Link (Archive)
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Meher Ahmad: I’m Meher Ahmad, an editor in the New York Times Opinion section. There’s been a resurgence in explicit “be thin” messaging and culture. With the Ozempic boom, we see the body-shaming of actresses like Sydney Sweeney and red carpets that were already filled with thin actresses becoming even thinner.
On the right, there’s been a focus on body size that’s been bundled up not just with health and wellness but with religion, morals and politics. And so when everything is political and we’re more divided than ever, should the size and shape of our bodies be any different? I’m here today with the Opinion writer Jessica Grose to understand why the right is obsessed with thinness and why that message is winning over women.
Jess, I want to start first by asking you what the messaging on diet and thinness coming from the Christian influencer spaces is — what do you see there?
Jessica Grose: So it’s really encapsulated by some things that the wellness influencer Alex Clark said at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit.
Audio clip of Alex Clark: Look around this room, let’s just be honest. It’s never been hotter to be a conservative. You are in this room and you are witnessing a cultural revolution. We’ve got the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together. Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity.
Grose: And by contrast, liberals are TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light. So it’s really defining what is “normal” as a very narrow ideal of womanhood. It’s all tied up with not just body size, but also behavior.
Ahmad: Even in that clip, Alex Clark is sort of describing a foil to what she describes as a liberal body type. How much of this is a reaction to a left version of a body type, and what even is that?
Grose: So I think it’s a reaction to the body positivity movement, which I would say peaked about 10 years ago. It was the idea that weight is not tied directly to health and that you can be healthy and not rail-thin.
You would see models who were not model size on the runway. It was never predominant. There was maybe one, and brands were more bullied into making more size inclusive lines. So often, if you are above a straight size — which depending on the brand, I think is 12, 14 — it was very hard to find fashionable clothes. And so there was a movement to be more inclusive and recognize the fact that the average American woman is not sample size. So I would say that was never the only thing that was mainstream.
I remember at the time, parents of teenage girls were like, yeah, the body positivity movement has not reached this middle school. So I don’t ever think that it was dominant and it wasn’t just liberals, but I think it was liberal-coded.
Ahmad: Who are some of the big names, specifically in the Christian diet trend or conservative women diet trend? Who are the voices that you’re seeing?
Grose: So Alex Clark, who is a podcaster, a wellness influencer, who we already mentioned. Then Liv Schmidt, who was associated with this term SkinnyTok.
Audio clip of Liv Schmidt: Skinny solutions for daily life is today’s video while I get ready. Because being skinny is a lifestyle, not a diet.
Grose: I don’t think she talks about politics too much, but she has appeared in conservative magazines like Evie, which is a magazine geared towards young conservative women. And then folks like Ballerina Farm, who’s a trad wife influencer.
Audio clip of Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm: I am going to show you what my day looked like today: I wake up, nurse Flora Jo, then we get the kids fed and ready for school, which is in a little schoolhouse we have here on the farm.
Grose: I know they sell products from their store that are emphasizing a meat-heavy lifestyle as healthy, which again, it is part of mainstream culture. I mean, you can’t throw a rock without hearing somebody talking about protein, which I’ve also written about before, but it’s just putting the conservative gloss on it.
Ahmad: What about the messaging is putting on the conservative gloss? Because I think, as you said, a lot of this feels familiar territory, especially the fixation on protein. I mean, Khloe Kardashian came out with a protein popcorn. I’m curious about how it overlaps with Christianity in particular and like what makes these influencers pair diet cultures with more of a religious or moral tent.
Grose: So there’s long been a history of a Christian publishing universe. They’ve long tried to take things that are popular in the mainstream and put their own spin on it. I went back and read a book that was a best seller about 10 years ago, co-written by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren. The book is called “The Daniel Plan,” and it features a blurb from Dr. Oz. So it’s sort of tied in with our current administration, and the book includes things like, “Satan does not want you to live 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?”
