How Are Black Women Left Out of Conversations About Diet Culture?
Key takeaways:
Jessica Wilson internalized negative messages about her body at an early age.
As a dietitian, she helps people recognize and deconstruct harmful systems and narratives around body image.
Jessica says conversations about diet culture should be more inclusive of Black women.
“Never eat more than two slices of pizza.” That was one of the recommendations Jessica Wilson got from her dietitian when she was 6 years old.
Jessica’s mother was concerned because Jessica was “taller and bigger” than other children her age. So Jessican regularly saw doctors and a dietitian from ages 4 to 10, which she says led to years of comparing her eating habits to her peers’. She thought she needed to lose weight, no matter what her size was, and felt shame about her body.
Those early memories of medical visits and rules around food were the catalyst for Jessica’s current work in dietetics and body activism.
“That made me want to become a dietitian, so that nobody was ever treated the same way I was treated,” Jessica says. She’s now a 42-year-old dietitian, author, and community organizer in Sacramento, California.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in clinical nutrition and master’s in human physiology, Jessica began her career counseling college students. She realized many of the young people she was helping had eating disorders. Some of her clients didn’t have the textbook symptoms of eating disorders that she had been taught.
“I was being taught, mostly in traditional books written by thin, white women, about thin, white clients,” Jessica says. “And that was just not what I was even seeing in 20-year-olds, many clients of color, many people who weren’t very thin or even underweight, who had anorexia.”
Over the next 20 years, Jessica narrowed her focus to working with marginalized communities, such as queer and transgender people and people of color. She also studied how eating disorders and diet culture affect those communities.
Diet culture and Black women
One thing Jessica learned is that, historically, the experiences of Black women have not been part of discussions about diet culture and how to overcome it.
“The conversations about weight loss [today] completely disregard the last four centuries of messaging about bodies and the way today’s pressure to be thin originates in anti-Blackness,” she says.
Jessica cites the example of Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman, a South African woman who was exploited in the early 1800s because of her appearance and put on display at exhibitions across Europe.
“Juxtapose her body with white puritanical values,” Jessica says. “A lot of diet culture exists just because of our historical values of purity, and virtuous[ness], and thinness.”
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Erasure of Black women in wellness
As a result of racism, Black women are not represented in the research on the effects of diet culture, Jessica explains.
“If we look at the research [on] Black women and eating disorders, the majority is on bulimia or binge eating disorder and none of it is on anorexia, because the assumption is that Black women don’t have anorexia,” she says.
That assumption influences medical guidelines, she says, and ignores significant factors in people’s lives that can determine health outcomes.
“When we go to the doctor’s office, we’re just told to lose weight, to eat less and exercise more,” Jessica says. “But rarely do people talk about environmental racism, environments generally, trauma — all the things that actually impact our health and our weight.”
What can we do about it?
To combat the lack of Black women’s perspectives in discussions about diet culture, Jessica recommends that people do these three things.
1. Find your community
Jessica was able to overcome being hyper-focused on her body and food by connecting with people who share similar beliefs.
“Finding people of similar values who are not as focused on their body, and finding meaning and identity outside of my body, really helped me,” she says.
In 2020, Jessica brought her community together by co-creating the #amplifymelanatedvoices campaign. The weeklong call-to-action on Instagram encourages people to follow and engage with Black and Brown people who worked in the eating-disorder field.
2. Allow yourself to be uncomfortable
Jessica hosts the podcast “Making It Awkward,” which features people who work to create awareness about issues that affect marginalized communities. On the podcast, she and her guests discuss how to approach new conversations and experiences with curiosity and courage.
3. Rethink society’s narratives about bodies
“People are just taught to treat Black people as if our bodies are problems,” Jessica says.
Instead of individuals, we should be focusing on systems and structures, she adds. That's when discussions about body image and diet culture will change for the better.
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