The Body Fights Back: Exposing Western Society's Toxic Obsession with Weight

Rory Brown. Source: Gravitas Ventures

***TRIGGER WARNING: TALK OF DISORDERED EATING AND TRAUMA

Western society has a major illness. Driven by misinformation, propped up with biased medical studies and funded by powerful companies set to make the most money off of the results, the diet industry proliferates.

The diet and food industry is steeped in a history of fatphobia; racism; ableism; a capitalist society that makes billions on making sure that you don’t feel good and a medical community willing to go along with the misinformation for profit. It ultimately bolsters and maintains a toxic, oligarchical system based on prejudice and lies.

The Body Fights Back , written and directed by Marian Vosumets, pushes back at the toxic system to reveal the truth that most are unwilling to accept.

The Sacrifice of Real People in Exchange for Money

“Let’s just take care of ourselves turned to something horribly destructive”-Imogen Fox.

The Body Fights Back chronicles the daily lives of several, brave individuals of various ethnicities and sizes and how their lives have been impacted by toxic diet culture and fatphobia. The film focuses on life in the U.K. , though the stories could resonate anywhere in westernized culture where thin and white falsely equates to health and beauty.

Rory is a bodybuilder at his supposed “peak”. His body is the supposed “fit ideal”, but what he has to go through in order to keep it is impossible to sustain in the long term. Not only did he spend most of his time in the gym, he ended up developing an unhealthy obsession with working out and binge eating. His entire life revolved around how he looked and no one knew about the 10-15K calorie per binge, eating disorder he struggled with.

Imogen Fox. Source: Gravitas Ventures

Imogen, who struggled with being overweight due to a disability in her younger years, is now thin but still not healthy. Imogen talks about how awful her life was being overweight and how stigma and fatphobia affected her. Doctors would blame her weight for her health conditions, yet, she still has health issues even though currently thin. Imogen now fights back by speaking out about this biased discrepancy and is now a warrior for body positivity and equality.

Mojo is another body positive warrior deemed “overweight” by society. Mojo struggled growing up with a fatphobic, abusive mother who would tell her things like she had a pretty face, but her body didn’t match. Mojo reveals that she was molested by a family member as a child and her mother blamed her for it. She also was raped at age 13 and was told that was her fault as well.

Mojo has struggled with her weight and weight stigma her entire life, but is now beginning her journey toward self love and acceptance. She is an outspoken advocate for body positivity and is reframing her relationship with food. But the judgements by others steeped in fatphobia still plague her life.

The Diet and Stigma Effect

As the documentary proceeds, we meet a few others who are struggling and we begin to see an insidious pattern emerge. Whatever began the process for each person and whatever behavior they cope with, the main components feeding into all of the eating disorders is stigma, fear and fat hatred.

Western society embraces the toxic masculine and everyone suffers under it. The thin, white, female beauty normative that is worshipped by too many cultures is not only fatphobic but racist, elitist, ableist and driven by money. After all, if we feel there is something wrong with us, capitalism will create a product to “fulfill” the need, even though it never really works. It keeps us buying more.

Mojo. Source: Gravitas Ventures

Diets are a perfect example of that. Diets and all of the products created for them is a multi-billion dollar a year juggernaut, incessantly fueling body shame and stigma no matter what guise of “health” it hides itself under. There is study after study the shows that diets are proven ineffective, at around 98%, but people keep flocking to them and failing, inadvertently, getting fatter because of it.

When the body goes into starvation mode it slows the metabolism and then ends up holds everything it gets. As such, once someone eats normally again, they gain weight. It’s a natural protection mechanism to balance the loss in the body. Why would any competent medical professional recommend something to so many patients with as big of a failure rate as that?

BMI as well has been proven an ineffective tool to use on individuals. It was created to be used on larger populations, and, as we see in the film it is used to further bully and stigmatize people based solely on their weight. Then the medical and insurance community use that to usher in, what I like to call, lazy diagnostics.

Thin people can also get Type 2 Diabetes, have heart attacks, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, among other things blamed on “obesity”. All this type of “science” does is legitimize bullying and cruelty. Then, as they say in the film, it makes weight your “identity”.

And Even More…

The film goes on to discuss how dieting is steeped in patriarchy. It shames women for not “snapping back” after child birth and praises those who work tirelessly to have the body they had before pregnancy. It allows social bullying under the guise of “concern about health”.

As the film states; if government was so concerned about people’s health, why isn’t everything we eat natural and organic? Why does it cost so much to buy real, whole, food rather than the alleged “unhealthy” choices? Even the UK recently proposed a sugar and salt tax blaming “obesity” as a costly side effect financially burdening their National Health System.

Source: The Evening Standard

Do they really think it will work? How many times has a government mandated restriction ever stopped people from wanting and accessing what is outlawed or penalized? Look up Prohibition in the United States as an example.

The only people who will suffer under this particular tax, is the poor. The limited food supply they had financial access to, will be taxed at a higher rate and pesticide-ridden, inorganic, fruit and vegetables will be “prescribed” for them.

Why don’t more people realize that the system is purposely set up like this so that the rich thrive and the poor fail? Medical officials don’t want people healthy, they want us sick so they can get their kickbacks from the pharmaceutical industry when they recommend drugs that we have to keep taking to “stay healthy”.

In All Honesty…

Government and this toxic society wouldn’t know health if it ran over them with a truck. The lust for money and power keeps us all sick in a myriad of ways.

As the film states, we need a fair society that is compassion centered. Where individuals are valued and where mental health is a top priority instead of stigmatized. Though we are seeing a slow movement towards body positivity, big money is fighting it all the way.

The film introduces intuitive eating and the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement. It also features a look at the annual festival put on in London by the “Anti Diet Riot Club”, where all bodies are celebrated and loved for exactly what they are.

Every body is unique, legitimate and worthy of respect. Period.

The Body Fights Back is an effective, all encompassing overview of the adverse, repugnant repercussions caused by the toxic, fat phobic diet and food industry. It is a rallying cry for people to see the real truth and not what is falsely “fed” to us on our television and phone screens.

It is also a call for self love, kindness and highlights the importance of mental health before true physical health can ever happen. Westernized society is sick and there isn’t anything but greed behind it. The body will always fight back in order to obtain its predetermined-by-nature equilibrium.

It’s time we fight for and demand that our society embrace the same.