On every episode of the “Maintenance Phase” podcast, which tackles shoddy nutritional research and anti-fat bias, hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes try to one-up each other: Who can nail the most cringe-inducing opener?
“Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that would never film you from across the street showing only your body and not your head,” says Hobbes in an intro to one episode about the dubious origins of theso-called obesity “epidemic"in the 1990s.
“There’s actually research on that specific thing,” replies Gordon. “And we’re totally going to [bleep]ing talk about it.”
“The only places in American life that you see that many headless torsos are local news segments about obesity and Grindr,” says Hobbes, both of them laughing. “As a gay man who researches this issue, I am very familiar with this format.”
The runaway success of “Maintenance Phase” is due, in large part, to Hobbes' and Gordon’s rapport, which frames incisive critiques of fad diets and nutritional statistics in profane, laugh-out-loud funny banter.
Both started their careers in the nonprofit sector. Gordon was a community organizer focusing on LGBTQ+ rights, while Hobbes worked in international development. That sense of mission led them into reporting.
Gordon blogged anonymously as “Your Fat Friend” for five years before going public when her first book,What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, was published in November 2020.
Hobbes conducted investigative reporting for publications likeHuffPostand theNew Republicfor a decade and co-hosted another podcast, “You’re Wrong About,” with Sarah Marshall from 2018 to 2021.
Just before the pandemic hit, the two met for the first time over dinner and talked long into the evening. They cracked each other up. They agreed with each other. What would it be like, they decided, if they recorded their conversations?
Despite the spontaneity, “Maintenance Phase” has become a master class in how to critically examine research studies and diet claims. Gordon and Hobbes point out the flaws in population-based nutritional studies and explore the dubious history of concepts like calories and body mass index.
Body mass index(BMI) is a measure that’s often used in healthcare to determine a person’s body weight category such as overweight or obese, and therefore, chronic disease risk. However, it has limitations and does not account for individual factors that influence one’s health status, such as body composition, ethnicity, race, sex and age. This is why it shouldn’t be used as a comprehensive measure of someone’s health andcan be a source of body size stigma and bias.
They also track down the origins ofcommonly quoted statistics about the obesity epidemic. For example, Hobbes recently learned that the idea that obesity and diabetes rates will cause life expectancy rates to drop for today’s children was made up. In 2002, a well-known pediatrician threw out that statement during a newspaper interview—despite the fact that he hadn’t done any research to back it up—and soon the U.S. surgeon general was quoting it as fact.
The two frequently argue that the problem with statements about the health impacts of being overweight is not that fatness is associated with higher risks for certain health conditions and higher mortality rates. They don’t question that. The problem lies, they say with doctors, researchers—and even thinner people in general—too often assuming that fatness is the root cause of health problems and not a symptom.
“We have been told this extremely simple story about obesity for so long, that it’s really hard to look at it any other way,” says Hobbes says inone episode. Researchers downplay systemic racial bias, poverty, lack of health insurance—all factors shown to have major impacts on health—because they haven’t investigated their own assumption that fat people should be thin.
Not only does “Maintenance Phase” appear in the top rankings for health podcasts, but thousands of subscribers support them through Patreon, which allows Hobbes and Gordon to focus full-time on their podcast and writing projects. Gordon says that she has received a flood of emails from fat people who are relieved to hear a discussion about nutrition and fatness that operates from a baseline of basic humanity.
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