So there’s a distinct idea that overeating or gluttony — which is one of the seven deadly sins — is immoral. And if your body size is not whatever society thinks is an appropriate body size, that is a sin. Then there’s a whole thing that really dovetails into the MAHA movement about the purity of food, and that also can be secular. You hear tons of people who are not religious talk about toxins and eating things that are bad for your body and how that is morally abhorrent. But I think that there’s a direct language of the sin of gluttony. And you see it all the time with creators on social media who directly talk about it that way — that overeating is sinful, gluttonous, bad, morally impure.
Audio clip of Kim Dolan Leto: No diet can give you the spirit of self-control. Only God can do that.
And obviously these ideas go back thousands of years.
Audio clip of Kim Dolan Leto: And the other fruits of the spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 are joy, peace, faithfulness. We can have all of that in this fitness journey if we’re doing it in God and through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that is my prayer for you today. OK?
These are very old ideas that are just consistently repackaged for a modern value system.
Ahmad: That’s one thing I’m interested in with these particular influencers is the desire for the way that they look or how they behave should be in line with certain values that are politically aligned with the conservative movement. How do you see the political aspect of it pairing with the way that these women are presenting themselves physically, online and in the world?
Grose: It’s all traditional gender roles. That litany of things that Alex Clark listed, it’s marriage, babies, fitness, protein — it’s all one very narrow image. Anyone who is not conforming to that image is sort of outside the circle. It’s also in a moment where we do see fewer female leaders across the board — I would say Democrats and Republicans. So the idea that women should be physically smaller goes along with the idea that they’re not going to be the ones out front taking up space.
Ahmad: You touched on this, but in a lot of ways, the desire to be thin is so ubiquitous — across time, across millennia and across the political spectrum. I’m curious about how you see the left version of aspiring to thinness, especially in this current moment, and how that compares to this more conservative value system. Are they unique in promoting thinness, these conservative influencers? Or are they just part of the general environment right now, which is kind of OK with being unabashedly pro-skinny?
Grose: They’re just co-opting what’s already in the water. I think what happened with the body positivity movement is it got co-opted by the wellness movement, and so people stopped using language like, “Oh, I’m doing this to be thin.” And instead changed their language to: “I’m doing this to be healthy.”
Audio clip of the influencer Alex Rose: Here is a glimpse into everything I ate today to just fuel my body and feel my best as someone who loves to cook and eat healthy and all the good things, but also believes in balance and feeling good from the inside out.
But healthy was always synonymous with thinness in the mainstream, and also it’s very white. I think that there’s a lot of cultures who are not so obsessed with thinness but we’re all reacting to the mainstream dominant public messaging that we’re all getting. There’s lots of studies that show people who are overweight — and especially women who are overweight — are discriminated against. They earn less money, they are treated more poorly in public. It’s not just a media creation fixation; it has real-world consequences.
Ahmad: One thing that I noticed about a lot of these Christian diet influencers is that they think that Ozempic is a cheater’s way to lose weight. That the real true way to lose weight is by hard work and self-control, which is interesting because I think now as Ozempic has become more ubiquitous and accessible to a lot of people, there’s more of an acceptance of taking it as a drug. But these Christian influencers are almost counter to that mainstream idea that taking Ozempic is like a normal thing, just like taking an antidepressant would be a normal thing.
So I’m curious what you make of the fact that a lot of these Christian influencers kind of decry these drugs or think they’re a sign of moral failure?
Grose: Well, I mean, I think ultimately they want people to be obsessed with these ideas and never stop thinking about them. And one thing that a lot of people on Ozempic say is that it gets rid of the food noise. So they’re just not preoccupied by eating in the same way that they were before, and that it gives them a great deal of freedom.
So I think it is, again, about control. It’s about preoccupation. It’s about martyrdom. Unless you’re punishing yourself, it’s not worthy or worth it.
