Michael L J Greer

Existing discussions of weight-cycling in fat studies rarely center the lived experience of weight-cyclers as they move between fatter and thinner states of embodiment in a fatphobic world. Drawing on critical feminist phenomenology and Rachel Fox’s (2024) concept of the Anti-Obesity Assemblage, this paper examines how weight-cyclers’ experiences reveal the everyday, embodied effects of fat oppression. I conceptualize the Anti-Obesity Assemblage as a quasi-transcendental structure of experience that shapes meaning-making within fatphobic worlds, imbuing perception with the imperative to eliminate fatness. Through first-personal, social-scientific, and fictional accounts, I identify three phenomenological forms of suffering produced by oscillating between differently perceived states of embodiment: anxious perception, intelligibility slippage, and proprioceptive ambivalence. Anxious perception names the anxiety directed toward the futurity of one’s body, which can be experienced as being drawn into thinking about how one’s body might or will be. Intelligibility slippage refers to the experience of slipping between different modes of intersubjective intelligibility, which can erode one’s trust in the world. Proprioceptive ambivalence describes the tension between hyper-awareness of one’s physical body (through monitoring its size, weight, proportions, and diet) and uncertainty about its physical qualities (like appearance and size)—a tension that can culminate in feelings of disembodiment.

This article develops the twin concepts of food ease/unease by examining the effect of Ozempic era cultural narratives on fat peoples’ relationship with food. Accordingly, I make three contributions to the literature on GLP-1RAs. First, I characterize four master narratives relating to food that stem from Ozempic era discourses. Master narratives were first theorized by Hilde Lindemann Nelson (2001): they are cultural stories through which people construct their narrative selves. I identify four relevant master narratives: the miracle narrative, the ending narrative, the simplicity narrative, and the food noise narrative. Second, I argue that these food narratives burden fat people with what I term food unease. Food unease makes the subjective experience of hunger and eating difficult, undesired, or interfere with life in an unpleasant or obtrusive way. Narratives that pathologize (fat) hunger and (fat) eating burden fat people insofar as fat people use them to make sense of their relationship with food. My third contribution is to show that the twin concepts of food ease/unease are more useful for thinking about GLP-1RAs’ effect on peoples’ relationship with food than the concept of food noise. By examining the impact of Ozempic era master narratives on fat people’s relationship with food, I provide more reason to be circumspect about the popularity of these drugs. At the same time, I offer new concepts that can be used to construct counter narratives against oppressive cultural stories.

In this paper I argue that medical providers who wish to prescribe semaglutides for weight loss ought to first consider that their patient may value having an easy relationship with food. I’m calling this food ease. Food ease allows one’s experience of the eating process (e.g., procuring food, cooking, physically eating food, choosing to order take-out or go to a restaurant, etc.) to simply exist as activities constitutive of a life well-lived without becoming objects of anxiety or obsession. Food ease is what someone experiences when they don’t worry about their portion size when eating their favorite meal, or when they eat at a restaurant and don’t count the calories. Ideally, food ease allows the objective facts about food (calories, size, nutrition) to fade into the background of experience while subjectively experiencing the goods (and bads) of self-making through eating. While perfect food ease is perhaps never attainable, the pursuit of food ease is something that can be valued (by me, for one!). After fleshing out the concept of “food ease,” I gloss three ways semaglutides can undermine it and close by arguing that medical providers should think about whether their patients want to experience food ease, and if they do, how the drug would either promote or interfere with these goals. To properly advance patient care, medical providers would thus need to consider their patients’ relationship with their alimentary practices, habits, and preferences before they prescribe semaglutides.