Australian philosophy professor Kate Manne had tried everything to lose weight. But it wasn’t until 2020, when she went for seven days without eating, that she realised her unhealthy obsession had to stop. Like any addict, she had to reach her own rock bottom before she could take control and deal with her problem. Issues around this are thought through in her new book, Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia.
It certainly wasn’t that Manne, 41 this year, lacked the intellectual capacity to understand what was going on – she is a highly regarded philosopher with a professorship at Cornell University, New York State, where she has been teaching since 2013. She is a second-generation public intellectual. Her father, Robert, was a professor of political science at Melbourne’s La Trobe University whose interests include indigenous rights and refugees. Her writer mother, Anne, has published books on motherhood and narcissism.
Hers is almost the philosopher’s version of a superhero origin story. Her childhood was spent in Cottles Bridge, “about an hour out of Melbourne, where we had 20 acres of mostly bush land and herds of kangaroos roaming through the neighbourhoods”.
Philosophical training began early. Her father and his best friend, philosopher Raimond Gaita, “encouraged me to pursue philosophical thinking from about the age of five. So I was lucky to be encouraged, in a way many girls aren’t, by both my parents.”
Wait. Five? How did that work? “They defined philosophy for me as thinking about thinking, and identified when I was thinking about thoughts that I had. And also thinking about moral questions from a very young age. Raimond Gaita said to me when I caught a butterfly in a net: ‘Do you have a right to do that?’ I was encouraged to think, was I being cruel to this innocent creature? Which is a very good question for young children doing things like collecting frogs or bugs.”
Academic accolades and achievements followed swiftly, culminating in the position at Cornell. She has two previous books on misogyny to her credit, and the latest, concerning fatness, continues the pattern of well-reasoned, passionately written polemics.
She has been interested in the field for 20 years, having long ago discovered “that fat people face enormous discrimination … the world is just not accommodating fat people, and is shaming us in ways that feel completely, unnecessarily stigmatising and cruel.” But although she knew this, she was unable to apply it to her own life and eating practices.
“I felt dissatisfied with my own body and was always working on shrinking it. It was only after I went on my most extreme diet, that felt so disruptive and so unhealthy, ironically, that I thought: ‘I can’t do this any more.’ Because I had been on so many diets, my metabolism had slowed to a point where nothing was working any more, except not eating at all.”
The most contentious part of Manne’s thinking, at least partly because it threatens the very foundations of the diet-industrial complex and dearly held medical articles of faith, is her pushback against the notion that being fat is unhealthy. Much of the support for her argument comes from a 2013 meta-analysis of other studies by Katherine M Flegal of Stanford University.
“This is a very robust set of findings, which is that the relationship between weight and health can be represented by a U-shaped curve, with people who are in the overweight category – which is where I happen to be right now – having the lowest mortality risk, statistically speaking. People who are moderately obese, which is a BMI [See box, left] of between 30 and 35, have a similar mortality risk profile to people who are in the normal weight category. And then for very thin people and very fat people, we see elevated mortality risks.”
She says that where there is a correlation between being very heavy and health risks, it is hard to know to what extent the relationship is down to a bunch of other factors that are not in doubt.
“For people in those categories, there are other things going on. Like the fact that they face incredibly rampant discrimination, weight stigma – that has demonstrably bad health effects. These people are the ones being put on diets and then regaining the weight, and that fluctuation is independently harmful.
“And yet another piece of it is that they’re facing inadequate preventive care, because a lot of these people are stigmatised at the doctor’s. They will avoid seeking care in direct proportion to their BMI going up, because they don’t want to be fat shamed. And also, they are misdiagnosed by doctors who can’t see past fatness to see the cause of someone’s true symptoms.”
Again, Manne provides well-researched evidence for all these claims.
She once said she was drawn to philosophy because it allows you to be wrong. And despite her book’s occasionally dogmatic tone, she is prepared to admit she may indeed be wrong about some of the health aspects of being fat. “But even if we do discover [that fatness causes ill health], it’s crucial that we realise people deserve adequate health care and compassion and human decency no matter what their health status.”
Unfortunately, in a recent survey of implicit biases conducted by two Harvard University researchers and quoted by Manne, anti-fat prejudice was the only one on the rise. Biases based on race, skin tone, sexuality? All down.
“I would never say, and don’t believe, that fat phobia is, like, the last acceptable prejudice because unfortunately, there will never be a last acceptable prejudice. But it is one of the ones that we’re complacent about and it seems to be getting worse.”
Lack of evidence
The beauty of anti-fat bias is that it can be presented as coming from love. Manne cites the attitude: “I’m so concerned about you that I’m going to stigmatise you [into] doing things that are demonstrably bad for your health … and you’re so unhealthy that I’m not going to give you adequate health care.”
Sometimes, the love is expressed in the form of public health measures, such as taxes on foods perceived to lead to weight gain.
Says Manne: “For reasons that aren’t really well understood, there is a modest, somewhat exaggerated but real uptick in fatness in the world. And there is not yet a known, proven public policy set of strategies that actually reduces people’s weight on average.”
She concedes, however, that the soft drinks “sugar tax” in the UK may be having an impact on obesity in some children. “It’s not to say that we won’t come up with those measures. But how to do it in a humane, just and liberal society remains an open question.”
