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Lipedema, for example, is a condition that affects up to 10 percent of people assigned female at birth. It causes significant fat deposits, often in the legs, and those fat deposits can’t be eliminated through diet and exercise. Gordon: Absolutely. That moral panic is also strengthened by our belief that someone’s weight is a direct reflection of their health, and that weight is controllable in all cases. That message is like a licence for people to tell the fat people in their lives, strangers and friends alike, that they have to lose weight. Hobbes: The decades-old moral panic over obesity has given a lot of ammunition to the health trolls. We’ve spent our entire lives hearing that thinness is not only inherently healthy but utterly obligatory. Why do you think people feel justified to concern or health troll?

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We know that exercise is good for your overall health, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to major weight loss. And even our best-tested diets only lead to small amounts of weight loss in the short term. As far as science is concerned, we don’t really know how to make fat people thin in the long term. But acknowledging that would mean letting go of a fantasy of weight loss that’s really important to a lot of us. We keep believing, in spite of our own experiences and in spite of the research, that we’ll find some skeleton key to thinness and to health. Gordon: It continues to blow my mind how much we hang on to the magical thinking of weight loss. Most of our data around weight loss and wellness is pretty thin. “We keep believing, in spite of our own experiences and in spite of the research, that we’ll find some skeleton key to thinness and to health.” And yet we’re still doing it in American schools! Why wouldn’t we weigh its actual benefits (none) against its actual harms (many)? It shames fat kids and makes teenagers associate sports with ostracism and unhealthy competition. The problem is, all the evidence suggests that it does exactly the opposite.

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The Presidential Physical Fitness Test, for example, is still defended by researchers and public health institutions because it might raise awareness of the obesity epidemic and it could encourage kids to do more sports in their free time.

Hobbes: The biggest revelation so far has been the ways weight-loss schemes are judged by dieters and doctors alike on their potential benefits rather than their actual harms. Was there anything that you were super shocked to discover during your research? The “maintenance phase” of the diet is the diet.Ī lot of your findings have blown my mind. But the minute your habits change, your weight will adjust to them. There’s no such thing as “kicking off” weight loss-you can lose weight on any restrictive diet, whether it’s cabbage soup or Slim Fast shakes or intermittent fasting. Almost every fad diet has the same structure: A period of extreme restriction to “kick off” the weight loss, then a slow reintroduction of more sustainable eating habits “once your body adjusts.” Both concepts are myths. Hobbes: The most persistent myth of fad diets is the idea of-wait for it-the “maintenance phase,” a point in a diet where weight is maintained, rather than lost or gained. When it comes to weight stigma and fad diets, what do you think people get the most wrong? Policies aimed at improving people’s diets and increasing exercise, on the other hand, have been shown to work.

We’ve been trying to convince people to lose weight for 40 years and it’s never worked. No state, city or country has meaningfully lowered its obesity rate over time.

This is true for individual dieters as well as political jurisdictions. Hobbes: My primary problem with focusing policy solutions on fatness rather than health is that we know most attempts to lose weight fail. Gordon: I’d been writing personal essays and research-driven stuff on fatness, fat people and anti-fat bias for about four years when we met up, and talking to Mike about this stuff was so easy and fun and natural. Getting to spend more time thinking and talking with him is one of the easiest, best decisions I’ve made in the last year.