The Dark History of BMI & Fatphobia
46:09 Share

Hi, I'm your host, Kate Lister. If you would like Betwixt the Sheets ad-free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe.

I used to think buying foundation online was impossible. How am I supposed to find my shade when I can't even get it right in store? Then I discovered Il Makiage. I took their AI-powered quiz to find my custom match, and wow, this foundation is literally my skin in a bottle. The undertone and coverage are spot on. It's so neutral and weightless, I can't even tell I'm wearing makeup.

Plus, with Try Before You Buy, you can try your full size at home for 14 days. Take the Power Match Quiz now at ilmakiage.com slash quiz. I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks. Admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

It took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry. Finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier. At BlueNile.com, you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from Blue Nile's jewelry experts who are on hand 24-7 to answer questions and the ease and convenience of shopping online. For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with code LISTEN at BlueNile.com.

That's $50 off with code LISTEN at BlueNile.com. Lovely Betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. How are you? Well, I'm fabulous. Thank you very much for asking. And I'm thrilled that you can join me for yet another episode of Betwixt the Sheets. But before I can continue and before you can continue, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And we have to tell you that.

Not because we desperately want to, but because the lawyers will tell us off if we don't. That is the fair dues warning. Feel safer? I do. Right, on with the show. Despite being a period called the Enlightenment, they didn't half have some unenlightened ideas, and that is putting it mildly.

With the transatlantic slave trade in full swing, racial hierarchies were reinforced with insane ideas around categorisation of body types, particularly women's body types. The way they saw it, if you weren't white and thin, then you were uncivilised and, well, unworthy.

But the damaging impact of these ideas, as we are going to find out, was enormous. And it's something that we can still see the impact of today. Today we are talking about the history of fatphobia and the history of the BMI. And the journey that those two things have been on throughout history is staggering. Curious to know more? Well, buckle up those belts because I am too.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Shades, the history of sex scandal and society with me, Kate Lister.

The term BMI, which I have heard far too much of in recent years, means the body mass index and it has become so commonplace that it is now accepted as a general marker of health. When you stop and think about it, the idea that you can work out how healthy someone is just by looking at how tall they are and how much they weigh is... that's kind of bonkers, isn't it? At worst, it's discriminatory and dangerous.

And yet, this is an idea that has stuck.

But it also has approval from the World Health Organization, the highest health authority we have. The history of the BMI is fittingly absurd, and that's putting it nicely. Joining me today to explore the dark and fascinating history of the body mass index is author and expert in all things fatphobic, Amy Farrell. Where did the idea of measuring health like this come from? How did it inform the eugenics movement? Of course it did.

And why have the effects to disprove it been shut down so rapidly by the medical community? Well, without further ado, let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Amy Farrell. How are you doing?

I'm doing well and it's really wonderful to be here. My students were very excited that I was coming on to your show. Oh, that's so lovely. Hello, students. You are the author of Fat Shame, Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. That is

is amazing. What made you want to write that book? What was its origin story? That's a great question because it actually goes back to my students. I had finished my book on Ms. Magazine, yours and Sisterhood.

I had kind of had a bit of a tussle with Gloria Steinem and I was seeking a new project. And I was reading in the in the intro to women's studies, it was called at the time. We read a history of anorexia by Brumberg. And in there, she said there had never been a good history of dieting. And my students said, well, that's your next project.

And I thought, well, that's actually interesting because I'm an American white woman born in the 60s and my whole life has been being told to diet. So I thought, very interesting. I started that research and pretty quickly got bored because what I realized was I needed to be great with Excel spreadsheets.

The diets had all been the same. They just repeat it. So it was like, you know, the cabbage diet keeps coming back, the rice diet, the meat diet, they all keep coming back. The exercises look very similar as well. As I was doing that, though, I became more interested in fat.

And the way that fat was really a protagonist and all of that dieting material. And I realized that fat stigma went back much longer than my understanding of it had been. I had thought it really started in the 1920s. What started then was the advertising industry. So we see lots of evidence of it, but

It went back much further. And I realized that it was so connected to ideas about race and ideas about gender. And so that's really the origins of my project. I was also a fat kid, experienced a lot of bullying as a fat kid. So as I got to know the work of fat activists, I

Many of whom really schooled me, I have to say, you know, they, you know, just me down a little bit, but in very useful ways. I mean, very generous ways, I would say, actually, I realized that the experiences they were talking to me about resonated with me so much from my childhood experiences.

