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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.
It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.
So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year. So you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.
This is an ad by BetterHelp. What?
What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better, even when it's impossible to make time for them. Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow.
Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?
BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory.
Hi friends, I hope you're having a wonderful day today. My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Dark History. Hi, how's it going?
This, if you don't know, is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who think, "Hey, Bailey, is history really as boring as it seemed in school?" Oh nay nay. This is where we can learn together about all of the dark, mysterious, and dramatic stories our teachers never told us about. So the other day I was on Instagram Live and I was with Saint. Maybe some of you watched it and Saint was farting. Oh my god.
Remember? Yeah, that was so funny. It was saint, I swear. Okay, it was saint. But, you know, I was reading the comments that were coming in. They were rolling in. And, you know, I try not to read too much into it. But I did see a handful of...
comments that asked, Bailey, are you pregnant? And then there were a couple other of comments that said like, you look pregnant. You have that pregnancy glow. And even though like everybody else was really nice in the chat and whatnot, sometimes if you just get you in the right mood or I should say the wrong mood, you can kind of fixate on just one negative, not even maybe a negative comment. Because let me tell you,
I kept thinking about it because lately I've been getting a lot of messages lately asking me if I'm pregnant. And I'm like, "God damn you guys. I know I've been eating Taco Bell a lot, but like is it that obvious?" Why are you asking me, you know? And like sometimes I'll be up at like 2 in the morning and I'm like sort of spiraling and I'm like, "Do I need to go on a diet? Is it because I'm fat?" And that's so toxic.
And this is how I got to today's topic. Her name is Diet Culture and she's a bit of a fickle bitch. If you go on Instagram today or watch a movie or look at any of the fashion ads, you'll see dozens of ways you can have the ideal body. Oh my god.
Beginning of the year and right before summer. How to lose weight, how to get in shape, achieving your goals for a freaking beach body, bronze, whatever, you know. And according to these ads, the women with the ideal body is highly feminine, slim, tall, usually white or like tan, like she just went on vacay.
living a truly fabulous life of luxury. These ads all claim that whatever diet they're pitching is the one that can give you this incredible life, and most of all, it's the easiest diet you'll ever do.
It's always easy, right? But what actually is diet culture? Put simply, it's living your life by thinking that going on a diet and being skinny can solve all of your problems. But really, it's the way all of us view beauty, health, or even our own bodies. It's a mental conditioning that places being thin as the pinnacle of success, beauty, and health.
And that's no accident because dieting is a billion dollar industry that makes money off of our insecurities, right? That this conditioning has created.
And money, if you haven't learned anything here, money is always the reason, right? Money is always the reason. But the truth is there isn't actually a quote-unquote correct body size and there never has been. And did you know that researchers have found that 98% of all diets are complete failures?
Yeah, 98%. That alone is proof that no diet will give you an ideal or average body. Plus, it turns out what we consider ideal, I'm using quotes here, or average, has evolved over history. And behind every change is someone or something looking to make women feel like shit no matter what. So buckle in kitty cats and get ready for the dark history of...
Diet culture. You ready Joan? Oh my god. If you guys are watching on YouTube, Joan has her workout gear on, she's got her leg warmers, her sweatband. She's ready to get physical, physical. She wants to get physical, physical. That was cute. Okay, let me open up my book for, to the, uh,
Diet culture chapter. This is gonna be toxic, I'm sure. Nobody knows for sure when humans started to say one type of body was better than the other. Because that kind of discussion predates written history. But what we do know is that the very first time the word "diet" appeared was almost 3,000 years ago in ancient Greece. It comes from the word "dieta."
I think I said that right. And it represented an entire way of life. Better food, better drink, and a brand new focus on exercise. Great. So even before it had a name, diet culture was a huge part of life in ancient Greece. Especially for women because people in ancient Greece showed their admiration for the female body in their artwork by painting and sculpting elaborate pictures of larger, curvier women.
Even the goddess Aphrodite was usually depicted as being curvy. And since she was the goddess of sex, love, and beauty, I think it's safe to say the body doesn't get more ideal than the body of a goddess.
And the quote-unquote ideal body pretty much stayed this way throughout history well into the 1800s. Weight was viewed as a symbol of status for women. If you were a curvier woman, you were probably rich because you could afford to eat more. And if you were rich, you were definitely beautiful. And if you were considered beautiful, well, men assumed you were fertile.
That's right, almost every Western beauty standard was related to how many babies a man thought you could pump out. And this continued throughout the 1890s when drawings started appearing in mainstream magazines of the Gibson Girl. The Gibson Girl was tall, beautiful, slim-waisted, yet curvy, often posing next to sayings like "the ideal body" or "the new woman."
