Jia Tolentino

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981 appearances 13 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Apr 2025

Jia Tolentino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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What Now? with Trevor Noah · The Ozempic Obsession with Jia Tolentino (ARCHIVE EPISODE) · 2 Jan 2025 podcast

And it's incredibly difficult in reporting this piece, even in talking to people. Like, I think that the fear of fat and the bias against it is it would come out quite casually. I'm sure it's built into me in some way. you know, in the way that I think about it. But I think that there is a way to get some basic facts on the table, right?

That BMI is based on, you know, like BMI is like a racist, kind of eugenicist standard. And there can be serious conditions that correlate with obesity, but that doesn't mean that, you know, obesity or... excess weight is in itself harmful. And so much of this is really arguably down to physician bias as well. There are OBGYNs that won't treat women over a certain BMI.

There's so many, so many statistically doctors self-report beliefs about patients that are quote unquote overweight or obese. And You know, they they treat them differently. They underdiagnose, they undertreat, they attribute all health problems. Yeah.

You need to lose weight in ways that are never sort of suspected about people of different sizes. And, you know, there's like.

Yeah. And yeah, it was blood. Yeah.

That was like, oh, you're like, your lungs are simply fat. Yeah. Yeah.

Blood clots. Oh, she had blood clots. Yeah.

But I think, you know, you mostly find the healthy way of talking about it in people who have had to like advocate for themselves against all of these things for a long time. I also think fundamentally, probably the healthiest way to talk about health is to kind of set weight aside altogether, right? And talk about other metrics like... VO2 max and... Yeah, I don't know what that means.

There are so many other metrics to talk about health that have nothing to do with weight. And probably that would be the healthiest way of talking about weight is having it be just sort of an incidental byproduct of all these other lifestyle factors.

Well, this is taking it in a slightly different direction. But what this part of the conversation makes me think of and what I think this thing that was in the back of my head when I was writing and thinking about it was that...

One of the reasons that I, on a macro level, find it really sad when people who are extremely thin take this to become much thinner is that what it is to be human, we're made up of our appetites. That's one of the defining things of what we seek and what we literally physically hunger for and desire. you know, like our desire for pleasure and relief and excitement, right?

These things are important and they make us human. And back to the conversation about kids, it's like so much of the rise of obesity in children seems directly related to the fact that people are so afraid of fat children in the first place, right? Like that children are taught to fear their appetites and fear the snack drawer. Like the idea of just kind of natural pleasure, right?

in our appetite seems to be the thing that might possibly lead to the healthiest relationship with them in all cases, right? To not need to indulge and have guilty pleasures and sort of secret little things, right? That if these appetites, if we could sort of treat them normally in all respects, and it seems like American consumerist culture just blows all of these kind of compulsions

sky high because of this fear we have of appetite.

balanced I guess culture then I'd be like sure enjoy the pleasure of food because then you can regulate that pleasure because you're getting pleasure everywhere but people don't get touched that's a really interesting idea they don't have community they don't have any other pleasures but that's what I mean right if we could if we could like honor our need like like what we were saying out outside time and safety yeah yeah and like the whole labor market being organized differently so that it's not like you have to squeeze all your pleasure into like two minute micro installments like

you know, six times a day, right? Like, I think we would have a very different relationship to compulsion and appetite and pleasure and relief if, you know, if American society were set up in such a way that would, like, honor people as, like, beings that need these things, right?

Yeah, I feel like that's the whole story of the entire conversation around weight, right? Like it's who is making the money off of them and who's making the money off of the cure. Follow the money. Always follow the money. Yeah.

Well, Yeah, I think one of the things that does seem maybe meaningfully new about this is that the beauty standards of the last decade seem to me to be this really kind of insidious arms race between digital enhancement and then technological alteration to match digital enhancement. And then you digitally enhance more and then use technology to further sort of shape, inject, discipline, whatever.

The thing that really scares me is The idea that an unaltered body or face is aberrant or deviant and sort of unacceptable, that like that's the thing that I find really like existentially terrifying.

And I think plenty of people who are fat and healthy and perfectly happy in their lives are now hit with this sort of unbearable wave of like, well, why don't you just get the little jab, you know?

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