So, while I couldn't speak about being a particularly fat person as an adult, though those are all relative terms, I mean, I'm not, I wouldn't identify myself as thin either. I was very interested in fat activism too. So I was interested in the history of fat and then the kind of counter movement of fat activism. We're here today to talk specifically about the BMI, the Body Mass Index, which

But just listening to you talk then, I got a flashback to my own teenage years and my childhood. And being fat was literally the worst thing that you could be. It was the worst insult. It was like it stalked everybody. And our perception of fat...

in the 90s and the 2000s, were so screwed up. Yeah, well, I think so. And it's still the most likely reason a child will be bullied on the playground. Wow. Oh. And I also think...

With phones today, I say this to my students, too. Do you know, I was a bullied kid, but the one amazing thing about it was whatever was happening at school stayed at school and I could come home and not that home was perfect. I'm not saying that, but it was it was free of that. And I think that all follows them now.

Yeah, it does. Because of the texting and what they're seeing online, et cetera. I think my generation was like the last chopper out of Saigon when it came to that stuff. At least nobody has documented evidence of what I was doing as a teenager. Thank God. What they're dealing with today is unreal. It really is. Yeah.

We're going to talk about all the things that you've said that, but let's just, what is the body mass index? Okay. So the body mass index, I mean, we all know it just from going to the doctor, right? That we get a chart and we have the body mass index there. And you get a number. It's literally a person's weight divided by your height in meters squared. It's your height and weight ratio is what it is. Yeah.

We know we think of it as something it seems very scientific, I think, to so many people like it's something very real. But it actually was the invention of a mathematician in the 1830s in Belgium. We didn't really use it, at least in the United States, until the 1980s.

But we would use the Metropolitan Life Insurance health charts for, you know, height and weight. And you had the little thing there about whether you were big boned, medium boned.

I don't want to make this too big, but we can't even understand what that mathematician was doing until we back up a little bit. So before the Enlightenment, so the Enlightenment is really the 18th century, right? Where we have the kind of advent of reason, etc. We have the rule of the church and of kings, right? So monarchy and the church.

And that really gives way to the rule of more scientists, philosophers, sort of the rule of reason. But here's the interesting thing. That old way of thinking with the monarchy and with the rule of the church, there were really clear hierarchies of people. So some people were better than other people. Some people had more power than other people. And that was God given really, right? The idea was that was God given. What I think is really interesting is,

is that when that gives way to kind of the rule of reason, there were still all these inequities with people, right? Especially the transatlantic slave trade, inequities between men and women, between poor people and rich people, between it was certainly like the attempted eradication of indigenous people,

But there needed to be a rationale for that because the rationale of this being God given because of God's right to the king or the church's right, that's gone. And so really science and philosophy comes in there and theories, the use of theories of evolution, that some people were simply more evolved and better people than other people. Yeah.

And there's a lot of searching then for what is the perfect specimen of the human being. And it was looking at the physical body for that. So people, probably your listeners know the word phrenology, which was like a real 19th century thing of like,

testing people's heads and bumps and things. But there was something called physiognomy too, which was just looking at the whole body for signs of whether or not you were civilized or not. And so the man who created the BMI, Ketelay, he was just part of a whole bigger school of thought of what makes

a perfect human being. And I think you've done a show on Sarah Bartman, for instance, before. We have, yeah. So that's in the early, very early 1800s. We have a scientist by the name of Georges Cuvier. He takes this woman who was an enslaved woman from South Africa. After she dies a kind of horrible and early death, he does an autopsy on her. And he's looking to see if she's the missing link between Ange

animals and human beings. He decides she's actually a human being, but

she's on the very bottom scale and lots of people have written about her and how he uses her skin color and her sexual organs as evidence of her being on the low on that scale of civilization. But what I found really interesting in looking at his original materials was that he's really talking about her fatness too. You know, he's talking about the fatness of her buttocks and

fatness of her breasts. He actually even gives this, you know, name to the supposed excess fat on buttocks, steatopegia, which is just a normal formation. Different people's butts come in different sizes, you know? Yeah. And all sorts of people. So we have him in the beginning of the century. We have Cesar Lombroso at the end of the century who... He was a head case, wasn't he? Yeah. So he wrote that book, Criminal Woman. His evidence...

