Our Obsession With Thinness
The Body Under Capitalism
Trigger Warning: Eating Disorders
With an average rise in yearly incomes worldwide in the past fifty years or so, we have more spending power. In the capitalized world overfed with neon billboards and pop-up ads, the labour of a clerk who punches the clock at five in the evening is equivocal to that of a sex worker or a daily wage worker. The only difference remains that sex work is dishonourable, and daily wage workers hauling cement by the side of the roads cannot afford the luxuries of linen pants and an air-conditioned cubicle. However, in each of these night and day professions, our bodies are being sold every day to a larger purpose. That larger purpose is a building yet to be completed, or a late-night project submission that takes more hours of a human body than physically lifting bricks. We are in some way or the other, giving our bodies to capitalism, at this point so much so, that we don’t realize that putting our bodies through a self-made famine is labour. If we’re not being paid millions of dollars to walk on runways, why do we then still obsess with jutting collarbones and romanticize thin waists? To answer this question with the foretoken of health is self-deception.
The diet industry is hardy: it demands the yearly subscription of unpaid labour in paying companies that profit off of our restriction. The diet industry is also a resilient beast: it has remained recession and pandemic proof. No matter illness, age, or continent; to be thin is to be good. Across the modernized world, the cultural obsession with thinness runs like a vein of quartz through our narrative of health. The culture of thinness is swathed in diet shakes and eating disorders, and no one asks why. The diet industry creates an artificial, toxic chain of demand and supply in our worlds, with the ever-changing physicality of beauty and a hollow promise of how we are one diet, or one eating disorder away from having the perfect body – at least until the next year or so. We pay no mind and ask no questions of this omnipresent force that defines our modern existence of the supremacy of digital living: cars faster than our Wi-Fi and computers quicker than our brains. The diet industry is a tentacled monster, terrifying not because of its outdated medicine, rather, that it morphs with us – like a chameleon changing colours, following us from one decade to the next. In the recent decade, diet companies have found that online readers are becoming averse to its very etymology, and so, it has adapted – alarmingly well, and with appalling speed. These days we find exhausted laptop workers balancing their mental function with their growling stomachs, fasting intermittently or restricting processed sugar. Instagram has become a sump of self-aggrandization: promoting, encouraging, rewarding displays of taut and blemish free expanses of skin.
To live in the modern world is to be intimate with restriction and excess simultaneously. The deliberate restriction of food is rewarded with thousands of likes and superlative compliments. The inverse proportionality between the number on our bathroom scales and the number of meals skipped in a week is very simply put, fatal. Diets – that is, any form of restriction, fail 95% of the time. When I say fail, I mean that the short-term profits of a reduced waistline will not sustain themselves in being thin forever. In fact, yo-yo dieting results in long-term weight gain. There are very few people, as low as 5%, who are able to keep off the weight. And even in their success, their will power is not to be lauded, for, it is the genetic precursors of their bodies that allow them to do so. Under capitalism it is said that there is no ethical consumption. This tagline is aimed at big companies exploiting their workers in impoverished countries, but it holds true in our homes as well. Every morsel consumed comes with a caveat: that of remaining ‘good’, that of the promise to be ‘good’ the next day, that of being a better person.
Diets have split bodily health into the fundamental binaries of morality, which is why we can never escape their deathly grip on our throats…quite literally. Diets are prescribed to us as covenants of good health: health is thinness and thinness is good. Living in a fat body is amoral for, fat bodies are auguries of our collective deaths. Think about how many chocolate desserts are described as sinful, or why macbooks are unilaterally marketed as modern and sleek, as signifiers of performance and speed. Personally, long-term dieting has reduced my body to an exiguous cage of maladies with chronic aches and pains, nausea, and permanent acid reflux – I can no longer stomach orange juice. Sometimes when exams or deadlines wrestle my body away from me, there is blood in the toilet bowl.
As with working a desk job, when you traumatize your body with a diet borne out of the misinformed promise of overall health, your finish line moves farther and farther away. The social congruence of dieters is the siren song of ‘one day I will like myself in photographs’. Dieting, in its honeymoon period at least, brings with it a sense of belonging to a larger purpose of health that no one has been able to define with clear-eyed terminology. To not restrict is to be a social outlier, a messenger of ill-health, upholding wayward tenets of food freedom. What is small talk without berating fat bodies or discussing fad diets over chai?
What we really mean when we glorify thinness is that our bodies are not ours – they serve only as communicators of our social capital, of our visible resilience to famine. That they are someone else’s gossip fodder, someone else’s vehicles for unethical profits: merely ours to tame for the world’s gaze.