Big Food and the Fitspo Trap: Is Pinterest bad for our health?

During my typical daily perusal of Pinterest, I am beset with various cheerful, click-baity pins suggesting various diet and exercise tips for staying or becoming slim and/or fit. Whether I’m browsing for bathing suits, a new workout top, or a vegan cupcake recipe, Pinterest assumes I’m also looking to be skinny. A search using the term “fitspo” or “fitspiration” turns up very similar results to a search using the word “healthy”.  Fellow pinners are constantly sharing posts like “How to Beat Back Fat,” “10 Natural Ways to Get Rid of Belly Fat,” or the more concerning “21 Ways to Lose 10 Pounds in a Week” or “5 Foods to Never Eat.” Each headline is accompanied by images of women showing off their toned physiques (all too often without showing the model’s head, driving home the point that I’m not to look at them as people: they are bodies and with enough work, I can insert my own head onto their form). The cumulative message of these pins is that with a few simple tweaks to my routine, I will be able to achieve the svelte physique of my dreams.

We hate our lives and feel like our souls are being crunched into oblivion but at least we’re synchronized.

The internet is full of articles that seem aimed at empowering people to change their bodies. Through these articles, people are provided with questionably authoritative scientific knowledge that may help them make changes and choices in their lifestyle that allow them to wield a greater degree of control over their bodies and their health. They can, for example, fight against their genetics and natural body composition in order to seek a desired “look”.  According to the fitspo narrative, our bodies are ours to shape and by exhibiting discipline, self-control, and extreme amounts of hard work, we really can achieve whatever shape we desire—or more accurately, we can achieve a physique which falls into a range of “acceptable” body types (for women, slim, toned, “goddess”, etc.)

On one hand, the claim that we have control over our own bodies, even against our predetermined genetics, is hopeful (if only lawmakers took women’s agency as seriously as Pinterest does). However, ultimately this narrative is built on an unstable web of half-truths and bad assumptions. Fitspo’s assertion that we have the power to change our bodies takes for granted that people are not—and should not—be happy with their bodies unless they fit into one of a few “attractive” body types,  and learning to love, care for, and revel in the body that you have is never a virtue. While we have the power to fight back against genetics, fitspo never tells us we have the power to rescript what “fit,” “healthy,” “attractive,” and “beautiful” mean in our world.

As someone deeply invested in both the health of my own body and the right of people everywhere to make decisions regarding every aspect of their physical, mental, and emotional selves, I want to highlight what I see as some of the underlying issues that make the fitspo narrative—as well as other narratives we see or read about obesity and sickness—so dangerous. While fitspo pretends to offer us agency over our bodies, it really serves to affirm and extend the belief that fatness is a moral problem, an issue of work ethic.

But let’s back up a bit. Medical professionals have agreed that statistically Americans are getting fatter and sicker at an alarming rate (especially among juvenile populations).This fact, combined with the rise of processed foods* and the historically powerful lobby of certain food industries, has been the subject of documentaries such as Food Inc., Hungry for Change, and Fed Up. Each of these documentaries outlines the way that the “big food” lobbyists have created a situation where we are left in the dark about the nutritional content of the food that we are sold. For example, the sugar lobby has made it so that food manufacturers do not have to print the daily percentage values for sugar on their products, masking the fact that many foods probably have too much of that sweetener.

Here’s the typical narrative: Food companies are huge players in a capitalist system that encourages and incentivizes them to make processed food as cheaply as possible while also being tasty enough to fly off the shelves (read: lots of sugar or artificial sweetener). As more health information is disseminated amongst the general public (i.e. that a diet with too much sugar leads to health problems) these companies try to protect their product by hiding contents or by making a new product that has lower amounts of a specific ingredient (i.e. diet soda is sugar-free) and is marketed as “healthier”, despite the fact that in order to take out a specific ingredient, they often had to replace it with an even less desirable alternative (like aspartame, a neurotoxin-cum-sweetener found in diet soda). Occasionally, policymakers or healthcare whistleblowers call these companies out for their crap, often with scientific studies in hand in  government hearings and demand that companies provide more information and become more accountable for the harmful ingredients in their food, but this rarely ever leads anywhere. Increasingly, the powerful “big food” lobbyists sideline systemic change by buying their way into academic studies and by choosing certain nutrients, often “fat” or “calories” to demonize while they continue designing low quality foods. These foods activate our brains in a way that causes us to become addicted to specific ingredients and then gain weight which has been correlated with certain health problems, such as diabetes.

