There's been a lot of conversation in the body positive space about public "health journeys," and the potential harm influencers can do when they aren't careful about their words.

There's a lot of "their body, their choice" rhetoric popping up again.

So let's talk about it.

A disclaimer, I still have size privilege and while my eating disorder history has resulted in a lot of weight cycling for me, I carry some amount of privilege regardless.

So I'm going to speak specifically as someone with an eating disorder, impacted by diet culture.

The context: A very visible body positive influencer recently discussed her health journey, as someone with a chronic condition that limited her mobility and caused her pain.

This video has been upsetting to a lot of folks within body positive and fat liberation spaces.

The reasons WHY people are upset are being misrepresented, though.

No one's saying that this influencer can't pursue health-promoting behaviors that are specific to her condition and her needs.

It's the framing, the language, and the audience that aren't landing.

One of the big pitfalls we see when influencers share their "journeys" is the continued moralizing of food. Good foods, bad foods, or trying to obscure their intentions by saying "special occasion foods" or "celebratory foods."

Diet culture benefits from moralizing food. Human beings don't.

We can talk about food in neutral terms! Without shaming or prescribing a certain relationship to different types of food. It can be harmful, though, to suggest some foods are inherently good or bad.

"I wasn't eating the variety of foods that my body needs" lands differently than "I was eating bad foods that I shouldn't have been eating."

In both cases, you're talking about needing to expand your food options. But the latter suggests a correct and "right" way of doing so.

For folks with eating disorders, fat folks who have been shamed for their food choices, and anyone negatively impacted by diet culture, moralizing food can lead to disordered behaviors that are NOT in tune with what's good for our bodies AND our brains.

Further, it perpetuates a culture of shame around eating, and the false idea that what we eat has the biggest impact on our health. In reality, health is much more complex — it's a constellation of genetic, environmental, emotional, physiological, and social factors.

So when we ask influencers to use their words in a responsible way — one that doesn't attach shame or moral judgments to food choices — it's not about silencing them. It's asking them to consider the contribution they're making in this larger conversation.

It requires intention, yes. But so does recording, editing, uploading, and marketing your videos online, you know? The extra step means reducing the harm that comes with perpetuating a culture that makes people feel like shit about nourishing themselves.

When your primary audience is people likely to be struggling with their bodies and their relationship to food, or people who are trying to educate themselves on that experience, it's worthwhile to consider how our telling of our own stories might still uphold harmful narratives.

Widening that lens for a minute, framing health itself as a moral imperative — even if you're just speaking to your own experience — is questionable.

"I gave up on my health and by doing so, I gave up on myself" is a very common narrative in fitness communities and it absolutely sucks, especially because it carries the assumption that fat people are helpless, irresponsible, unmotivated, lazy, etc etc.

Again, there's a difference:

"I realized that I needed to pay more attention to the role movement plays in my life, and by doing so, I saw where I'd disconnected from my body's needs"

versus

"I stopped caring about myself and I let myself go"

There's a difference between "I rediscovered movement as a way to alleviate my chronic pain" and "I didn't care about myself before but look! Now I do, because I'm exercising just like the normies do!"

The subtext, which I'm attempting to pull out here, is the difference between upholding and challenging diet culture. A culture which suggests that food restriction, regimented exercise, and a small body size are the fundamentals of health, when they so clearly are not.

The best, "healthiest" body is the body that allows you to live your life in an emotionally supported, nourished, easeful way.

This is why my chubby, transgender body is exactly as it should be — recovered from an eating disorder and gender-affirmed.

But when we start assigning moral rules to food, movement, access, and ability — speaking as though those rules of what's good, bad, possible, and necessary apply equally to us all — it's no longer about the unique dimensions of individual wellbeing. It's about diet culture.

And when we suggest that pursuing specific diet culture-approved behaviors will make us inherently better people (more actualized, more responsible, more driven, etc), we are now assigning judgments not only to food, but to bodies and real fuckin' people living in them.

"Health journey" has become synonymous with "exercise and restrictive eating journey." And that means that influencers who use this framing are just perpetuating a culture that makes health synonymous with a VERY limited scope of what helps us live better, more nourished lives.

These "journeys" are also often synonymous with privilege, too — access to certain foods, forms of movement, and resources that make all of that more feasible. And to pretend that this is The Path to Wellness And Goodness suggests that privileged folks = inherently better.

The point is, sure, you can talk about YOUR specific relationship to health, but if it's still using archaic definitions of what health is, it's still upholding a larger narrative that harms people and it still reinforces a culture of stigma and shame.

Words matter. A lot.

Influencers can say whatever they want. But their audiences can, too. And when communities are asking public figures not to play into tired stereotypes, and be thoughtful about the framework they rely on to tell their own story, that's valid as fuck criticism we should welcome.

In my ranting last night, I didn’t tag and mention that @fatgirlfreedom started this conversation first! It’s over on Youtube, with this super honest video:

I want to invite folks to both watch it AND see the starkly different reactions we’re getting.

While she’s getting blasted online, the responses to my thread have been more or less positive. Hold that for a minute.

Because this is the difference between a superfat calling out diet culture, versus someone who is ~acceptably plus-size~ / smaller having that conversation. Like, an exact case study.

There’s a lot to be said about who we consider to be “credible” in conversations about health, fatphobia, and diet culture.

I don’t carry anywhere near the same burden, so I don’t carry the same expertise! And yettttt... I’m given a LOT more respect.

So do me a favor? If you appreciated this thread, go give @fatgirlfreedom a follow as well. And show the video some love, too.

Because at the end of the day, if we were truly listening to superfat folks in the first place, this conversation would be old, old news.