I just read a book by Swedish author Isabella Nilsson, "En bok för ingen: brev från en underpresterande övermänniska" (roughly: A book for no one: letters from an underacheiving übermench").
She's got anorexia and sits in her apartment reading philosophy (mostly Nietzsche) and fiction, writing down various thoughts and observations, ranging from silly puns to astute observations to very dark snippets of autobiography (great book which I recommend to everyone if it ever gets translated into English...). She says about the anorexia that yes, it's terrible and destructive and she once checked herself into mental hospital because of it (and was then horrified to find out that she had been registered under coercive care even though she went there on her own initiative, voluntarily seeking help, because apparently "anorexics always change their minds and bolt again"). But it also fills and have filled many different psychological functions over the years, and clinging to it has paradoxically functioned as a survival mechanism during dark and terrible times.
She recognizes her own anorexic experiences in lots of "great men" who stopped eating or ate very little for periods of time. But society, researchers and scholars, want to draw this sharp line between male and female experiences of self-starvation. For men, it's supposedly ALL about what functions this behaviour fills - even when it's seen as destructive rather than some cool "biohacking", as when scholars look at self-starving great poets of the past, it's all about artistry and creativity and GRAND psychological stuff. For women, it's all about going mental because you're obsessed with being thin, or maybe because of blabla genetics blabla neurology and hormones. Nothing more than that, nothing grander or more interesting.
Thanks for the sane discourse on this! I have been so much more at ease in being aware of all this stuff...I feel less guilty, I even went to the gym just wanting to swim for the floating feeling, which was great, ...not to go for any other reason felt like heaven! thank you!!! I look forward to reading your book!
Thank you so much for customary insights, your delightful and delicious discussion, dear Dr. Kate. As satisfying as my former lusty indulgence of crispy bacon, sans the interference of Lemon Bottle (whose slick packaging you have just got to appreciate, come on now...) I've been a pescatarian for 50 years, so I no longer know what that's like. But I do remember that the crispy fat was the best part.
There is always so much to unpack, but it always can be traced back to the capitalist milieu, and the craven complicity of benighted mass media. If the Kardashians think Ozempicgovy is a smart and sexy thing to do, then we plebe followers of the pop cultural message must fall in line. There is no underestimating how impactful the influence of the successful celebrity flavor of the week/month/year is. Underlying it is also the idea that being lean, and projecting that image, somehow indicates that you're on a sort of hero's journey, not available to the thicker amongst us.
In any event, please keep the enlightening posts coming, and I will keep eagerly absorbing them.
I so appreciate your perspective on these issues, particularly in this age of rapid adoption of the new weightloss and promises of 'solving the obesity epidemic.' Sigh. I also love that you hold space for the questions--and answers/comments--at the same time as you write through your own thoughts and experience in relationship to these, questioning fundamental beliefs that go far beyond the basic idea of our bodies and their size. Here for all of it. 💜
Thank you and all others that are putting words to things. I have learned so much. My radical NY resolutions are to take up space and people can deal with it or not as they like. Accept my appetite for a start then maybe even enjoy it. Read your book!
“I am getting better at accepting the body I have. It wasn’t a mental before and an after. It was a gradual yet important shift in the way I look at all bodies, my own body included.” This hit me hard. I want it so bad to be a before and after. Like I’ll wake up one day and I will no longer think about whether I’m fat or not. I’ve made great progress for sure but this shit is insidious. I quit drinking three years ago and for me looking at this and making these changes is so much harder.
I see it but at 44 there is an entirely new lie and scam being thrown at me. The cures for perimenopause. I want to believe so badly that if I just take x supplement or do x workout that all will be well, but I know from 30 years of the same bullshit- it’s all the same- just marketed different to different age groups. There are days when I tell me self that I can just go back to the old ways, over exercise, restrict, count etc. And that gives me comfort for a moment or two. But I know that trying to shrink doesn’t give me the relief I’m looking for. It never has. No matter the size, I was never satisfied or “happy”.