In every picture, the Gibson girl had a look of complete confidence on a flawless face. She was always drawn doing something physically active, so sometimes the Gibson girl was riding a bike. Sometimes she was swimming. Sometimes she was riding a horse. There's even this one picture of the Gibson girl using a magnifying glass to burn a tiny little man that was the size of an ant. Girl power! I mean, the girl could do it all, right? And she did it all while looking hot as hell.
songs, clothing lines, and even wallpaper designs were modeled after the Gibson girl. And when most women in America saw her, they wanted to be her. The only problem?
The Gibson Girl wasn't even real. She was a drawing made by a man named Charles Dana Gibson who wanted to make drawings of the ideal woman. In 1914, the Gibson Girl started to fade away at the start of World War I. With almost every man in America at war, there was a huge void in the workforce that was filled by enthusiastic women craving independence.
But once the war ended and men returned home, women didn't want to return to the old ways. Three things happened. The first thing that happened was a doctor named Lulu Hunt Peters published the very first diet book in 1918. It was called Diet and Health with Key to the Calories.
So it's just a very super exciting title. Now, according to Dr. Lulu, you had to think about your body like a car engine and about food like it was fuel. If there's not enough fuel, the car will run sluggishly and die. But if you eat too much, it'll slow down the whole system. Dr. Lulu stated that women should eat one perfect meal at lunch every day
consisting of cottage cheese and an unbuttered French roll. I mean, yeah, that's gonna work for sure. I mean, you're gonna lose weight. And in order to resist eating any more than that, well, Dr. Lulu introduced the idea of calorie intake. She recommended women consume no more than 1,200 calories per day to stay healthy.
For comparison, most women today are told to consume no more than 2,000 calories per day. But the book was a hit. It sold millions of copies and became the very first successful diet book. The second was that the bathroom scale was invented. Ugh, the worst thing ever. Now that people could easily find out how much they weighed, articles started popping up in magazines and newspapers saying that body fat was a result of bad willpower.
You weren't considered rich if you were fat anymore. Now you were considered lazy. And the third and final thing that happened? The passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919, where President Woodrow...
we're looking at you, Edith Wilson, gave women the right to vote. With this newfound independence, a new kind of rebellious style began to pop up: the flapper. Now we've talked about flappers a few times before on the show, so you already know the basic details I hope, at least maybe you remember. Cute little bobbed hair with like a v at the neck, art deco inspired skirts which hit like
at or right above the knee, which is much shorter than the dresses women usually wore back then. Sexually liberated, drinking all day and night at the speakeasies, illegally during prohibition. You get it. But one thing we haven't really talked about is the flapper body shape. For the first time in US history, women weren't interested in looking curvy or fertile for men.
No, they were not. Now because of calorie counting, the scale, and a cultural desire to look and feel more independent, women wanted to be thin. This was also around the time that Coco Chanel began promoting the iconic Chanel silhouette, which if you don't know, is a drawing of a small black dress with such a tiny waistline that frickin' Joan over here couldn't fit into it. You have to be invisible to fit into it, okay?
And I'm not body shaming you Joan, it's just, you know, yeah, okay, you get it. But the silhouette was such a successful ad campaign, it directly led to the creation of the flapper body type. As we all know, counting calories and just wishing for a better body doesn't, it doesn't work.
but that didn't stop people from trying to turn a profit. And this is where this story starts to get dark because we see the birth of the fad diet. Diets that promise a better body, a better life, a better me, and it's not even that much work. That's what a fad diet is. But before we get into that, I'm gonna pause for an ad break.
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.
It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.
So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year. So you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.
Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?
BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory.
And we're back! Hi! And it's still the roaring 20s. Prohibition's the law of the land, but speakeasies are commonplace. And what was common at speakeasies in the 20s?
Flappers. By the 1920s, diets promoting ways to look like a flapper were so common that you couldn't open a magazine or newspaper without seeing them. There would be ads for diet pills, chewing gum that supposedly made you wanna eat less, and even laxatives that would make you poop out all that excess food, you know? Great.
One of the earliest fad diets at this time was known as the Medical Millennium Diet, which called for patients to chew slowly, eat one dish per meal, and endure regular enemas. I could see that working. If you don't know what an enema is, allow me to quote a producer on this show. Her scientific definition is that enemas "suck everything out of your butt."
She's not wrong. Anyway, another early fad diet was known as the cigarette diet. And that is exactly as it sounds like. Advertising for Lucky Strike cigarettes would show thin, sexy women taking a drag off of a cigarette next to words like "reach for a lucky" instead of a sweet.
