“Whenever we create standards about how we all should live, these norms always benefit those individuals who are already in power,” says Sabrina Strings, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. “What constitutes ‘good’ behavior is going to be far more accessible to white persons, to men, to wealthy persons, than people who do not fit into those categories,” says Strings. This includes conventional thinness, and “when you have been told that you should only have [a certain amount of] calories or that you must keep your BMI here, you will always feel like you are doing either good or bad, right or wrong by sticking to these dictates,” Strings adds.

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