Fact Checking Jillian Michaels Takedown of Body Positivity (PLUS her DEFAMATORY Statements Against ME!)

Here’s a run down of what we discussed in today’s episode: My Role in the Jubilee Debate Claim 1: Is Obesity Unhealthy? Visceral Fat vs BMI: Why the Nuance Matters Claim 2: Does “Big Food” Benefit from Body Positivity? The Defamation Claim Claim 3: Does Body Positivity Oversimplify Eating Disorders? Are Eating Disorders Caused by Trauma Alone? Claim 4: Is Body Positivity Disempowering? Claim 5: Does Shame Motivate Weight Loss? Key Takeaways from the Debate References: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2714500 https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/13/dietitian-instagram-tiktok-paid-food-industry/ https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(24)00221-6/abstract https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953625009670 https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/en/publications/self-determination-theory-applied-to-health-contexts-a-meta-analy/ https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSuWqkK27/ https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSuWvrNS1/ Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider. If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✨ Reach Your Weight & Health Goals — Without Dieting! Pre-order The Hunger Crushing Combo Method, Abbey’s revolutionary additive approach to eating well. Learn how to boost satiety, stabilize blood sugars, reduce disease risk, and improve your relationship with food — all while getting the best nutrient bang for your caloric buck. With 400+ research citations, cheat sheets, evidence-based actionable tips, meal plans, and adaptable recipes, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method is the only nutrition bible you’ll ever need. 👉 Pre-order today! 🛒 Where to Purchase: Amazon Barnes & Noble Amazon Kindle Apple Books Google Play Kobo Apple Books (Audiobook) Audible abbeyskitchen.com/hunger-crushing-combo • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •✉️ Subscribe to My Newsletters: Abbey’s Kitchen Newsletter 📘 Check out my FREE E-Books: Hunger Crushing Combo™ E-Book Protein 101 E-Book 👋 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchen TikTok: @abbeyskitchen YouTube: @AbbeysKitchen Blog: abbeyskitchen.com Book: The Mindful Glow Cookbook • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — and leave us a review! It really helps support the show ❤️ 💬 If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review — and let me know who you’d love to hear about next! ⭐ ⭐ ⭐⭐ ⭐ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Abbey Sharp?

  So for Jillian to name me, who was not involved in any of this. I hadn't worked with these companies. I hadn't failed to disclose. And for Jubilee not to fact-check this is the definition of defamation and slander.

• 0:50Abbey Sharp?

  Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle die culture rules, call it the charlatan spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. So a wee little story time here. But a few weeks ago, I was honestly just trying to mind my own business on my March break vacation with my family when my phone literally started to blow up. A new episode of Jubilee Surrounded was released featuring Jillian Michaels, who was debating 20 body positivity activists on the merits and dangers of the body positivity movement. Now, I have been a loud critic of The Biggest Loser and the harms of weight loss competition reality TV. So I surely would have been pinged by my followers

• 1:36Abbey Sharp?

  to respond to the episode's claims. But what I wasn't expecting was to be wrongfully called out as part of a scandal I had nothing to do with. So today, I'm going to be breaking down some of the arguments that Jillian and the body positivity activists made, the good, the bad, and the clear-cut case of defamation against yours truly.

• 2:04Abbey Sharp?

  First of all, if you're new here, welcome. If you like diet culture commentary, please do subscribe to Bite Back, leave me a five-star review if you're loving this, and check out my new bestselling book, The Hunger Question Combo Method, in the show notes. Second, I do want to set the stage for where I kind of fit into this "debate." Contrary to what it seems Jillian may think, I would not identify myself as part of the body positivity community as a dietitian. I support folks who feel empowered by the movement, but ultimately, this is not really an ideology that I identify with as a professional, as I feel that at times, it can feel exclusionary to a lot of folks. It could feel unrealistic

• 2:46Abbey Sharp?

  for a lot of folks, and therefore discouraging for those who've kind of struggled to love their body all of the time. And ultimately, it doesn't always align with the research on the risks of obesity. At the end of the day, I believe in body autonomy and meeting people where they are. So unlike some of my BOPO dietitian colleagues, I don't think it's unethical to support folks who want to lose weight and provide gentle, evidence-based strategies that provide the most benefit for the least risk of harm. But I also support you if you want to focus on acts of self-care that have nothing to do with the scale. So this is why I personally prefer the term "body kindness" or "body respect," and I really just try not to pigeonhole myself

• 3:27Abbey Sharp?

  into one way of "doing dietetics." I also want to note that a lot of folks in the BOPO community do not like the word "obesity," and I understand that. This is still a word used in the literature, and I do have a policy to not censor science, so I will be using it in context throughout this episode. All right, friends, let's get into Jillian Michael's first argument about the body positivity movement and where I net out in my interpretation.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Obesity is not healthy, and pretending it is puts lives at risk.

