 application developer, web applications developer, WillowTree, and I have an undergraduate degree or a minor in psychology. So I'm just making sure that we're all clear that I'm not a doctor, and I cannot diagnose or treat whatever medical conditions or stuff. And I do have some content warnings to announce about my talks, so do pay attention. My talk is going to discuss intentional weight loss and the medicalization of weight. We're going to discuss a little bit about chronic illness, gender dysphoria, eating disorders, and disorder eating. I add a little bit of current and historical racism, classism, sexism, weight discrimination, and ableism. I'm going to be quoting one ableist term at one point, but that should be about it. I'm trying to keep most of these things to minimum detail, so nothing very detailed about the symptoms. So what is body positivity even? Standing desks and pizza, and somehow my talk is about all these things. So the talk is, it's something, in figuring out how to approach this piece, I owe a lot to a talk I saw at last year's Cascadia Fest by Ashley Williams called, if you want to learn ES6 from scratch, you must first invent the universe. So what does a JavaScript talk have to do with body image? It's a JavaScript joke. So the title of her talk is a reference to a quote by Carl Sagan. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. So I guess for my talk, we're going to go with a pizza pie or something. So, our apples, or in this case, our tomatoes, the building blocks are the things that we're trying to create. The point is that they go back a long ways through many steps of cultivation, growth, intention, and accident. Over simplifying her talk a whole lot, her talk was about programming extractions from a teaching perspective. We create abstractions of bigger, more complicated concepts, and we use those abstractions to match patterns. So when we're teaching beginners, we need to be careful about which abstractions we collectively use, because ultimately those match patterns have consequences for the way that they interact with things in the future. Sometimes even the way that our abstractions were developed makes it extremely hard for us to figure out even what purpose they originally served, and it's especially hard for our students. So if we want to talk about body positivity, and we have to be generous enough to assume that I can even kind of do that, we'll figure it out, I have to invent a universe where the way that we talk about bodies makes some kind of sense to begin with. PS, estimates are hard. I guess debated that I could invent this universe in 20 minutes, typical dev. So, in the research field of artificial intelligence, and shout out to everyone making bots right now, right? Yeah? So hot. There's the concept of an embodied agent, and basically what that means is that the AI interface is given a body or a face or both, and it uses that to communicate non-verbally alongside methods like text or voice. Sometimes that means a physical robot. Sometimes it's as simple as a virtual representation of a body, like this little guy. So I contact gestures, body posture. They turn towards a thing to show that they're interested in it. They not show they're listening. These embodied agents convey meaning in ways that other kinds of AI may not. The people who write the bots, who make AI also have bodies. You and I have bodies. What meanings do our bodies convey? And what control do we have over those messages? Instead of being maintained by code, our bodies are maintained by food. Food also conveys meaning. Where we live, what we believe, who we've met, what resources are available, and what jobs we have. So, eight necessities for successful companies to provide in their break rooms. Top 20 snacks to turbocharge your tech team. 3,288 slices, the Baltimore tech community's growth measured in pizza. We and our coworkers, our peers, our bosses, we see and we share articles like this about tech culture. Maybe, ironically, maybe not. Staying on top of trends either way though, whether it's stuff like Facebook's Messenger bots or what Airbnb serves their employees for lunch can impact our careers, our businesses, and our tech communities. From the high cost of free office snacks, technology companies are famous for providing free food for their employees. Office areas stocked with snacks are great for morale and promote random interactions that generate new ideas. The problem is that free food, if it's the wrong kind, is not really free. It can kill you, or at least make you fat and unhealthy. In the opening of this article, ideas are generated by snacks, and the snacks can kill you. Tech employees are somehow involved. And not those employees, but you, you specifically the reader, you are implicated. And if your body is fat, the meaning that embodiment is conveying to everyone is apparently sickness and death. We're told that there's an obesity crisis today, that fatness is a health epidemic, a literal disease. Diseases are scary. Diseases are things like cancer. We have words now like abesogenic, which are, which is like how things create fat somehow like a disease. And you