The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad


Losing Weight as a Form of White Supremacy and Colonialism？ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_638)

Topics
co-healthism in fat liberation
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Faith Stadnik

Episode Stats


Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Healthism in Health at Every Size, TikTok Activism, and Transforming the Definition of Healthism via Feminist of Color Disability Studies Theorizing. An article by Faith Stadnik at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation examines the power relations surrounding how popular health at every size frameworks are disseminated on TikTok and unpacks the implications for fat liberation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.180 Hi everybody, this is Gadsad. Some of you know that I periodically will read an important academic paper stemming from feminist studies or critical race theory or of course post-modernism.
00:00:17.620 Today I've got a really powerful paper from Fat Studies. As a matter of fact, let me just read it here for you. This is, the journal is called Fat Studies, an interdisciplinary journal of body weight and society.
00:00:34.740 The article was just published online, which is very exciting because I'm glad that we were able to rush this paper to the world.
00:00:45.180 It's by Faith Stadnik. She is at the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation, which interestingly, it's written here, the acronym is FIST because they are fisting through reason, logic, common sense, and science. 0.62
00:01:06.860 The title of the article is, Co-Healthism in Health at Every Size, Aligned TikTok Activism, Transforming the Definition of Healthism via Feminist of Color Disability Studies Theorizing.
00:01:30.940 This is not, I mean, I'm going to put the link to the paper. So I'm just going to read the abstract, okay? Just the abstract. You ready?
00:01:40.660 This taxpayer-funded work, I'm presuming.
00:01:44.880 This article is a feminist of color disability studies oriented TikTok critical discourse analysis of 100 popular health at every size TikToks.
00:01:59.880 It evaluates the power relations surrounding how health at every size frameworks are disseminated on TikTok and unpacks the implications for fat liberation.
00:02:17.820 Health at every size frameworks of care capacitate the eradication of fetical fat mesia.
00:02:27.020 Sorry, I usually am able to get through these without laughing, but this is really good.
00:02:33.160 And the weight-centered health paradigm.
00:02:37.380 While popular among online fat activists, health at every size frameworks have been widely accused of perpetuating healthism.
00:02:51.100 Did you get that?
00:02:53.200 You need to engage in fat liberation to get rid of this notion of healthism.
00:03:03.600 My analysis makes clear how health at every size discourse is often steeped in ableist, white supremacist, and colonial healthism.
00:03:19.800 Through this analysis, I ultimately argue that the definition of healthism needs to shift to center ableism, white supremacy, and colonialism,
00:03:33.000 as well as the co-constituting nature of how systems of oppression aggregate to weaponize health against those with embodiments marked as unhealthy.
00:03:47.320 I argue that this shift is necessary to produce analyses committed to radical solidarity.
00:03:59.220 I mark this shift by coining and utilizing the term co-healthism.
00:04:04.920 To demonstrate the need for my argument, I organize the results into three themes.
00:04:12.280 Healthist ableism, healthist white supremacy, and healthist colonialism, and health at every size discourse.
00:04:22.740 In the discussion, I clarify the co-constitutive nature of these themes and argue for the shift from healthism to co-healthism.
00:04:36.100 I also define the concept and explain its methodological potentialities.
00:04:45.200 Some of you may know that over the past few years, I have lost quite a bit of weight.
00:04:57.800 I have returned to my glorious, svelte physique, but there was a time where I weighed as much as a NFL middle linebacker,
00:05:10.480 albeit I wasn't endowed with the height of a NFL middle linebacker.
00:05:16.440 And it turned out that I fell prey to the white supremacist notion that it is not healthy to be overweight.
00:05:30.160 And so what I did is I started eating a lot more healthily in that I restricted my calories to, you know, 15, 1600 calories a day.
00:05:39.820 I committed to doing at least 15,000 to 20,000 steps a day.
00:05:47.620 And I ended up losing from my highest recorded weight to my lowest recorded weight, 86 pounds.
00:05:55.300 I discussed this, by the way, in my latest book on happiness.
00:05:58.780 Now, this paper has clearly demonstrated to me that I was promulgating white supremacy. 0.62
00:06:07.500 As the paper, this academic paper published in an academic journal has argued that this, to promulgate the notion that, you know, you're not healthy at any size is part and parcel of white supremacy and colonialism.
00:06:27.180 For that, I apologize and I'm sorry that I did it.
00:06:31.600 And, uh, I will try to return to being a walrus as a means to fight for fat liberation.
00:06:42.120 I wish I could say slowly we inch.
00:06:44.780 This is published from a person at Carleton University in Canada in an academic journal titled Fat Studies.
00:06:52.820 Take care, everybody.
00:06:53.580 Thank you.