- Hello, my beautiful doves. My name is Mina, and today
we're gonna be talking about dieting. I don't know if you guys made any new year's resolutions this year. I think mine is just to learn French. I've been on Duolingo
for about a week now, and I've been doing it everyday. And I sound like a little
bit better than Emily from Emily in Paris. - Merci, have a bonne journee. - While I was thinking
about new year's resolutions and trying to come up with
my own list of resolutions, I was thinking about how some
of the most common ones tend to be like, "Oh, I'm gonna exercise more." Which really should be my
resolution, but here we are. Another really popular
one is to lose weight. And I get it, it's
plague year number three we're going into.
(people booing) And most of us don't go
out as often as we used to. A lot of us who would be going into the office are now
working remotely at home, sitting around in pajamas with adjustable waistbands all day. And also we've just survived Thanksgiving and the holiday season. So yeah, I understand why
this is a very popular new year's resolution for a lot of people. But then I got to thinking
about society's obsession with losing weight to begin with. So what I have found, I'm
going to share with you all, and it's a lot, it's a lot. So let's dive in. (TV static) Thank you, Ritual, for
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you can use my link down below, or my code MINALE to get started today. (TV static) (gentle music) Also, just as a disclaimer,
this video will be talking about dieting practices, and
we'll be discussing fatphobia, so if those are triggering topics for you, I recommend you skip out this time. So let's start in the 19th century. I know a lot of you who've
been watching my videos are like, "Mina, why do we keep starting in the 19th century?" It's because a lot happened, okay? Most historians will agree
that the late 19th century is when the dieting craze started. But that's not to say that
people weren't dieting or there weren't like anti-fat campaigns before the 19th century. I believe the earliest documented public anti-fat campaign was
in the 1670s in Europe. But it's important to note that back then and really up until the 20th century, having a little bit of
weight was a good thing. Like thinness was associated with starvation, disease, poverty. Fatness on the other hand was associated with health, longevity.
(angelical chanting) Beauty. And so needless to say these
early anti-fat protests were largely ignored by the public. It was then in the 18th
century in Great Britain that obesity started to become classified as a medical problem. And this coincided with just
a larger cultural debate on conspicuous consumption. For those of you who
don't know what that is, conspicuous consumption is basically when you just buy things or
consume things for the sake of showing off your status and wealth, not because you actually
need those things. So like think of a guy driving a Ferrari in New York city, you know? Or in this case, if we're
gonna relate it to food, ordering everything on the menu even though you couldn't
possibly eat everything. Early advice manuals for
gentlemen warned about the dangers of overindulgence, of overeating, saying that it was
unmanly, ungentleman-like, and unenglish. And yes, you heard me, I
did say unmanly because back in the 19th century, dieting
was mainly a man's problem. There's also an article published in 1855 that argued about how being
overweight was the plight of the upwardly mobile. This article was talking
about how "old money" people, like people who were born
into riches and wealth, they, from a young age,
learned about the dangers of living comfortably and
developed these control mechanisms to prevent them from like overindulging. The "new money" man on the other hand, AKA the man who was getting
money for the first time thanks to his employment, he was at risk. The article said, "The new
money man has no other resource, no hunting or cricket to
take up his attention, no lectures to attend, and
the consequence is that beer and tobacco commences the day, and tobacco and spirits wind it up. Such a man suddenly finds
all his energies going, his mind dull and enfeebled,
his body weak, flabby, and bloated." So we can see that a lot of
the 19th century discourse around dieting was mainly to push men into being better members of society, and to get rid of their vices. On a more subconscious level,
historians Keith Waiden and T.J. Jackson Lears have both suggested that as the US became
more urban, fast paced, and homogenous, people dieted
or controlled their bodies as a means to cope with their anxieties about this new chaos. In the mid 19th century, there
was also this growing concern that men and women were
becoming too similar, like men were becoming too feminine. With the growth of the bourgeoisie class and the managerial class, there
was now a whole group of men that would in a previous
century have been laboring in the fields, bored now sitting in these very sedentary professions. And God forbid, they were
getting a little fatter. The soft body was stereotyped as being a very feminine trait. At the same time, there's
also this paranoia that women were becoming
a little bit too masculine because women were starting
to become educated. Women were starting to
participate in politics. So now there was this like anxiety to further separate the genders again. This consequently led
to a new fitness culture that promoted manly outdoor
exercise and sports. Then in 1863, William Banting published the first bestselling diet guide in the US called A Letter on Corpulence. The guide was aimed at men of course, and suggested diet regimen
that featured food associated with masculinity, wealth,