Ahmad: I find the religiosity of all of this really fascinating. One thing that might be relevant to this is that when I was a foreign correspondent, I was based in Pakistan, which is a predominantly Muslim country. And during the month of Ramadan, people fast. They don’t drink water or eat or even chew gum or anything like that between sunup to sundown.
I ended up reporting a piece when I was there about this phenomenon of Ramadan boot camps where women would channel the fasting, religious kind of fervor of Ramadan and turn it into a weight-loss goal. So I did the boot camp and it was grueling. It was actually really, really tough because first of all, I was in Karachi at this time. Ramadan moves with the lunar calendar, so back then it was in the summer and it was like 110 degrees on an average day. We would do an hourlong HIIT workout right before we broke our fast, so that meant that I would do burpees and all this stuff and then not drink water afterwards, which was really difficult.
But a lot of the boot camp’s focus was on self-restraint, and during the month of Ramadan you’re fasting because you’re trying to access higher thoughts and you’re thinking of people who don’t have food. There’s all these purposes, kind of morals behind why you’re doing this.
And it’s to develop empathy and feel closer to God. They kind of took all of that and then applied it to weight loss and I found it sad, but it also made sense to me that it would happen. When I walked away from the experience — which by the way, in the process of which I lost like an unhealthy amount of weight in a very short amount of time ——
Grose: I’m sure you did.
Ahmad: When I walked away from that experience, I also found that the appeal of religion itself in a lot of ways is that it gives you a moral set of guidelines to navigate a very complicated world. When I look at these Christian diet influencers, in a way, the appeal to me is totally apparent because especially when it comes to things like food, American food culture is so confusing. There’s so many options. What you’re meant to eat, or what powders you should be taking, changes day by day, week by week. There’s so much decision making that has to go into everything.
And the guidance on what you should eat, especially with MAHA becoming more part of our culture, there’s an inherent distrust of a lot of information. Having just a clear set of guidelines based on something like religion almost feels like a relief. Sometimes I’m envious; I wish I believed in something that just told me how to live my life. So it’s interesting seeing how they pair food and food choices and weight loss with religion. But I’m curious how you see that playing out in American culture?
Grose: I love that you just told that story. That’s so fascinating. I totally agree with you that it is really hard to know what to eat and why at this moment. I think where it becomes coercive and controlling is when you’re telling people your salvation is tied to the way that you are eating, and if you step off this path, that is akin to consorting with the Devil. I just don’t think that that’s morally fair to people. But I certainly understand the appeal.
I’ve written before about my obsession with Orangetheory and I often joke that I’m in a cult, but part of the appeal of that high-intensity interval training workout is that you put your brain aside for the hour that you’re there and you’re just listening to the coach tell you what to do. So again, it’s all a spectrum of behavior and I’m not sitting here acting like I am not completely ruined by diet culture.
I always think it’s just it’s too late for me. I read too many magazines in the ’90s and I saw too many pictures of Kate Moss in Wellies at Glastonbury — do not try those. If you are under 5-10, they make you look so stumpy, which I learned the hard way.
I think I write about these issues and think about these issues so much in a Helen Lovejoy “think of the children!” way. I want so badly for my daughters and the kids growing up today who are just inundated with images and visuals of extreme thinness all the time to be more skeptical of what they are seeing and figure out a healthier, better way.
Ahmad: Yeah. Just to bring it back to the appeal of religion that lies beneath the surface of this trend, I was wondering — especially because you’ve reported on religion in this country a fair bit — how you see the vision of diet culture being fully formed versus the left version or the left’s answer being more of a chaotic disarray of ideals?
I kind of see this across the political spectrum, not just when it comes to the aesthetics of what conservatism looks like, but conservatism to a lot of Americans is like: Here’s a vision of what this country is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to be white picket fences, it’s supposed to be a husband and wife and their kids, and the wife is thin. And the husband is this way, and they go to church and this is what this country is meant to be.
