The Messed-Up History of Dieting (with Dr. Katharina Vester)

High Brow

Society & Culture

4.8 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2023

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For this episode, Mina revisits an old video she made on the history of dieting, supplemented (no pun intended) with more information, listener stories, and an interview with Dr. Katharina Vester, culture historian and professor at American University.

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Sources:
Regime change: Gender, class, and the invention of dieting in post-bellum America by Katharina Vester
From Robust Appetites to Calorie Counting: The Emergence of Dieting among Smith College Students in the 1920s by Margaret A. Lowe
The Progressive Era Body Project: Calorie-Counting and “Disciplining the Stomach” in 1920s America by Chin Jou
Dieting in the Long Sixties: Constructing the Identity of the Modern American Dieter by Nancy Gagliardi
Slimming One’s Way to a Better Self? Weight Loss Clubs and Women in Britain, 1967–1990 by Katrina-Louise Moseley
“Lose Like a Man”: Gender and the Constraints of Self-Making in Weight Watchers Online by Emily Contois
Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell
History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger
An examination of the imposture of Ann Moore, called the fasting woman, of Tutbury: illustrated by remarks on other cases of real and pretended abstinence by Alexander Henderson
America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929–1971 by Nicholas Rasmussen
The return of rainbow diet pills by Pieter A. Cohen, Alberto Goday & John P. Swann

A Speedy History of America’s Addiction to Amphetamine
Saint Wilgefortis: a bearded woman with a queer history
How slimming became an obsession for women in post-war Britain by Myriam Wilks-Heeg
Kids' Sugar Cravings Might Be Biological
5 Food Myths You Should Stop Believing
Anorexia Mirabilis: Fasting in Victorian England and modern India
The Jacob Case
Breatharian Website
Cult that shuns food shaken by reports leader is eating
Breatharian Leader Wiley Brooks Lives On Light, Air, And Quarter Pounders

Written by Mina Le, Ella Gray, and Sophie Carter
Edited by Sophie Carter
Music by Olivia Martinez
Cover by Lindsay Mintz

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, welcome to high brow. I'm your host, Meena Lay. And today I actually have dug up a previous YouTube video topic I covered,
0:25.2	my history of dieting video. And it's been over a year since I published this video, and yet
0:32.6	dieting culture is still as ubiquitous as ever. So I thought it would be relevant and interesting to go back
0:41.2	and revisit it, add some more information, have people call in, and just expand on what has
0:49.1	been ruining the lives of everyone for so long now. I've made a couple predictions about heroin
0:55.7	chic resurfacing. I'm not the person who coined that. Obviously, like a lot of people
1:00.4	have been writing articles about the death of body positivity and the death of Slim Thick and
1:05.8	the BBL for months now. But I feel like everything's just been escalating more and more. There was a major
1:15.1	article that was published by the cut on OZMPIC. For anyone who doesn't know, OZMPIC is a drug that's
1:21.4	supposed to treat diabetes type 2. It is a prescription medication, but it's become increasingly easier to get a
1:30.1	prescription for it without having diabetes. And the reason you would want to do that is because
1:35.6	Ozzypic, one of the major side effects is you lose a ton of weight because it virtually
1:41.7	suppresses your appetite. I guess what was interesting for me to
1:45.2	read in this article is like I assumed OZemPEC fully suppressed your appetite. Like you did not
1:51.7	experience any hunger pains, but that didn't seem to be the case for everyone because in the article
1:57.9	they interviewed this actress named Allison and she she says on OZMPIC,
2:02.9	you can eat one and a half meals a day and then you're kind of hungry at night, but it's
2:06.6	not terrible. You can drink some tea with magnesium and maybe take a Xanax and get to sleep,
2:11.9	which sounds awful, I'm not going to lie. It's fully giving like eating disorder behavior.
2:19.8	And I just can't imagine like only eating one meal a day and then ignoring my body's hunger pangs and just going to bed.
2:27.5	That sounds so insane. And it's just so upsetting that so many women and queer people, and I'm sure men too, are
2:37.6	torturing their bodies like this to fit into a standard that's ever-changing.
	...

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