Have the new weight-loss drugs changed what it means to be body positive?

This episode explores the impact of new weight-loss drugs on the body positivity movement, questioning the long-held ideals of health and body image.

1. New weight-loss drugs are challenging the core beliefs of the body positivity movement.
2. The societal obsession with thinness is deeply rooted in culture and media, often overshadowing genuine health concerns.
3. Personal experiences and medical perspectives suggest health is multi-faceted and not solely dependent on weight.
4. The dialogue around these drugs and body image reveals a complex, often conflicted relationship with weight loss.
5. The episode underscores the importance of distinguishing between physical health and societal beauty standards.

1: Cultural Contradictions

The episode opens with an exploration of American food culture versus the slim ideal, setting the stage for the ensuing discussion on body image. Juana Summers: "Americans love to eat, yet culture prizes a certain kind of body."

2: The Rise of Weight-Loss Drugs

Discussion on new weight-loss drugs and their impact on public perceptions of body positivity. Heather Gay: "It's disappointing to know that body positivity was all a big lie because it's better to not be overweight."

3: Media and Health

Analyzes the media's role in reinforcing unhealthy body standards. Samhita Mukhopadhyay: "We have a culture that worships thinness."

4: Redefining Health

Explores how recent shifts, including weight-loss drugs, challenge the synonymous view of health and thinness. Samhita Mukhopadhyay: "Your fitness level, your blood work, and your proportions matter more than your weight."

1. Evaluate health beyond weight: Focus on blood work, fitness, and overall well-being instead of just the scale.
2. Question cultural norms: Be critical of how media and culture influence your perceptions of health and body image.
3. Embrace food diversity: Incorporate a balanced diet that includes all food groups, mindful of personal body reactions.
4. Increase mobility: Engage in regular physical activity that is enjoyable and sustainable for your lifestyle.
5. Seek personalized medical advice: Consult healthcare providers who understand your health history and needs.

America is a land of contradictions; while we're known as a nation that loves to eat, we also live within a culture that has long valued thinness as the utmost beauty standard.

Over the last several years the body positivity movement has pushed back on that notion. But then came a new class of weight-loss drugs.

New York Magazine contributing writer Samhita Mukhopadhyay grapples with the possible future of a movement like this in her recent article, So Was Body Positivity All A Big Lie?

She joins All Things Considered host Juana Summers to discuss the ever-evolving conversation on health, size, and whose business that is in the first place.

People

Juana Summers, Heather Gay, Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Companies

NPR, New York Magazine

Guest Name(s):

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Content Warnings:

None

Now you can supersize your McDonald's extra value meal with a supersize order of our golden fries for about the same price. Seven eleven's big gulp gives you the freedom to enjoy a bigger coke. Americans love to eat. There's nothing better than a subway series foot long, except when you add a new footlong sidekick. What do you call a crunchwrap with double the seasoned beef, a crunchy taco, and a large drink for just $5?

Juana Summers
And big food and restaurants have been there and are there to meet the demand. Hydroxycut, America's number one weight loss brand, helps you lose weight your way. Let MMC, weight loss, and wellness design a medically supervised program which will help you to meet your weight loss goals. Slim fast. Pick a date, lose the weight.

At the same time, american culture prizes a certain kind of body. Jane Fonda admitted that she was bulimic in the eighties, and I think we have to learn from this that it. Pays off one that's not always compatible with eating a lot of highly caloric food. But for the last several decades, there's been a counterpoint to the idea that being thin is all that matters. In the 1960s, it was the fat activism movement.

That movement evolved over several decades into the current body positivity movement. Every version of you has been a good version. The version of you with stretch marks and the version of you without. The version of you with acne. The version of you that wore smaller pants.

The version of you that wore ten sizes bigger than you do now. All those versions are good. But that message to accept and praise bodies of any shape and any size has been challenged in recent years by a new class of weight loss drugs, GLP one s, that are sold under names like Wagovi and Zepbound. They mimic a hormone that increases the feeling of fullness and decreases food intake. And it's disappointing to sad to know that body positivity was all a big lie because it's better to not be overweight.

Juana Summers
That's Heather Gay, star of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, talking to ABC's Nightline about her decision to go on weight loss drugs. Did she say the quiet part out loud? Consider this body acceptance activists have been trying to change american attitudes toward being overweight for generations. In recent years, they've gained a measure of success. Now that there's a so called miracle drug for weight loss, could that mean the end of the body positivity movement?

From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

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Juana Summers
It's consider this from NPR. There is a lot of noise, particularly for women, around what it means to have a healthy body, how you get it and how you keep it. Don't eat carbs. Don't eat fat. Do eat protein.

Run, do yoga. Lift weights. But at the end of the day, having a healthy body has been synonymous with one thing being thin. Yet in recent years, that idea has been challenged by body positivity activists who have preached a message of healthy at any size. And now, with the arrival of a new class of weight loss drugs, often referred to as miracle drugs.

Is the body positivity movement at risk of fading away? It's a question that New York magazine contributing writer Samita Mukopadai grapples with in her recent article. So was body positivity all a big lie? She joins me now to talk about her article. So I want to start by talking about this idea that being healthy and being thin are the same thing, which is one of the main things that you get into in this article.

