that they do
(08:30):
need to change their shape. Yeah, we're so screwed. Um.
The aversion to foundness starts very young. This is a
study from the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology that found
the existence of negative attitudes toward overweight people in kids
as young as three. Yeah, and that also that's that
(08:52):
study also found that both boys and girls will adopt
this fat is bad mindset at um. But at the
same time, overweight preschoolers also demonstrated stronger stigmatism. So it
starts to compound because they are aware of of this
um fat phobia in our culture. Yeah, and you know,
(09:15):
playing off of that, these whole these attitudes about weight
can be passed down from moms to daughters. This is
a British Journal of Clinical Psychology study from July. It
found that mothers of high restraint girls basically that means
high restraint means they practice a lot of high restraint
behaviors as far as food goes and calories. So mothers
(09:36):
of high restraint girls reported more between meal snacking and
fasting than comparison mothers. They also rated their daughters attractiveness
significantly lower than other mothers. There are a lot of
um like moving parts in the study that they looked at,
like family dynamics when the mother has food issues and
the daughter ends up inheriting those food issues from her
(09:57):
mother because it's kind of a learned behavior. This happened.
I mean, I don't think that I have terrible food
issues or anything, but I watched my mother diet throughout
my childhood. She wasn't even big, but I watched. I mean,
I went to she'd take me to weight watchers. I
sat in the lobby at the Nutral system building in
the strip mall, Like, I went to a lot of
(10:18):
diet related activities with her. Do you think that that,
as a result kind of increased your version toward dieting,
like seeing that endless cycle. It could be because it's
not like she would go to weight watchers and come
home and be like, you know what, that was great.
I feel really good about myself. You know, I met
a lot of women who were also struggling, and I'm
(10:38):
going to press forward or Okay, I went to neutral
system and I picked up my great meals. No, she
would come home and complain about the meetings, complain about
how hard it was, complain about how terrible the food was,
and cardboard and all that stuff. So I was just like, oh,
why would you want to do that. I'll have another
cup of ice cream plays thanks mom. Uh. Yeah. And
I would also be interested to see UM if they
(11:00):
expanded that study population from I mean, it makes a
lot of sense to to look at that mother daughter relationship,
but I am sure that it can criss cross from
fathers to children, UH sons as well. Especially we're seeing
that more and more now with UH younger boys having
similar kinds of body image issues. As we would typically
(11:22):
associate with younger girls. Um, and you mentioned the highly
restrained activities like I eat, lots of portion control going on,
and uh. In that same issue of the British Journal
of Clinical Psychology, there was a study tracking the rise
of dieting and childhood, childhood and adolescence and it was
(11:44):
looking at nine year olds and fourteen year old girls.
And yes, they're they're dieting, and that's not to me,
that's not surprising at all, especially for the fourteen year olds. Yeah,
but it is sad to think, like, I'm trying to
think back to myself as a nine year old, and
I think, to me that just now was of course
sounds so young, like oh my gosh, you're such a baby,
like go play on the sandbox or whatever. But I
(12:05):
remember being ten and writing in my diary like I'm fat,
I don't feel good about myself, you know, stuff like that.
So it is terrible to know that, like our cultural
prejudices are seeping into children's brains. Yeah, and those and
those girls who are dieting would express lower body esteem
(12:26):
and discontent with their body build, and they would have
certain already even at nine and fourteen, they would have
trouble spots that they would point out. And I remember,
I remember similar things, you know, looking in uh A
Delia's catalog and those girls thighs did not touch. My
thighs touched and I hated and I was yeah, and
(12:47):
it's that same age range. Yeah, well there's you know,
we we mentioned that there's also issues with boys. This
is not just contained two girls and their dieting problems.