So basically just like stop eating and start smoking. I mean, that's what I did when I was 18. But it wasn't just magazines that helped spread impossible beauty standards. Because if you remember from past episodes, like the golden age of Hollywood was just really starting to take off in the 1920s. And anytime you went to a movie theater, you would see an impossibly beautiful woman with a flapper bod, like staring down at you. How did these women end up looking that way?
Well, they did it with the help of something called the Hollywood 18-Day Diet. For 18 days, you cut out all food and drink other than oranges, grapefruit, toast, and eggs. And of course, you would follow it all by chain-smoking cigarettes. I mean, all that fruit counteracts the cigarettes. It makes sense. The calorie intake for this one meal? A mere 585 calories.
Obviously, none of these diets were actually good for you if you haven't caught on. Some sources say that over 90% of these diets ended in failure. I wonder why. They were probably hungry. I mean, some of those failures were just death. I'm not laughing at that. It's just like, yeah, you know?
I guess if you die, that counts as a failure. One of the best examples of these diets failing women can be seen with a woman named Reatha Dale Watson. Reatha was born on July 23rd, 1896 in the state of Washington. She was considered a lovely and clever girl with an active imagination who from a very early age had wanting to be an
She told everybody in her family she wanted to be a great actress so she could wield a dagger against men. I mean, same. When she read in newspapers about all the new opportunities popping up in this brand new city called Hollywood, she begged,
her daddy to move the family down there. Well, dad saw all the potential and so when Riaza was only 13, the whole family headed straight on down to Hollywood, California. Riaza started working as an extra in early silent films for a few years, but I guess during this time she wasn't really able to break into acting like she had hoped. So she decided to change her name.
So at 24, she changed her name from Riaatha to Barbara Lamar.
and quickly got a job with Fox as a screenwriter. Barbara was visiting a film set with a friend when an actor named Douglas Fairbank saw Barbara from across the room. Historians say Douglas thought Barbara was so smoking hot and got her to sign up to make her first few films. Within just a few months in 1921, Barbara Lamar was a star. She was always playing a lot of roles where she looked dark, mysterious, and beautiful.
And most importantly,
audiences couldn't get enough of her. She ended up making 27 films over the next four years and was even considered an icon in flapper culture. But keeping up that image came at a huge price for Barbara. And to keep her thin appearance up, she would experiment with every fad diet she could find. One of those diets was rumored to have been an experimental tapeworm diet, where she would take like a huge pill with a small tapeworm inside
So that when she digested the pill, the tapeworm would grow inside of her and it would help her lose even more weight. I remember years ago, I watched a Tyra Banks show. Maybe some of you know what I'm talking about, Tyra Banks show. And it was about the girl who had the tapeworm diet. So nasty. Not to mention she was partying into the early hours pretty much every single night.
I was struggling to say those words right now.
now, which is an inflammation of the kidneys. Words are hard sometimes. Sometimes I ask myself, Bailey, why are you doing a podcast? You can't even say words, you know? Yeah, but here I am. Dream big. I think I said that in the beginning. Remember? Okay, anyways, these forced her to be completely bedridden and by December 1925, she was said to have weighed less than 80 pounds.
Barely even a month later, on January 30th, 1926, Barbara died as a result of those diseases. She was just 29 years old. Barbara's story is just one of many of young women who suffered from dangerous diet standards in the 20s. Between the turn of the century and Barbara's death in 1926, historians say that women's bust-to-waist ratio size in magazines dwindled by almost 60%.
And by bust-to-waist ratio size, we mean the size of women's waist was getting smaller and the size of their breastises were getting bigger. Titties! Now this sounds great and dandy until you realize that during the same time period, historians also say that there was an epidemic of eating disorders in young women who over-adapted to the flapper beauty trend.
I mean, this was like the real birth of diet culture. Now, the rise of fad diets and diet culture in the 1920s started making people a lot of money. But unfortunately for them, the 1920s ended badly when the Great Depression hit the United States. Millions of people lost their jobs and their homes.
I mean, there were as many as 2 million recorded homeless people in just the first few years alone. So for women, fashion and dieting became an afterthought to simply surviving. And over the course of the 1930s, magazine advertisements for diets shifted focus. Out was the rail-thin body of the 1920s flapper, because now being skinny was associated with being poor.
So a fuller, curvier body type was all the rage. Kind of like the Gibson girl from before. But this time there was a bit of a difference from the Gibson girl because women didn't have much in the way of resources. They had to get creative with their clothes. So they started turning men's suits into women's attire.