For a lot of people, having a clear idea of what that vision is is appealing because if the left feels like it doesn’t even know what that vision looks like, it’s harder for people to grab on to. Do you see that happening outside of just diet culture? Is that part of the thing that draws people into more religious, conservative political viewpoints?
Grose: I think definitely conservative; less so religious because religion also requires them to go to church and have this whole other set of beliefs and behaviors that younger generations are really not showing that they want in big numbers.
I’ve written about this numerous times, but if you look at the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian and go to church regularly, it just — every generation, from the silent generation on down — shows a lower percentage of people who, even if they define themselves as Christian, attend church weekly. They just don’t want to do it. So whether it’s more of a cultural identity or not, conservatives clearly have the upper hand in terms of a defined message: what to do, who to be, what to look like, what America means.
I think they’ve been very savvy over the past couple of years in understanding that politics is downstream from culture. But if I have to have one more conversation about who the left’s Joe Rogan is, I’m going to throw myself off a cliff. So I think providing an alternative vision is going to be more about how we behave than how we look. I think that is more of a compelling message because there’s such a nastiness right now to the rhetoric from conservatives and conservative influencers. I don’t know if the left is going to be able to compete on the clarity of vision, but they might be able to get somewhere with the clarity of behavior and morality.
Ahmad: So if there’s no Joe Rogan on the left, as you said, is there an Alex Clark on the left? Is there an alternative in that way?
Grose: Well, I mean, we’ve seen Michelle Obama’s podcast do incredibly well. Kylie Kelce, who I love, is also an example of someone who actually has all the things that Alex Clark talks about but is very open and welcoming and warm. I love her vibe, personally. So I think that there are opportunities to have a version of wellness that isn’t so intimately tied to body image and shaming.
Ahmad: Well, this feels like a good place to end our conversation. Thanks Jess, for being here.
Grose: Thanks so much for having me.
Why the Right Is Obsessed With Thinness
Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Meher Ahmad: I’m Meher Ahmad, an editor in the New York Times Opinion section. There’s been a resurgence in explicit “be thin” messaging and culture. With the Ozempic boom, we see the body-shaming of actresses like Sydney Sweeney and red carpets that were already filled with thin actresses becoming even thinner.
On the right, there’s been a focus on body size that’s been bundled up not just with health and wellness but with religion, morals and politics. And so when everything is political and we’re more divided than ever, should the size and shape of our bodies be any different? I’m here today with the Opinion writer Jessica Grose to understand why the right is obsessed with thinness and why that message is winning over women.
Jess, I want to start first by asking you what the messaging on diet and thinness coming from the Christian influencer spaces is — what do you see there?
Jessica Grose: So it’s really encapsulated by some things that the wellness influencer Alex Clark said at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit.
Audio clip of Alex Clark: Look around this room, let’s just be honest. It’s never been hotter to be a conservative. You are in this room and you are witnessing a cultural revolution. We’ve got the girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together. Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity.
Grose: And by contrast, liberals are TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light. So it’s really defining what is “normal” as a very narrow ideal of womanhood. It’s all tied up with not just body size, but also behavior.
Ahmad: Even in that clip, Alex Clark is sort of describing a foil to what she describes as a liberal body type. How much of this is a reaction to a left version of a body type, and what even is that?
Grose: So I think it’s a reaction to the body positivity movement, which I would say peaked about 10 years ago. It was the idea that weight is not tied directly to health and that you can be healthy and not rail-thin.
You would see models who were not model size on the runway. It was never predominant. There was maybe one, and brands were more bullied into making more size inclusive lines. So often, if you are above a straight size — which depending on the brand, I think is 12, 14 — it was very hard to find fashionable clothes. And so there was a movement to be more inclusive and recognize the fact that the average American woman is not sample size. So I would say that was never the only thing that was mainstream.
