From Instagram photos of candles and spa days highlighted by #selfcare to social justice activists voicing the importance of caring for themselves, the ideal of self-care has enjoyed considerable popularity in recent years. In this paper, I explore the political significance of intuitive eating as a self-care practice in the context of healing from anorexia and bulimia. Feminist philosophers have described how eating disorders emerge in socio-cultural contexts marked by an idealization of thinness, especially in women. Besides this, philosophers and sociologists have spoken to the connections between fatphobia, diet culture, racism, and sexism. Given these claims, I will argue that healing from these disorders can be framed as acts of political resistance.
At first blush, engaging in the practices necessary to heal from eating disorders seems thoroughly apolitical. For example, an anorectic’s learning to eat enough to restore their weight appears to be a matter of individual health. Likewise, developing “intuitive eating” habits after weight restoration could simply be read as embracing a healthy relationship with food. Instead, I will show that such eating practices can constitute acts of resistance to the very social forces that underlie many manifestations of these disorders.
To make the case for certain eating practices as political acts, I proceed in four stages. In section 1, I present the notion of self-care and touch on its evolution from an ethical to a political ideal. In section 2, I discuss the socio-cultural origins of the thinness ideal and of fatphobia, with an eye towards showing how they fuel eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. In section 3, I introduce Kate Manne’s conception of “bodily imperatives” and describe Audre Lorde’s framing of her struggles with cancer as acts of political resistance. The upshot of this discussion will be that the self-care practices anorectics and bulimics engage in to recover from their disorders are political in nature. In section 4, I entertain and respond to three objections to my view. I then conclude that healing from disordered eating can not only be an individual act, but one full of political potential.
Before proceeding, let me sketch what I mean by the notion of an “act of political resistance,” while noting that I will expand on this idea in section 3. Under this notion, I include any action that is conceptualized by an agent as opposing a form of oppression. I take oppression to be a feature of social groups. Actions or institutions are oppressive when they constrain individuals because they belong to a group deemed “natural” or “physical” in nature (Frye Reference Frye1983). The constraints on group members may include subjection to exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, violence, or other limitations (Young Reference Young1990). I define an act as one of “political resistance” when it responds to a form of oppression. For example, someone who joins a march against racism has formed the intention to participate in a collective effort to battle one type of oppression.
What will be of interest in the context of the paper will be the effects of eating disorder recovery on shaking the “tyranny of slenderness” (Chernin Reference Chernin1981) and facing fatphobia (Manne Reference Manne2024). The crux of my argument is that certain self-directed actions, while they may appear to exclusively belong to the domain of morality—that is, of conduct responding to the demands of persons taken individually—are also constitutive of a political praxis. Indeed, philosophers such as Alycia LaGuardia-LoBianco have argued that agents have a general moral duty “to care for themselves by protecting and expanding their agency” (Reference LaGuardia-LoBianco2018, 252). I take this view further and claim that the duty to self-care in the domain I circumscribe is not only a moral obligation but can be a political one. The “diet culture,” which leads, in some cases, to full-fledged eating disorders, springs from fatphobic biases originating in sexism and racism. Thus, resistance to this culture can be conceived as political.Footnote 1
Let me make two further introductory points. First, context matters for my argument. Undereating could be an act of political resistance during a hunger strike in protest of an injustice. Yet, in a society that encourages people to shrink themselves through weight-loss dieting, intuitive eating may also be viewed as a political response. Second, it is conceivable that overeating could also be an act of resistance. Since it is possible to respond to internal hunger or emotional cues while at the same time eating more than is optimal for health, such eating would be a response to diet culture.Footnote 2 Having made these points, let us first broach the history of the ideal of self-care.
1. From the ethics to the politics of self-care
In Self-care: Embodiment, personal autonomy, and the shaping of health consciousness (Reference Ziguras2004), Christopher Ziguras defines self-care as “the active process of recovering, maintaining and improving one’s health” (3). On the one hand, some self-care practices “concern physical techniques of the body such as keeping one’s teeth clean, eating well and avoiding physical injury” (3). On the other hand, some practices “are not so much techniques of the body as ‘techniques of the self’ aimed at sustaining mental health by managing one’s self-identity, self-perception, feelings, and relationships” (3). In healthcare fields, self-care typically centers on the practices that an individual may undertake to restore one’s health (e.g., taking medication). However, self-care often has a wider scope, referring to “those everyday practices in which people engage to maintain or improve their own health” (4). In short, healthcare fields typically teach us how to restore our health, while large swaths of self-help and related media claim to show us how to enhance our health. Indeed, many diets, fitness regimens, and “New Age” practices exemplify the “health-enhancing” strand of self-care.
The ideal of self-care is not new. As Michel Foucault and others have shown, practices related to bodily health, mental health, and sexuality were deemed essential to a flourishing life among male elites in antiquity. Indeed, in Care of the Self, Foucault claims that caring for oneself was a vital activity in antiquity—one imbued with moral significance. Today, self-care is usually excluded from the moral domain and is viewed as an optional activity that we have no responsibility to engage in. In contrast, during that period, caring for oneself was inextricably linked with social concerns. In Foucault’s words, care of the self “took the form of an attitude, a mode of behavior; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on, developed, perfected, and taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to relationships between individuals” (Reference Foucault1988, 47). Besides highlighting its significance, Foucault delves into the specific practices and rules adopted in the ancient world as part of their ethics of self-care. Of particular interest to Foucault are the activities and messages relating to sexuality. These take the form of prohibitions against certain sexual acts (e.g., those relating to homosexual conduct) or specifications concerning the conduct appropriate for married couples. The rules articulated by different philosophical schools or thinkers served to regulate what pleasures we may enjoy. For instance, ancient philosophers often asked whether different forms of sexual pleasure conformed to what was deemed natural or whether they could be enjoyed in moderation. Regulating one’s sexual practices became integral to living well.
