Oprah Winfrey was the first black woman Whitney Trotter saw on TV –– and the first television figure to have conversations that affected young black girls like her. But beyond those groundbreaking TV moments, interviews, and trailblazing successes, Trotter — now a registered dietitian — remembers that Winfrey was known for something else: the size and shape of her body.
A moment in 1988 left a mark on many people when Winfrey went on her nationally syndicated show pulling a small red cart with 67 pounds of animal fat, equivalent to the amount of weight she had lost at the time.
Immediately, people were watching to see when she got it back, how she would lose it again, and — most recently — whether she would use a drug like GLP-1 (in Ozempic and Wegovy) to try to make her body smaller.
While this public attention is specific to celebrities, the scrutiny Winfrey faced at every step of the way as her body changed is something many people face, says Alexis Conason, a psychologist and certified eating disorder specialist in New York City.
This scrutiny is a product of food culture, the influences and messages that affect the way we eat, based on cultural pressure to achieve an ideal body type, according to experts.
“This sense of wanting to bring people down, and especially reducing women to their appearance and pointing out their flaws as a way to disempower, I think has been a really long-standing tactic used in the media,” says Conason. “And I think it continues (to this day).”
Criticism of Winfrey’s body shows how much of a losing game diet culture is, even if you are one of the most influential people in the world, according to experts.
Lose, win or keep –– the scrutiny continues
Many people have felt pressure from diet culture to lose weight, but often the expectation is that the scrutiny will end when that happens. And often, that’s simply not the case.
Whether maintaining, gaining or losing weight, many clients come to New York-based nutritionist Kimmie Singh, saying they feel like their body is under surveillance.
“It’s such a normalized thing—in magazines, but also when talking about people at the dinner table,” reflects Singh, “or people congratulating the person who lost weight.”
Even if you reach the body size that society considers ideal, goals change to put pressure on you to achieve the correct body shape, according to Trotter, who is also a doctor of nursing and a psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner in Austin, Texas.
The myths about weight and size
Tied to this focus on other people’s bodies are two harmful ideas: that weight is under a person’s control and that a body’s size is connected to moral worth, according to Conason.
“There is a cultural narrative that it is morally inferior to be in a larger body,” she says. “There are all these associations with lazy fat, people not being as smart, people not being motivated, not caring about themselves, not being disciplined.”
People feel more justified in discriminating and being cruel if they believe these associations are true — especially if they think a person’s body size is within their control, according to Conason.
“It all comes down to the myth of personal responsibility regarding weight and body size, that if you try hard enough, you can achieve this cultural ideal of thinness and be accepted,” he adds.
This view of weight and acceptance is not true, according to Chika Anekwe, an obesity physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital Weight Center and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
While a segment of the population is biologically “resistant” to obesity, others can make major changes to their lifestyle and still be unable to maintain weight loss, says Anekwe. And with increasing changes in access to food, exercise and health care, people’s weight is becoming more out of their individual control, he adds.
One 2019 meta-analysis showed that more than 80% of weight loss is regained after five years.
“If people could simply choose their weight, size or body shape,” says Anekwe, “we wouldn’t have such a thriving diet culture industry.”
“Moral” Ways to Lose Weight
Even when people appear to be losing weight, they may still be losing the diet culture game.
The rise of GLP-1 medications, which were originally prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes but are now often used for weight loss, has popularized the idea that a smaller body is a matter of choice, according to Conason. She noted that this also adds another way society can examine how people lose weight.
This content was originally published in Aesthetic pressure: how women are still judged by their weight on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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