I remember at the time, parents of teenage girls were like, yeah, the body positivity movement has not reached this middle school. So I don’t ever think that it was dominant and it wasn’t just liberals, but I think it was liberal-coded.
Ahmad: Who are some of the big names, specifically in the Christian diet trend or conservative women diet trend? Who are the voices that you’re seeing?
Grose: So Alex Clark, who is a podcaster, a wellness influencer, who we already mentioned. Then Liv Schmidt, who was associated with this term SkinnyTok.
Audio clip of Liv Schmidt: Skinny solutions for daily life is today’s video while I get ready. Because being skinny is a lifestyle, not a diet.
Grose: I don’t think she talks about politics too much, but she has appeared in conservative magazines like Evie, which is a magazine geared towards young conservative women. And then folks like Ballerina Farm, who’s a trad wife influencer.
Audio clip of Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm: I am going to show you what my day looked like today: I wake up, nurse Flora Jo, then we get the kids fed and ready for school, which is in a little schoolhouse we have here on the farm.
Grose: I know they sell products from their store that are emphasizing a meat-heavy lifestyle as healthy, which again, it is part of mainstream culture. I mean, you can’t throw a rock without hearing somebody talking about protein, which I’ve also written about before, but it’s just putting the conservative gloss on it.
Ahmad: What about the messaging is putting on the conservative gloss? Because I think, as you said, a lot of this feels familiar territory, especially the fixation on protein. I mean, Khloe Kardashian came out with a protein popcorn. I’m curious about how it overlaps with Christianity in particular and like what makes these influencers pair diet cultures with more of a religious or moral tent.
Grose: So there’s long been a history of a Christian publishing universe. They’ve long tried to take things that are popular in the mainstream and put their own spin on it. I went back and read a book that was a best seller about 10 years ago, co-written by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren. The book is called “The Daniel Plan,” and it features a blurb from Dr. Oz. So it’s sort of tied in with our current administration, and the book includes things like, “Satan does not want you to live 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?”
So there’s a distinct idea that overeating or gluttony — which is one of the seven deadly sins — is immoral. And if your body size is not whatever society thinks is an appropriate body size, that is a sin. Then there’s a whole thing that really dovetails into the MAHA movement about the purity of food, and that also can be secular. You hear tons of people who are not religious talk about toxins and eating things that are bad for your body and how that is morally abhorrent. But I think that there’s a direct language of the sin of gluttony. And you see it all the time with creators on social media who directly talk about it that way — that overeating is sinful, gluttonous, bad, morally impure.
Audio clip of Kim Dolan Leto: No diet can give you the spirit of self-control. Only God can do that.
And obviously these ideas go back thousands of years.
Audio clip of Kim Dolan Leto: And the other fruits of the spirit in Galatians 5:22-23 are joy, peace, faithfulness. We can have all of that in this fitness journey if we’re doing it in God and through the power of the Holy Spirit, and that is my prayer for you today. OK?
These are very old ideas that are just consistently repackaged for a modern value system.
Ahmad: That’s one thing I’m interested in with these particular influencers is the desire for the way that they look or how they behave should be in line with certain values that are politically aligned with the conservative movement. How do you see the political aspect of it pairing with the way that these women are presenting themselves physically, online and in the world?
Grose: It’s all traditional gender roles. That litany of things that Alex Clark listed, it’s marriage, babies, fitness, protein — it’s all one very narrow image. Anyone who is not conforming to that image is sort of outside the circle. It’s also in a moment where we do see fewer female leaders across the board — I would say Democrats and Republicans. So the idea that women should be physically smaller goes along with the idea that they’re not going to be the ones out front taking up space.
Ahmad: You touched on this, but in a lot of ways, the desire to be thin is so ubiquitous — across time, across millennia and across the political spectrum. I’m curious about how you see the left version of aspiring to thinness, especially in this current moment, and how that compares to this more conservative value system. Are they unique in promoting thinness, these conservative influencers? Or are they just part of the general environment right now, which is kind of OK with being unabashedly pro-skinny?