and racial superiority, like red meat and alcohol. And required men to eat four meals a day. Banting was also a believer
of this very, like not true, not scientifically backed idea that being overweight
was a personal problem, it wasn't hereditary, and
if you had enough willpower, you could will the fat away. As for a women, whatever
dieting advice existed out there was initially ignored. In an 1865 issue of Harper's Weekly, a diet expert complained
that overweight young woman could not be convinced
to diet for anything, even in cases in which their
weight severely impaired them, because they were only
interested in having fun, sleeping in, and spending
time with young men. The beauty ideal for women
was actually at its softest and heaviest between the
Civil War and the early 1890s, because plumpness was
once again associated with very positive traits, like
motherhood, respectability, and sexual availability. On the other hand, thinness
was also associated with a lack of fertility. And you're gonna love this
one: a text from 1893 suggests that women eat a third less as soon as they turn 45 years old. You hear that? Once the clock strikes midnight. Because their ovaries shrivel up and no longer need to be fed. We don't feed our bodies to
get fuel or energy for the day. We feed our bodies so that our
ovaries can get enough fuel to create children. Oh, Victorian doctors. Believe it or not, there
were even publications to help women gain weight, such as the very popular
1878 guide How to Be Plump. Of course, it would be like
a total oversimplification to say that no woman was
dieting in the 19th century. If a woman did diet,
it was done in private. And we don't really know because of that, like how many women dieted,
but we can at least see from magazine articles of the time period, there were a number of women who wrote to editors asking for dieting advice. For an example in 1868, Godey's Lady Book and Magazine published a short explanation of the Banting system. And in September 1869,
Viola asked the editors of Harper's Bazaar Self-help Column how she could buy
Banting's book in the US. Early women's rights activists
also encouraged women to pay attention to their diets, and also to start exercising. Rachel Brooks Gleason,
one of the first female American doctors even
recommended her female patients to follow Banting's advice
to gain more muscular fiber. And in an article from 1890,
Eliza Putnam Heaton asserted that "There is no reason why, provided she has sufficient willpower, a woman should not mould
her figure to her liking." This brings us to
another interesting idea, at the time dieting could
be considered to be a tool of bodily control, a tool of rebellion. Rather than only men being able to diet, women were asserting that
they also had the self control to do this too. And this may sound
really dumb and arbitrary for modern day people, but at the time, we have to consider the climate, the social climate, you know? There were some woman who chose to fast, and these fasting women were viewed as having supernatural
powers or being clairvoyant, because it was just so strange for a woman to have the same self control as men. By 1896, the Boston Daily Globe reported that dieting had become
THE craze for women. And it goes without saying that as the slimmer figure
started becoming in vogue, the rounder, stouter figure
started to become out of vogue. Katharina Vester said in
her article on dieting in Post-Bellum America: "In this cultural climate, Jewish women, immigrant or American-born,
were often imagined as overweight, which
increased the pressure on them to control their body
weight in the attempt to gain assimilated middle-class status." This pressure is possibly
why The American Jewish, the first English
magazine for Jewish women, published expert dieting
advice several years before other women's
magazines endorsed the topic. Similarly, Black women were also targeted. The mammy caricature was
artificially fattened up in popular culture. "And this body was also a
symbol of revisionist history of a South that had fed and treated its enslaved
people generously." Of course people are built in all shapes and sizes regardless of race or ethnicity, but these stereotypes served to prove how society deliberately
try to exclude Black women and other like non-WASP
women from ever being viewed as beautiful in the popular culture. (gentle music) While the origins of dieting started in the 19th century really,
a lot of historians do say that dieting as this aesthetic
craze didn't come about until the early 20th century. And what I mean by that is
that in the 19th century, dieting was more associated
with good health, but historian Roberta Seid notes that "The first significant thinness craze was between 1919 and 1935." I want to take look at a
case study at Smith College, a women's college, to show you guys how cultural norm shifted
over a couple decades. But first we have to really understand what it was like there at
the end of the 19th century. In the late eighteen hundreds, female students were actually
encouraged to gain weight. And this is because it was
essential for college women to appear healthy in the eyes of society. Critics of women's
higher education claimed that academic life would
destroy female health, and they used scientific backing. Scientific in quotation
marks, please note this. That using your brain, would usurp the body's finite resources and deplete the female reproductive system of bloods, nutrients and energy. Yes, everything goes back
to the reproductive system. They basically claimed that college woman will become infertile at the
cost of higher education, and the human race would die out if too many women decided to get educated. So weight gain was supposed to show that women were actually healthy in these learning environments. One student, Charlotte