Further complicating the whole issue is the emotional component of food, which is bound up with a connection to the virtue of self-control and which rejects the pleasure that eating can bring. “I think there has been this sense that we need to get to the point where we merely fuel our bodies, as if they’re little machines.”
She would like to see an alternative – “a place where we are able to eat in ways that are not guilt-ridden or shame-faced about the pleasure and comfort and connection and deep human good of food for many of us. Diet culture severs this ability to emotionally find a peaceful relationship with food that can be both nourishing but also comforting and a part of – it sounds a bit naff – self-love.”
Thinking about this has contributed to the development of Manne’s own Big Idea as a philosopher: bodily imperatives are moral imperatives. In other, over-simplified, words: what your body tells you to do is morally good. It’s the kind of original thought that you’ve never heard of but is obvious once explained. “The body tells us what it needs in certain ways. When someone is starved of oxygen, there is a bodily imperative to get a full lungful of air. When we’re in pain with an injured knee, our body tells us to get off that knee. Pain can be understood as a bodily imperative, or at least closely linked to a bodily imperative. And I think hunger is much like this. It tells us to eat the apple. That food looks appealing, because our bodies are kind of impelling us to seek out food that is both nourishing and tasty.
“My view is that bodily imperatives constitute our most important moral imperatives on behalf of other people and creatures. So, when a creature is in pain, and they have a bodily imperative to make it stop, that gives us all a moral mandate to try to help that creature inasmuch as we can.”
Which doesn’t leave much room for intermittent fasting/5:2 diet/calorie-counting/portion-weighing/keto approaches. “Diet culture is establishing this immoral set of dictates that tell us to deny or ignore something that is actually itself a morally weighty voice that has a kind of authority for us.”
As far as the new weight-loss wonder drugs Wegovy and Ozempic go, it should be clear by now that Manne is not really interested in losing weight, but she does wonder what the prospects are for users to keep the weight off after it has been lost, and what the long-term side effects will prove to be.
For herself, since she changed her behaviour to match her thinking, life is a lot better.
“One aspect that might be counterintuitive to some people is that I actually feel a lot less fixated on food now that I can just enjoy foods that are appealing to me, and don’t have to really restrict how much I eat. It’s also nice to be able to have a photograph taken and not worry about it appearing somewhere and being called fat because, yeah, I am, and that’s fine.”
Apparently, you’re not supposed to ask a philosopher what their philosophy is, but Manne does have one. “The only mantra I’ve ever had is the idea that just popped into my head one day: your body is for you. And my body is for me. And this is the idea I call body reflexivity, and it’s an alternative to body positivity and neutrality. It says, look, I have not managed to have a relentlessly positive or upbeat attitude towards anything in my life. So the idea of cultivating that towards my own body seems rather unlikely and a piece with toxic positivity, which I detest.
“Neutrality is hard to channel as well. Rather, we just throw out the scales and say, well, my body is for me, and that’s the only perspective on this that matters. And the same for any person. I found that incredibly liberating.”
Manne on BMI - ‘it’s garbage’
The BMI, or Body Mass Index, purports to be a measure of fatness that can be used to determine whether someone is in a healthy weight range – defined as between 18.5 and 24.9. It’s the number you get when you divide your weight by the square of your height. It was devised by Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, who first did the maths some 200 years ago. His “ideal” was an average based on a database of soldiers of the time.
“The BMI is garbage,” says Manne. “It’s based on race as pseudoscience. Why our bodies should be the same as white European men in the army in the 19th century is anyone’s guess. I use it with great worries about it. It perpetuates the stigma.”
Manne occasionally talks, reluctantly, in BMIs because they allow her to compare fat apples with fat apples rather than fat oranges when looking at the literature on weight, much of which uses the index.
Telling it like it is
Manne writes about being fat – not about being overweight, big or obese. “I think of the terms ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ as medicalising and stigmatising in ways that are not helpful. They’re not popular with the majority of people working in the body liberation or fat activist space. The idea is that we don’t have to be ashamed of living in larger bodies. And so the word ‘fat’ is a neutral descriptor of some bodies, much like ‘short’, ‘tall’, or for that matter, ‘thin’. It’s not attached to a particular value or value system.
“It’s also useful to distinguish a spectrum of fatness. So there are small fat people, mid fat and large fat people. And that’s important because large fat people face more barriers to access than I do as a small fat person.
“I’m someone who is at the lowest end of that spectrum, so I certainly don’t speak for everyone who is facing fatphobia, some of whom face far more serious barriers to accessibility and justice than I do in my small fat body.”
Is it analogous to the way the word ‘queer’ has been reclaimed? “Yeah. And similarly, with a word like queer there are various euphemisms that one can use. And I don’t begrudge anyone who likes terms like ‘curvy’ or ‘fluffy’ or ‘zaftig’, but they’re euphemistic. They kind of dance around the point, and they often refer to a particular body type, like ‘curvy’ means you have, generally a small waist and larger breasts. So, the general term ‘fat’ is more inclusive, and it’s also more matter of fact.”
Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia, by Kate Manne (Penguin, $55). Kate Manne is also on Substack: More to Hate.