• 4:00Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, so I think Gillian starts off strong here, mostly because she kind of stuck hard to the science around the claim itself. And I agree with her acknowledgement that there are real documented risks of obesity. More specifically, because specificity matters here, we do have MRT research that shows that excess visceral fat is strongly associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary artery disease, and some liver fat-related diseases. We don't see causal evidence for all diseases, and we also don't see strong causal evidence for body fatness or a high BMI. We are specifically talking about the inflammatory visceral fat. And this is really the main reason I don't identify myself

• 4:44Abbey Sharp?

  as a quote-quote "body positivity advocate dietitian", because there does seem to be this echo chamber in the community at times that I feel sometimes fails to acknowledge the biological realities of carrying excess fat and instead kind of shifts the blame solely on the social determinants of health, fat stigma, and poor medical care in explaining fat people's poor health. Not all folks who identify as BOPO feel this way, but I do hear it and I do see it a lot. And that is why I've distanced myself from the movement. The reality is, this is not an either-or argument in my books. This is really an and/both situation. So to understand how to help folks in larger bodies,

• 5:28Abbey Sharp?

  we need to acknowledge the biological effects of excess visceral fat, the environments that can increase both fat gain and disease risk, and the stigma, discrimination, and stress of living in a fat body. In my opinion, I can see why Gillian may want to downplay this part of the picture, because it may mean confronting criticisms of her work on The Biggest Loser. But let's move on to Claim 2.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  The large food companies are one of the primary beneficiaries of the body positivity movement.

• 6:02Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, this is an interesting take, and I think it's best that we listen to Jillian's explanation before I give you my thoughts.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  So there have been two really big exposes, one by The Washington Post and one by The Examiner. The Washington Post analyzed more than 6,000 social media posts. By 68 registered dietitians with a combined reach of over 9 million followers, 40% of them were using the anti-diet language, right? Like food freedom, no food rules, ditch the diet, healthy in any size, so on and so forth, very often not disclosing the fact that they were paid by the big food companies.

• 6:39Abbey Sharp?

  Okay.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so they're basically going after the intuitive eating dietitians. I can give you Abbey Sharp.

• 6:46Abbey Sharp?

  Um, what did she just say?

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I can give you Abbey Sharp.

• 6:50Abbey Sharp?

  Oh, girl, we have a lot to unpack. First of all, I had a little chitty chat chat with my lawyer the other day when this video came out, and that, my friends, is considered defamation and slander. Because not only did my name and my name alone get brought into a scandal that I have no business being a part of here, but she also just kind of totally random called me out a few minutes later as well.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Abbey Sharp.

• 7:15Abbey Sharp?

  So what actually happened here? And does it even prove her point? Well, a few years ago, The Washington Post published a series of articles that were not really flattering to dietitians. The author, Anna Had O'Connor, who is a vocal proponent of kind of more low-carb, high-fat diets, called out a handful of my dietitian colleagues, many of which who do more work in the kind of anti-diet space, for their social media partnerships with a few more controversial commodities: the American Beverage Association and the Canadian Sugar Institute. The campaign content itself was, in my opinion at least, totally sound. So the former was a campaign explaining the WHO's listing of aspartame as a carcinogen,

• 8:00Abbey Sharp?

  and the latter focused on reducing extreme fear-mongering around sugar at like times like Halloween. Totally benign and evidence-based content, in my opinion, and really something that most of us dietitians would be putting out there anyway. But the issue was more so that, in some cases, the dietitians didn't make it super duper clear that their posts were being sponsored, which is a huge no-no in my books. And actually, when the story came out, I expressed my disappointment because it sure as fuck didn't represent how I have come to the table for over a decade in this space. And I did a whole YouTube video discussing the controversy, which I will link in the show notes as well.

• 8:41Abbey Sharp?

  So for Gillian to name me, who was not involved in any of this, I hadn't worked with these companies, I hadn't failed to disclose, and for Jubilee not to fact-check this, is the definition of defamation and slander. As for her claim, honestly, I think it's one of her most weak arguments, to be honest. You know, big food is opportunistic. It's not ideological. So these companies profit from both sides of the same body anxiety economy. Like, they've got regular soda, they got zero-sugar soda, they got candy, they got better-for-you snack bars, they got indulgence, they got restriction. Big food benefits from all of our vulnerabilities and insecurities and wants and desires.

• 9:26Abbey Sharp?

