This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)
"As a fat person, you’re always under surveillance when you’re eating or in proximity to food."
That's Lindy West, author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, on this week's episode of The Sporkful.
Lindy is a leading voice of the fat acceptance movement -- a position that has earned her a lot of devoted fans and plenty of enemies:
"Oh man, if my Internet trolls get ahold of this [episode]," she told Dan over lunch and milkshakes at his go-to diner. "Just an hour of me drinking a milkshake and talking about pepperoni. ... If I made a food podcast, I would never hear the end of it."
Listen in to the full episode to hear why Lindy prefers be called fat (rather than any other word people use) and her take on the difference between good fat people and bad fat people:
"People don’t like it if you don’t feel the shame. ... You have to be demonstrating and performing your penance. You have to be ostentatiously eating salad in public at all times and going to the gym."
But Lindy says in reality, the game is rigged. "You can try as hard as you can to be a good fat person and they still hate you."
Plus, hear Lindy's response to the question she gets most often, "By promoting fat acceptance, aren't you encouraging people to be unhealthy?"
And Lindy talks about going out with her husband, whose body type is very different from hers, and getting handed separate checks.
This week's episode of The Sporkful podcast is up! Listen through the player, Stitcher, or Apple Podcasts. (And please subscribe!)
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Interstitial music in this episode from Black Label Music:
- "Still In Love With You" by Stephen Clinton Sullivan
- "Mud Pile" by Jack Ventimiglia and Kenneth J. Brahmstedt
Photos: Courtesy of Lindy West and FlickrCC/Bram Cymet