Uh A Record study found that similar to women and girls,
boys were more likely to be dissatisfied with their bodies
when they were relatively heavy and had low self esteem. However,
(13:11):
while weight status is usually the primary predictor of girls
body dissatisfaction, there's more at play for boys. It's kind
of different. It appears that, according to the study, psychological
factors like self esteem may be more es central to
boys body perceptions, whereas typically all it takes is girls
just looking in the mirror and looking at everything around
(13:33):
them and starting to mentally compare um. And I mean
you also have to take into account when we're talking
about these kinds of gender differences, the beauty myth differences
in the and this is in big old air quotes,
ideal body shape for a woman compared to an ideal
body shape for a man. A lot of times, Um,
(13:56):
you'll have more men can like complaining of being underweight
because they don't have that that muscular V shape that
is idealized in masculine culture as opposed to you know,
the thin, whispy feminine shape. Although can you really I mean,
I don't know that it would have been constitute feminine
at that point when you get when you get so
(14:19):
so bonesy about it right, well, you know you you
talked about the difference between what men and women want
to attain as far as that ideal body shape. Um,
and that just goes right along with an October two
thousand five study in the journal Sex Roles that found
different motivations behind are potentially health compromising diet behavior. So
(14:40):
we're not talking about like having a healthy routine at
the gym and a healthy like I'm going to eat
a salad with dinner kind of thing. We're talking about
health compromising having a hungry woman dinner, having a hungry
woman dinner and just crying, I'm gonna drink tears with
dinner tonight, honey. Um. Yeah. They found that in their
sample of this study. The majority of men in the
(15:01):
study sample were overweight or obese, but they were more
likely than women to be satisfied with their bodies. What's
up with that? Well, I think it's it has to
do a little bit with um different psychologies that it
mentioned that, uh, men don't consider they don't label eating
a lot of food at one time as binging in
(15:23):
the same way and then and they also have more
of an aversion to fur into something as as dieting.
You know, it's not it's not. It doesn't seem like
it's quite as uh, this is good food, this is
bad food. Yeah. Well, they also point out that, uh,
as far as the motives behind the unhealthy behavior, men
were more likely to engage in unhealthy like crash diet
(15:46):
stuff if they were heavier, So like, Okay, i'm heavier,
I'm going to try to lose weight, whereas women wanted
to look thinner. They wanted to look much thinner than
even the infrequent dieters did. So women it was more
about appearance, looking a certain way. Men were just like,
I'm kind of heavy, I should lose weight. Well, and
this would be a good time to point out this
(16:07):
this theory, uh, that was written about in Salon in
April two tholeven by David Saroda, and he was talking
about fat guy privilege and essentially saying that there is
a double standard in the demand for physical perfection from
women while bigger dudes, yeah whatever, you're just a big guy. Hey. Yeah,
(16:31):
and one that I think of all the time. Well,
because this is something I think about all the time.
But it is it's like you see in all these sitcoms,
like a guy like Kevin James paired with what's her name,
the teeny tiny lady who plays his wife on that show,
and but that's okay, Like that's socially acceptable, big funny guy,
big funny people whatever, paired with little teeny tiny women.
(16:54):
We'll even think about, um, John Goodman and Roseanne Barr
on Rosanne and like John Goodman was, you know, he's
awesome and he's a hilarious big guy. And then Roseanne
always was getting like bodies snarked for being a bigger
woman and her, you know, she was portrayed as more
of you know, an old crab, and it was related
(17:16):
in a way. I mean, it's partially just her her
comedic style. Uh, but I think it was a lot
to do with that, with that double standard, because we
don't you know, it's not as much of an okay,
passable thing. Yeah, it's not a liability for men, yeah,
to be really big like Chris Farley. Obviously everybody loves
Chris Farley, big guy, whereas female comedians or female actresses
(17:40):
don't get that same consideration. It's like, oh, I just
see your weight first. And perhaps that's why, as sorta
points out, of the commercial weight loss industries, clients are female,
and uh, probably weight watchers waited so long to even
target men because they haven't seen them as a via
a bowl um demographic. But I have a feeling though,
(18:04):
we're going to see more of that as the beauty
industries has started pay far more attention to getting stoking
the fears of men. So welcome to crazy town, fellas. Yeah,
join us soon, hungry man dinners will be justice said, um.