Is that you could look at a woman and tell by her thigh size whether or not she was going to be a criminal. So women with more.

hefty butts and thighs were more likely to be prostitutes. I mean, the ironic thing is it actually throws all women, like it says basically all women have the potential to be a prostitute, right? Because, or what they really called like literally degenerate traits or atavistic traits, like that you were low on that scale of civilization. So. And there was lots of comparing of black

women's bodies to sex workers' bodies. It's all flooding back to me now, 19th century. Physiognomy, this very, very strange thing that I can't remember his name, some physiognomist who was wandering around Paris looking at the vulvas of sex workers and of black women and attempting to compare them directly to prove what? What?

to prove, I don't know, that he shouldn't have a medical license, I think. But that's what they were doing at the time. Well, they were and they couldn't get access to, well, to do white women. They couldn't get access to their bodies for the most part, although sometimes they did, depending upon what kind of access they had. But for the most part, they had access to prisoners'

and to poor women in all sorts of different contexts, which then included black women. So the BMI was Cotelet's attempt to actually somehow map out what he called la moyenne. So like the, well, I would literally translate the medium man, but I think he meant more specifically like the perfect man. Like here are the ratios of what the perfect human being is. But so that was based on white European men.

and his ideal of what a perfect ratio is. It had nothing to do with health. It had nothing to do with longevity. It had nothing to do with disease. It fit into this larger picture of these ideals of what makes a perfect human being. And so, and really about the scale of civilization and scale of like who has...

the least primitive traits and who has the most primitive traits. So it was just putting by definition what were typical white European men's, like what was their stature, what was their weight, et cetera, at the top. That was just by definition, he's putting it there on the top. And then everyone else is falling in below that. It's mad anyway, because if you're only looking at white European men, you've excluded quite

quite a few people there, but who was his sample size? Where was he looking at? What demographic was he looking at? A wide variety of ages or body sizes or? No, because his point was really to look at the, what's the perfect one? Do you know? So he already had this preconceived idea. Oh, for goodness sake.

Well, I mean, that's what I think we have to think about. Like someone like Cesar Lombroso or Georges Cuvier, like all of them, they already have their ideas in their head. Do you know what I mean? And then they're doing the science to follow. I'm putting science in quotation marks. It's really scientific racism. The science is following their ideas as opposed to the other way around. His idea, the other thing that's, I think, interesting is

It just really gets dropped. It's really just it's like a mathematician's tool. It's like it's it's an idea theory of who the perfect human being is. And it's not until there were some people who are challenging whether or not this metropolitan life insurance charts really were that useful for predicting health.

that they're kind of the National Institute of Health in the United States picked up the idea of someone sort of like a few people started to pull back out. Like there's these other models like this BMI, but there was never any studies that explicitly linked that to actually any kind of predictor of health, predictor of longevity, morbidity, mortality. It was just another measure that was pulled out. So.

Every time I've been to the doctor and I've been told that my BMI is in the very overweight to obese category, really what I'm being told is I don't have the physique to

of a 19th century Belgian male teenager. Right. That's what I'm being told. You are being told that. I mean, there's been some fussing with that chart. So in 1998, the National Institute of Health in the United States in conjunction with a lot of international obesity task forces, we have to be thoughtful about those as well because

They have lots of people who are involved in the business of weight loss on those. So obesity doctors, weight loss experts, et cetera, they lower the threshold. So they even lower the numbers. So like tons of people become fat just overnight. Yeah. Well, I think I remember reading an article that was really funny that it was something like overnight half of major league baseball players became obese and

And there's still some fooling with that chart. You know, now they're trying to use that chart just as an indicator. I saw some movement and then you would just use your waist measurement. So I have a lot to say about that, but at any rate, yeah. I mean, we,

we think about it now that I know where it comes from, like the obvious questions around it. Well, what about boobs? What about bottoms? What about anybody that isn't a 19th century Belgian male teenager? That it just doesn't make any sense at all. Now I think about it. Right. And I mean, I think that's sort of like the language of deotopegia, which is the excess fat on buttocks.