And this led to the padded shoulder look. Ooh. Now you might be picturing the padded shoulder look from the 80s when I say that, right? But the look that women in the 30s and 40s came up with accentuated their curves more, creating the iconic hourglass look.
And along the way, diet books continued to rise in popularity and become a multi-million dollar industry. Like people don't have money for food, but they had money for diet books. Anyways, nothing really shifts in the 40s and 50s. Ideal body type is still a little curvy and like fad diets and diet books continue to grow just as an industry. It's all just...
chugging along. Then in the 1960s, the ideal body in the United States once again changed into a thinner body type. But this time women began to push back.
Eurocentric beauty standards had been the focus for far too long, and as a result, we start to see two movements begin. First, the Black is Beautiful movement. It was informed by the civil rights movement and sought to challenge those Eurocentric beauty standards that considered blackness quote unquote ugly. I'm not saying that, that's what, don't, yep.
Don't come for me. The organizers of Black is Beautiful joined forces with other members of the Black Power movement and began boycotting institutions that didn't highlight or even acknowledge beauty beyond white skin. Black is Beautiful officially began on January 28, 1962 at a huge fashion show in Harlem. This wasn't a typical fashion show for the 60s. It was called
Naturally 62, and had been organized by the African Jazz Art Society and Studios, also known as AJAZZ, which was a group of black creatives that was led by a photographer named Kwame Brathwaite. Kwame's show featured black women who had actively chosen to move away from Western beauty standards.
The models who walked down the catwalk that night proudly wore their hair in natural styles. Their clothes were inspired by designs from countries like Lagos, Accra, and Nairobi. And their bodies, much more fuller figure than the women pictured in fashion magazines. Kwame said later that the fashion show was both an act of celebration and protest. A celebration of black beauty and a protest against western beauty standards.
The show was such a success that more shows popped up across the world. The mantra "Black is Beautiful" started to hit the mainstream with musicians like Nina Simone promoting it. At the same time that "Black is Beautiful" was making an impact on Western beauty standards, another movement popped up with a more unorthodox approach.
This was known as the Fat Acceptance Movement. This movement was started by a man named Steve Post. Now, Steve was born in the Bronx in 1944 and grew up a kid who had been picked on his entire life for being bigger.
As he got older, Steve slimmed down but never lost his anger over being picked on for being fat. He eventually became a radio DJ and would spend just as much time talking about fat acceptance as he would the music on the radio. When the New York Times interviewed him, he said, quote, people should be proud of being fat. We want to show we feel happy, not guilty, end quote. And one day, Steve decided he had enough. He
He called for his supporters to band together to fight against unfair body standards. So like so many other countercultural movements, the fat acceptance movement began with a sit-in, but the fat acceptance movement called theirs a fat-in.
In 1967, 500 people hit Central Park in New York City to protest against companies pushing unrealistic beauty standards. The group held protest signs saying things like "Take a fat girl to dinner," "Fat power," and "Buddha was fat." They also brought full meals and set up a bonfire to burn diet books.
Other than the fires, no laws were broken and the Fat Inn was a huge success. One of the people who saw the success of the Fat Inn was a man named Lou Lauderback, a journalist for the Saturday Evening Post. Just days before the Fat Inn, Lou's wife came home crying from work.
She said that her coworkers had been tormenting her for her weight and she just didn't know what to do, okay? And when Lou saw the fat in, he decided to write an article called More People Should Be Fat that detailed his wife's discrimination as well as others he had heard about. This article interested a lot of people and over the next few years, more and more people started to reach out to Lou. Just a few years after the initial article, Lou started the first...
official fat acceptance organization. It was called the National Association to Aid Fat Americans, also known as NAFA.
Along with Black is Beautiful, NAFA were one of the first known organizations to raise the point that American beauty standards tend to favor one type of body. That body type may change throughout history, but the consistent theme is that America always prefers a somewhat skinny white woman. And what the NAFA and the Black is Beautiful movements proposed is, well, what if it wasn't this way?
And many people agreed. But while many people were focusing on being more accepting of bigger body types, the rest of the country was focused on fully falling in line with diet culture. And sometimes in very deadly ways. But first, let's pause for an ad break.
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.
It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.
So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24-7, 365 days a year, so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.
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Your cash back really adds up. As the years went on, fad diets came and went in the United States. There was the Metrical Diet, which was a 225-calorie shake meant to be drunk four times a day. Then there was the Drinking Man's Diet, which was like a liquid-based diet that varied depending on who you asked.