Wilkinson, wrote to her mother in February 1892, that it was her ambition to weigh 150 pounds. So this was the late eighteen
hundreds, by the 1920s if we look at the letters
that college students wrote to their families or their diary entries, we start to see that now they
were focused on "reducing." Reducing was the term for losing weight, and at this time it meant
mostly cutting out sweets and starches, working out
more, and not snacking in between meals. But of course, you know, with
any kind of dieting craze, there were people who
took it to an extreme, and it manifested in
very unhealthy practices. For instance, student Dorothy
Dushkin wrote an entry in May, 1922 saying: "Resolved once more to cut down my diet. Betty and Fran's chief topic
of conversation is dieting. It is extremely wearisome especially since they're both slender. I shall try once again
to exert my willpower. I'm not going to say a word about it. I'm not gonna foolishly
cut meals and starve on certain days and relax
on others as they do, but attend all meals and refrain from eating between meals." And in 1920, college physician
Florence Gilman wrote: "Never have we had such a
large proportion of seniors who are tired, nervously
tense, underweight, anemic, with low blood pressure
showing a condition of depressed vitality. These things are found in
students who have not been ill for the most part." So what shifted? Why were these students who 20 years ago would have been trying to gain weight, why are they now losing weight? Well, on a larger societal level, according to anthropologist
Claire Cassidy, "Slenderness symbolize
the freedom from want. The wealthy are able to
switch the bodily metaphor of success from fat to thin
because they do not need to worry about famine
or infectious disease. They can go beyond the message of fat, 'Look how much abundance I
have' to a more etheric model. 'I'm so safe, I can afford
to ignore abundance.'" But it's important to note that most of these college students didn't write in their diary entries with
this of class consciousness. Most of them wrote about how
they wanted to lose weight because they wanted to look better or because all their
friends were doing it. With that said, a major reason for this dieting craze was men. (people booing) Up until 1910, college
was mainly homosocial, as in girls would hang out
with other girls, have parties with other girls, et cetera. However, by the 1910s, students would bat, which was a term that
referred to groups of students and their usually male
gas motoring to a rural off-campus spot to picnic. Early Smith students
also used the term date to mostly refer to hang out with a friend, usually another woman. But by the 1920s, the term
date almost always referred to going out with a man. Historian Beth Bailey notes
that dating moved courtship into the public world,
relocating it from family parlors and community events to
restaurants, theaters, and dance halls. And unlike courting, the goal
of dating was not necessarily to get married, but to raise
your popularity status. And to get more dates you
needed to look your best. And looking your best in
the 1920s meant following the very thin flapper look, and wearing the most fashionable clothes. But unfortunately, if you
were fat, much like today, it was harder to find fashionable clothes, especially because
couture was slimming down. In a 1923 interview, French
clothing designer Paul Poiret even talked about his
unwillingness to dress fat woman. He said: "We do not pay
much attention to fat women. They're the infirm among the fashionable. We can not do anything special for them. They have merely to trail
along the path of la Mode. Their case is not for the dress designer, it is for the physician." - I guess nothing's changed. - [Man 1] Nothing's changed. - And ready-made clothing,
which was becoming more and more available due
to industrialization, gave women idea of what
their bodies were supposed to look like, and where they existed on the spectrum of available sizes. So let's talk about the flapper. Margaret Lowe claims
that before World War I, there was actually a number
of different beauty ideals that women could fall into. There was the natural
woman who had a curvy, but not extremely hourglass figure. The voluptuous woman who had
an extremely hourglass figure. And the Gibson girl, which had a linear, but sensuous shapeliness. There was only one beauty ideal now, the thin straight figure. And if you couldn't mold your
body to fit into that shape, then it sucks for you. You may have been hot like 10 years ago, but you're not anymore. The flapper represented
youthful modernity. She was slender, flat-chested,
and small hipped. And because having any
of these features is usually a genetic thing, not every girl in the 1920s looked
exactly like the flapper, but they at least followed
the straight silhouette things to the undergarments available. According to Lowe, these
straight lines signaled adherence to the new sexual codes of twenties youth: Dating, petting, fast dancing, and freedom from parental supervision. Another contributing factor
to the slimness craze was the development of new food science. Building on mid 19th
century German research, American food scientists
were pushing for this idea to choose food based on
its nutritional value rather than its taste and appearance. On top of recommending people
to reduce fats, sugars, carbs, and proteins, they were also recommending calorie counting. Chin Jou writes that this
emphasis on calorie counting was in part stimulated by the
US government's World War I food conservation campaign. The government was invested in
conserving meat, wheat, fat, and sugar for domestic and allied troops. Because these items were calorie-dense and the dry goods among
them were relatively easy to ship overseas. So it was only after the