(18:26):
But yeah, so you know, we've touched on issues of
like how it's more socially acceptable for a guy to
be big a woman should be small, but somehow with
ginormous boobs and hips and all that stuff, unrealistic expectations. Yeah,
so on that it sounds Like what we're saying now
is with this question of whether or not, uh it's
okay for a woman to diet, and can she still
(18:47):
be like a liberal minded, pro woman, pro equality gal um. No, right,
you know we we should just abandon all of that
and not buy into this culture. But then, but then
it's also I can tell you that I feel better,
(19:11):
I have more energy, I am friendlier in general when
I am I'm not not dieting necessarily, but I'm eating
well and exercising and probably am slimmer than I am
when I'm not well. That is part of the Is
(19:33):
it more feminist to take care of yourself on a consistent,
you know, lifestyle basis, or is it more feminist to say,
screw you, you guys are making me feel bad about
my spare tire. Yeah, And also like, uh, you know
you don't want to It's like your a cog and
that giant machine and you don't want to comply. So
(19:55):
let's let's let's first touch on some arguments out there,
because some women certainly say, like the dieting is a
huge feminist issue because it has to deal directly with
our bodies and how we relate to the world. Yeah, Well,
Janna Ficken and Esther rothbloom In even had a great study,
(20:18):
a great analysis that looked at the prices that women
pay as a result of weight based discrimination. Basically that
being overweight affects a lot of aspects of women's lives,
whereas men don't receive. They're not on the receiving end
of that same type of discrimination, which would probably go
back to that quote unquote fat guy privilege that I
(20:41):
mentioned earlier, and so as a result, and this was
something that was initially um written about in nineteen seventy
eight by Susie Orbach in the book Fat as a
Feminist Issue. They argue that because women are held to
higher standards of thin thinness and suffer greater penalties if
they don't meet that thinness ideal, then yes, this is
(21:04):
a feminist issue and we need to nip it in
the bud right. They are also argue that it's a
feminist issue because it ties into the workplace. Uh. They
looked at several different studies about you know, a fat
woman wouldn't be hired whereas a fat man would have
no problem, or people expressed prejudice like well, I don't
(21:25):
really want to work with a fat woman. And so
this study about like people who don't want to work
with fat women. Um, they were rated negatively on supervisory potential,
self discipline, professional appearance, personal hygiene, and ability to perform
a physically strenuous job. And that's crazy to me because
all these uh, these people in the study, the raiders
(21:48):
that they were rating written descriptions. It's not like they
were looking at someone in front of them and judging
whether that person could be a good boss. But it
just kind of blows my mind that you would rate
someone negatively on supervisory potential because they're overweight. Yeah, so
that's a big argument that, like, you know, if people
don't want to work for or with overweight women, then
(22:08):
that is a feminist issue. Yeah. There's also um an
interesting sexual orientation tie in as well that was written
in the written about in the journal Sex Roles in
October two thousand eleven by Abigail Saggy and Um. She
talks about how, uh, with fat activism like the whole
body acceptance campaigns, lesbians have been disproportionately active and outspoken
(22:33):
in the fat rights movement, and she quotes British activist
Charlotte Cooper Um talking about how while fat women typically
internalized quote social messages of being second class, fat queers
are quote a little bit more advanced, and that we
are able better able to reject homophobia or question assimilation
(22:55):
um and then going on to another essay in the
Fat Stuff He's Reader from two thousand nine, there's an
essay by s. Bear Bergman, whom identifies as transgender UM
and it's often perceived as a man two thirds of
the time, and Bergman is is larger and and talks
(23:17):
about how before um identifying as transgender and uh and
dressing as a woman, there was so much humiliation associated
with being overweight, but being perceived as a big guy,
it's completely gone away. Yeah. Bergman was writing about how
when being perceived as a woman, she would be followed,
(23:39):
like people would be yelling at her. Even described an
instance where in a restaurant, you know, she would ask
for butter or something and they would be like nah,
they would conveniently forget to bring it. Whereas when identifying
as a man, he was treated like, hey, dude, you're
an awesome guy. You're funny, you're great, Like nobody looked
(24:00):
askance when he was shopping for clothes at the store,
whereas as a big woman, people are like, oh my god,
look at that woman shopping for big clothes. So again,
it seems like things might be stacking up in favor
of saying no dieting. That's we're just buying into this
(24:20):
horrible system and we need to change that, right, But
there's still, uh, there's still another side of that argument.
And Kirsten Grus knows about this firsthand. She is a
sociologist and she's also writing a book that's coming out
in spring of two thousand thirteen called Mirror, Mirror Off
(24:42):
the Wall that documents the three sixty five days she
spent not looking at herself in the mirror. And she
wrote a post for society Pages dot org talking about
how she is she's a recovered anorexic and that process
made her a feminist, but now she wants to lose
(25:06):
some weight and she is incredibly conflicted about it. Yeah,
because the whole thing is like, Okay, well, I found
myself at an uncomfortable weight for me personally, and you know,
I'm in I'm in kind of tricky territory because as
of recovering anorexic and someone who considers herself a feminist, like,
am I allowed to lose weight? Will people judge me?