The history of self-care does not end in antiquity. For the sake of brevity, I will only touch on the social context of self-care in the United States. As the writer Jordan Kisner describes, “Historically, in America, full citizenship has rested on an idea of the capacity for self-care” (Reference Kisner2017). For example, a lack of self-care was sometimes used as a pretext to justify slavery. Consider this statement from the physician Samuel A. Cartwright, who speaks of a “debasement of mind, which has rendered the people of Africa unable to take care of themselves” (quoted in Kisner Reference Kisner2017). Likewise, in the late nineteenth century, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were “deemed ‘unfit citizens’ because they lacked the ‘ideas and attitudes which befit men to take up … the problem of self-care and self-governance’” (Matthew Frye Jacobson quoted in Kisner Reference Kisner2017). These statements link stereotypes about the capacity for self-care and lack of intelligence to exclude certain persons from participating as citizens.
Furthermore, Kisner notes that “after decades of disuse, the term [self-care] was repopularized in the seventies and eighties by people of color and queer communities—this time as a gesture of defiance” (Reference Kisner2017). Most famously, Audre Lorde proclaimed, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare” (Reference Kisner2017, 130). Her idea is that, when members of marginalized groups care for themselves, they resist the dominant norms that deem them unworthy of care and, in many cases, expendable.
The idea that self-care is tantamount to political resistance lives on in communities facing oppression today. For example, in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting, hashtags such as #QueerSelfLove proliferated on social media to highlight the importance of caring for oneself in the face of homophobic violence. In these and other oppressed social groups, self-love and the caring acts that spring from this attitude serve to build resilience in the face of continued attacks. Such acts of self-care may also signal efforts to instill self-reliance when allies fail in their duties to support more marginalized persons.
This trend stands in opposition to the current cooption and commodification of self-care by privileged persons. For instance, under the purview of #selfcare on social media, we witness individuals who view treatments to enhance their well-being, such as spa days, as ways to restore their health and improve their productivity in today’s profit-driven societies. These luxuries, to echo Pooja Lakshmin (Reference Lakshmin2023), do not constitute “real self-care” so much as temporary palliatives to cope in our cutthroat work environments—ones which disproportionately lead to burnout in women, to name one oppressed social group.
Altogether, despite this cooption and commodification, the ideal of self-care has become political. From antiquity to present-day Western societies, this value has evolved from an ethical ideal linking individuals together to a political one embraced for the sake of resistance to injustice.
2. The politics of disordered eating
The immediate precipitants of eating disorders may include a variety of events—parents divorcing, a romantic breakup, or bullying, to take a few examples. Nevertheless, I will argue that we should consider the patterns of behavior inherent in these disorders as socio-political. As thinkers such as Susan Bordo have argued, anorexia and bulimia emerge in a cultural context marked by the elevation of feminine slenderness (Reference Bordo1993). In what follows, I investigate the matrix of injustices in which these patterns of disordered eating emerge. I focus, first, on the connection between disordered eating and the thinness ideal, and second, on the gendered and racialized character of this aesthetic ideal. The take-home of this section will be that anorexia and bulimia have a political foundation, which will justify, in the next section, my claim that recovering from these disorders can be an act of political resistance.
To launch our discussion, I want to appeal to Sheila Lintott’s argument in “Sublime Hunger” (Reference Lintott2003). Although her analysis is over 20 years old, it can still illuminate the social significance of these disorders. There, Lintott explores the motives behind anorexia and bulimia by appealing to two aesthetic categories: the beautiful and the sublime. Popular discourse around anorexia and bulimia typically appeals to the category of the beautiful to explain these disorders. According to such discourse, narrow beauty ideals concerning body size and shape compel many to diet to fit these ideals. For some, this dieting becomes extreme, and they develop an eating disorder.
Yet, as Lintott persuasively explains, the picture is more complicated. As she puts it, while beauty “may start many women on the path to developing an eating disorder,” appealing to the category of beauty is insufficient to comprehend what “keeps many on that path” (Reference Lintott2003, 80). Instead, she invokes the category of the sublime, that is, the mastery of one’s fear of a fearful object, to conceptualize anorexia and bulimia. According to her, the mastery of hunger inherent in anorexia and bulimia gives women an experience of the sublime that they might not otherwise have access to. This explains the feeling of self-worth that anorectics and bulimics derive from overcoming their appetites. As Lintott puts it, “The dieter might truly wish her appetite to vanish, whereas the anorectic or bulimic depends on her hunger for her identity” (Reference Lintott2003, 79). Specifically, anorectics and bulimics seek a sense of spirituality by vanquishing their hunger, just as a mountaineer might do by conquering the natural world. Mastering hunger—not the appearance of thinness—eventually becomes one’s raison d’être in anorexia and bulimia. Lintott’s focus on girls and women is not accidental, as she reasons that they are afforded fewer opportunities to confront the sublime in its traditional forms and hence turn to disordered eating behaviors to experience a feeling of command. Therein lies the political valence of her argument.