  They sell to people who are restricting, people who are rebelling against restriction, and people who are literally just trying to get food on the table for their family. And you can be mad all you want at big food, and we obviously can advocate for better access to more nutritious choices, but that is an economic and societal and also really a business issue, not a body positivity problem. But moving on to claim number three.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  That the body positivity movement oversimplifies disordered eating and trauma.

• 9:57Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, so I feel like "oversimplifies" was kind of a confusing word to use here. It really did trip everyone up trying to figure out what she meant by this claim, including myself. But what it seemed like she meant, and again, this is my paraphrasing and interpretation because I'm not 100% sure, was that body positivity reduces the solution to complex issues like eating disorders and trauma to simple messages like "just love your body" or "just eat intuitively," while ignoring the deeper psychological or medical roots. I think- That's what she was saying because this argument was messy AF. Her evidence of this was largely around her experience seeing intuitive eating being essentially

• 10:41Abbey Sharp?

  kind of prescribed online for folks with EDs in BOPO circles when in reality intuitive eating is not necessarily an appropriate quote unquote treatment for someone with anorexia. And if that is happening, like, yeah, I agree with Gillian wholeheartedly that that is not good. Intuitive eating is not an appropriate suggestion for everyone, especially someone in an active ED. But I think a common theme for Gillian in this debate is that she kind of tends to conflate a lot of other concepts with body positivity.

• 11:30Abbey Sharp?

  Intuitive eating is not the same as the body positivity movement and real professionals like eating disorder dietitians are able to assess the nuance of each individual's experience and determine the safest and most supportive course of action, not just tell them to like get on IG and tell them to love themselves in the mirror. So sure, if randoms online are telling people with anorexia to just eat intuitively, that is a problem. But I don't feel like it proves her point in any way, nor did the bombshell she dropped next.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  I think that these tools or things like, oh, you know what? It's society, it's diet culture, it's this, it's that, it's bigotry. I like, no, dude, it's probably the fact that like somebody, God forbid, touched you when you were a kid.

• 12:20Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, so this is when I believe I started to better understand Gillian's ultimate narrative. It seemed that Gillian was arguing that eating disorders or obesity, or really any under or overeating behaviors all come from quote unquote, primary wounds like sexual assault or childhood trauma. In my opinion, it seemed like she was kind of vehemently rejecting that diet culture or any kind of problematic media like The Biggest Loser could possibly negatively impact someone's relationship with food. Because it sounded like by her thinking, you know, why would you even be triggered by diet culture messaging if you weren't abused as a child? Like, those things should only bother you if it all started with a more catastrophic,

• 13:05Abbey Sharp?

  quote unquote, "primary wound." And again, I do believe this framing could make sense for her because it shifts accountability away from the role that media, like The Biggest Loser, may play in shaping people's relationship with food. The reality is that eating disorders are rarely caused by a single trigger. They're more like a perfect storm where biological vulnerability, psychological traits, social pressures, and life experiences collide and intensify with each other. And not everyone who gets an ED has childhood trauma, myself included. Also, if we want to talk about oversimplifying complex solutions, diet culture does this better than anything

• 13:47Abbey Sharp?

  with messages like "just eat less and move more," "calories in, calories out," or "weight loss equals health," et cetera. So this critique is not unique to body positivity online. But let's move on to claim number four.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  that the body positivity movement is fundamentally disempowering.

• 14:06Abbey Sharp?

  This one also took me a little while to understand Gillian's point, so here are some direct quotes.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  First, it's externalized shame as opposed to appreciating that this is something that does arise within. And if you'll hear me all the way out, I think I can illustrate that for many, it is actually a choice. So it externalizes it first, and then it invalidates it right off the top. Right? It's bad, it's evil, it's this, it's that. Instead of like, what can we explore? What can we learn here? And then it replaces it with things that I think are platitudes and really difficult to believe. Oh, no, I'm perfect, I'm beautiful, this, that. But...

• 14:42Abbey Sharp?

  Okay, so to recap, my interpretation of this is that perhaps Gillian believes that the body positivity movement teaches people to blame their body Diet culture rather than looking at that quote-unquote "primary wound", which to her is likely childhood trauma. And because the BOPO movement may teach you to recite these positive affirmations like, "You're beautiful", you never acknowledge that obesity is your quote-unquote "choice", and therefore you don't make changes that could improve your health. Okay, so first of all, I don't love the framing of obesity as a choice. Body weight is influenced by a complex mix of genetics, metabolism, hormones, mental health, access to food,

• 15:27Abbey Sharp?

  socioeconomic status, trauma, medications, epigenetics, and environmental factors like diet culture and weight stigma. Of course, we absolutely do have choices and agency in behaviors that affect our weight. But choices don't exist in a vacuum, and they're often shaped and constrained by factors that people don't choose. So I just really wish that we could be more empathetic and really meet people where they are on that. Second, I do understand to some extent why Gillian sees what she sees. There are definitely fringe like BOPO advocates online who may kind of co-opt the movement to explicitly promote gaining weight or not taking care of your body, almost like an act of resistance.