Thank you so much for writing this! Exactly what I needed to read this morning. Already ordered your book and cannot wait to read it.
Great post! Another cultural context for the idea of the transformative experience would be the nineteenth century novel. My students always guffaw at Scrooge waking up and doing a 180 on Christmas, or Marianne Dashwood recovering from illness only to stop pining after the hot cad and marry the middle aged man with the flannel waistcoats instead. But the overnight transformation makes a great story!
Wow! I just found this amazing NY Times article with a favorable mention of Kate Manne. I have to say - i didn't think this would happen, but subscribing to this substack I'm learning a whole new very valuable to know dimension of these issues. Much appreciated to Kate and y'all who are here!
I found you today through the "New York" article. I identify with what you're saying so much, it brings tears to my eyes. I'm 51 and I'm so tired of being at war with my body. Every decade of my adult life, I've lost weight and gained it all back so much so that I'm now at my heaviest and I feel yucky. I'm trying to rearrange my thinking in that I just want to be able to move — I don't want to be a fat 60 year old who can't get up and move around. But it's so much noise in my head that's been there for decades — seeing a body online or on tv that I find attractive and spiraling into things like "I'd love to look like that" to "I can never look like that" is just so exhausting. How do we untrain the brain to stop with all of it. I just want to eat healthy and be healthy and not focus on losing the weight — it's obvious I haven't lost it, it always finds me again. I want to have a healthy blood pressure and not drop dead of a heart attack...you don't see a lot of fat old people out there (maybe they're there, maybe this is just a stupid thing stuck in my head too). Ugh. I'm getting older, I'm tired of it all and I just want to be unapologetically me and not hate that clothes don't fit how I want or hate seeing myself in the mirror or wish this body looked different. Thanks for bringing it out into the light.
in the most earnest and good faith possible tone: read Paul Preciado. “Can the Monster Talk?” is short enough to get through in an afternoon, even counting going back to page one and starting again when you get to the end. (don’t worry about the register either. it’s literally a speech he gave to French psychoanalysts. I threw all that shit against the wall real dang hard in like 1992 but it’s mostly fine and good here)
it’s extremely difficult to think clearly about transformation from within acceptance.
i’m not here to fuck up the acceptance.
i do think we need to aggressively develop the ability to practice what Keats calls negative capability about it
Preciado is extremely r e f r e s h i n g in the sense/along the lines i mean and -- hm. it is salutary to do the occasional quick check that you’re not fully caught up in the shadows in Plato’s cave even if you are busily and *usefully* negotiating them
Perhaps another interesting way to frame this: Aspiration and transformation both promise a lot in terms of autonomy.
But your work shows clearly: What might seem like a positive impulse towards self-transformation and autonomy and taking control of your life (embodied in New Year’s Resolutions) is often anything but.
As you show, it actually turns out to be a particularly pernicious form of conformity——pernicious because it can involve all kinds of self-harm (as you show) and because it exposes us all kinds of (marketing, pharmaceutical, etc) manipulation.
It’d be interesting to think more about how this is all different from more traditional forms of (say) Christian or spiritual transformation: It’s more infected by a modern individualism, by the needs of capitalism (e.g., the need of markets to sell us things), by the cult of status, by a spirit of careerism. But, for all its talk about hard work being rewarded, it actually seems strangely divorced from deeper moral concerns: solidarity, compassion, equity, politics.
Ok, first, I love this blog. I love the in-your-face-ness of it.
Now I have a question. How do I ask it innocently, with (I should shout in all caps) NO SHAME NO BLAME NO JUDGMENT)
As a mostly skinny kid who in his teens made a lot of effort to gain weight. I just didn’t think about weight loss at all, so hardly paid attention from age 30 to 50 as I gained 40 pounds. I took it seriously when I discovered my blood pressure was 160/100, knew nothing about macros or calories, so just picked a semi random number, 1500 calories, and lost 30 pounds in 3 months and have kept it off since.