(25:29):
Will it be dangerous? Will be bad for me? And
so she says, given the patriarch patriarchal bargain of weight loss,
being radically anti diet as a political stance doesn't always
fit comfortably as a personal stance, right because I guess
the way that it has been framed. Unfortunately, because of
all of the fat phobia and the thin privilege that
(25:53):
exists in our culture that we don't want to support
when it comes down to our personal choice of perhaps
wanting to lose weight, perhaps wanting to go on a
diet um for instance, Emily McCombs um, who is an
editor over at exo jain dot com, or a post
about how um she diets because she has an unhealthy
(26:15):
relationship with food and she needs that kind of structure
or else there will be a tailspin. And that's simply
how it's going to have to be. It doesn't make
her less of a feminist, but for her, that's what
works best. But then other people say, don't use choice
feminism as a cop out, you know, just acknowledge. Call
(26:36):
a spade a spade and say yeah, at some point,
like we are just buying in but you want to diet. Yeah.
I mean there was the argument that just because you're
a woman and you're doing something doesn't make it feminist.
But that's okay, because it's really not anybody else's business
what you're doing with your body or your weight, whether
you're eating right and exercising or not. Yeah, I just
(26:58):
wonder if, um, I don't know, if we're we're too
I don't want to say if we're like too concerned
about it, because obviously body image, having nine year old
dieting that is, that is not a sign that we
are in a healthy place as like a collective um community.
(27:18):
But if if I am stressing out over you know,
choosing to be choosier about my food for a little
while because I put on more weight than I wanted to,
then should I feel some kind of feminist guilt? I
don't know that that's a good sign of things either,
(27:39):
you know what I mean. That's why this, uh, like
we said at the beginning of this podcast, answering this
question was perhaps more complicated than than we thought it
would be. Yeah, well, I mean it's an issue of
control uh Aerial stallings of an alternate dot Org wrote
that when you buy into the idea that thinking about
food makes you a victim of the patriarchy, there's a
(28:02):
certain loss of control. So there's a potential loss of
control everywhere, because you're gonna lose control as a feminist,
or you're gonna lose control as a thin person or
as a fat person, or as you know, someone who's
worried about the patriarchy and what society wants from us.
It's like, oh, who am I answering to today? Uh?
(28:22):
So you know in that regard, just it's like, just
eat a sandwich or don't eat a sandwich, but stop
stressing me out about it? Right? Is that a cop out? No?
I don't. I don't think that. Um, I don't think
that's a cop out at all, because if we all right,
so let's let's take it one more time, like to
the extreme other side saying like absolutely food is a
(28:45):
feminist issue. This was coming from Heather Lane Tally and
she was writing about the uh the new U s
d A guidelines. Instead of getting rid of the food
pyramid and having um my my plate, you know, the
nice little plate with it all portioned off showing you
how many leafy grains and such that you should eat,
and she says that, you know, nutrition is merely a
(29:07):
trope that employs scientific neutrality to disguise body fascism. She
went to a doctor. She refused to get on the scale.
The doctor was like what, and she was like, don't
be a body fascist. I don't. It's when we get
into we swing into that territory. That's when I say, Okay,
that's I'm gonna go ahead. And I'm fine saying that.
(29:29):
I in my opinion, that is too far because that
you can't get away from the relationship between nutrition and diet.
And yes, like I, I think it's also difficult to
make a blanket statement about whether or not dieting is
an appropriate choice because you know, some people are going
(29:52):
to finger wag and say like, you're only doing it
to serve the male gaze, not you know, paying attention
to the fact that everyone has a little bit of
a different relation chip with food. You know, some people
are stretched eaters, some people are emotional eaters, some people
are stressed non eaters. I have to pay in my experience,
I have to pay more attention to how much I'm
eating if I'm stressing and freaking out. Yeah, okay, so listen,
(30:29):
we've been back and forth about this about is it
feminist to go on a diet? Is it anti feminist
to go on a diet? Is this even a question
we're asking or should we use? Caroline said, just eat
a sandwich. You just so much to let me alone. Well,
as feminist writer and activist Audrey Lord said, caring for
(30:52):
myself is not a self indulgence. It is self preservation,
and that is an act of political warfare. And I
think Caroline may I speak for the both of us
and say that is where we stand on this issue
of dieting. I I want to take care of myself,
(31:14):
and I think you want to take care of yourself.
And you know what I mean, do what's right for yourself,
Be healthy, be happy, don't worry, be happy, right right,
It's not where it's I think you can say to
that that dieting is not inherent advocating um inherently advocating
(31:35):
for a Thinness ideal either. It's more trying to look
at it from a health perspective. And maybe it's just
also a call. It's just change our collective definition of diet.