With the rise of eating disorders in boys and men, the landscape of anorexia and bulimia has changed since the publication of Lintott’s piece. Today, the rate of eating disorders in boys and men is increasing more quickly than in girls and women (Gorrell and Murray Reference Gorrell and Murray2019). Nevertheless, Lintott’s analysis remains relevant for the following reasons. First, the prevalence of girls and women suffering from anorexia and bulimia versus that in boys and men is still skewed, suggesting that gender-based norms may be interacting with individual predispositions for and triggers of disordered eating. In fact, the lifetime prevalence of anorexia remains three times higher in females than in males (Galmiche et al. Reference Galmiche, Déchelotte, Lambert and Tavolacci2019). Second, one could argue that the encroachment of sexual objectification and appearance concerns in other gender groups indicates that the forces driving these disorders among girls and women are affecting a greater number of people, not that they have lost their political significance. As studies of body image suggest, body dissatisfaction in boys and men is on the rise (Grogan Reference Grogan2022, 114). And while they are overall less likely than girls and women to diet to achieve an idealized body type, nevertheless, they may still restrict food (often combined with exercise) to embody the “slender and moderately muscular” physique valorized in Western societies today (Grogan Reference Grogan2022, 114). Therefore, it is reasonable to infer that preoccupations with body fat and size may also lead some boys and men to disordered eating, much like Lintott explained in the case of girls and women. In fact, longstanding research on body image corroborates this claim. For example, in their landmark book The Adonis complex, Harrison Pope, Katharine Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia describe the slide from body image concerns to anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating in men (Pope et al. Reference Pope, Phillips and Olivardia2002).
Thus far, I have suggested that the aesthetic norm of thinness may be a contributing factor in certain eating disorders. What remains to be seen is why this norm has taken hold. My discussion will take us through Sabrina Strings’s work on anti-Black racism and fatphobia, Elizabeth Wissinger’s research on the modeling industry, and Susan Bordo’s argument concerning women’s emancipation and the idealization of feminine slenderness. I will then briefly describe how this norm has been “exported” from the West to other parts of the world.
In Fearing the Black body (Reference Strings2019), Sabrina Strings develops a genealogy of aesthetic ideals that links anti-fatness to anti-Black racism. To begin, Strings draws on Bourdieu’s notion of distinction to make the case for the connection between the ideal white body and the elevation of slenderness. Bourdieu writes that “Social subjects … distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984, 6). Building on this observation, Strings claims that elites generally seek to “distinguish themselves by cultivating tastes, diets, and physical appearances that are in opposition to those of the subordinated groups” (Strings Reference Strings2019, 6). One such distinction is body fat. As she explains, from the seventeenth century onward, “racial discourse was deployed by elite Europeans and white Americans to create social distinctions between themselves and so-called greedy and fat racial Others” (Reference Strings2019, 7). Whereas Renaissance aesthetics elevated proportion and a certain amount of body fat in bodies both white and Black, the seventeenth century marked the advent of the “thin, fine” European man who distinguished himself from those who were inferior and beholden to their appetites—specifically, people of African descent (42). According to Strings, the idealization of thinness as a form of social distinction then expanded to women, first in Europe and, later, in the United States. Thus, the negative stereotype linking fatness, excessive appetites, and Black bodies was born.
While the relationship between gender, the norm of thinness, and excessive dieting has garnered much attention in popular media, Strings’s research adds a layer of complexity to the discourse about the socio-political character of body aesthetics. Thanks to it, we can understand the deeper roots of the elevation of slenderness as a marker of social standing. The intersection of gendered norms and anti-Black racism explains the rise of this ideal.
Changes in the fashion industry in the West in the twentieth century continued to fuel this rise. As Elizabeth Wissinger argues in This year’s model (Reference Wissinger2015), during that period, the modeling industry further normalized thinness. She explains that, in the early to mid-century, with the standardization of clothing sizes came a standardization of the measurements of fashion models, such as weight and height requirements. As she puts it:
The new corporeality demanded by industrialized perception pulled for serially interchangeable models, with identical proportions portraying this attenuated ideal. Those who did not fit the standard were eventually winnowed out. … [F]rom the 1920s into the 1940s, the fairly relaxed atmosphere in modeling, with room for a variety of body types and sizes, moved toward a reliance on a uniformity of type, with more strictly enforced measurements. (124)
Paired with the perception that taller and thinner models best showcased clothing, these forms of standardization heightened the normalization of slenderness. Indeed, John Robert Powers, one of the architects of the concept of a “professional model,” declared: “The tall, slight figure complements the lines of clothes and makes them more effective. … A short girl has a stubby effect in photography and cannot display clothes to the best advantage. … In other words, they must be tall and slim, well-proportioned” (quoted in Wissinger Reference Wissinger2015, 124).