NO NO NO - not a judgment, or anecdote about losing weight, at least not primarily The main thing is, I noticed a significant drop in blood pressure. And over the 20 years since I did this, I’ve noticed in periods (once ever few years) when I gained 5 or 10 pounds, the BP would shoot up.
So, before I make any other horrific faux pas’ (I beg your forgiveness if already I’ve done so, really), is there a problem - philosophic, psychological, social or any kind - in doing this sort of thing for what I understand to be scientifically legit reasons related to blood pressure?
I’m asking not primarily for myself (I love eating this way - as a rule, it has to be easy, cheap, reasonably healthy (I love ice cream, brownies, etc so no hard and fast rules) and most of all, super delicious) - but as a psychologist I get a lot of people with all kinds of food issues. I always have to start with - why do you want to change? Do you think it wil make you feel better or other people care about you more? Can you imagine being just the way you are the rest of your life and being 110% self accepting, happy, fulfilled? Are you sure it’s worth it for purely health reasons?
I just want to make sure, since the folks here appear to be super well informed scientifically as well as philosophically and psychologically - I don’t make any inappropriate recommendations.
I see choosing Transformation as groping for control. I spent the latter half of my 30s learning to accept that, while I’d always thought of Adulthood as a fixed destination, a permanent self, change and uncertainty will in fact always be a part of my life. In a confusing and overwhelming world, who doesn’t want to be able to direct a major change?
I just finished listening to your book Kate. An excellent addition to the incredibly valuable material addressing bodies and health and weight and society ……I particularly liked the philosophical angles. Do you know of anyone who writes about aging in a fat body? I’m 60 and fat. Up until now my body has been strong and healthy. Now many of the things we’re warned about as fat people are happening. I don’t want to bore everyone with the details, but I would love to hear from other older folks about how they’re feeling. Thanks :)
I just read a book by Swedish author Isabella Nilsson, "En bok för ingen: brev från en underpresterande övermänniska" (roughly: A book for no one: letters from an underacheiving übermench").
She's got anorexia and sits in her apartment reading philosophy (mostly Nietzsche) and fiction, writing down various thoughts and observations, ranging from silly puns to astute observations to very dark snippets of autobiography (great book which I recommend to everyone if it ever gets translated into English...). She says about the anorexia that yes, it's terrible and destructive and she once checked herself into mental hospital because of it (and was then horrified to find out that she had been registered under coercive care even though she went there on her own initiative, voluntarily seeking help, because apparently "anorexics always change their minds and bolt again"). But it also fills and have filled many different psychological functions over the years, and clinging to it has paradoxically functioned as a survival mechanism during dark and terrible times.
She recognizes her own anorexic experiences in lots of "great men" who stopped eating or ate very little for periods of time. But society, researchers and scholars, want to draw this sharp line between male and female experiences of self-starvation. For men, it's supposedly ALL about what functions this behaviour fills - even when it's seen as destructive rather than some cool "biohacking", as when scholars look at self-starving great poets of the past, it's all about artistry and creativity and GRAND psychological stuff. For women, it's all about going mental because you're obsessed with being thin, or maybe because of blabla genetics blabla neurology and hormones. Nothing more than that, nothing grander or more interesting.
Thanks for the sane discourse on this! I have been so much more at ease in being aware of all this stuff...I feel less guilty, I even went to the gym just wanting to swim for the floating feeling, which was great, ...not to go for any other reason felt like heaven! thank you!!! I look forward to reading your book!
Thank you for this. I love your acceptance, not only of your own journey, but also of the journeys of others, which may be so different from your own.
Thank you so much for customary insights, your delightful and delicious discussion, dear Dr. Kate. As satisfying as my former lusty indulgence of crispy bacon, sans the interference of Lemon Bottle (whose slick packaging you have just got to appreciate, come on now...) I've been a pescatarian for 50 years, so I no longer know what that's like. But I do remember that the crispy fat was the best part.