• 16:11Abbey Sharp?

  And when I look at those interpretations of the movement, I agree with Gillian, like, that's kind of fucked up. But there were so many different stories told here in this debate. Like, she spoke to folks who used the BOPO movement to help inspire them to exercise more without shame, to lose weight, to recover from an ED, or to feel better about aspects of their body that they cannot easily change, like the woman with the genetically large breasts, for example. So if we are at least going by the experiences of the activists in this debate, body positivity isn't inherently anti-agency. Like, these people took accountability and acknowledged the aspects of their life that they could change and the choices that they do have.

• 16:55Abbey Sharp?

  The key, of course, is to approach that accountability from a place of curiosity and self-love rather than shame. And self loathing, which we'll speak to in just a moment. So again, I think I agree with some aspects of what Jillian is saying, but real people's experiences are far more nuanced. And talking kindly to yourself is not just an SNL skit like Jillian says. When it comes to helping people take that next step to make better choices, given the circumstances that they're in. But let's look at the last claim.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Shame is far more dangerous than body positivity.

• 17:34Abbey Sharp?

  So this was Marcy's claim that she spearheaded. And while I don't think that Jillian was ever explicitly saying, yeah, you should feel more shame. Her work has been heavily criticized for contributing to a culture of body shame. So again, in my opinion, you know, it doesn't really surprise me that Jillian may perhaps kind of try to double down on this idea that it's childhood trauma, not diet culture that causes you to under or overeat. But here's my like honest take on this one. As I've already said, I'm not a BOPO dietitian. And while I do not agree with downplaying or ignoring the scientific health risks of excess body fat, there are absolutely aspects of the body positivity movement or adjacent behaviors, like having a positive body image,

• 18:19Abbey Sharp?

  that can be enormously helpful for a lot of folks. So I'm not totally sure why Jillian is opposed to this, but I am not threatened at all by the existence of this movement. But you cannot argue with me that shame is like more beneficial than the existence of body positivity. Shame has literally no benefits. Like across the literature, weight stigma and body shame are consistently linked with more disordered eating, more avoidance of health promoting behaviors, and significantly worse engagement with care, not durable, self-directed health habits. So one 2025 study specifically tested the, hey, well, maybe shame works as a motivation for weight loss idea. And they literally found the opposite.

• 19:04Abbey Sharp?

  Attempting weight loss because of weight-based teasing was associated with elevated blood pressure, inflammation, and skipping meals among US youth. The paper's conclusion was explicit. Shaming someone into losing weight does not work. And when we actually look at behavior change research grounded in self-determination theory, we see that more durable health behavior change has to be driven by autonomous motivation, not external pressure, guilt, or shame. So to summarize, here is where I stand with and against Jillian's takes. Number one, excess fat, specifically visceral fat, absolutely does independently increase the risk of disease.

• 19:46Abbey Sharp?

  And I really do hope that we can continue to innovate effective strategies, including pharmacological, behavioral, structural, and social changes to help folks find their healthiest, happiest weight. Number two, I was wrongfully accused by Jillian Michaels for participating in a scandal that I was never part of, which did not even really prove her point, anyway. Number three, big food benefits from all consumers, including those who are dieting and those who are rejecting diet culture. Number four, EDs are not solely caused by childhood trauma or because you were touched as a kid. They result from the interplay of multiple factors that amplify and reinforce one another.

• 20:27Abbey Sharp?

  Number five, body positivity isn't inherently anti-agency, and you can benefit from aspects of the movement while still taking accountability for what you want to change in your life, including weight change. And finally, shame is never an effective behavior change strategy. Well, folks, that is a wrap. And honestly, it would have been really nice to just enjoy my family holiday and not to have spent hours watching and re-watching these clips, trying to ascertain the points that Jillian was trying to get at. But here we are, we made it through. And if you guys want to help me out, I would really love if you would flag that Jubilee video as misinformation and leave them a comment asking them to retract the defamatory use of my name and for both Jubilee and Jillian to issue a corrective statement.

• 21:11Abbey Sharp?

  Or the very least, please share this episode far and wide, because it really, really does help me out. All right, friends, signing off with Science and Stats, I'm Abbey Sharp. Thanks for listening.

• 21:31Speaker 04

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