Another twist in the idealization of thinness occurred in response to the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In Unbearable weight (Reference Bordo1993), Susan Bordo argues that anorexia and bulimia, on the one hand, and everyday preoccupations with thinness, on the other hand, lie on a continuum. She attributes the norm of feminine thinness to a cluster of factors. First, with these movements, girls and young women came to feel “fear and disdain for traditional female roles and social institutions” (155). These reactions found their expression in disgust for typical attributes of the female body, such as rounded hips or full breasts. Second, there emerged “a deep fear of ‘the Female,’ with all its more nightmarish and archetypal association of voracious hunger and sexual insatiability” (155). Thus, newly emancipated women found themselves torn between two contradictory images: they were increasingly seen as productive and capable of mastery, but, in the background, lurked the specter of femininity as consumption. Dieting became the means to express this mastery, on the one hand, and quash the association between femininity and voraciousness, on the other hand. All in all, this reaction to feminism reinforced the fetishization of thinness.
In Western societies, we have inherited this beauty standard born of colonialism, the normalization of thinness by the fashion industry, and the backlash to the women’s emancipation movements. Unfortunately, this standard is no longer confined to the West. Alongside other exports, we have spread the obsession with thinness. Take the introduction of TV shows from the West in Fiji in the 1990s. According to reporting on research pioneered by Anne E. Becker, “In 1995, without television, girls in Fiji appeared to be free of the eating disorders common in the West. But by 1998, after just a few years of sexy soap operas and seductive commercials, 11.3 percent of adolescent girls reported they at least once had purged to lose weight” (Ireland Reference Ireland2009). This anthropological evidence suggests that the thinness ideal may play a role in the rise of eating disorders in and outside of the West.
More generally, as Heather Widdows contends in Perfect me (Reference Widdows2018), the norm of thinness has become globally dominant: “The beauty ideal is not a single model, but a (relatively narrow) range of acceptable models. For example, size can vary, you can be tall or short, petite or Amazonian, but you must be some version of slim” (19). According to Widdows, among the global ideals, the norm of feminine slenderness is the most powerful: “The primary feature of the dominant beauty ideal is that of thinness. Study after study suggests that women would choose to be thin in preference to almost anything else” (21). She adds that “the thin ideal manifests in a number of ways. For some it is very thin (catwalk thin); for others it is slim with curves; for others it is athletic, buff, and strong. However, for all, slimness in some form is crucial” (21).
In tying these genealogies together, we can reach the following conclusion: the thinness norm preys on racialized and gendered oppressions. While dieting to conform to this norm may not always precipitate anorexia or bulimia, one can, at least in some cases, draw a connection between disordered eating and the idealization of slenderness. Considering this discussion, I want to posit that these disorders are partially political problems. Rather than attending to individual cases and their specific precipitants, I invite the reader to step back and develop a holistic view of the emergence of these disorders. If I am right, then we fail to fully conceptualize them when we leave to the side issues of sexism and racism and treat them as merely psychiatric issues. This is not to say that individual histories, personality traits, and genetics do not play a role in the etiology of these disorders. But it is to claim that they “thrive”—for lack of a better term—on political and cultural conditions.
3. Eating disorder recovery as political resistance
So far, I have argued that we should conceptualize anorexia and bulimia as, at least partially, social phenomena. Does this imply that healing from these disorders is political in nature? I now argue for this implication, drawing on Kate Manne’s notion of a “bodily imperative” and Audre Lorde’s conceptualization of self-care as an act of political resistance.
In Unshrinking (Reference Manne2024), Manne develops the notion of a “bodily imperative” in the context of her argument for resisting fatphobia. By such imperatives, Manne has in mind states of the body that “tell us what we are called upon to do for other people and creatures, and ourselves, conceived as subjects” (173). They are largely “universal” (173), being shared by all or nearly all of us. Further, they are “deep” as opposed to superficial: the desire for an iPhone may be “intense,” but it is not deep because it does not correspond to a basic survival need (173–74). Lastly, bodily imperatives “are not up to us”: while one may retrain a “consumerist urge” for an iPhone, a bodily imperative is something largely out of one’s control and difficult to control for long (174). Manne’s prime examples of bodily imperatives are pain and hunger.
Crucially, Manne claims that bodily imperatives constitute moral imperatives. In general, respecting bodily imperatives prevents suffering in ourselves or in others. In this regard, her argument harkens to Peter Singer’s famous claim in “Famine, affluence, and morality” that “suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad” (Reference Singer1972, 231). Like Singer, Manne takes this to be an intuitive claim that requires little further argumentation. That said, she also indicates that dieting to conform to aesthetic standards can harm others downstream—for example, by inculcating a dieting mentality in children. Not only is the self-denial of restrictive eating a moral harm to oneself, but it is also a potential harm to others.
Manne’s position is that dieting as a practice to lose weight is morally wrong because it forces us to ignore the bodily imperative of hunger in the service of an aesthetic ideal that is, by and large, impossible to maintain in the long term and rooted in oppression.Footnote 3 For the first part of her claim, Manne relies on abundant empirical literature that suggests that dieting for the sake of weight loss is rarely sustainable.Footnote 4 Often, such dieting leads to the phenomenon of weight cycling, which she describes as “the process of losing and almost inevitably regaining weight repeatedly” (41). Since restrictive eating generally fails to accomplish its intended goal—a slim body—in the long run, and since this physical ideal is itself mired in racist, sexist, and fatphobic biases, Manne concludes that the denial of hunger involved in weight-loss dieting constitutes a moral wrong. Put simply, the dieter violates a self-directed duty to respond to the bodily imperative of hunger. Conversely, eating practices that respect one’s hunger have a positive moral value. As Manne indicates, one such practice is that of intuitive eating, whose scope I now outline.