There is always so much to unpack, but it always can be traced back to the capitalist milieu, and the craven complicity of benighted mass media. If the Kardashians think Ozempicgovy is a smart and sexy thing to do, then we plebe followers of the pop cultural message must fall in line. There is no underestimating how impactful the influence of the successful celebrity flavor of the week/month/year is. Underlying it is also the idea that being lean, and projecting that image, somehow indicates that you're on a sort of hero's journey, not available to the thicker amongst us.
In any event, please keep the enlightening posts coming, and I will keep eagerly absorbing them.
I so appreciate your perspective on these issues, particularly in this age of rapid adoption of the new weightloss and promises of 'solving the obesity epidemic.' Sigh. I also love that you hold space for the questions--and answers/comments--at the same time as you write through your own thoughts and experience in relationship to these, questioning fundamental beliefs that go far beyond the basic idea of our bodies and their size. Here for all of it. 💜
Thank you and all others that are putting words to things. I have learned so much. My radical NY resolutions are to take up space and people can deal with it or not as they like. Accept my appetite for a start then maybe even enjoy it. Read your book!
“I am getting better at accepting the body I have. It wasn’t a mental before and an after. It was a gradual yet important shift in the way I look at all bodies, my own body included.” This hit me hard. I want it so bad to be a before and after. Like I’ll wake up one day and I will no longer think about whether I’m fat or not. I’ve made great progress for sure but this shit is insidious. I quit drinking three years ago and for me looking at this and making these changes is so much harder.
I see it but at 44 there is an entirely new lie and scam being thrown at me. The cures for perimenopause. I want to believe so badly that if I just take x supplement or do x workout that all will be well, but I know from 30 years of the same bullshit- it’s all the same- just marketed different to different age groups. There are days when I tell me self that I can just go back to the old ways, over exercise, restrict, count etc. And that gives me comfort for a moment or two. But I know that trying to shrink doesn’t give me the relief I’m looking for. It never has. No matter the size, I was never satisfied or “happy”.
Thank you so much for writing this! Exactly what I needed to read this morning. Already ordered your book and cannot wait to read it.
Great post! Another cultural context for the idea of the transformative experience would be the nineteenth century novel. My students always guffaw at Scrooge waking up and doing a 180 on Christmas, or Marianne Dashwood recovering from illness only to stop pining after the hot cad and marry the middle aged man with the flannel waistcoats instead. But the overnight transformation makes a great story!
Wow! I just found this amazing NY Times article with a favorable mention of Kate Manne. I have to say - i didn't think this would happen, but subscribing to this substack I'm learning a whole new very valuable to know dimension of these issues. Much appreciated to Kate and y'all who are here!
https://txrecommend.blogspot.com
I found you today through the "New York" article. I identify with what you're saying so much, it brings tears to my eyes. I'm 51 and I'm so tired of being at war with my body. Every decade of my adult life, I've lost weight and gained it all back so much so that I'm now at my heaviest and I feel yucky. I'm trying to rearrange my thinking in that I just want to be able to move — I don't want to be a fat 60 year old who can't get up and move around. But it's so much noise in my head that's been there for decades — seeing a body online or on tv that I find attractive and spiraling into things like "I'd love to look like that" to "I can never look like that" is just so exhausting. How do we untrain the brain to stop with all of it. I just want to eat healthy and be healthy and not focus on losing the weight — it's obvious I haven't lost it, it always finds me again. I want to have a healthy blood pressure and not drop dead of a heart attack...you don't see a lot of fat old people out there (maybe they're there, maybe this is just a stupid thing stuck in my head too). Ugh. I'm getting older, I'm tired of it all and I just want to be unapologetically me and not hate that clothes don't fit how I want or hate seeing myself in the mirror or wish this body looked different. Thanks for bringing it out into the light.