That's really just describing a normal place that women will hold fat, you know, and in European women would tend to have less fat on on their butts than African women historically. But that's just a normal spread. And even within there, it's going to be there's going to be huge variations where some women will have big butts. Some people will have small butts. But my point is, it's like the placement of fat itself.

is being identified as something that's a deformity. I mean, that's really the language starting in the 19th century is that we're looking and that's what all of these measurements were really somehow trying to weed out deformities.

deformities. So I think that when we look at sort of the range of human beings, we need to be really skeptical about how much of this has anything to do with health. And what is this really about saying which bodies are acceptable and which bodies are not acceptable?

And the bodies that it seems to target the most as being unacceptable would be who's in your opinion? Well, I think we know that I would say for the most part, it's women and it's black women. Yeah. So I would say it's all women as less acceptable, but then black women in particular. And it gets dragged into the eugenics debate in the 19th century, doesn't it? Well, maybe not the BMI, but certainly this idea around bodies and how you measure bodies.

Yeah, well, it definitely does. I mean, that was sort of like the Lombroso argument about, you know, which people are more likely to become criminals. I was thinking about it, especially for your podcast, because for me, one of the

Most interesting things as I was doing my research was realizing how much men in the latter part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. So really up through the 1940s were being taught through these kind of cartoons and movies.

you know, doctors like books that they would publish that would be like how to live a good life, you know, and postcards, you know, postcards as being like the memes of the day that they were not supposed to enjoy the pleasure of a fleshy woman, you know, like, like really mocking men and

For enjoying a woman who had flesh on her body, do you know whether she had a big butt, breasts, just overall soft and fleshy so that there are just these series of cartoons that really mock sex.

The only men who are sort of shown as enjoying those women are very working class men or even men who are perceived to be kind of almost perverts. You know, they look really weird and they're very odd. And then you see images of the middle class men, like the men who are have the office jobs and who are sort of especially becoming more professional men.

if there's images like of a fat woman sitting on them, they are sweating. They're like not sweating in a good way. I mean, they're, they're sweating and they're like looking like embarrassed, you know, and dragged down. They want a woman next to them who is light and has no flesh on is, is a status. But what I think is fascinating is like,

It's like the men are having to be taught this. Get it out of your system. If you think that's sexy, that is a perversion. It's something that has to be underground or something that's shameful, not just a kind of part of what people might find sexually attractive or not. Whenever you see things like, like literally phrases like a civilized man knows he doesn't find that attractive. And it's like,

It doesn't surprise me, but where would that be written? In the kind of books for health. And there was one, I can't remember the name of the author, but it was called Girth Control. So it was like a diet book. So like have thoughts for getting, you know, your exercise that you should do every day and everything.

And that was in the early part of the very early, early 20th century, but latter part of the 19th century too. But these postcards spanned, I would say they spanned from about 1870 to 1940. Do you know the funny postcards that people would send? You get this sort of the rise of the mocking the jolly fat woman. I'm the fat man as well, but I'm just thinking when you're saying this of like every depiction of an angry wife of...

a shrew, a harridan from past films and, as you say, postcards, and they're all shown to be overweight, not super svelte and skinny. The implication being, I suppose, that they've let themselves go. They've let themselves go. They're taking up too much space. By definition, that body size makes them not feminine. Yes, not feminine. That's it. Yes. And I guess I keep coming back to it, but what I find fascinating about it is

This wasn't something that was just reflecting what was the common idea. It was being taught to people. Being indoctrinated. Yeah, because especially about...

for the men what their sexual pleasure needed to be. That it was like, you're not, if you thought that was sexy, just take it on the down low maybe, but don't acknowledge having a fat girlfriend or that that's who you find attractive. In the, so the 19th and the 20th century, and as the sort of diet culture is emerging, you do get a kind of an emphasis on, I don't know if I'd call it fat in women, but like shape in women. I've seen all of these

for ionized yeast so you won't be skinny and you can put weight on. So that seems to have been a concern as well, that if you go too far the other way, then you're not womanly anymore. Yeah, and I'm glad you're bringing that up because I think nothing in history, too, is a straight line. So it's like all of these things are kind of warring with each other. And the reality is there's still, especially in the 19th century, there's still wasting diseases happening.