Broadly speaking, intuitive eating is a form of eating arising from food choices that honor physical and emotional needs. Unlike weight-loss dieting, such eating is not driven by appearance concerns. As the pioneers of this approach, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch, formulate it, intuitive eating is “a dynamic mind-body integration of instinct, emotion, and rational thought,” which depends on “cultivating attunement” to physical sensations, such as hunger and satiety cues and “removing obstacles” to such attunement, including those founded on judgments about what you “should or should not eat” (Tribole and Resch Reference Tribole and Resch2017, 1–2). More specifically, they advocate ten principles: (1) “reject the diet mentality”; (2) “honor your hunger”; (3) “make peace with food”; (4) “challenge the food police”; (5) “feel your fullness”; (6) “discover the satisfaction factor”; (7) “cope with your emotions without using food”; (8) “respect your body”; (9) “exercise—feel the difference” (that is, avoiding punitive routines); (10) “honor your health—gentle nutrition” (Tribole and Resch Reference Tribole and Resch2012, 21–30). While there may be disagreements with Tribole and Resch on certain principles—for example, some may take issue with the inclusion of health concerns—at its heart, intuitive eating repudiates dieting as a framework for making food choices. For example, someone who practices intuitive eating may have a larger lunch than usual if they feel especially hungry. In so doing, they are “honoring” their hunger. By contrast, in such a situation, someone operating under the norms of “diet culture” might drink water to dampen their hunger before having lunch or stick with their usual meal to conform to an eating pattern designed to help them lose weight. If we adopt Manne’s framework, such a person would be disrespecting their hunger and guilty of a moral transgression.
Intuitive eating plays an important role in eating disorder recovery—though not necessarily in the first instance. For those suffering from classic anorexia and bulimia, “nutritional rehabilitation” and “weight restoration” might be the first goals of treatment (Tribole Reference Tribole2010, 12). Effective weight restoration will depend on different feeding protocols and behavioral changes, depending on the severity of the person’s illness. In the beginning, some suffering from anorexia or bulimia may not be able to practice intuitive eating because they may have skewed hunger signals (for instance, very reduced ones). However, over time, and with weight restoration, eating disorder recovery will involve acquiring intuitive eating habits (Tribole Reference Tribole2010, 13). Having said this, the concept of “weight restoration” might not always come into play. This would apply to cases of “atypical anorexia,” where a person displays the classic symptoms of anorexia nervosa, but after losing weight, still remains within a “normal” or higher weight category (National Eating Disorders Association n.d.).Footnote 5 It is important to underscore that this condition, first included in the DSM in 2013, is quite prevalent.Footnote 6 As the National Eating Disorders Association highlights, “atypical anorexia is equally if not more common than anorexia with 0.2%–4.9% of people experiencing the disorder at some point in their lifetimes, a rate two or three times higher than that of anorexia” (National Eating Disorders Association n.d.). Therefore, I want to be cautious in making the claim that so-called “weight restoration” necessarily comes before the introduction of intuitive eating. Indeed, it is worth highlighting that the relative dearth of attention to atypical anorexia might itself stem from fatphobia.
Intuitive eating contributes to resisting diet culture writ large, and in healing from anorexia or bulimia, in particular. I now want to add that this form of eating is an act of self-care. I contrast this with certain feeding protocols (for example, via an intravenous drip) that an agent may not willingly engage in during treatment for anorexia or bulimia. In such instances, it would not be coherent to say that the agent is directly caring for themselves. (They could be said to be doing so indirectly if they consented to hospitalization for disordered eating.) Intuitive eating, by definition, requires agents to tune into their own physical and emotional needs and to respond accordingly by selecting and eating foods that meet those needs. Therefore, it makes sense to call such eating a form of care that is self-directed.
Intuitive eating as self-care is importantly different from eating practices that are governed by others’ expectations or collective concerns. For example, as was my experience in recovery, one may eat “performatively.” That is, one may consume an average-sized meal with others to signal that one is in recovery; yet, given the choice, one would deny one’s hunger and resort to food restriction to cope with psychological needs. In this example, one is catering to others’ opinions rather than paying attention to one’s own emotions or hunger. As such, it would not be an example of intuitive eating. Similarly, someone who, during recovery, cooks a meal for others may also not be caring for themselves if the meal they prepare does not honor their food preferences (for example, they may desire something spicy, but those for whom they’re cooking want something bland). This is not to say that it is wrong to engage in this type of cooking and eating on some occasions. If such eating patterns dominate one’s life, however, one would not be properly seen as caring for oneself. My claim is that someone who, by and large, honors their own hunger and emotional needs when consuming food is engaging in intuitive eating and caring for themselves. Such self-care is vital for fully healing from anorexia and bulimia.
From this argument, the reader might infer that intuitive eating is a form of self-care that has moral value: it exemplifies respect for the bodily imperative of hunger. But I have not yet justified the eating protocols that are part of recovery from anorexia and bulimia as political practices or, to use Lorde’s language, as acts of “political resistance.” In my eyes, someone who eventually adopts intuitive eating to heal from anorexia or bulimia may also be engaging in “political warfare.”