in the most earnest and good faith possible tone: read Paul Preciado. “Can the Monster Talk?” is short enough to get through in an afternoon, even counting going back to page one and starting again when you get to the end. (don’t worry about the register either. it’s literally a speech he gave to French psychoanalysts. I threw all that shit against the wall real dang hard in like 1992 but it’s mostly fine and good here)
it’s extremely difficult to think clearly about transformation from within acceptance.
i’m not here to fuck up the acceptance.
i do think we need to aggressively develop the ability to practice what Keats calls negative capability about it
Preciado is extremely r e f r e s h i n g in the sense/along the lines i mean and -- hm. it is salutary to do the occasional quick check that you’re not fully caught up in the shadows in Plato’s cave even if you are busily and *usefully* negotiating them
Perhaps another interesting way to frame this: Aspiration and transformation both promise a lot in terms of autonomy.
But your work shows clearly: What might seem like a positive impulse towards self-transformation and autonomy and taking control of your life (embodied in New Year’s Resolutions) is often anything but.
As you show, it actually turns out to be a particularly pernicious form of conformity——pernicious because it can involve all kinds of self-harm (as you show) and because it exposes us all kinds of (marketing, pharmaceutical, etc) manipulation.
It’d be interesting to think more about how this is all different from more traditional forms of (say) Christian or spiritual transformation: It’s more infected by a modern individualism, by the needs of capitalism (e.g., the need of markets to sell us things), by the cult of status, by a spirit of careerism. But, for all its talk about hard work being rewarded, it actually seems strangely divorced from deeper moral concerns: solidarity, compassion, equity, politics.
Ok, first, I love this blog. I love the in-your-face-ness of it.
Now I have a question. How do I ask it innocently, with (I should shout in all caps) NO SHAME NO BLAME NO JUDGMENT)
As a mostly skinny kid who in his teens made a lot of effort to gain weight. I just didn’t think about weight loss at all, so hardly paid attention from age 30 to 50 as I gained 40 pounds. I took it seriously when I discovered my blood pressure was 160/100, knew nothing about macros or calories, so just picked a semi random number, 1500 calories, and lost 30 pounds in 3 months and have kept it off since.
NO NO NO - not a judgment, or anecdote about losing weight, at least not primarily The main thing is, I noticed a significant drop in blood pressure. And over the 20 years since I did this, I’ve noticed in periods (once ever few years) when I gained 5 or 10 pounds, the BP would shoot up.
So, before I make any other horrific faux pas’ (I beg your forgiveness if already I’ve done so, really), is there a problem - philosophic, psychological, social or any kind - in doing this sort of thing for what I understand to be scientifically legit reasons related to blood pressure?
I’m asking not primarily for myself (I love eating this way - as a rule, it has to be easy, cheap, reasonably healthy (I love ice cream, brownies, etc so no hard and fast rules) and most of all, super delicious) - but as a psychologist I get a lot of people with all kinds of food issues. I always have to start with - why do you want to change? Do you think it wil make you feel better or other people care about you more? Can you imagine being just the way you are the rest of your life and being 110% self accepting, happy, fulfilled? Are you sure it’s worth it for purely health reasons?
I just want to make sure, since the folks here appear to be super well informed scientifically as well as philosophically and psychologically - I don’t make any inappropriate recommendations.
Thanks!
I see choosing Transformation as groping for control. I spent the latter half of my 30s learning to accept that, while I’d always thought of Adulthood as a fixed destination, a permanent self, change and uncertainty will in fact always be a part of my life. In a confusing and overwhelming world, who doesn’t want to be able to direct a major change?
I have three family members using Ozempic. It's depressing and I worry about what it will do to their bodies long term.
I just finished listening to your book Kate. An excellent addition to the incredibly valuable material addressing bodies and health and weight and society ……I particularly liked the philosophical angles. Do you know of anyone who writes about aging in a fat body? I’m 60 and fat. Up until now my body has been strong and healthy. Now many of the things we’re warned about as fat people are happening. I don’t want to bore everyone with the details, but I would love to hear from other older folks about how they’re feeling. Thanks :)