One of the versions of this diet asked people to drink six glasses of buttermilk a day. Girl, what is that gonna do for you? There was even one called the Israeli Army Diet, which is weird because it has nothing to do with Israel or their army. But this one was four cycles of one food per day. So like days one and two,
All you get is apples, okay? Three and four? Cheese. Five and six? Chicken. And the final day, you were upgraded to a salad. Yum. But there was one diet in particular that changed everything, and it continues to exist even today. I'm giggling because, I mean, we all did this, okay? I don't know anyone, I don't know someone who didn't do this. The Atkins diet...
Round of applause for the Atkins diet. Yep. The Atkins diet was created by a man named Robert Atkins who was born in 1930 in Columbus, Ohio. Now, Robert graduated from Cornell University Medical College in 1955 and
and he received a degree in medicine. And after an internship and residency, Robert opened a private practice that specialized in cardiology in the Upper East Side of New York City. But his medical practice didn't, it didn't go so well at first. So I guess Robert became depressed. And during that time,
He gained weight and he became very unhappy with his body. I guess one day Robert came across some research by a man named Al Pennington. And Al had theorized that the perfect diet was one with low carbohydrates,
Now, what Robert got out of it was that burning fat takes more calories, so you expend more calories. Robert loved this idea, so he put together a diet and he named it after himself, of course. In 1972, he published the very first Atkins Diet Book. This diet said you could eat as much meat, cheese, eggs, and other high-fat foods as you wanted.
Butter, mayonnaise, sour cream, mmm, you could eat it, okay? But there's a catch. You absolutely cannot eat anything high in carbs like bread, pasta, cereal, and even fruit. Pick your poison. If all this sounds familiar, that's because Atkins is basically the world's first keto diet, which still exists today. But back in the 70s, the idea that you could lose weight while eating fatty foods
Mm-hmm.
The Atkins diet didn't go without criticism, though. Many in the medical industry said his diet was dangerously wrongheaded. Some doctors said that the Atkins diet would cause heart problems, constipation, fatigue, and...
bad breath. One doctor even compared the Atkins diet to the cigarette diet I talked about earlier, saying that the fact that some people could lose weight by smoking cigarettes did not mean that smoking was good for them. So the big question is, does the Atkins diet work? Well, I mean, I'm sure a lot of you are going to say, yeah, it does work. It works, but like, is it good for you? I think that's what we're going to try and decide here. First, we have the story of Ann Gardner.
In the spring of 2004, Anne was 33 years old and weighed 325 pounds. Anne had always had a larger body, but she didn't see her weight issues as a problem until her aunt was diagnosed with diabetes. Now this made Anne anxious, so she decided it was time for a change. And that change came the very next time Anne saw her aunt, who had lost 80 pounds since the last time she'd seen her. So her aunt told her she had started this thing called the Atkins diet.
And Anne didn't believe it could be that simple. You get to eat cheese steak, what else? Everything else? Yum? You know, it just doesn't sound... It sounds too good to be true. But then she found out that another one of her aunts had done the Atkins diet and lost weight as well. So Anne figured like, fuck it, you know, everyone's doing it. So she decided to give it a try. Now within six months,
Anne lost 80 pounds. Within the next two years, she lost another 60 pounds. And today, Anne weighs 185 pounds, and this brought her joy, which is really all that matters. But for every Anne, there are dozens of stories that are much darker. One doctor told a story about three patients he had. Two of them were men in their 40s who had no prior history of heart disease, but they both suddenly died.
When the autopsy results came back, it was found that both these patients' arteries were clogged. The third patient was a 16-year-old girl who also died of a massive clog in her heart. And this made people wonder about the high fat in the Atkins diet situation. I mean, three healthy people all dropping dead. And the thing they had in common was their diet. Maybe only eating red meat, butter, and cheese came with the price?
So does the Atkins diet do what it promises? Multiple reports exist saying two different things. Some say a low carb diet is great for your health. Other reports say it's really bad. And we'll never know for sure because empirical data wasn't even tracked on the diet until the late 2000s, which was years after Robert Atkins died.
But no matter what you think, the Atkins diet was a huge success in a number of ways, but it further led to the creation of more and more fad diets. So as the 1980s came, so did the beginning of yet another ideal body. Isn't an ideal supposed to be like the best version of something? It's almost as if there's no right way to have a body, right? Now here we are again striving for the ideal.
But there was one person in the 80s who wanted to find a way to make diet culture more empowering for women. She had actually been around for a while, but the way she arrived? Unexpected. Iconic. Amazing. So let's give a warm welcome to Miss Jane Fonda. Wouldn't that be cool if she like came out? Not really. I would like be starstruck and die. Anyways, I have to pause for an ad break really quick. Hold on.