war that calorie counting became a phenomenon for weight loss. You may or may not have also
heard of Dr. Lulu Peters, who was an infamous diet promoter, and who published numerous
popular articles and books that recommended restricting
calories for weight reduction. Following in her footsteps,
numerous doctors also wrote to women's magazines and
journals telling women that they should count their calories, not just for themselves,
but for their families to keep everyone at the right weight. This all inevitably led
to a larger social disdain for being fat. And the effects were devastating. In 1927, home economist
Lydia J. Roberts said: "In this country, the
calorie is a familiar word in the vocabulary of
practically every adult. And anyone who doubts the possibility of popularizing it should observe a group of 10-year-old children
counting their calories." Little children were counting
their calories as well. There was a girl named Dorothy
who even wrote a letter to Dr. Peters in 1924 saying: "I am 11-years-old and weigh 136 pounds, which was too much." And for men because they
haven't forgotten about the men. Most of them who decided to
calorie count were doing it to gain muscle, not to like lose weight. So now, dieting for weight
loss was a predominantly women-targeted arena. (gentle music) Lastly, I wanna talk
about the post-war era, so the 1950s to 1970s,
because I feel like this was the time period that
really set the precedent for what dieting is today. In this era, we get diet
pills, slimming clubs, and before and after photo advertisements. So yeah, let's get into that disaster. The reason why this era
was such a profitable time for the dieting industry
was because during the war, national interests were prioritized over individual interests. Nancy Gagliardi mentioned several factors for the diet rebirth post-war. The first is the rising middle class. Middle-class families were
rebuilding their post-war lives through consumerism, and housewives, which have been primary
advertising targets for a while now became the diet industry's core demographic as well. The second reason is that food technology and marketing strategies
were becoming more and more sophisticated. The mid-century was the
golden age of processed foods. Artificial sweeteners appeared
just about everywhere, and consumption of it rose
from 5 million pounds in 1963 to 17 million pounds in 1969. The artificial sweetener market also led to a booming diet soft
drink market that was valued at $660 million in 1965. The third reason is that the media, especially with the popularity of the television was becoming
more and more powerful. In constant headlines in
fear-mongering programs about the nation's growing weight problem and weight-related diseases were seeping into the public consciousness. This is in part because in 1959, US insurance companies published the Build and Blood Pressure Study, which at the time
represented the largest body of information relating
body weight to mortality. If you want more information
on the obesity epidemic, I highly recommend listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast, specifically their episodes
"The Obesity Epidemic," and "Is Being Fat Bad for You?". But in sum, the study was bullshit, there were not enough control variables. You know, people just
didn't understand statistics that well, I guess. But subsequently this idea
that being overweight led to early death was
leading to a public scare. And obesity was largely pushed
as being a behavioral issue. An interesting idea that I came across while reading Nancy Gagliardi's article, and I say this is interesting
because I'm against dieting just in general, but she does mention that dieting is not necessarily
like a complete awful thing. There were plenty of aspects involved in the dieting process,
such as planning, shopping, and cooking meals, which
resulted in a sense of agency. There's also social aspects
as well, like Weight Watchers, which was founded in 1963,
and offered a community space for women to talk about
their insecurities. Before I open the whole
Weight Watchers Pandora's box, I wanna talk about appetite
suppressant pills or diet pills, specifically this pill called AYDS. AYDS? AYDS. - AYDS are tasty caramels for dieters. AYDS contains one of the most effective appetite suppressants you can buy. And AYDS contains no stimulant. - So why don't you let
AYDS help you lose weight, and keep it off? - [Announcer] AYDS helps you
stay the way you want to be. - Ads for this pill where
the first of the 20th century to use the before and after
weight loss story template, involving the stories of real
women written in first person, of course, and using
emotionally descriptive dramatic language. This is powerful and is still
a go-to advertising strategy for diet companies today. But the reason it was so, so powerful in the mid 20th century is
because before this time period, women who were dealing
with problems were told to just like keep it in. And especially for fat
issues, a lot of women prior to these ads were just not visible. Nidetch and Heilman wrote
of the social stigma for fat people at the time: "You never see fat people. They never go outside. They stay home because they
can't walk without getting out of breath and they can't climb on a bus. You never see them at the movies because the seats are too small. They don't even go shopping
because people laugh." Diet pills were not necessarily
new, they were prescribed for weight loss as early
as the 1930s, but by 1949, sales climbed to $7.3
million and continued to rise through the 1950s
as competition increased. - Ladies, stay fit and trim
the easy way with amphetamines, the pleasantest way to reduce. - The market for appetite
suppressants was estimated to generate $153 million