To reach this conclusion, let’s revisit the definition of an “act of political resistance” provided in my introductory remarks. There, I claimed that an action is one of political resistance if it helps combat the constraints oppressing members of a social group. In A burst of light (Reference Lorde2017), Lorde makes her iconic claim about the political value of self-care in the context of her navigating cancer treatments. As mentioned above, Lorde declares: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare” (130). On a preliminary reading, one might interpret her efforts to heal herself as moral in nature: she sought healthcare, including alternative approaches, and followed different treatment protocols. To use Manne’s terms, her physical suffering and the threat to her life posed by her cancer created bodily imperatives for her. Yet Lorde’s social position as a Black lesbian also lends itself to a political interpretation of her efforts. As her words suggest, for a member of an oppressed group, her struggles to preserve her life challenge the social presumption that Black lives like hers were expendable. Or, to draw on the now-famed slogan, by undergoing cancer treatments and seeking different means to cure herself, she was staking a claim: Black lives, like hers, matter.
Let’s now put this conclusion in conversation with the line of reasoning defended in section 2. There, I claimed that anorexia and bulimia at least partially depend on diet culture, which is itself dependent on racial and gendered oppressions. Working backward, I now claim that efforts to heal oneself from such disorders may be acts of political resistance. Thus, someone who is intentionally seeking to recover from disordered eating is striving to preserve their health in a sexist, racist, and by extension, fatphobic world; as such, their efforts can be interpreted as political. They are marking themselves as worthy of care. Their hunger matters. Their bodily integrity matters. Their life matters.
4. Objections and responses
4.1 Objection one: narcissism
A general criticism of self-care—namely, its supposed narcissistic character—would seem to undermine my thesis that the acts of self-care involved in eating disorder recovery might be construed as political. According to the Narcissism Objection, all self-care is, by definition, self-directed and hence apolitical. Indeed, as Christopher Ziguras explains in Self-care, social critics, such as Philip Rieff and Christopher Lasch, deplored the “inward turn” that self-care seemed to herald. In Ziguras’s words, for them, “the preponderance of self-help texts represented a growing introversion and the emergence of a self-obsessed culture” (Reference Ziguras2004, 126). But I agree with Ziguras that we need not interpret this shift as narcissistic. As he puts it, the popularity of self-help made “reflexive concerns … very public in the mass media” (126). In simpler terms, social ties were forged precisely through the medium of self-help. More interestingly, though, if we look at the experiences of marginalized groups, we can see that caring for oneself and caring for one’s community interlock.
Myisha Cherry’s argument in “Solidarity care” describes the relationship between self- and community care. Cherry begins by enumerating the burdens that social injustices place on members of oppressed communities. Some of the burdens may be “existential.” Take W. E. B. DuBois’s idea of double consciousness—namely, the anguish borne from seeing yourself through the eyes of the privileged, the feeling of “being a problem” in society. Other burdens weigh on members of oppressed communities in the form of stress and trauma. Consider, for instance, the well-documented physical and emotional tolls of racism on African Americans (Cherry Reference Cherry2020, 3). Cherry claims that “solidarity care” is necessary to face these burdens: “being woke” or aware of oppression—whether it’s one’s own or that faced by others—is only one part of fighting for freedom. Correcting an injustice also requires extending care to others; in Cherry’s terms, “solidarity care … prioritizes not issues but caring for and about each other with the goal of making members be and stay well—given the reality of the issue (i.e., social injustice)” (5).
The bulk of Cherry’s argument is devoted to defending the importance of solidarity care: while the liberal tradition focuses on individual freedoms, it neglects the problem of the well-being of agents fighting for such freedoms. Although the emphasis on solidarity care would seem to undervalue self-care practices, this is not the case. Cherry denies that “self-care is a sufficient condition of well-being,” all the while asserting that “we should view self-care differently than we often tend to” (10). For her, solidarity and self-care are not at odds with one another:
Self-care is never done independently. Someone has to watch the kids as you meditate. Someone teaches the yoga class that relaxes you. Someone gifts you with the book that is changing your life. A therapist or friend listens to your story. A friend shows you how to make the green juice. Self-care takes place in community. Even if and when we decide to take care of ourselves, someone else is always joining in. (10)
These examples show that self-care is not narcissistic, as critics of this ideal are wont to complain. On the contrary, self- and community care are interdependent.
Cherry’s framework can now help us conceptualize the communal character of eating disorder recovery. Altogether, the care those recovering from disordered eating receive from others can help them make lasting peace with their bodies and give them the wherewithal to resist oppressive social forces. While someone may recover from disordered eating without the help of a professional, such as an eating disorder counselor, this does not imply that their recovery isn’t socially shaped. Eating, whether it follows an intuitive, restrictive, or other pattern, is a shared practice: we were born into the world learning from and eventually emulating our caregivers’ eating. And when, later in life, our native patterns come undone, this is typically done under the influence of a particular person (e.g., a parent admonishing a child to restrict their food intake) or a social phenomenon (e.g., diet culture). Whether one eats alone or not, the choices we make in selecting, preparing, and consuming foods depend on a shared social background. Although someone may return to more wholesome eating patterns without the explicit guidance of another person, that person is still reconnecting with a way of consuming food they acquired at an earlier time as part of a supportive social environment.