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.
It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.
So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24-7, 365 days a year, so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.
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It probably sounds like I'm being a little hard on diet culture. There's nothing wrong with trying to eat healthy and take care of your body, but it can lead to some really dangerous things if you're sticking too far. Or if you take bad advice like smoking cigarettes and eating an apple. I mean, come on. But I do want to spend a minute talking about Jane Fonda, who saw how damaging the culture could be for women and decided to turn that shit on its head. And she did this all by accident.
Jane Fonda was born December 21st, 1937 in New York City. Her father was a legendary Hollywood actor, but she had a bit of trouble, like a troubled upbringing. When she was 12, her mom committed suicide in a psychiatric hospital, but nobody told her.
Nobody told Jane. She didn't find out until she read about it in a magazine. Could you imagine? Now this left Jane with just her dad, who historians say was emotionally distant and demanding and wanted Jane to be perfect, whatever that is, at all costs.
When Jane was a teenager, she became a model in New York and appeared on the cover of Vogue twice. In 1958, she attended Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio, where she discovered that she loved acting. Soon, agents took notice and she started acting on stage and screened for like the next few decades, starring in some pretty iconic films.
Drama.
Jane didn't know what to do. And normally she did like ballet type exercise to stay in shape. But with a bad ankle, she needed to like figure something else out fast. She discovered an exercise class in Century City, California run by a woman named Leni Kasdan. Now Leni specialized in a type of exercise that didn't require your feet at all. It was centered on repetitive movements backed by music, but without your feet.
By using Lenny's technique, Jane could do aerobics and strengthening exercises with ease. Jane called the class a revelation, saying, End quote.
But this gave Jane the idea to go bigger. If Jane could actually help women feel empowered and she had the money and means to make that happen, well shit, you know, why not? So in May of 1979, Jane and Lenny teamed up to open Jane's workout studio in Beverly Hills. Now Jane was usually teaching the classes in person and this was like an obvious draw. Six days a week,
Every week, the studio saw 3,000 or more women passing through just to work out with Jane Fonda. I mean, bigwig, Hollywood agents, and companies came knocking wanting to franchise the business, but Jane had a better idea. What if I wrote a book?
So that's what she did. In November of 1981, Jane Fonda's workout book was released detailing Jane's fitness program. It included chapters on nutrition, health, and beauty,
as well as demonstrations of the exercises. But the book also contains some of Jane's life story, which was the biggest hit with her audience. I mean, by 1982, Jane Fonda's workout book became number one for over six months on the top 10 New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list, becoming known as the exercise book for women.
Soon, Jane expanded into exercise videos, more books, and TV appearances. You know that phrase, "Feel the burn"? That was Jane. Jane managed to tap into a gold mine of female frustration.
According to one writer because before Jane there were a few places for women to work out safely or even know which exercises to do There had always been this stigma for women working out Jane once said that she overheard a man say quote women weren't supposed to sweat I still believe that to this day like ah That's why I don't work out. That's my excuse. That's why I tell myself anyways, but
This was why she became obsessed with exercise. Today, Jane is still around. I hope you are aware of that. As an actress, activist, and exercise guru. And she's one of the best examples of somebody who can like find the positive side of diet culture. Reclaim it. But you know what they say, nothing gold can't stay. We can't have anything nice.
Because hey, even Jane's story has a downside. She recently acknowledged she's battled bulimia for most of her adult life.
Most people think bulimia is a young person's disease, but that's not necessarily the case. More and more middle-aged women are dealing with bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating. In fact, the number is on the rise. It's estimated that there has been an 84% increase in eating disorders in women over 35 since 2001. Right around the corner from the height of Jane's success in the exercise world was the 1990s.
which saw a return for the 1920s flapper bod style. Only this time the body style had a more dangerous name. Oh, I was obsessed with this as a young lad. No, but really I was obsessed with this as like, as a early teenager. It was so bad because this is where heroin chic, this style comes into fashion. Bitch. I'm still kind of low key obsessed with it, but we're gonna take a pause for an ad break really quick.
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What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better, even when it's impossible to make time for them. Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow.
Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?
BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory.
So, we're in the 90s. Flannel, boom boxes, MTV, super cool, dude, you know. At this point in history, diet culture has sunk its teeth into American culture. Beauty ideals have come and gone from impossibly small waist to huge old titties. And
and whatever in between. By the early 90s, the fashion industry was in a bit of a golden age. It was the decade of grunge and Calvin Klein and the slip dress and hammer pants. But it was also the decade that introduced one of the most dangerous developments in diet culture ever: heroin chic. Oh, it was iconic. What is heroin chic? Well,
Kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a look used to describe women who are drastically underweight, with pale skin, dark circles under their eyes, and a slightly androgynous fashion sense. Essentially, it's a style to mimic the body of a heroin addict.