Let's start there. How do you see it? The conventional wisdom has long been that no matter what your health problem is, if you go to the doctor, the doctor is going to tell you to lose weight, irrelevant of how your blood work may be or how your mobility issues are or your fitness level. And in the last couple of years, starting with body positive activists, but then also there's been quite a bit of research on this in medical science. They are seeing that the relationship between the size of your body and your health is not as linear as we have long thought right.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay
And so your fitness level really matters. Your proportions matter. Your blood work matters. And I think that one of the things that, you know, we're really grappling with this in this moment is that we're still a culture that loves thinness. Right.

And so it's really hard to separate that from health. We have so internalized this idea that if you're fat, you're unhealthy, and if you're thin, you're healthy. I mean, as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking about so many interactions I have had with healthcare professionals over the years where you come in with an ailment and it's like, well, how many calories are you burning? Or are you active enough? Or what's your normal lunch or dinner routine look like?

Juana Summers
And it can just be so frustrating. How do you think it is that we got to a point culturally where these two things are so intertwined and what I think many would argue could be a problematic way? You know, we have a culture that worships thinness. Right? And so, you know, Hollywood reinforces this, media reinforces this, and it's really always been the, like, thin at any cost.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay
Right. Like, we've never criticized what people have to do to get thin or how healthy that may be, whether that's physically healthy or healthy from a mental perspective, from, like, a psychological perspective. Right. But I do think that, you know, both this media reinforcement of a type of, you know, what is considered the ideal body size really fused with also this idea of taking, you know, weight in our health, which, let's be honest, there are personal factors that lead to our health outcomes, but a lot of them are systemic. Right?

Like access to healthy food, having grocery stores in your neighborhood, living in an environment where you feel comfortable going for a walk. Right. Like all of these things that are really systemic issues that impact health outcomes. I do think it's both this internal process of, you know, we judge ourselves if we gain a little weight. Oh, I'm, like, losing control.

I'm not eating right. I need to do this, you know, and those might be true also, right? Like, we know when we're not being our best selves and we're not taking care of ourselves. But the way that the systems kind of both our society, our culture, and the medical system continue to reinforce that, I think has made it very hard to disentangle those two things you've written. In this piece and others about your decision to go on Mounjaro.

Juana Summers
You've described it as a choice that you struggled with. And you've now been off of that medication for months. And I'm curious, how do you personally think about that? How has that experience changed if it has the way you feel about your body? Yeah, it's been really hard.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay
You know, the medication does a lot of different things. You know, you don't crave food as much. Right? Like, your relationship to food really changes. So fried food is really hard to digest.

If you eat too many sweets, you get really sick. And so there were certain things that happened while doing it where my body would have a really exaggerated reaction to something that I would have normally just eaten and been like, oh, my God, I'm being so bad. And it was like, no, you're being real bad, girl. Like, stop eating this, you know? And so that did force me to eat fresher foods and more vegetables and more fruit.

And I was craving, like, I always wanted something crunchy, so I, like, wanted crunchy salads and things like that. And that did actually have an impact on my behavior, even coming off the medication. And without it, I can tell how I feel when I'm eating well or I decide to indulge, which I do. I'm human. I love food.

Juana Summers
Same. You know, and I'm the child of immigrants. We have delicious food, like, I eat rice, like, all of these things, but really figuring out how to kind of balance that and what my doctor had originally said about increased mobility was true. I had gotten to a point where for me and for my body, the size of my body was impacting my mobility in very subtle ways, but they were painful. And as I get older, I was feeling knee pain and ankle pain.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay
And as I started to move more, I mean, really all I did was I started walking. Like, I started going on these, like, five to seven mile hikes and walks. And that mobility really changed my outlook. It changed my mental health. It changed my body.

And so even as I am, you know, gaining back some of the weight, I've managed to maintain some of the lifestyle changes. And I think that that's, like, a really key piece of this that we don't talk about as much, which is, you know, how can this actually be used strategically to support people that do want to take better care of themselves? You've been open about this. You've written multiple times about your experience on Manjaro, and since then, what has that experience been like for you? It's been really hard.

It took me, like, two months to write this piece. And I think part of it is it is very hard to color within the lines that have been drawn for us in this conversation. Right. It's either that you completely support it, you want to take it. It's a great medical intervention.

We should all want to be thin, right? That's the dominant narrative. But then the counter narrative is also that we accept our bodies as we are. And as I write about in the piece, a lot of pressure within the community to say that any move towards weight loss is perpetuating this idea that thinness is the ultimate ideal. And so part of what I wanted to, I was like, this is messy.

I don't even have all the answers. But I just know that the way that I am navigating this, as somebody who is a feminist, someone who is committed to body positivity, but also somebody who is facing some serious health related concerns that I wanted to address and get ahead of, I could not be alone in this experience. And so, yeah, it's been challenging, but it's been overwhelmingly positive in terms of the outreach that I've gotten and how many people have shared their own personal stories. I mean, my DM's are paragraphs and paragraphs of, like, heartbreaking, you know, gutting stories of people going to the doctor, the experiences that they've had or, you know, mobility issues or just so many different experiences that people have had, or even celebrities have reached out to me and said, you know, I was feeling really judgmental about these drugs. And, like, this really helped me understand, like, you know, how I should really be thinking about it.

So it's been good. Samita Mukopada is a contributing writer with New York magazine. Her latest article in the cut is so was body positivity all a big lie? Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Juana Summers
This episode was produced by Mark Rivers with audio engineering by Neil T. Volt. It was edited by Courtney Dorney. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

It's consider this from NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay
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