Alan Levinovitz

It's almost as if I'm going to have to invent new language to discuss these things in a way that doesn't drag us back into the binaries that are making it impossible for us to understand what's really happening.

Forget psychogenic.

Let's look at dieting.

People who gained a lot of weight or gained a lot of weight and then had difficulty losing it were called lazy.

They were told they were slobs.

They were told that it was their fault.

I mean, Oprah, right?

The least lazy woman in the world, right?

People were blamed for being obese and they were blamed for not being able to lose their weight.

I think that being blamed, feeling like something is your fault is one of the worst things you can possibly feel.

And it was false.

It was false in the case of obesity.

It's not true that all of a sudden a bunch of people got lazier right when processed foods hit America.

It's just ridiculous, right?

But what happened, and you know this, is that there was this whole weird, not weird, there was this whole reaction, understandable but misguided,

where they would say things like, well, actually, this isn't about how much food you eat.

It's not calories in.

People would say things like, I eat no more food than anyone else, and I'm still really fat.

There were all these other theories about what caused weight gain or what stopped people from losing weight.

It's your metabolism.