in retail sales in 1960. And whether most of these
worked is up for debate, but if you watched Mad Men you'll
remember The Relax-a-Cizor, that was a real thing,
like a vibrating belt that was supposed to help you lose weight. It sounds like a scam to me. So let's get it to Weight
Watchers and other slimming clubs. I don't know if the structure
of Weight Watchers has changed since the sixties, but
at the time the business offered classes that gave
weight loss guidance, tailored food plans, a weekly weigh-in where a woman would have to
weigh themselves on a scale in front of the class. And the emotional support
of fellow slimmers. The experience was of course
different for everyone. I did come across testimonials of women who liked their experience,
just because it offered a time for them to address their own feelings, and to get solidarity from fellow women. Other women like a woman
named Jackie who was part of Weight Watchers in the
1980s, said that the classes could be a bit cringe-worthy, and it could be also
humiliating and shameful if at the weekly weigh-in,
you didn't lose any pounds or you gained another pound. In the fall of 1967, Weight
Watchers UK held a fashion show at Bentalls Department Store. It was a promotional event
that included huge blowups of the models before pictures,
so that viewers could see how different they looked now. Le'a Kent criticized the
transformation trope writing for the book The Body Reader: "The fat person, usually a
fat woman, is represented not as a person but as
something encasing a person, something from which
a person must escape." And it's important to also tell you guys that the slimming clubs had
very not good rates of success. From a survey conducted in 1975, 63% of the participants regained
some of their lost weight, and 16% reverted back
to their before weight. These slimming clubs did not care about changing the lifestyles of women about raising their
self-esteem and body image to prevent them from getting
into these binge behaviors. Instead, they just focused and prioritize this arbitrary
number that was supposed to represent like premium
objective health for all women. - [Aubrey] She thinks, "Well, I'm fat, and I need to lose weight," not "Uh-oh, something's
going on in my brain. And maybe the solution
here is a brain thing and not a body thing." - [Man 2] Like you can be alarmed by your binge eating
behavior, and try to work on that behavior in a way
that is not necessarily about weight loss or about seeing yourself as a fundamentally failed person. - And yes, they were a minority
of men who did participate in these slimming clubs as well. But Bernice Weston, the
founder of Weight Watchers UK recollects that: "Men
frequently said they joined for medical reasons, or
because they were frightened when one of their friends
died from a heart attack. Women were more likely to say that they hated the way they looked." So here we are today. Some things have changed,
even though there are still staggering eating
disorder cases and numbers of women who have very low self-esteem because of their weight, I feel like we are
crawling towards progress. Thanks to the work of activists
who promote body acceptance. Though the BBL trend did set us back a couple years, but progress
doesn't go like this, progress goes like this. (Mina laughing) As for my personal opinion
on diets, as I've said, I don't like diets. And I understand that's
a very general statement because there's a number of
dieting practices out there, and not all of them are scams probably. But I think it's a problem that
diets tend to mostly appeal to people with already low self-esteem. And I think if you go into
a diet with low self-image, with low body image,
you're going to be prone to developing an eating disorder. The National Eating Disorders Association even released a statement
in 2019 as a response to the Weight Watchers app saying: "In a large study of 14 and 15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of developing an eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately
were five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme
restriction were 18 times more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet." Also like, a lot of dieting programs, they utilize this negative body talk, which is just not healthy. - [Aubrey] As of 2011, 93%
of women reported engaging in social quote unquote "fat talk," which they sort of define as this practice of expressing dissatisfaction
with their own size or talking about like quote
unquote, "feeling fat." People who engage in this kind of fat talk have like significantly
weaker romantic relationships and friendships, so like relationships of all stripes are weakened by this. Weight Watchers is a place that has sort of systematized and participated in the popularization of this phenomenon. - I also think that there's a lot of truth about what Naomi Wolf has
written about a woman being overly concerned with their appearance. She's written about how American woman, whenever they achieve
greater status in society, there are pressures that force them to consider their appearances
a little too much, which ends up distracting
them from achieving economic and financial success at the
same rate as their male peers. So yeah, food for thought. That's all I have for today. Let me know in the comments
what you think about dieting, what you think about these trends, whether you think they
work, whether you're against them, for them. I love to hear what you all
have to say and thank you for spending this piece
of your day with me. And I'll see you next time. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day. Bye-bye. (Mina blowing a kiss) (gentle music)
I love Mina Le! I'm so excited to watch this!
The irony of seeing a n$#m add at the beginning, ugh.