More broadly, my response to the Narcissism Objection is the following: the self-directedness of acts of self-care does not undermine their political character; rather, what matters is whether such acts further a struggle against an oppressive force.
4.2 Objection two: scope
Another issue to consider is whether all acts of self-care in eating disorder recovery are political. To help understand this objection, let’s return to Lorde’s case. As an intellectual, she was aware that her efforts to restore her health were a political statement in a racist, misogynistic, and homophobic society. But would we say the same of a Black lesbian without Lorde’s political consciousness? Would her attention to her health be an act of political resistance? Someone might object that this “Twin Audre Lorde” is only heeding a moral imperative. In general, the Scope Objection states that, in conceptualizing self-care as a political act, one is committed to counting all actions of the same kind (e.g., all acts of intuitive eating) as political. So, according to this objection, the suggestion that embracing intuitive eating can be political commits one to saying that all acts of intuitive eating are political. This is a serious concern that I will treat in the context of eating disorder recovery. Having said that, my argument could be extended to other contexts, such as Lorde’s self-care during her cancer treatments.
To begin, people suffering from anorexia or bulimia may conceive of their efforts to restore their physical and psychological well-being as having nothing to do with others. If the story ends there, though, it looks like we remain in the domain of morality as opposed to politics. However, in some situations, it will make sense to conceptualize eating disorder recovery as political. Let me outline this claim.
I have in mind cases where a person explicitly understands their eating as resistance. For someone to satisfy these conditions, they would: (1) need to engage in a form of eating not directed at weight-loss, such as intuitive eating; (2) need to be aware of and actively oppose the fatphobic social context that motivates weight-loss dieting and precipitates many instances of anorexia or bulimia. If that person satisfies these conditions, they will count as resisting diet culture. I include the first condition to eliminate cases of “performative activism,” wherein someone gestures at the political significance of opposing diet culture without changing their eating behaviors. I adopt the second condition to highlight the special value of self-care practices undertaken in opposition to weight-loss dieting.
Yet one may wonder whether there are other examples of eating-as-self-care that could still be counted as political in nature even if the agent is not self-conscious of their social valence. Indeed, an agent’s actions may lessen the oppressive conditions of other members of their group, thereby contributing to undoing their overall oppression. For instance, a person of color who has recovered from an eating disorder may be more present within and helpful to their community because they are no longer in the throes of their condition. To draw on Cherry, self-care may have the consequence of enhancing solidarity care. Still, in such a case, it would be a stretch to conceive of the eating itself as political since they do not understand this action as such.
To see why, consider the following example. Let’s suppose that someone stops ordering products on Amazon. And let’s add that this improves the condition of workers by redirecting money to local businesses that have better labor practices. But this particular person divesting from Amazon is only doing this because they want to drop Amazon Prime subscriptions out of budgetary restraint. So, their act does not appear to be one of political resistance, since they are not acting out of concern for laborers. In fact, they might be entirely ignorant of the labor practices of large corporations like Amazon. Rather, they are acting on prudential reasons. Extending this line of reasoning to our question, someone who embraces intuitive eating would not be engaging in an act of political resistance if they do not understand the political nature of diet culture and if they do not want to resist such a culture. Absent these conditions, they are operating out of concern for themselves—not out of an awareness of the forces that conspire to oppress them.
On a similar note, one might imagine situations where another person witnesses a person eating in a manner that they infer to be either an act of dieting or intuitive eating. Let’s imagine that I’m friends with someone who I know is recovering from anorexia. We’re at a restaurant, and I see this person picking at her food. I conclude that she is relapsing since she is eating very little. But, in truth, my friend dislikes this restaurant’s cuisine and is honoring her food preferences. Indeed, she would be following Tribole and Resch’s sixth principle of intuitive eating by making food choices that provide satisfaction. For all I know, she may then go home and have a hearty meal that she finds tasty. That is why it would be misguided to say that someone is “caving to” or combating diet culture without knowing why they are eating the way they do.Footnote 7 Precisely because intuitive eating is about responding to internal cues, it is hard to read food choices as political resistance or not without understanding an agent’s intentions. Observation is insufficient to conclude whether they are resisting diet culture or not.
To push this issue, let us take another example: imagine someone who, on their way to the grocery store, is swept up in an anti-racist protest. Perhaps, their presence is helpful in increasing the number of people visible in the march and, as such, might draw attention to the anti-racist cause. But, as in the Amazon thought experiment, it is hard to classify this as an instance of political resistance, as this person did not form the intention to protest racism. Without knowledge of their intentions, seeing them in the march is not enough to deduce that they value anti-racist demonstrations. So too, when we merely witness someone eating, we cannot discern whether their food choices stem from the ideal of intuitive eating or not, and whether their actions are undertaken out of a sense of political consciousness.
These cases help clarify the scope of my argument. Not all intuitive eating engaged in by those in eating disorder recovery is political. Rather, the purpose of my paper is to nudge us in the direction of including some eating practices under the umbrella of political resistance. Cases where an individual practices intuitive eating, is aware of the oppressive origins of diet culture, and shapes their food choices in opposition to this culture would count as political.