If you get tuberculosis, you're going to lose a lot of weight. It's still seen as a sign of fertility to have a little bit of weight on you if you're a woman, that you're young and you're juicy and you're going to be able to have babies. For a man, just that

Work was still hard for many people. Food could be scarce. So it was still a sign of wealth in a certain way. Do you know what I mean? But that was shifting. So I think it was always about a little bit of balanced and also balanced.

do you know like what is a bustle but a fake butt do you know so there's things like you know you're encouraged to wear that but not to actually have a hefty buttocks when i think about like you know the paintings of rubens and renoir and the classical world and all of those women they certainly didn't have rail thin size zero bodies they were quite voluptuous but

And a lot of people looked at that as like, oh, look, look, it's so great that they were bigger women. But they weren't really big, were they? Like they have a bit of a wobble. And I think they might have been more of a kind of sexual fantasy in a lot of them. Not necessarily the men who Ruben's like colleagues would have been actually marrying. You know, so I think it's about sort of different classes of women, too.

back with Amy after this short break. Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding. Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use, prompt-free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion. But some opinions are more useful than others.

So we've arrived in winter. We're getting up in the dark. The commutes are stuffy. The person next to you is coughing.

I've got just the thing for you, an excellent escape. I'm Dan Snow, host of the Dan Snow's History Hit podcast, where I whisk you away into the greatest stories in history. Join me on the Inca Trail in Peru, where I'll tell you the story of Machu Picchu, or travel with me to the mighty Colosseum in Rome to find out just what the gladiatorial games were really like. Follow Thomas Cochran, the real master and commander across the high seas. I take you round the world to where history happened.

So check out Dan Snow's History Hit for the best historical escapism this winter, wherever you get your podcasts.

Has this ever impacted men in the same way? I know fat is a feminist issue and we'll certainly get to fat in the feminist movement, but fat men, is that like, what's the history of that? Yeah. I mean, it's not nothing. And in fact, the very first diet book was written by William Banting. That's a phrase that was common in the United States and in England, I think really until the, even the sixties to say your Banting meant you're dieting.

So he wrote a book called Lessons on Corpulence. He was a really fat... Well, he identifies himself as a fat man. And he went to his physicians and they were like, this is just normal. You are aging. Just get over it. You're well-to-do. He was a casket maker. He had a wonderful business as a casket maker. But he hated being fat. Like he thought it was... He called it a parasite of barnacles. He really thought himself as...

I think not having the status he wanted to have because of being fat. So he wrote this diet book that was just basically eat less, eat more meat, don't drink, not just meaning don't drink alcohol, like almost don't drink, but then people would become really constipated. So he sold a cordial with it. That was basically some kind of laxative diet.

He really made a lot of money from that. So my point is, it's not like it's only women. I think what is different is that historically, body size men are able to take up more space and that that scene is masculine. And that goes for much longer than it does for women. What I mean by that is

they're going to not be seen as fat or not recognized as fat and inappropriate. They have a bigger leeway for that, you know, whereas that line is going to stop for women. And especially I think for white women, or actually I would say for black women of a certain class, that's going to stop much earlier. The other thing I think that's connected to that is that we have a really powerful idea of the fat cat.

So like the fat cat is a man who's powerful. I mean, the current US president, I would say is- I was just thinking of him actually. Is that kind of fat cat image that no one's going to mention your weight. Do you know what I mean? And you will have clothes that will fit you because you have plenty of money for that. And it's a sign of your wealth and power that you have that body size. Yeah.

