“Less Prozac, more protein.” That quote, uttered by the wellness influencer Alex Clark, jumped out at me from coverage of the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, a gathering of around 3,000 hosted by Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization focused on the next generation.
Clark went on to discuss the melding of diet, exercise, religion and politics that, as she sees it, defines the conservative brand for 20- and 30-something women. “The girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together” are right wing, the “cool kids” and “mainstream.” By contrast, liberals are “TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light.”
My first reaction: Enough about protein (that macronutrient needs a rest) and grass-fed beef from Whole Foods is neither Republican nor Democrat. I lift weights, married and got pregnant in my 20s; yet by Turning Point standards, I am basically a Marxist career harpy.
But my second reaction is that our ever-present diet culture once again has a conservative, Christian bent to it. I had recently seen some social media postings about sinfulness, gluttony and “SkinnyTok,” and since Trump’s re-election there have been magazine articles tying thinness to conservative values and the idea that women should take up less physical space in the public sphere. But it was the explicit pushing of diet and exercise at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit that tied it all together for me: religiosity, conservatism, the Make America Healthy Again movement and diet culture.
Despite rumblings about “body positivity” that peaked about 10 years ago, for decades the white American beauty standard has been thin. As part of the focus on body positivity in the 2010s, it became unfashionable to talk about skinniness as a goal, so it just got rebranded as wellness, health or self-care, though the pressures to conform remained the same.
In the ’90s and ’00s, thinness had a debauched, libertine air to it; if anything, I guess it was default coded as liberal, but it wasn’t really tied to electoral politics or health. The image that comes to me is of the model Kate Moss at the famously muddy Glastonbury Music Festival in 2005, where her uniform was tiny shorts, Wellington boots, a troubled rock star boyfriend on her arm and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. The subtext was always that the skinniness came from cocaine and dancing all night, or simply not eating. Many women of my vintage can quote a relevant line from “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006): “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.”
Thinness has never been fully vanquished as the normative feminine ideal, even in moments when other body types gain momentary mainstream acceptability. Because it never goes away fully, the goal of being skinny can pretty easily shift into different ideologies and trends. There have been many times over the past several decades when conservative Christianity and weight control were explicitly linked, according to Kelsey Kramer McGinnis, who is a correspondent for Christianity Today and is also working on a book about wellness, diet culture and Christian women. “Evangelical Christians get sold a lot of merchandise, basically by people repackaging mainstream advice as spiritual in some way,” she told me.
When I put out a questionnaire asking readers why they moved away from organized religion two summers ago, a woman in her 60s from Virginia said that the inciting incident for her was when she was in college and “a church told me I was too fat to sing in their choir.” It is impossible to gauge how widespread this kind of anti-fat discrimination was 40 or 50 years ago in church culture. But in the 1970s, students at Oral Roberts University, a private evangelical school, were subject to annual physical exams that included body fat measurements.
According to New York Times coverage of Oral Roberts’ policies from December 1977, if students were determined to be obese, they were “automatically placed on a weight reduction program. They meet with school doctors and sign a contract to lose a pound or two a week until they reach their goal. If a student fails to lose the weight, he or she faces probation and, eventually, suspension.” In 2016, Oral Roberts was back in the news for making its 900 freshmen wear fitness trackers. “Students are required to average 10,000 steps per day and 150 minutes of intense activity (as measured by heart rate) each week.” The data made up a portion of their grades in health and physical education classes, The Washington Post reported.
Before there were conservative Christian “fitfluencers” all over social media, there were also many best-selling Christian diet books that explicitly tied sin and spirituality to weight loss. In a 2013 preview of our current MAHA/MAGA alliances across medicine, religion and politics, the megachurch pastor Rick Warren co-wrote a diet book called “The Daniel Plan” with Dr. Daniel Amen and Dr. Mark Hyman, which features a blurb from Dr. Mehmet Oz.
The book includes admonitions like “God isn’t going to evaluate you on the basis of the bodies he gave to other people, but he will judge what you did with what you have been given,” “Satan does not want you living a healthy life because that honors God” and “Why should God heal you of an obesity-related illness if you have no intention of changing the choices that led to it?”
Using the power of faith and the institution of the church to fat-shame makes me sad on multiple levels. Spiritual solace should be available for all of us, no matter what our weight or health status is, and a low body weight is not always an indicator of health. The kingdom of Heaven shouldn’t have an upper weight limit; it is not a literal elevator to salvation.
In the 12 years since Warren’s book was published, the effectiveness of drugs like Ozempic and other semaglutides have changed our understanding of obesity. We know now that overeating is not just about willpower. As Julia Belluz put it in an Opinion guest essay in 2023, “The way the drugs work can teach us that people who are larger did not necessarily choose to be, just as people who are smaller did not — and are not morally superior.”
Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped fat from being seen as a moral issue; it almost seems worse now. McGinnis told me that in her reporting, she heard from a former Christian wellness influencer that there’s a backlash brewing to Ozempic because “it doesn’t require you to bear any self-control, which is the fruit of the spirit.”
Regardless of whether it’s glossed as liberal or conservative, religious or secular, keeping women occupied with controlling our bodies, rather than gaining power in ways that go beyond our physical selves, is the goal. In an attention economy where the algorithms seem to prioritize conventional female attractiveness as a prerequisite for having your voice heard, I don’t know how to break out of this trap.
End Notes
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Exploit it, baby: I’m reading a 1999 biography of the scandalous early-20th-century French writer Colette, called “Secrets of the Flesh,” by Judith Thurman. It is refreshing in this moment to read about a woman who did not care at all about convention and lived her life as a deliberate provocation (for good and for bad). The book is also filled with fantastic characters who provide endlessly quotable Gallic realness. For example, an early mentor of Colette, Léontine Arman de Caillavet, once said, “You must take the world for what it is, despise it and exploit it.”
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ICYMI: My wonderful colleagues Emily Holzknecht and Adam Westbrook made a video after hearing from around 2,000 mothers about their challenges. They followed up with dozens of them, and more than anything else, these women talked about the financial strain of parenting in America today. Here is a link to the video and an essay I wrote to accompany their moving work.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
The post The Unrepentant Return of Christian Diet Culture appeared first on New York Times.