Grose: They’re just co-opting what’s already in the water. I think what happened with the body positivity movement is it got co-opted by the wellness movement, and so people stopped using language like, “Oh, I’m doing this to be thin.” And instead changed their language to: “I’m doing this to be healthy.”
Audio clip of the influencer Alex Rose: Here is a glimpse into everything I ate today to just fuel my body and feel my best as someone who loves to cook and eat healthy and all the good things, but also believes in balance and feeling good from the inside out.
But healthy was always synonymous with thinness in the mainstream, and also it’s very white. I think that there’s a lot of cultures who are not so obsessed with thinness but we’re all reacting to the mainstream dominant public messaging that we’re all getting. There’s lots of studies that show people who are overweight — and especially women who are overweight — are discriminated against. They earn less money, they are treated more poorly in public. It’s not just a media creation fixation; it has real-world consequences.
Ahmad: One thing that I noticed about a lot of these Christian diet influencers is that they think that Ozempic is a cheater’s way to lose weight. That the real true way to lose weight is by hard work and self-control, which is interesting because I think now as Ozempic has become more ubiquitous and accessible to a lot of people, there’s more of an acceptance of taking it as a drug. But these Christian influencers are almost counter to that mainstream idea that taking Ozempic is like a normal thing, just like taking an antidepressant would be a normal thing.
So I’m curious what you make of the fact that a lot of these Christian influencers kind of decry these drugs or think they’re a sign of moral failure?
Grose: Well, I mean, I think ultimately they want people to be obsessed with these ideas and never stop thinking about them. And one thing that a lot of people on Ozempic say is that it gets rid of the food noise. So they’re just not preoccupied by eating in the same way that they were before, and that it gives them a great deal of freedom.
So I think it is, again, about control. It’s about preoccupation. It’s about martyrdom. Unless you’re punishing yourself, it’s not worthy or worth it.
Ahmad: I find the religiosity of all of this really fascinating. One thing that might be relevant to this is that when I was a foreign correspondent, I was based in Pakistan, which is a predominantly Muslim country. And during the month of Ramadan, people fast. They don’t drink water or eat or even chew gum or anything like that between sunup to sundown.
I ended up reporting a piece when I was there about this phenomenon of Ramadan boot camps where women would channel the fasting, religious kind of fervor of Ramadan and turn it into a weight-loss goal. So I did the boot camp and it was grueling. It was actually really, really tough because first of all, I was in Karachi at this time. Ramadan moves with the lunar calendar, so back then it was in the summer and it was like 110 degrees on an average day. We would do an hourlong HIIT workout right before we broke our fast, so that meant that I would do burpees and all this stuff and then not drink water afterwards, which was really difficult.
But a lot of the boot camp’s focus was on self-restraint, and during the month of Ramadan you’re fasting because you’re trying to access higher thoughts and you’re thinking of people who don’t have food. There’s all these purposes, kind of morals behind why you’re doing this.
And it’s to develop empathy and feel closer to God. They kind of took all of that and then applied it to weight loss and I found it sad, but it also made sense to me that it would happen. When I walked away from the experience — which by the way, in the process of which I lost like an unhealthy amount of weight in a very short amount of time ——
Grose: I’m sure you did.
Ahmad: When I walked away from that experience, I also found that the appeal of religion itself in a lot of ways is that it gives you a moral set of guidelines to navigate a very complicated world. When I look at these Christian diet influencers, in a way, the appeal to me is totally apparent because especially when it comes to things like food, American food culture is so confusing. There’s so many options. What you’re meant to eat, or what powders you should be taking, changes day by day, week by week. There’s so much decision making that has to go into everything.