It doesn't mean you're a nice person. It doesn't mean you're a good person. It doesn't mean people like you, but it means it's a sign of wealth and power. No, you could at least have the good decency to be jolly with it, couldn't you, for goodness sake? Well, no, not at all. So it's not that it doesn't affect men. And there's been lots of studies that actually have been done within gay male communities that actually kind of focus on

thinness is pretty important. Do you know, I think it's sort of, some have argued that it's whoever the male gaze is falling upon these kinds of standards, but, and even, you know, some people have argued. So does that mean within like African-American communities, for instance, the United States, that there isn't this kind of weight emphasis, but I don't think that's true. I think that's more like there's an openness to fat, more fat in certain places. So like,

fat buttocks or fat breasts but that the waist still needs to be this tiny size or yes that's what Samik Slott said didn't he is the waist is small and your curves are kicking like it was like he wanted the big butt the juicy doubles but it had to be

With a tiny waist as well.

just no one would comment on his weight. You know, I mean, he just was able to go out on the day. Do you know, it was fine. But if he was dressed in such a way that people recognized him as a she, they would actually, even if he asked for a Coke, for instance, at a restaurant, they'd bring him a diet Coke. You know, there'd be comments at the grocery store. There would be not cat calls, but harassing calls from cars. But it really was very clear that,

to him that it was about whether he was being identified as male or female. Could you just clarify for us, who is Baird Bergman? He is a cultural studies scholar in the United States.

So you can find that essay in the Fat Studies Reader. I'm actually going to. That's fascinating. Yeah, it's a personal narrative. I mean, he's gone on to write lots of other things and it's actually a short piece, but I always find it moving myself when I read it. And yeah. So with the rise of second wave feminism in the 50s, 60s and 70s,

How did they wrestle with fat? Was fat at the forefront of these movements or was it something that they kind of shied? Was it like an underground discussion? You know, a little bit of both on the one hand. And I think this is true, actually. And I really map this in my book from the suffragist movement as well. So in the early part of the 20th century, that fat is such a sign of.

an uncivilized body. Feminism is many things, but it is also an attempt to claim a space as a citizen in the public sphere.

Fatness seems to be something that you can change and it can morph into this body that's acceptable. Do you know? So I think that's why you see so many, even like someone like Michelle Obama, for instance, do you know who would have been criticized so resoundingly as a black woman daring to take this public space? Do you know? And it's like, but she keeps her body in order, you know, with her really huge emphasis on, you know,

on the fit body. So there's that emphasis, which and, you know, even fat is a feminist issue really was focused so much on kind of like the reason women are fat, the mental issues, you know, dealing with abuse, et cetera. But at the same time,

There's a whole nother movement that starts to challenge that to say, do you know, this is really about the male gaze. So a lot, especially among black feminists saying this is another way that we are just being targeted. So people like Johnny Tillman wrote in Ms. Magazine that.

saying, you know, I'm old, I'm poor and I'm fat and I'm nothing, do you know? Because I mean, and she wasn't saying she was nothing. She was like, you know, but she was saying the world recognizes me as a problem because of all of those things.

And there were white feminists who were active in like the fat underground, which I love their acronym was FU. So it was great. But who really were like, this is about being able to claim space and say we deserve to actually live.

as fat women. And that was especially fueled by fat white lesbian women, that movement of the fat underground. So we have those kind of two parallel movements there that are challenging. What I would say is that the flip side of kind of mainstream feminism or achievement feminism

which has pretty much kept a focus on that thinness. The other thing that weight in women particularly is associated with is age. Because when we are teenagers, 15, 16, it's much easier to lose the weight. Your body isn't fully developed. You're rail thin. And as you get older, your body changes shape. It becomes much harder to lose the weight.

Do you think that that plays a part in this as well, is that fat is also about devaluing women as they age? I haven't really written about that, but I think you're spot on with that. It just popped in my head there. Well, I mean, I think you're spot on with that and especially, you know, sort of the

how it's found is so unacceptable as women's bodies, not just become larger, but actually become their shapes change. Right. So a thicker waist, a bigger stomach that is seen as inherently diseased. And, um,

It's interesting because I'm not a physician, so I don't like to, you know, I realize sometimes I'm being asked to go down a kind of rabbit hole of medical advice. And I always remind people I'm a cultural studies scholar, so I don't, it's not my thing. But I do read a lot of medical materials now, though. And so, for instance, you know, there have been people who have done these kind of meta studies. And I was thinking Kathleen Flagle is the one, probably the most famous medical

Of the BMI, so to go back to the BMI, that...

