472-Body Positivity and Activism in the "Ozempic Era" with Virgie Tovar

So this, this particular series aim at weight neutral practitioner, and I wanna...

The reason why I invited you was twofold.

First of all, the Truth Serum podcast, which was amazing, and also an article-

Thank you

... that you wrote for Forbes about body positivity.

And I'd like you to take us through the shift or the observation that you're seeing in the body positivity movement with the rise of GLP-1.

Yeah.

I mean, that article was really about kind of the difference between body positivity and its parent movement, which is, I w- I would say, fat activism.

And I just wanna say, there are people who would not agree that fat activism is the parent movement of body positivity, but, uh, I feel, I feel strongly looking at the tenets and the history and how it rolled out, that it is.

Um, but that's still up for debate.

I just wanna kinda put that out there.

But, um, you know, fundamentally what it came down to is, um, body positivity in a lot of ways was about the individual, and fat activism is more about the collective.

So it's kind of like this social change, like how do we change society to have it be safer to exist in any body, no matter what size it is? It's kind of the question of fat activism, and the question I would say fundamentally at the core of body positivity is, how do I feel better about my body? And you can kind of see, it's like the movement from the first person to the third person.

And the scope is really important when we're talking about GLP-1s.

So as you probably have seen, and probably the listeners have seen-

Mm-hmm

... um, body positivity is largely, I would say, scaffolded from, from kind of a theoretical perspective by body autonomy.

That was always, I think, right, like, again, when we're thinking about fat activism as, like, justice is the, is the scaffold.

It's, it's like the, the foundation of the house is social justice.And then I think with body positivity, I would say the, the, the, the house was kind of built on body autonomy, which is again, the movement from the collective to the individual.

Just it's really important to kinda keep these lenses in mind.

Yeah.

So of course, when, when body positivity is now faced with GLP-1s, we begin to see body autonomy very quickly step in to defend GLP-1s.

So you can kind of see how at its very core, it was always that individual right to choose.

Um, and you know, and right, there's a lot to be said about that, right? Like, I think people ha- people misunderstand what body autonomy is, um, in the sense that I think people think, "Oh, body autonomy means that I, you know, my decision doesn't have impacts on others, that they're, that I get to step out of the collective." It's sort of a version of libertarianism.

Um, you know, like, I wanna step out of the collective and make the right choice for me, and I'm not going to name the fact that this has an effect on anybody else.