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As a teen, Sabrina Strings loved getting to hang out with her grandma.

Even when her grandma was obsessing over one of her soap operas.

I remember one time she called me into the living room and she's like, Sabrina, look at Victoria.

Victoria is a character on Young and the Restless.

She says, Victoria is killing herself to be thin.

Why are white women dying to be thin?

Fast forward to 2003.

Adult Sabrina was working at an HIV medication adherence clinic in San Francisco where she witnessed

real life examples of women sacrificing their health to be thin.

I had spoken to a couple of women, both HIV positive, who refused to take their HIV

medications for fear of gaining weight.

And that blew my mind.

And it immediately took me back to conversations I had been having with my grandma.

And I was like, oh my gosh, she was onto something so important.

You know, when she was talking about it, she saw it as largely a white phenomenon.

But the women I interviewed that day were both women of color.

Why are these women dying to be thin and did race have anything to do with it?

Sabrina went on to become a sociologist at the University of California Irvine and wrote

a whole book investigating these questions.

If you were like me, you might have assumed that there was some moment in between Marilyn

Monroe and Twiggy in which, right, suddenly, we suddenly became fat-fold in those three

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