Really morbidity and mortality only gets associated with the very, very far ends of that. That actually people's healthiest spot appears to be in the overweight category. And that's particularly true for women. And I mean, some of her work, like there are other, there are some of the scholars she's writing with who might speculate on why that might be, but it's really speculation. She's just trying to lay out the facts, like the statistical facts on that.

I mean, maybe it's like I look at my own mother who died at age 90. If she hadn't been a little bit hefty in her 50s, she was the size of a bird when she died. Do you know what I mean? I feel like her this is my own intuitive sense. I feel like that weight protected her, you know, for those years as she had some health problems and she was able to live until she was old. My point there is just that we sort of make things into be a disease, right?

without actually looking at some of the more complexities. I think it has a lot more to do with, I think our cultural ideas get in the way of us being able to think clearly and ask good questions. We'll be back with Amy after this short break.

We'll see you next time.

With over 600,000 five-star reviews, this best-selling foundation is going viral for a reason. Take the Power Match quiz now at ilmakiage.com slash quiz. I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. Dear old work platform, it's not you, it's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

I think that fat phobia is actually incredibly entrenched in our culture. And I think that we all carry it with us in a lot of ways, like to undo that internalizing of shame and that because we're so quick to judge people who are overweight. And I'm not even talking about hollering at people in the street, but like the assumption that if someone's overweight, they must be unhealthy, for example. Like that's a stigma. And you don't know anything about that.

person's weight at all. And then also this ongoing thing of, but why do you feel the need to comment on someone else's body when it has absolutely nothing to do with you whatsoever? It's strange the way it works. It is. And then also to go back to your question about eugenics, it has such...

really pernicious effects as well, not just on people's individual lives, like the discrimination they face from the time, you know, they're even babies on the playground, you know, through schooling, workplace, romance, doctor's offices. But I was just actually had a visit in my fat studies class today by a scholar by the name of April Herndon. And she writes about

About women with high BMI is not getting access to either IVF treatments or I know from other studies that she didn't write about this per se, but not being accepted even for adoptions. And some of my students were asking, but isn't that because they would have the success rate would be lower, right?

I think we need to look at like sort of what are the legitimating reasons that people give to to legitimate their fat stigma. But what that means then, though, is that you are ensuring that fat women don't have access to reproduce. Do you know? And I think that's so if we think about she doesn't necessarily make the argument about eugenics. That's me about that.

I think in the UK, you can't get fertility treatment on the NHS if your weight is above a certain point. And certainly it used to be the case with it was featured into adoption as well. I'm not sure if it still does, but that's just because it's just that assumption, isn't it? That if you are of a certain weight, then you must be unhealthy and an unfit parent. That's wild. But to return to the BMI and the tyranny of it, when did it get started?

such a stranglehold on us? Because you were saying earlier that there has been work to challenge this, that there have been scientists to lay out all the information and go, well, actually, it's not a good indicator. It's all it can tell you is how tall and heavy somebody is. That's pretty much it. It can't tell you how healthy somebody is. Yeah. I think it's sort of a perfect storm from my point of view of

are really strong ideology, fat phobic ideology that started back really in the 18th century, really gained steam in the 19th century and then into the 20th century. So this

idea that fatness is a sign of a deformed body, you know, of a deviant body. And a deviant person as well. That association is there. Yeah, absolutely. A person that has atavistic traits. So meaning like primitive traits inside themselves that need to be

eradicated so much so that like a real human being by definition has to be thin as you, I think you put it earlier, like the water we swim in or the air we breathe that coupled with now in the United States. So I don't know what it is in the UK, but in the United States, we have a $90 billion weight loss industry. There's a lot of vested interest in not letting go of this. Do you know? So if you have money and ideas, you,

that merge together, it's difficult to get that to release. Like the bottom line is, is if I'm supposed to be in a natural, naturally thin state, much thinner than I am now to be healthy, why is it so hard to get there? Like if that's supposed to be my natural state,

that I'm supposed to go and glow with health. Why do I have to stop eating in order to get there? That doesn't make any sense at all. Well, and what's interesting now, too, is all the new medications. I was just going to ask you about that. What's your take on that? Well, I want to put a caveat out there that those drugs, I think, have been found to be really successful for people who have diabetes and a few other health problems. And I also would want to put a

That individual people are making their own choices. And I don't think it's useful for us to get involved in like blaming people for making the choices they make within the culture that we live in. Okay, so I'm going to say all that. And then I'm going to say, I think it's going to be really difficult for us.

a person now to quote unquote, choose to be fat. That there's gonna be so much pressure and there already is pressure to have younger people taking it. And we don't really know what the effects of that are long-term.