The phrase "heroine chic" actually comes from a model named Gia Karanji, who was addicted to heroin. Now, Gia over here was one of the biggest supermodels in the world and was featured on the covers of the French, British, and American Vogue publications.
Because of her addiction, her arms became so covered in heroin needle marks that despite airbrushing, the marks were visible in one of her Vogue spreads. Now when Gia first started using heroin, her heroin-thin look was appealing to some designers.
So they wanted to recreate the look with other models. And it was a look that echoed into the 90s, hitting all the major runways in the world. Damn Gia. But when heroin became cheaper and more widely available in the 90s, heroin chic
really took off in the country. Now, not just rich supermodels could look heroin-thin, so the very idea of doing heroin became sexy to a lot of US citizens. It was further popularized by models like Kate Moss, who isn't known to have done heroin herself, but for a time perfectly embodied the heroin-chic look.
Now in fact, Kate and models like her are said to have called themselves "Gia's girls." Before heroin chic came along, the fashion industry was focused on physically healthy supermodels with a full figure. But in the 90s, there was this sudden push against that body type, and thousands of weekly magazines started publishing articles with pictures of heroin chic women promising ways to become a size zero. And they weren't saying like, "Do heroin!"
Which they should have just said that, honestly. The truth is that the articles were bullshit because studies have found that most of the women in this period were actually just not eating anything at all. Some women started using heroin heavily. And when they did eat, it was said that some models ate tissue paper to fend off the hunger. And in a callback to earlier, a lot of women started replacing food with cigarettes.
So welcome back, Cigarette Diet High. I mean, when I was 18, I started smoking cigarettes and really stopped eating because of Mary-Kate.
Olsen? I want to be in the American so bad. Would not recommend. Anyways, so I mean, if that all sounds really bad for you, that's because it was. It has been. We're just never good enough, are we? Most of these women were suffering from an eating disorder many of us know as anorexia nervosa. Now maybe you've heard of one of your friends saying something like, oh my God, she's like,
Anorexic skinny. Or maybe you have this idea that anorexic is just another word for thin. In actuality, anorexia is a full-fledged mental health disorder. Its symptoms may include refusing to eat altogether.
Anorexia comes from a disordered body image, meaning that the person you see in the mirror is not the person everyone else sees. And some have described it like a vampire looking in the mirror, except instead of nobody being there, it's only your flaws looking back at
One of the highest death rates for young women in the 1990s was related to anorexia. And researchers say the biggest reason anorexia is a problem is because it seems easy to rationalize. Like if I don't eat, I won't gain weight, right? But it's really not that simple. And if undiagnosed, anorexia can completely take over your life and
potentially can even kill you. One of the most frightening yet sad, sadly common examples of anorexia overtaking somebody's life is the story of a girl named Izzy Harris. When Izzy was a young girl, she took ballet but was teased by the other girls because she had more body hair than them. So they called her a gorilla for her hairy arms and legs. And
Said her eyebrows were big bushes. Meh. So when she was nine, she found a pair of tweezers and plucked almost all of the hair on her body, including her eyebrows. This kind of anxiety about her body stuck with Izzy well into her teen years. And one day she noticed that she was a little taller and bigger than the other girls her age. So when she was 15 years old, she went on a diet.
Izzy became obsessed with exercise and calorie counting. She started cutting her food intake down daily. First, it was fast food, then bread, sugar, dairy, and then finally fat. But she didn't stop there because soon she started eating only one fruit.
and one vegetable per meal. It didn't matter to Izzy that she was losing weight every day because whenever she looked in the mirror, she didn't see any difference. So Izzy decided to cut down to just one meal per day. But you know who did see a difference? Izzy's family.
They sent her to a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with anorexia and bulimia, which immediately worried her family. But all this did was confuse Izzy. She said, quote, I was always a slightly chubby girl who never said no to dessert and hated exercise. Anorexia and bulimia were two words I would never associate with myself.
End quote. So Izzy decided the doctor was wrong and she kept up with her exercise and diet. Now it wasn't until Izzy had lost half of her weight that she looked in the mirror and finally saw what her disease had done to her.