And the guidance on what you should eat, especially with MAHA becoming more part of our culture, there’s an inherent distrust of a lot of information. Having just a clear set of guidelines based on something like religion almost feels like a relief. Sometimes I’m envious; I wish I believed in something that just told me how to live my life. So it’s interesting seeing how they pair food and food choices and weight loss with religion. But I’m curious how you see that playing out in American culture?
Grose: I love that you just told that story. That’s so fascinating. I totally agree with you that it is really hard to know what to eat and why at this moment. I think where it becomes coercive and controlling is when you’re telling people your salvation is tied to the way that you are eating, and if you step off this path, that is akin to consorting with the Devil. I just don’t think that that’s morally fair to people. But I certainly understand the appeal.
I’ve written before about my obsession with Orangetheory and I often joke that I’m in a cult, but part of the appeal of that high-intensity interval training workout is that you put your brain aside for the hour that you’re there and you’re just listening to the coach tell you what to do. So again, it’s all a spectrum of behavior and I’m not sitting here acting like I am not completely ruined by diet culture.
I always think it’s just it’s too late for me. I read too many magazines in the ’90s and I saw too many pictures of Kate Moss in Wellies at Glastonbury — do not try those. If you are under 5-10, they make you look so stumpy, which I learned the hard way.
I think I write about these issues and think about these issues so much in a Helen Lovejoy “think of the children!” way. I want so badly for my daughters and the kids growing up today who are just inundated with images and visuals of extreme thinness all the time to be more skeptical of what they are seeing and figure out a healthier, better way.
Ahmad: Yeah. Just to bring it back to the appeal of religion that lies beneath the surface of this trend, I was wondering — especially because you’ve reported on religion in this country a fair bit — how you see the vision of diet culture being fully formed versus the left version or the left’s answer being more of a chaotic disarray of ideals?
I kind of see this across the political spectrum, not just when it comes to the aesthetics of what conservatism looks like, but conservatism to a lot of Americans is like: Here’s a vision of what this country is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to be white picket fences, it’s supposed to be a husband and wife and their kids, and the wife is thin. And the husband is this way, and they go to church and this is what this country is meant to be.
For a lot of people, having a clear idea of what that vision is is appealing because if the left feels like it doesn’t even know what that vision looks like, it’s harder for people to grab on to. Do you see that happening outside of just diet culture? Is that part of the thing that draws people into more religious, conservative political viewpoints?
Grose: I think definitely conservative; less so religious because religion also requires them to go to church and have this whole other set of beliefs and behaviors that younger generations are really not showing that they want in big numbers.
I’ve written about this numerous times, but if you look at the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian and go to church regularly, it just — every generation, from the silent generation on down — shows a lower percentage of people who, even if they define themselves as Christian, attend church weekly. They just don’t want to do it. So whether it’s more of a cultural identity or not, conservatives clearly have the upper hand in terms of a defined message: what to do, who to be, what to look like, what America means.
I think they’ve been very savvy over the past couple of years in understanding that politics is downstream from culture. But if I have to have one more conversation about who the left’s Joe Rogan is, I’m going to throw myself off a cliff. So I think providing an alternative vision is going to be more about how we behave than how we look. I think that is more of a compelling message because there’s such a nastiness right now to the rhetoric from conservatives and conservative influencers. I don’t know if the left is going to be able to compete on the clarity of vision, but they might be able to get somewhere with the clarity of behavior and morality.
Ahmad: So if there’s no Joe Rogan on the left, as you said, is there an Alex Clark on the left? Is there an alternative in that way?
Grose: Well, I mean, we’ve seen Michelle Obama’s podcast do incredibly well. Kylie Kelce, who I love, is also an example of someone who actually has all the things that Alex Clark talks about but is very open and welcoming and warm. I love her vibe, personally. So I think that there are opportunities to have a version of wellness that isn’t so intimately tied to body image and shaming.
Ahmad: Well, this feels like a good place to end our conversation. Thanks Jess, for being here.
Grose: Thanks so much for having me.
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