might remember what I said about the dangers of abstractions though, because we've been talking about this for a long time, much longer than we've had a so-called obesity crisis. This is a quote from 1863, William Banting, who made a really popular like diet system. Obesity seems to me very little understood or properly appreciated by the faculty and the public generally. We talk about how the snacks are killing us. The pizza is poison. The gluten in the pizza might be poison. The sugar in the tomato sauce is definitely poison. Preservatives are poison. Also your desk chair is poison. Everything is spiders. Basically, the way that we talk about these things, fatness is the oncoming storm. And if you do not strap on your Fitbit right now, then you only have yourself to blame. So we parse all these messages in all kinds of different ways. I would eat this. So we do all kinds of things with these messages we get. We do, we sometimes do Soylent. We do CrossFit. We do treadmill desks. We do salads. We do Whole30 for like 10 days. We do CSA subscriptions. Pretty cool, right? Oh, we do Paleo. We do YOLO. We do, we do some really strong filters on all these messages and maybe occasionally stronger beers. But when all is said and done, no matter what we do with the information in our own lives, we are being encouraged to pattern match a non-fat body as a healthy body. And that's where the real problem begins. And we are told that we should see a healthy body as a body of higher value, not just at home, but in our workplaces because they're catching on to this messaging. Abs joining apps on tech firms to do lists. Employers that are like giving their students and sorry, their employees treadmills and really sort of encouraging this stuff. And the further we go with this rhetoric, the more ableist it risks becoming. Who gets to participate in health? Talking to people who've read articles or anecdotes about like these teams that do planks or pushups to keep their meetings short. You may hear a few comments about those, about how like, wow, that's really ableist. There's a lot of assumptions going on here. But a lot of the other practices that we do every day may seem, you know, a lot of, you know, really less extreme. So, you know, they're not as bad. But what kind of bodies can use a standing desk or participate in a walking meeting? And why do we assume certain foods are healthy for all bodies? When one person's health food can be someone else's trigger for a symptom flare-up, for that matter, what cultural assumptions do we make when we decide which foods are good or bad? Where does it come from? I mean, what does it have to cost? What foods don't make the cut? And who are we willing to displace to remake the world that we think we want? There is so much material on colonialism and white supremacy from the earliest days of nutritional studies that we have abstracted away from their origins, but it's still fully present in the way that we talk about bodies and food. I gave myself 20 minutes, so I don't even have time to scratch the surface of that whole section of things in the ways that we oppress people using tools like food and exercise. So at this point, for that section of stuff, I'm giving some recommended reading and I'm gonna have to try to make it up to you later. But everyday actions can build a universe that we don't want. A lot of the stuff that I've been talking about is pretty systematic and I'm supposed to be giving you something to do at the end of all this to make it better. So we're gonna talk about fat talk. So what's fat talk? It's probably a lot of things that are gonna sound very familiar. So stuff like, I know I shouldn't eat this brownie. I need to work out more. I'm scared of what I'll look like if I gain weight. Mike works out twice as long as I do. I wish I had their stamina so I could lose weight. Look how much weight he has gained. He looks terrible. My ass is huge. I ate way too much yesterday. Or comments about supplements, meal replacements, or strategies to change your body. I didn't ask the research on this set of questions and concerns but I'm pretty sure that wearables and soylent would qualify here. People use fat talk as a way to test people's perceptions, to get reassurance, to get confirmation of suspicions, or to evaluate socially upward trajectories because these bodies are seen as having more value and so we gotta get on with it on that. Fat talk can also be a means of absolution. Sometimes it can be a way to gain control by saying something bad about yourself before someone else says it. It can be a way to share what scares us. The problem is that unlike flux or redux, fat talk is not a unidirectional flow. My research crushes Arroyo and Harrow again who set up those questions I just talked about. There is a tendency in much of social science to understand causality as a unidirectional process. In part fed by the way that, summary up basically the way we do studies. However, many causal relationships are bi-directional and mutually reinforcing. Fat talk is mutually reinforcing. There's, it's conversational. There's practically a set script to it. When someone says, I wish I