Excerpt
The Latina Anti-Diet
1Las Dietas and YouChula Story: Vanessa Vanessa is a twenty-seven-year-old living in L.A., where she works as a schoolteacher. She found me on Instagram and began working with me a year after her doctor told her that she was “obese” and needed to lose weight. No matter how good the results that came back from her lab work, they always pushed her to lose weight, saying that if she didn’t change her ways, she would most certainly become diabetic because of her BMI. Her doctor told her that the Mexican food she was eating was “bad” and that because she was eating rice and tortillas, she had a 50 percent chance of becoming diabetic.
In a panic, Vanessa did what anyone would do: She started a diet. She first began dieting when she was fifteen, in preparation for her quinceañera, and her participation in diets continued into her adulthood. This is a story that many of you know: starting a diet for a specific reason, only to have to repeat the cycle again later on.
And in this case, Vanessa was asked by her doctor to diet again. She cut out all Mexican foods, began counting calories, and soon became obsessed. She could not stop thinking about food and calories and “earning” what she ate. As many people do when they go on rigorous diets, she lost weight, but her friends started noticing how preoccupied she was and became worried. Her hair was thinning, her nails were brittle, and she barely ate and spent all her time at the gym.
To many this seems “healthy”—she was constantly being told how amazing she looked and how much willpower she had. The constant reassurance kept her wanting to keep going. A year later, she went back to the doctor and was told that everything she had done was not enough because her BMI was still not normal. Throughout this chapter, we will follow Vanessa’s story to discuss how diet culture was created and how weight stigma within the medical system can cause more harm than good.
Dismantling Diet CultureBefore we can discuss the steps we can take on our journey to achieve food freedom, we first need to look at what has negatively impacted our relationship with food in the first place. And the primary suspect is diet culture.
Diet culture is a societal belief system that values and promotes the idea that intentional weight loss, thinness, and restrictive eating is the only way to achieve health and well-being. This belief system has been heavily perpetuated by Western media and capitalism, as I will show throughout this chapter. When I search “healthy eating” in my Instagram search bar at the time of this writing, I am inundated with images and videos that primarily emphasize weight loss, low calorie swaps, meals for staying full while cutting calories, and body composition.
This system of beliefs makes us feel inferior, like we need to change and that everything about our cultures, our looks, and our bodies is wrong. It instills fear that if we are not thin, we are not healthy. If we are not restricting, we are not healthy, and if we are not eating like a white woman, you guessed it, we are not healthy.
It’s pretty clear that our society is obsessed with thinness, and this obsession stems from more than one place, including beliefs in the medical community and the media’s perpetuation of beauty standards. In associating thinness with goodness and social acceptance, society pressures all of us to feel like we need to be thin to be considered worthy. And as you’ll see, that’s a slippery slope that many of us can fall down.
BMI Is Bullshit!I am sure Vanessa’s story resonated with many of you, and I am sure many of you have been personally victimized by BMI. BMI is an acronym for “body mass index.” The formula used to calculate BMI is the medical system’s favorite little equation to supposedly figure out health. But as many before me have pointed out, it isn’t an accurate measure of health, and it was never intended to be. I personally define it as an equation that uses our height and weight to determine if we are worthy of being treated with dignity and respect by the medical system. The truth is that many of us have probably been told we are in a higher-than-normal BMI category, and that’s made us feel like utter shit. Let’s break down the history and the ridiculousness behind this little equation.
The basis for BMI was created in the 1830s by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician, statistician, and sociologist. He was on a mission to define the “normal” man representing the population and “ideal” beauty. The formula uses your weight in kilograms divided by your height in meters squared. Quetelet himself did not think it should be used for individuals, but rather for populations—after all, he was a statistician. Quetelet cofounded the school of positivist criminology, a doctrine that laid the groundwork for eugenics, which was an ideology that had begun popping up in the late nineteenth century. Eugenics is the “science” of improving human genetics through various interventions (does this sound eerily similar to the wellness world of today?). For example, Italian criminologist and doctor Cesare Lombroso theorized that a person with “marks of degeneration” was more likely to commit crimes. In other words, an individual’s appearance, such as the shape of their cheeks or the size of their ears, was used to gauge their dangerousness. While Lombroso’s theory of atavism is largely rejected feels repetitive with largely, I find it important to share that different researchers in this time period, from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, emphasized physical characteristics to a point of dehumanizing them. Basically, white men used BMI to identify what bodies were (and still are) considered ideal and beautiful while pathologizing and trying to erase undesirable characteristics and disabilities to better the white race.
Many will argue that BMI itself was not created to be racist. But the thing is, BMI was conceptualized during a time when prevailing attitudes labeled people of color—specifically Black people—as “savages” and white individuals as the “ideal” of beauty. At the time, people who looked like the global majority weren’t technically viewed as people, so saying BMI wasn’t explicitly created to be racist erases the fact that Black people were dehumanized based on their appearance. And this remains true today.
BMI became a method of determining ideal health as early as 1895 with the introduction of a height and weight table that became a life-insurance industry standard. By the 1940s, a tool that was intended for standardization in developing life-insurance policies became a new standard on its own for identifying ideal body weights in the medical field. In the 1950s, doctors started using these charts to determine the “desirable weight” of their patients. To this day, BMI is used by both medical providers and insurance companies. While the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurance companies from using BMI as a factor to approve or deny coverage, it is not uncommon for folks in larger bodies to be delayed medical procedures until they’ve lost weight first.
Then Ancel Keys, an American physiologist who studied primarily diets and heart disease, decided to take a fresh look at determining what was a “healthy” weight. In 1972 he published a paper reporting on his comparisons of different anthropometric methods of measuring body fat. In this particular paper, Keys analyzed data from about 7,500 middle-aged men from the United States, Japan, Italy, Finland, and South Africa. (Note that this one study, even with a large sample size, includes young and older working men, without much diversity for race or class.) After this study, more researchers started to use Keys’s weight-divided-by-height-squared formula, and the term “body mass index” was coined. Then, in 1985, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to use BMI categories in its definitions of “overweight” and “obesity.” The World Health Organization (WHO) adopted BMI in the early 1990s.
The current categories are as follows:
If your BMI is < 18.5 kg/m2, it falls within the underweight range.
If your BMI is 18.5 to < 25 kg/m2, it falls within the healthy weight range.
If your BMI is 25 to < 30 kg/m2, it falls within the “overweight” range.
If your BMI is 30 kg/m2 or higher, it falls within the “obesity” range.
Before 1998, the NIH classified a BMI of 18.5 to less than 27.8 for men and less than 27.3 for women as normal, but in that year the upper limit for that category was reduced for all people to less than 25, making nearly thirty million Americans overweight or obese overnight. That stirred up a lot of controversy. This decision was made to streamline the BMI classifications, but the change in the categorization of millions of people had a medical and social impact. The impact I’m talking about is weight stigma, which we will discuss later in this chapter.