That's what we you know, we're always on a diet. Yeah,
And I don't understand why the opposite of diet and
thin privilege and the idea of the ideal thin body,
(31:58):
Why does the opposite of that have to be I mean,
eat whatever the whatever I want and not let anyone
weigh me and not weigh myself and not be conscious
of what I'm putting in my body? Like, isn't there
a happy middle ground? I think so, I definitely think so. So. Yeah,
that's my confused two sense. Yeah, thank you Tracy at
(32:18):
pop stuff for asking us complicated question. But now it
is time to turn it over to our listeners because
I have a feeling that considering the vast number of
women who go on diets, there was also I didn't
throw the statistic out, but there was a survey. Granted
it was published by or commissioned by the Laughing Cow
(32:39):
Cheese Company, but it was reported on in the Telegraph
saying that the average woman will diet for thirty one
years of her life. And with that, that's that's who.
That's really a lot um. But for folks out there
who have grappled with this aspect of dieting, specifically for
weight loss. Want to year from you. Let us know
(33:02):
your thoughts, mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is where
you can send them, and of course you can also
head over to our Facebook and start a conversation over there.
And before we get to a couple of listening listener
letters that we have, we've got a quick message from
our sponsor and now back to our letters. I've got
(33:36):
one to kick things off from Jessica, and this is
in response to our episode a while ago on women
and NFL football. She writes, I've been a huge football
fan for most of my life, since I come from
a family of rabid New Orleans Saints fans Hohoda go Saints,
and I recently started my own small blog and Twitter
(33:56):
account to channel my obsession. At first, I was really
excited to find out that there were a number of
other female NFL bloggers out there, but with somewhat disappointed
to learn that most sites tend to emphasize the stereotypically
gendered topics of fashion, party planning, and off the field
celebrity aspects of football and players far more than the
game itself. On the one hand, I'm excited to see
a game. I'm passionate about take hold with a growing
(34:18):
audience of women, including many of my own friends, But
I also feel like the pageantry that surrounds this kind
of marketing signals that women still need a safely gendered
entry point into football fandom. Of course, can you really
blame them When you look at how the NFL mainstream
media operates and broadcasting, female reporters are always relegated to
the sidelines staring games to talk about the personal interest
side of the story, injuries and coach players sound bites,
(34:41):
while men always call and analyze the actual game itself.
I don't know that I could even count on one
hand the number of women who write about football regularly
from mainstream websites like NFL dot Com, dead Spin, and
bleacher Report. From the outside looking in, I'd say it's
still incredibly tough for smart women who know their football
to break through this arena without assuming sanctioned role from
the sidelines of a tailgate. Still, I'm hopeful that the
(35:02):
growing NFL female fan base produces a ton of knowledgeable
die hards in the long run. Baby Teas or not
uh And you can visit Jessica's NFL blog at Lady
Blitz Football dot blog spot dot com. And here's an
email from Tracy about our child Caregiver's podcast. She wanted
to share her own personal experience with the issue. She
(35:24):
said that my brother and two sisters took care of
my mother. She suffered from heart and kidney disease brought
on by lupus. My parents divorced shortly before her health
declined and our father disappeared. My mother pulled myself and
my younger brother out of school at the ages of
twelve and thirteen to take care of her. My sisters
were just old enough to work full time, and they
paid for all the bills, working long hours to do so.
(35:47):
They would help out around the house as best they
could when they were off work. My brother and I
administered her medications, including giving her home dialysis, cleaned her bedside, commode,
bathed her, cooked and cleaned, and took care of my
sister autistic Sun while she was at work. We took
care of her until her death in two thousand one,
when I was twenty three. It was extremely difficult for
(36:07):
all four of us. Thankfully we had each other to
lean on, and we're all still very close. Despite the
tremendous responsibilities we faced. With our sister's support, my brother
and I got our g e d s and went
to college. Thank you for doing this podcast. I hope
that with the support groups out there, young caregivers have
somewhere to turn for assistance. So thank you, Tracy, and
thanks to everyone who's written in to mom Stuff at
(36:29):
Discovery dot com. And like I said, you can head
over face to our Facebook page, like us and start
a conversation over there, and follow us on Twitter as well.
You can tweet us at mom Stuff Podcast and you
can also follow us on tumbler. It's stuff mom Never
Told You dot tumbler dot com. And if you would
like to learn more about healthy eating, there are lots
(36:51):
of articles about it at our website, it's how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. M
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