It’s at this point that health professionals often step in, offering ways to combat big food’s nefarious plot. But health professionals are often also tied into their own industries and we see magazines and TV programs report on “superfoods”  or supplements that promise to transform our diets and health (often these superfoods are then incorporated into processed foods to make them more appealing to health-conscious consumers). Thus when faced with criticism, the food industry throws up its hands and says “I don’t know what more you want from us. We gave you low fat food with acai berries. Your weight gain (obviously unwanted) must be because you don’t exercise enough”. And then, the fitness industry—bolstered by online movements like fitspo—takes over and tells us that “This month’s choices are next month’s body” and “suck it up so one day you won’t have to suck it in”. We are convinced that it is our work ethic rather than our ability to make informed decisions about food and exercise that will give us control over over bodies and self-esteem (nevermind freeing ourselves from this system by choosing to accept our bodies the way that they are).

Weights are tools for living your best capitalist-work-ethic dreams, according to a familiar moral fitness narrative.

Try as they may, the documentaries that shed light on this system also do little to actually combat it. Like fitspo, they focus on body weight as an indicator of health, often showing pictures of headless fat bodies as signifiers of sickness and spending little time discussing the way that thin does not mean healthy (and vice versa!). As many of these documentarians point out by using the phrase “fat and sick,” being overweight and being sick are two separate things. But by focusing so heavily on losing weight as a key to a healthier life, these documentaries implicitly make the inaccurate claim that we can know whether or not a body is healthy by looking at its size alone.

The solutions that these documentaries often suggest appeal to our power as consumers, not activists. They ask us to change our buying practices, moving away from processed foods and towards local, organic options, which are not options available to everyone. Though choosing one product over another can certainly be a form of activism, I am uncomfortable with the conclusion that the way to combat big food is to opt out of their productions, instead of demanding that they make more honestly-labeled and perhaps even higher-quality processed food.  As it stands, these documentaries give people who do not have access to local, organic food  no other options, confirming that people with less income or the many Americans who live in a food desert with limited grocery options actually do not have the same level of agency over their health as their wealthier, suburban counterparts.

A few more observations about this system:

1. All of the industries described benefit from you trying to lose weight (buying new food products, gym memberships etc.) but none of them benefit from you actually being happy about your body (as a result of weight loss or just because you’re cool with your body the way it is).

2. By not providing information about nutritional content or by providing false information about nutrition and exercise in order to protect industry interests, all of these industries take away our abilities to make informed decisions about our health.

3.  When our health suffers the consequences of not having this information, it becomes our problem to fix: we have the power to remake our bodies, but apparently not the power to force the food industry to be more transparent about their contributions to the public health problems.

4. By displacing responsibility for health problems away from industry and onto individual morality/willpower, the conglomerate of food, fitness, and health industries encourages us to see our bodies purely as a result of our discipline and the obesity epidemic resulting from a collective dearth of individual willpower.

The problem with all of this is that it transfers the “blame” for fatness or sickness to a person’s lack of labor and lack of moral fortitude without ever holding large scale capitalist industries accountable for the way that their practices affect not only our ability to make decisions about food and health as informed consumers, but also for the way their products have spawned other industries that contribute to this vicious cycle. This situation leads to phenomena such as fitspo that further affirms that society connects thinness with values such as discipline, willpower, and endurance (all forms of labor) and fatness with immorality and laziness.** Fitspo messages like “Don’t give up what you want most for what you want now” ignore the possibility that we may want to live in a mindset and a body where those two wants are not opposed. What I want is to live in a society where my self-control regarding ice cream is not an overall statement of my moral fortitude. Eating ice cream now does not threaten what I want most, because what I want most is not related to the way my body conforms to social norms. Fitspo assumes that our primary want is for our bodies to be deemed attractive by society.

I also do not want to argue that wanting to be fit or lose weight is bad. Fitspo and the food industry wrong those of us with those goals as well. They work symbiotically: the food industry keeps information from us that will actually help us make informed decisions in pursuing our health or weight goals and the fitness industry tells us that our ability to lose weight depends on us, regardless of the fact that the consumption of certain foods and chemicals that appear to be diet-friendly actually lead to weight gain.

What we choose to do with more accurate nutritional  information once it is disseminated is ultimately up to each individual. It’s necessary for us to stop all of our body shaming practices, perpetuated by fitspo and the diet/fitness industries. Our power and right to decide what our body looks like is not limited to those of us who want our bodies to fit a certain cultural norm. We have a right to ignore any and all health guidelines without any consequence to the perception of our “discipline,” because if we can reshape our bodies however we want, fat is also an acceptable body shape.