But also like, we just don't know. Like, I just find it like it's it's really is about I remember some fat activists who I was reading who were like the fat underground in the 1980s and then other activists in the 90s saying this war on fat is really a war on fat people. And it's about a desire to eradicate the existence of fat people.

And so many people reacted to that, like these people are so radical and out there. And I just think, were they really? Do you know, like, were they really that extreme in that idea? When you look at now, like, is there going to be a pressure that if one shows any signs of, as they used to call it, adiposity, if any signs of adipose tissue appear,

that you're going to have to take that medicine. It's like the ultimate challenge to the body positivity movement. It feels like having come through the early 2000s, when I look back now at the news stories around women that we were told were fat, and I just, that's...

insane like Bridget Jones was supposed to be fat and Kate Winslet and Titanic got mocked for being fat and now I look at them like my god but it felt like we did a lot of work to get to the point where it's like actually that rail thin size zero I'm not sure they were very healthy or happy and we were being more inclusive and then all of a sudden Ozempic hit and now like everyone's shrinking again

Yeah, really shrinking, like really shrinking to the point where you don't recognize people. I think you'd find it, you know, they look completely different. So as a final question then to all of this, what do you think is the future of the BMI? Do you think that we'll get rid of it? Because it has been discredited, hasn't it? Like we know now, we know that we're not supposed to weigh the same amount as a 19th century Belgian teenager. Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really good question, though. It might disappear, but I think something else will take its place. I don't see it disappearing. And I don't want to be negative. I don't. But I feel like there's such a desire to map our bodies in ways that it's about mapping our individual bodies. And somehow our individual body needs to be then treated and targeted.

as opposed to, you know, I look around and think of everything that is making us sick right now. Wildfires, microplastics, lack of just basic health care, war. And I don't mean I mean, like, how many people does it kill? Do you know? Yeah. And then we go to the doctor and we get targeted for like our bodies being mapped again. To me, it's a bigger question than just because it might disappear, but there'll be some other way of measuring.

It feels more like we need to have a whole new way of thinking about what would be health. Amy, you have been marvelous to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, and frankly, they should, where can they find you? Well, you can look up my book, Fat Shame. I also have a new reader out that's called the Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies. And that's actually...

Open Access. So you can just look that up and get that. And that has so many different great authors in there. And I have a new book coming out next October, a change of subject. It's called Intrepid Girls, The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Will you come back and speak to us about that? That sounds fascinating. Love to. I would love to. So Amy, thank you so much for joining us. You've been brilliant. Great to talk to you.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Amy for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you want us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hi, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Coming up, we've got episodes on the biggest red light district in Europe and Michelangelo's sex life all coming your way.

This podcast was edited by Tom DeLarge and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

Did you know one in two women wear the wrong foundation? Matching foundation is hard, but ill maquillage makes it easy. Take the Power Match Quiz to find a perfect match in seconds, customized to your unique skin tone, undertone, and coverage needs. With 600,000 five-star reviews, Woke Up Like This is our best-selling foundation for a reason. Available in 50 shades of weightless natural coverage. And with Try Before You Buy, you can try your full size at home for 14 days. Just pay shipping.

Take the quiz at ilmakiaj.com slash quiz. That's I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. Renew your health and wellness purpose this new year with The Reset on Allo Moves, a curated weekly program of Pilates, strength, and step goals to kickstart your fitness journey. It's a 30-day week-by-week program. Three days of Pilates, two days of strength.

and 8,000 daily steps, plus bonus nutrition tips from Saqqara. Plus, for only $99, you get a year's worth of access to Allo Moves, on-demand, full studio experience wherever you are. Get moving today at allomoves.com.