tl;dr: Decolonization is the answer.

I'm just going to say it. Fat Acceptance can't fix anything.

I've been following it now for 20 years, and I started watching it in the infancy of the modern movement as I had a freshly earned anthropology degree. And Harvard, we need to talk about your most visible influencer graduate. Because you're not exactly promoting yourself as a great education with her content.

See, Samyra (she seems to be a single-named celebrity, like Madonna or Cher) is probably the most prominent Gen Z Fat Acceptance activist out there. She's a Harvard Grad, and loves to drop that she's read scholarly texts on the intersection of fatness and race, class, feminism, etc, etc. Her brand is angrily calling out all of the "fatphobia" in society, particularly in large corporations.

Here's my issue with Samyra's content - it was revolutionary 20 years ago, when she was in preschool. She's so far added nothing new to the conversation. Despite that Harvard education, which apparently never taught her critical analysis, just made her read books.

Because, see, life made this a special focus topic for me. I was raised Seventh-Day Adventist, not only did I have a front-row seat to early American diet ideology, I had it snowballed in with concepts of religious purity. And the prescribed diet was based on soy, eggs, dairy, and nuts - all foods I'm allergic to. My obesity was caused by a literal Holy Trinity of religious, medical, and diet culture trauma. And I was experiencing this during the 90's and 2000's era of fad dieting and extreme thinness. I have a very unique lived experience and insight here.

So, combine this with formal training in cultural study (maybe not from Harvard, but I'm obviously still doing okay here), and exposure to the principals of decolonization early through the Standing Rock Protests, and my AuDHD brain let the pattern recognition take over:

1. Truth: we moralize "thinness" and "fatness" thanks to our Puritanical history. Where did that come from? Colonization.

2. Truth: the standard American diet is addictive poison. America's extreme capitalistic culture prioritizes convenience foods over homemade, and even when we do cook, we're so used to cracking open a can of Campbell's soup or Ragu red sauce that we're still adding corporate trash to our meals to cut a corner or two, because that's how grandma did it. Not to mention the stabilizers, preservatives, and other additives we allow, again for the convenience of transportation or shelf life. And the refined fats and sugars that do double duty as those preservatives, and triggers a dopamine hit when you eat the food to boot, making you buy more and making the product more profitable for the company. And what is capitalism? The modern expression of colonization.

3. Truth: we have been taught to look at food superficially as calories and nothing else, and to look at weight gain and weight loss as a matter of eat more/gain more and eat less/gain less, when the reality is far more complicated, and the consumption of the right combination of nutrients for optimum health should be the goal of eating. Why did we do this? Go back to the Puritans. We have science now. We know how to know what each unique body needs in its diet. We need to champion access to scientific diets over religious dogma. And again, dogma's the colonizer's beliefs. We're right back to colonization.

I do believe we've identified the root of the issue here: a colonizer's mindset, and a colonizer's diet.

So. How do we fight colonialism? We decolonize.

And here is where Fat Acceptance is wrong. They're all eating the colonizer's food. And they're proud of it.

Before hopping over here to write this, I saw another influencer (not Samyra) claim that her morbidly obese body was a rebellious act against Eurocentric beauty standards. How are you rebelling against the colonizers if you're eating so much of their food you're carrying excessive weight?

See, the "Mediterranean Diet" is a decolonized diet. There are versions for every culture, of course, but the diet by in large is based in whole grains & tubers (rice, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, taro, etc), beans and legumes (lentils, chickpeas, etc), nuts and seeds, fruits and vegetables including mushrooms, and minimally processed meats. Dairy and eggs are okay for people not allergic, but the dairy is generally kept to yogurt and kefir, and hard cheeses.

If you're obese on a diet like that, there's an underlying medical issue that needs to be addressed. Same with being underweight. You'll look fed on a decolonized diet - the point here is true health, not starvation for effect, either way.

And that's the mindset switch that needs to come with the diet change - you're eating to give your body the mix of nutrients it needs to function at its fullest and best capacity. You're eating so you have real energy and real focus to put into things that matter to you. You're eating so you can perform at work, so you can have better sex, so you can enjoy your personal time, so you can have clear skin and strong hair, so you sleep better at night, all things that will genuinely improve your life. And that doesn't mean you're not still eating for pleasure - whole foods are incredibly low calorie while being nutrient dense, you can eat very satisfying portions of food that you can season to your liking, that will truly fill you up and make you feel satisfied and energized.

Notice weight or size has absolutely nothing to do with any of that. It's all about health, energy, and quality of life. But it's very, very hard to stay morbidly obese on a decolonized diet, if you don't have any underlying health issues. Same with being underweight. Morbid obesity is the natural result of eating a diet of majority ultra-processed foods, the human brain still craves hearty portions of low calorie/high nutrition food and we're feeding it the opposite, high calorie/low nutrition and expect morality to overcome biology and restrict our eating. Staying underweight in a food system where the food itself is an addictive, harmful substance is a flex because morbid obesity is so easy to attain.

Everyone - fat, thin, I don't care - needs to step outside of the colonizer's framework if they want to break the cycle on body image and relationship with food. And that means doing the personal work of decolonization, so we can build a communal base for real cultural evolution.

And you can't do that as you're pounding a bag of Doritos for the camera. That's not food freedom. That's just the other side of the same coin of the colonizer's diet.

We need to change together. Everybody. And that means everyone taking responsibility for doing the work of decolonization.

Now, what could an influencer do to inspire real change, not just rage bait their audience with tired arguments?

1. An influencer could focus positive energy on people and small businesses and co-ops centering decolonization in their lives and business philosophies, introduce their following to people they need to connect to.

2. An influencer could show their own decolonization journey, share their research into what their ancestral foodways were like pre-colonization, record their recipe demos and reactions, and discuss how amazing they feel after eating whole foods and how much it has improved their life and their bank account.

And before you start in on "these are all big words for someone with no audience" do you really think corporate owned social media is about to give me an audience with this? Ha! That's why I'm getting into the zine community, real change isn't going to happen on a corporate-owned product.

Speaking of, in my two week absence from this blog, I did not die, I just got really into three separate zine projects that are just about ready to print. All are lil themed mini-cookbooks from my recipe blog of decolonized recipes. So, I am walking the talk here, not just shitting on a popular creator for the sake of clout. This is something I really believe in.

Let's start building the future we want to live in.