Body positivity and rejecting fat bias

Diet culture is crap and needs to die

But what’s really magical about chicken soup isn’t the nutrient quota or the fact it shifts your snot along: it’s that it is a delicious, precious metaphor for caring, and for nourishing. What feels really good about feeding yourself chicken soup – whether it’s a bone broth simmered for 12 hours or a microwaved bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken –

Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

Soup as a metaphor of self care

This is cause and effect at its most fundamental: goodness on your plate will help to foster goodness in your body.

Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

What wellness culture asserts, in essence, is that there is some higher state we can achieve, but only if we’re willing to put in the work. Our natural impulses, the ones that draw us to the buzz of sugar, the sting of salt, bright sweets and festive feasts, are all wrong according to the wellness mantra. The way to upper-middle-class white-girl he

Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

You’re right to notice this. This person is indeed black or they do indeed have a large belly. Bodies come in all shapes, sizes and colours. Isn’t that cool?

We dont talk about people’s bodies unless they want to.

Just as my friend Bethany is accused of ‘glorifying obesity’ just for having the gumption to exist without shame, Lindy describes being harangued with the same question – ‘isn’t this a slippery slope into poor health?’ – every time she asserts her humanity as a fat woman. As she puts it: ‘The question itself is an assault: it validates the idea tha

Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

Another facet of this enforced shrinking is that those with fat bodies are deemed somehow incapable of knowing what is best for them.

Ruby Tandoh • Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want

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