Therefore, if we are truly to have power over our bodies, as fitspo wants to claim we do, we need accurate information about the nutritional content of our food and reliable information about nutrition and exercise that will promote health without selling us a normative body type. Furthermore, we need more healthful alternatives to low-quality food that do not come with a high price tag. Perhaps it’s time to start figuring out how to make a higher quality processed food that is available to everyone, or how to make organic and local food available and affordable for all.

Most food industry critics realize that the problem we face results from a capitalist system that creates low-quality, dishonestly-labeled food, but those critics still often insist that the solution lies in individual willpower and consumer practices. It’s time to rethink that logic: the problem is with production, so let’s fix production. Equally important is the cultural work we do in advocating for body-positive movements that will ultimately allow us to find pleasure and satisfaction in our bodies, whatever size and state of health they are in. We have a right to make informed decisions about our health, but we are not then obligated to make our bodies conform to a certain societal norm. As soon as we can culturally abandon the notion of an “ideal body,” the forces of the food, health, and fitness industries will have one less way to lure us into their traps.

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*Due to the forces that we are discussing, the phrase “processed food” has been evacuated of stable meaning. I tend to use it to describe foods that have artificial ingredients or additives (with a negative connotation), but in reality most of the food we eat must be “processed” in some way to make it edible. Here’s a great article from Jacobin about the history of food processing if you’re interested in pursuing this further!

**By asserting that fatness is not a result of a lack in moral fortitude, I’m not trying to take anything away from those who have had great success with losing weight or toning up. It certainly does take discipline to do those things. My point is that being fat does not equate to a lack of discipline and we are wrong to make any assumptions about a person’s health, happiness, or fitness based on the way their body looks. We all have different goals, challenges, and resources and it’s time to stop policing bodies.

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On Weight and the Pathologization of the Black Feminine

After walking home from the bus stop, I threw my backpack on the kitchen floor, reached towards whatever was left in the pantry, and sat, for hours, in front of a large television screen as I did every day. Prioritizing Sister Sister and That’s So Raven re-runs over homework was obviously the responsible thing to do.

What I didn’t realize in elementary school was that each marathon I was invited to sit through threatened to color my world with a white-dominated standard of beauty and value.. Each episode of Lizzie McGuire, Even Stevens, and The Suite Life reinforced the notion that eurocentrism was ultimately the standard by which beauty needed to measured and upheld. As time went on, I began sitting in front of the television less because I no longer saw people on the screen that looked like me. In their attempt to offset backlash, some networks hired one or two token non-white cast members. Seeing them became an occasion for me to think about how harmful inclusive exclusion is. It was never enough.

As I got older, I no longer searched for remotes with the same urgency and interest as I used to. When Precious was released in 2009, it became clearer to me that my disinterest in pop culture was, in fact, a disinterest in the anti-Blackness that undergirded every facet of mainstream media. But Precious was presumably supposed to provide nuance in an industry and world that was built on the subjugation and attempted erasure of Black women.

“My name is Claireece Precious Jones. I want to be on the cover of a magazine.”

Gabourey Sidibe as Precious (2009)

The school bell sounded as the trailer began for the film. As Claireece walked out of stairwell she was stared at and pushed by other students. Not unlike the majority-white audience who purchased tickets to see the film, the students in the backdrop of the opening scene of the trailer had a desire to see and lay claim to a Black body that did not belong to them. The space that Claireece occupies is one that is imbued with violence and in the opening scene of the trailer Claireece makes it clear to the audience that the violence that the Black Feminine experiences does not render the Black Feminine nameless, silent, or invisible.

Claireece creates an alternative mode of life and sociality for herself by imagining herself on the cover of magazines. In the opening scene of the trailer, Claireece insistently acknowledges her own humanity while others fail to. She imagines a world in which she has full control over when and how she is seen. After several outfit changes, Claireece returns to a world that not only pathologizes her Blackness but also problematizes her weight. And after purchasing movie tickets to see the film, I realized that my presumption about the film was the furthest thing from true. I had anticipated seeing a move that sufficiently represented the nuances of Black sociality but instead, the movie seemed to trouble the binary of spectator and performance.

Every seat in the movie theatre was occupied. I sat behind rows of blonde and brunette white people who seemed all too eager to see Precious and my initial confusion turned into discomfort because I no longer felt safe. Although I was too young to articulate the convoluted feeling I had about sitting next to, behind, and in front of white people to see this film, I was certain that something was not right.