In general, my response to the Scope Objection is that we must take into account an agent’s intentions when deciding whether their self-care is political. Acts of self-care are political only when an agent is conscious of the political context in which their actions unfold and frame their actions accordingly. In addition, acknowledging that an individual’s self-care is political does not imply that all actions with the same outward appearance are political.
4.3 Objection three: leveling
My argument may give the impression that all acts of recovery from anorexia or bulimia that meet the criterion just outlined have the same political value. This leveling would seem to drain the political significance of the self-care performed by members of oppressed groups. In general, the Leveling Objection states that all forms of self-care that are undertaken self-consciously have the same political character. To this, I reply that they do not all have the same political character because we need to take into consideration the relative social positions of persons undertaking self-care. Let me now describe why we need to take positionality into account.
Think of a white man who is suffering from anorexia or bulimia. Is his recovery an “act of political warfare”? After all, absent other oppressive forces, such as homophobia or classism, the value of his life is probably taken for granted. And, unlike many other bodies, his is not generally treated as expendable. Consequently, his self-care may not seem to have the same political character as other instances. Should we even conceptualize his recovery as a political act?
Let’s start with the moral issue. By honoring his hunger and engaging in the self-care practices necessary to heal from his disorder, he is certainly heeding a moral imperative, as Manne would argue. But I want to make the further claim that he may also be participating in a political project. He would need to be aware of fatphobia and diet culture and explicitly choose to oppose them. His “yes” to recovery and “no” to weight-loss dieting further the cause of resisting diet culture and the anti-fat biases intertwined in it. As a woman of color who has recovered from disordered eating, I know the effects of such resistance firsthand. When one of my close white male friends shared his rejection of dieting and acceptance of his larger body size with me, I felt comforted in the fact that I was not alone in these struggles. His resistance to dieting and fatphobia strengthened my own efforts. More generally, we can draw on Lorde’s claim that “Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression” (Reference Lorde2007, 112). This statement indicates that freeing oneself from oppression is not a “solo act,” but rather one that is enmeshed with the struggles of others. Thus, my friend, while he may not occupy the same social position as mine, furthered my resistance to the norms grounded in sexism and anti-Black racism.
In summary, while a white man’s recovery from anorexia or bulimia may not, at first sight, appear to be an act of political warfare à la Lorde, it becomes one to the extent that it may inspire more marginalized persons to survive. Eating disorder recovery is strengthened in community, whether through conversations or shared practices, like eating together. Thus, the hypothetical white man’s self-care does not have the same political valence as that of a woman of color’s self-care, but this fact does not imply that it lacks any political character whatsoever. It does so secondarily—that is, to the extent that it motivates those who are the most likely targets of the relevant form of oppression.
Stepping back, my response to the Leveling Objection is twofold: acts of self-care can be political insofar as they explicitly resist oppressive forces, and they are political in degrees dependent on the extent to which an agent is likely to be the target of that form of oppression.
***
In this paper, I have sought to illustrate a key insight: in an unjust world, self-care has political significance. Specifically, I have argued that learning to eat intuitively can be an act of political resistance in a sexist, racist, and fatphobic society. In section 1, I defined the notion of self-care, described its emergence as an ethical ideal in antiquity, and touched on its evolution into a political ideal in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In section 2, I depicted how racism, sexism, and fatphobia are intersecting forms of injustice that lay the ground for disordered eating. This conclusion motivated my claim, in section 3, that learning to eat intuitively in the context of anorexia and bulimia recovery can be a form of self-care that serves to resist these injustices. In section 4, I entertained and responded to the following objections to my argument. First, I considered the claim that all self-care is, by definition, self-directed and hence apolitical, thereby stripping all acts related to eating disorder recovery of any political value (Narcissism Objection). To this, I responded that self- and community care are interdependent and that the acts of recovery discussed in this paper might have positive social ramifications. Second, I examined the question of whether claiming that some actions of self-care are political commits one to saying that all acts of the same type are political (Scope Objection). To this, I argued that we should only count cases where an agent explicitly conceptualizes their eating as a response to diet culture as political acts. Third, my argument seems to suggest that all politically conscious forms of self-care have the same political character, thereby failing to recognize the distinctive nature of the self-care performed by members of oppressed groups (Leveling Objection). To this, I countered that the self-care undertaken by someone who is not a member of an oppressed social group can still have a political character if it inspires more marginalized persons to engage in self-care in a politically conscious way. Thus, it does not have the same political character as that performed by someone who is part of the relevant oppressed group. Altogether, I conclude that healing from disordered eating and, in particular, developing intuitive eating habits can be acts of resistance to our present-day diet culture—a culture that depends on anti-fat biases rooted in sexism and racism. Anorexia and bulimia are driven by political injustices, and recovering from these eating disorders can be interpreted as an act of political resistance. The life-affirming forms of eating I have discussed here serve to undo diet culture, one forkful at a time.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Nancy Bauer for reading over the first draft of this manuscript and the anonymous referees for their insightful questions about my argument.
Céline Leboeuf is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida International University. Her research lies at the intersection of the philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and phenomenology. In her writings, she addresses important questions about beauty and the body in contemporary society. How are standards about physical appearance shaped by gender and race? What does it feel like to be sexually objectified? Why can’t we shake the pressure to shrink our bodies into sizes we can’t sustain in the long term? Her first book, The tyranny of thinness, will be published by North Atlantic Books in October 2026.
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