Personal Narratives and Case Studies

"When I realized all of our drinking glasses were really just Prego spaghetti sauce jars." 1. "We never had any other kids cartoon channels other than PBS KIDS. My friends now talk about how much they loved watching SpongeBob SquarePants and Steven Universe, and I've never seen those shows." 2. "During third grade when I got sent home because my shirts kept showing my belly. My mom couldn't afford to buy new clothes when I grew. The teacher was always super rude about it too and acted like I...

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what...

"About three months after I was born, my father was incarcerated. As a toddler, I was poor but housed. Mom and I stayed with a paraplegic meth dealer named Tony who used to employ my father. After that, up until the age of 14, life depended on Mom’s relationship with a man who sold insurance. When they were on, there was money. When they were off, there wasn’t. Through high school, it was all poverty — abject, uninterrupted and more severe than what had preceded it. I was on the margin’s...

How can linguistic anthropology help illuminate the connections between dietetics, fatphobia, and racism? Recently, a Twitter user wrote: “There is a fat politics movement. Come on in. The water’s fine.” Linguistic anthropology needs to “come on in,” as it were, to the fat politics movement. Specifically, we need to harness our analytical insights into the co-constitution of language, the body, and social differences to understand how people in this “fat-talk nation” produce and contest...

It’s 6 p.m. on the patio at Il Moro, a twinkly-lit Italian gastro pub in West Los Angeles, and Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole are intuitively eating their dinner. They start with warm, crusty bread, liberally dipped in olive oil, and then move on to salad, branzino and the penne tossed with little pillows of burrata that Ms. Resch ordered for the table. In accordance with one of intuitive eating’s 10 principles — “challenge the food police” — neither woman moralizes about the carbs. “The...

Our society has long treated weight gain as a function of insufficient willpower. If you’re overweight, it’s because you chose to be. You ate too much, or you didn’t exercise enough. You lack the virtue and the discipline of the thin. This story is great. It is great for punishing anyone who struggles with weight. It is great for justifying discrimination and maltreatment. But it is just nonsense if you take even a cursory look at the data. And Stephan Guyenet has looked — and I put this...

This writer expresses an essential idea about health. She writes about existing comfortably in her own skin as the motivation to be fit and eat healthy. I often think the field of health and wellness is doing a disservice to us all by ignoring this message and instead promoting healthy eating/exercise for weightloss or illness prevention. Sure exercise and diet can affect those things, but our messages also promote confusion, stress and anxiety, unattainable standards, body shaming, and diet...

Saeeda Hafiz, author of The Healing: One Woman's Journey from Poverty to Inner Riches, is a nutrition educator for San Francisco Unified School District, wellness expert, trained cook, and yoga teacher. "On the surface, she was an accomplished professional. Beneath the exterior, however, she suffered from her past and her family challenges, including domestic violence, addiction and poverty that she witnessed throughout her childhood. Through her writing, Saeeda takes us on a journey...

The thing about something like fatphobia is that it touches every part of your life. It shapes what you desire. It molds your personality. It changes the trajectory of your dreams. You lose sight of which part is you and which part is it. I mean honestly that's true for all of us for one reason or another. You never get to know what your story could be if it hadn’t been touched by gender education or racism or all those years that someone made fun of your knees or a lifetime of being told...

It is traumatic when your family does not share the food they have. Not because it is in short supply rather it is done out of meanness of spirit. However, as a child, you conclude you are not good enough, you do not belong. It is painful to be excluded.

"Victims of childhood sexual abuse are far more likely to become obese adults. New research shows that early trauma is so damaging that it can disrupt a person’s entire psychology and metabolism -- Women [have] said they felt more physically imposing when they were bigger. They felt their size helped ward off sexual advances from men." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/12/sexual-abuse-victims-obesity/420186/

Kiarra’s struggles with her weight are imbued with this sense, that getting thin is a mystery she might never solve, that diet secrets are literally secret. On a Sunday, she might diligently make a meal plan for the week, only to find herself reaching for Popeyes fried chicken by Wednesday. She blames herself for her poor health—as do many of the people I met in her community, where obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are ubiquitous. They said they’d made bad choices. They used food, and...