Why am I Obsessed with Thinness?

from Smart & Unserious Hosted by Jordan Van Clief

Thinness hasn't always meant beauty, for most of Western history, it meant poverty, illness, or holy self-denial. So how did "skinny" become the most aspirational body type on the planet? In this episode, we trace the surprising, recent history of the thin ideal: from 18th-century class anxieties that mocked both fatness and thinness as aristocratic excess, through the romanticized "consumptive chic" of the tuberculosis era, into the flapper-driven body revolution of the 1920s, and on to the actuarial-table sleight of hand that gave the world BMI. Along the way: Twiggy, Wallis Simpson, heroin chic, the diet pill crazes of the 20th century, the rise of bariatric surgery, and the deeply flawed science behind a hundred years of body shame. This episode tells the real story of how the modern West learned to fear its own bodies.