The first thing she noticed was her blue fingernails attached to hands so bony, she said they looked like a skeleton. Then she noticed that she had empty patches on her scalp where her hair used to be, rotten teeth from vomiting from her food, and gray skin. Izzy immediately called her psychiatrist and admitted she had a problem. So her doctor helped her get into an anorexia recovery program.
While Izzy was in recovery, she scoured the internet looking for stories from people who had recovered from eating disorders, but she couldn't find any. She found horror story after horror story, but few stories about people recovering to live a happy life. Now this actually became Izzy's primary motivation to get better. According to her, quote, "I could be that recovery story that gave hope and motivation to other people in my position, the people who thought recovery was impossible."
Izzy started small by eating three meals a day and eventually adding in snacks. She started branching out her diet by eating foods that scared her before, like pasta and bread and olive oil. Then she deleted the calorie tracker on her phone and started seeing all her friends she had pushed away at the height of her sickness. By 2018, Izzy fully grew her hair back, recovered her nails, and gained the weight she lost back.
but she still considers herself in recovery. She describes herself as being haunted by the ghosts of her disorder. Painful thoughts that creep up on her whispering, "Can lose weight, must lose weight." Today, Izzy is an advocate for people suffering from eating disorders who shares her story to let people know they don't have to suffer alone.
Her mantras are that mental illness does not make you a failure and to embrace your flaws and strive for body acceptance. Izzy admits that she hasn't reached a point of self-love yet, but that's okay because she's reached a point of self-acceptance.
Side note and a very important one. If you think you or someone you love is suffering from anorexia, bulimia, or just an eating disorder, I cannot stress this enough, but please contact your doctor, but also know that you're not alone and you can recover. There are tons of organizations out there to help like the National Eating Disorder Association, which I will link down below if you're curious or, you know, I got you.
With the rise of social media, there has been a bit of a shift in celebrating more diverse body types in the media and fashion. No, seriously. Because of social media, word spread about things like the fat acceptance movement, which inspired the birth of the body positivity movement. And this movement began in 1996, but really took off in 2012. The key focus of body positivity was to challenge unrealistic beauty standards for women.
and the message being, all bodies are beautiful. Now this movement was so successful in raising awareness that some companies are now adopting body positive messages into their advertising because they want to profit off of it, but whatever. Now it's not perfect and there's definitely a lot of work that still should be done, but
I can acknowledge that it's a shift in the right direction, right? We can acknowledge that, yes. But let's make one thing clear: being resistant to diet culture is not being resistant to taking care of yourself. According to researchers, it's the opposite. Because resisting diet culture is realizing that the one person who can really make you healthy is, well, you. Instead of constantly policing your body or comparing yourself to what you see,
In the media, you can instead focus on making yourself feel and look good however you want. On one side of the spectrum, we have fad diets that work for some people but not others, like the Atkins diet. And then on the other side, we have icons like Jane Fonda, who centered female empowerment above all else, but also fell victim to how damaging diet culture can be with
Her own struggles. Smack dab in the middle, movements like black is beautiful or body positivity that call for self-acceptance. My point is there are so many ways to take care of yourself and there's no such thing as one size fits all. And I know that's easier said than done though.
You know, I could sit here and say love yourself, but I also feel like that's very, um, I hate saying that, to be honest, because I personally also struggle with loving myself. It's not that easy. I mean, we're dealing with hundreds of years of people telling us how we should look, sizes constantly changing. I mean, ads upon ads upon ads of...
Diets and fads and all this, like it's going to take time for us to really unlearn all of this and I don't even know if we're gonna get there.
I think if we're aware of it though, like if we're aware what's going on, it can help us kind of move forward and not, and see through the toxicity. And that's what I kind of hope with this episode is that you're aware and I hope you know that you are good enough just the way you are. I'm speaking to myself too, 'cause trust me, bitch, I have my days every fucking day. Anyways.
Don't be so hard on yourself. You only got one of these lives, okay? Well, everyone, thank you so much for learning with me today. Remember, don't be afraid to ask questions to get the whole story because we all deserve that. Now, I'd love to hear your guys' reactions to today's story. So make sure to use the hashtag darkhistory so I can follow along.
Join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday after the podcast airs and also catch my Murder Mystery makeup which drops on Mondays. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. You make good choices and I'll be talking to you next week. Goodbye.
Dark History is an Audioboom original. This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Dunya McNeely from 3Arts, Ed Simpson, and Claire Turner from Wheelhouse DNA. Produced by Lexi Kiven. Research provided by Tisha Dunstan and Jed Bookout.
Edited by... Special thanks to our historical consultants. And I'm your host. It's me, Bailey Sarian. It's me, Jessica. Name that movie. Thank you. Bye.
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