was thinner, we know what we're supposed to say next. Like, oh, me too, or nah, you look great. Someone says, oh, I need to start going to the gym. I'm so weak and you're supposed to follow it up by like, oh yeah, I'm totally out of shape too. Or, yeah, you at least had that salad. You're pretty, yep, you're good, it's fine. So when other people fat talk, we feel pressured to engage. Even if we personally feel awesome about ourselves or indifferent about the subject, it's expected that we will fulfill that social contract. The problem here is that fat talk is a mediator of those abstractions and ultimately the patterns that we developed from them in our behavior. Arroyo and Harwood found that fat talk is what exists between weight thoughts and mental health concerns, between chronic dieting and the possibility of an eating disorder, turning a good day into a bad one. Fat talk, whether reinforced or shut down, negotiates the way forward for vulnerable populations, even when you aren't the one initiating it. So who's assumed to be vulnerable? When we talk about eating disorders, those vulnerable populations are often assumed to be women, usually white women, and usually those with means to seek treatment in the first place. Research demographics, unfortunately, and obviously tech diversity measures, unfortunately rarely deviate from that expectation. The everyday assumption about eating disorders is also that we're talking about anorexia or bulimia, but the range of stuff out there is a lot bigger than we tend to talk about. Binge eating is associated with depression and with obesity, if that's a thing that concerns you, but also with work productivity impairment. In a workplace culture that often waxes on about 10X and flow, employers don't seem to recognize how much this and other eating disorders can affect their workforce. If you're thinking that because tech has so few women, that that's not an issue, think again. Because tech, it's yes overly full of men, but those men are also at risk for or already have an eating disorder, and it is negligent to not talk about that. And yes, I have to tell you that research in this area is a big old pile of gender binaries and science is made up of scientists who are regular people and many of the people responsible for educating us about this stuff need to educate themselves a lot better. So, if you find yourself saying a lot of fat talk yourself, you don't have to love your body or your workout or your food choices to do something about it. You just kind of have to put a pause on it. Try doing it for a week. Challenge yourself to do it for a month. Try not doing it. Just that's all it is, just don't say it. Also consider the implications of some of the phrases that we use when we talk about body positivity. Some of these tropes like your body is already perfect. All bodies are good bodies. Things like this, bodies are not a fixed point or a source of perfect truth. Sometimes bodies are problematic for us and sometimes bodies do have to change. And that's okay. It's also okay to fully disengage with these conversations. I mean, you don't have to even participate at all. Especially if you don't feel like you know the person well enough to bust out some body positivity when you're trying to get like a granola bar. It's gonna be kind of weird. So, it might sound awkward if you're not used to it but you can really just leave them hanging if they say something and you're expected to respond. So like the next time someone complains about or justifies their food choice to you, change the subject. Ask about their dog or the kid. Ask them what they've been working on. You don't have to love your body to be valued. You are never obligated to love anything including your body. So what we need to do instead of say all bodies are good bodies, really what we need to be doing is emphasizing care and agency over perfection. All bodies have value. All bodies deserve care. And don't let society tell you that your body makes you less than. If you're an employer or you have a co-working space or any kind of thing where you be in that position, the people who work for you, they don't owe you their health. But you owe them theirs. And that includes mental health. So don't penalize or reward food choices, desk choices, body decisions. If you offer free snacks, like offer a variety, not just like the so-called healthy ones. If you do meetups, keep doing the pizza. But offer some alternatives like nuts or veggies or just really make it explicitly chill to bring your own food. Maybe even try Pollock, I don't know. See if it works, never know. Embodiment is hard. And it's a lot harder for some bodies than others. But I want you to know that you are amazing. Yes, really, yes you, you, all of you. And so I think that we can really work on this and we can do better. And we can also work on feeling a little bit better about ourselves. So, you know, get out there, maybe eat some snacks or don't. Let's focus on those random interactions that we're supposed to be having while getting those snacks and let's go back to generating new ideas and maybe we'll touch a spider, you know, just because. Thanks.