Precious was a box office success grossing over $63 million, receiving six nominations at the 82^nd Academy Awards, and overwhelmingly good reviews from critics. The problem is that movies that cast non-white or, more specifically, Black actresses gross $63 million and receive numerous nominations at the Academy Awards insofar as they dehumanize Black women. Black women are consistently nominated for playing nannies, slaves, the sexually exploited…the critical acclaim of their movies is definitely tied to the excess of their on-screen suffering. That is to say that the hyper-investment and interest of Precious is a means by which the general public can continue to work in service of white standards of beauty and human value by reifying the notion that Black women are subjects that the world can dehumanize, commodify, and lay claim to as it wills.

Black women are told that we do not belong on the cover of magazines, let alone the concluding pages that are marked by advertisements. We are told that we taint spaces that are reserved for white women and when self-aggrandizing liberals decide to cast Black women in their films they tell us that we will be cast insofar as we assent to the violence that the role is imbued with. In this case in particular, Gabourey Sidibe is navigating an inclusive exclusion that welcomes her into a labor market that needs her and yet disavows her humanity because she is a plus size Black woman.

This type of inclusive exclusion is a guise that coerces people into believing that fat people and Black people are no longer being dehumanized by mainstream media. Yet their presence depends on their acquiescence to dictated, controlled space. Most of these women in popular culture are being told how and where to exist. When someone is both fat and Black, this becomes even more convoluted because every facet of their identity is denigrated according to white mainstream standards. . Nearly every film, advertisement, sitcom, magazine spread and commercial tells fat Black women that they are subhuman because they do not evoke the right kind of desire, and that they only deserve to occupy cultural space when they suffer.

The oppression of fat Black women through certain types of representation is something that deserves greater attention than it receives. What is often forgotten is the fact that there is nothing pathological about fat Black women. What is often forgotten is the fact that fat Black women exist. And this is the problem. Fat Black women not only exist, but do in revolutionary ways, and deserve to be the arbiters of their own lives, their own performances, and their own representation. That means that we do not have a right to determine for ourselves when it is and is not convenient for us to see and subjectivize fat Black women. In other words, the fat Black woman (the doubly pathologized body) should not just be valorized when an Oscar is on the line.

Gabourey Sidibe for French Elle

After purchasing movie tickets to see Precious I situated myself in a sea of white people and I felt suffocated by their desire to cathartically look at suffering Black bodies. Theorizing the relation between performer and spectator becomes even more crucial in these circumstances. The violence that was coupled with the collective gaze of the audience hinges on the type of violence Black women experienced in the 19^th century when they were forced to be subjects of medical experimentation, sideshows, and museum exhibitions because the white onlookers in the movie theatre viewed Black bodies as propertied subjects to be possessed.

I was reminded of this when a few weeks ago, I attended The Vagina Monologues and witnessed a performer disavow the gaze of an audience that was eager to see and contain her. The performer, a plus size Black woman, was the arbiter of a story that fell on and through ears unwilling to listen to what her performance was imbued with—resistance .  The audience was made profoundly uncomfortable by the fact that the performer demanded to be humanized, but they were even more uncomfortable by the fact that the performer humanized herself and reconfigured what is thought to be a binary opposition between performer and spectator. Before one of the students in the audience began to capture the performance, the Black woman—in anticipation of this violence—unapologetically  embraced the space she occupied as well as her Blackness by centering herself on the stage and shouting.

Despite our intentions, we often find ourselves working in service of white supremacy when we assume the powerful position of the onlooker or arbiter of a performance. When plus size Black women move in violent spaces such as the one the performer moved through, they can choose to negate the ways in which people attempt to see them. So an attempt to capture plus size Black women without their knowledge or consent is an attempt to disregard the work that they do to create alternative modes of existing.

There is also a disjuncture between when, where, and how plus size white women and Black women are seen and “accepted”. While celebrities such as Adele, Rebel Wilson, Jennifer Coolidge, and Melissa McCarthy are subject to denigration and ridicule because of their size, Black women like Amber Riley, Monique, Jill Scott, and Rachel Jeantel have to resist a world that not only fails to see them but condemns their existence when it does. For instance, when Rachel Jeantel, 19-year old prosecution witness, recounted her final phone call with Trayvon Martin before George Zimmerman murdered him, the general public was eager to compare her to an animal because of her skin color, weight and speech. Because Rachel did not articulate herself the way everyone wanted her to, the general public delegitimized her testimony and dehumanized her by gleefully shaming her.

MZ 007

Women like Rachel Jeantel, Gabourey Sidibe, Amber Riley, Monique, Jill Scott and Mz 007 give us an occasion to deconstruct normative modes of existing and thinking about subjectivity. Despite the fact that mainstream media tries to control and regulate Black women whose bodies are “unconventional”, these women are among many who remind us what it is to live in, through, and beyond a world that tells us at every waking moment that plus size Black women do not deserve to exist.