In The Fat of the Land, we explored how fat equaled health, beauty, prosperity, success and all things good in this life. However, in the time leading up to the 20th century, the perception of fatness had started to change.

Developments in agriculture, science, medicine, literature and the arts, began to chip away at the former ideal that being fat was good. It first began to change for aesthetic reasons, with literature and the arts crafting characters that established an association between rejection and being fat.

The medical community began to link chronic and other serious diseases to obesity, publishing findings in medical literature that being fat was ‘medically undesirable’. These journals made moral judgements about being fat, calling it ‘morally reprehensible’. Furthermore, thanks to Freudian psychology, ‘the literary and folkloric stereotype of the jolly, easygoing image of fat individuals changed into that of an affective, intensely reactive, and emotionally grown-up child’, setting a negative stereotype of fat people in motion.

Gird Power seeks to identify and obliterate these biases and old paradigms of thought that have influenced how we’ve been socialized around body image. Everyone’s journey is different. The challenges presented on these journeys are unique and it would be wise to refrain from making moral judgements about them.

Whatever your journey is with health and weight loss, remember that it’s deeply personal. Gird Power advocates for loving our bodies, focusing on holistic well-being rather than conforming to societal ideals.