How do you feel about your physical body? Are you slim, gorgeous, buff, married to a hot man or woman? Or do you fear getting on the scale or if you’re a guy, looking in the mirror because you haven’t been able to work out for two weeks and you know that the flab is growing in leaps and bounds around your middle? Do you have an inner voice that screams don’t eat another piece of pizza or have that cronut? Or do you annihilate that voice and go unconscious eating everything in the fridge after being “careful” and eating only salad and a small piece of fish for your entire food calories daily for one week, though you go to bed hungry?

The Body Fights Back written and directed by Marian Vosumets shadows five individuals from diverse backgrounds that represent all of us at one point or another in our lives as we confront issues of weight, appearance guilt, body shaming, appearance perfection and the subterranean condemnation that the media lays on men and women through the marketing industry, the fashion industry and most predominately the weight loss industry. And this includes you, too, icon of “superior weight loss,” Weight Watchers.

If that is a mouthful about what Vosumets tackles in her documentary, it is because she highlights all of the problems the culture presents for everyone as they attempt to find happiness in getting to the next day. Meanwhile, they must navigate through the dangerous rocks, the images of perfection that are everywhere and that brainwash and bamboozle everyone to internalize self-condemnation because their appearance just “doesn’t have what it takes to get anywhere.”

Vosumets interviews Mojo, a feisty, adorable, overweight black woman, Rory Brown a buff-looking white male, Hannah Webb, a thin, quiet-speaking, young white woman, Imogen Fox, a thin, out-spoken, confident gay white woman, Tenisha Pascal, a confident, bubbly overweight black woman and Michaela Gingel an outgoing, overweight white woman. Each of these individuals is a courageous star who has confronted and battled body shaming, self-ridicule and unhappiness with their appearance identify which was beaten into them by the diet industry and culture at large. Mind you, diets don’t work. Indeed, as one researcher in the film points out, 85% of the individuals who diet again and again go back to their former weight and many gain even more weight. Of course, the diet culture keeps that statistic under wraps.

Recording her subjects’ prescient and brilliantly honest presence and commentary, the documentarian gets at what the diet culture and all of its octopus tentacles (the fashion industry, marketing industry, media in all its forms, health industry) do to destroy the souls of millions of individuals, predominately in the U.K., U.S. and Australia by making them feel inferior and deserving of condemnation, unless they look perfect. Appearance is everything to the diet culture octopus. Unless one fits the image in the billboards, magazines, media, people are the equivalent of worms to be outcast from community and companionship. Importantly, they are not deserving of love, most importantly self-love. Thus, they HAVE to go on a diet to look better. Their lives, which are boiled down to appearance only, and never includes their treasured souls, depend on dieting to look good. If they don’t diet, they face the outer darkness.

If this sounds like hyperbole, it is. Diet culture and all of its psychotic means to make billions of dollars a year exploiting fear of fat, will stop at nothing to twist the minds and hearts of everyone. Let’s face it, women, if you’re not a BMI 18-20, you’re a pig. The sacrosanct thin people who fit this weight category are most probably in some form of eating disorder or addicted to pills, cocaine, smoking, crack, heroin, etc. Celebrities have revealed their disorders and addictions to stay thin: anorexia, bulimia, binging and purging, cocaine addiction, speed addiction, crack, heroin and more.

Hannah Webb truthfully discusses how doctors missed her eating disorder because they, too, had fallen for the lie that healthy people are always thin people. She weighed within a normal range of BMI, which is not an accurate indicator of health; other factors must be taken into consideration. Thus, Hannah lived a lie which made her miserable until she confronted it. In poignant discussions with her mother captured by Vosumets, she discusses battling her issues with eating, for example, a croissant and constant fears of gaining weight. With her disorder she was on the verge of life and death. Yet, she was able to come out of it with the help of her family and therapy.

Hannah is the opposite side of the same coin as Mojo, Michaela, Tenisha and Imogen, all of whom had or have issues about weight. Imogen also battled a disability and discusses that when she was heavier, the hospital staff were very insulting and annihilating about getting her a gown to fit (get her a man’s gown which is bigger) and other obnoxious calumny in front of her face, almost as if they enjoyed and felt sanctified in their sadism.

But this is par for the course. Overweight in the culture is anathema and grounds for banishment from normal society. It deserves vilification, ridicule, jokes and shaming. How unhealthy these fatties are!!! Of course, this emerges from colonialism, white male paternalism (women must be quiet, thin, beautiful and sexually available 24/7 and perfect until they can be thrown away for another model) and capitalism-make that money even if you have to step over the bodies of those you kill in the process.

TRAILER The Body Fights Back OUT July 13 from The Body Fights Back on Vimeo.

The diet culture, thus, reinforces the most nihilistic of values at the expense of truth and health. Vosumets has researchers and scientists comment that one could be thin and on the verge of death; overweight is not correlated to healthiness. Indeed, based upon appearance, Hannah and Imogen who are at the epitome of thin (according to the diet culture and Octopus standards) are perfect and sanctified. Ironically, they are not; one battled for her life just to eat certain foods without fear and the other is disabled. Thus, the diet culture lies. It is its own profitable myth. (diets don’t work) And this is one of the key points in Vosumets’ wonderful documentary. What is healthy should include physical, mental, emotional, psychic well being. We are, after all, not only a body; we have a soul and spirit. And indeed, the body disintegrates. However, what are we doing about the interior of our lives? No wonder with eating obsessions individuals are miserable, regardless of how thin and buff they appear.

Vosumets cleverly includes Rory Brown to show that he, too, is a slave to conformity. For men the idea that you have to be buff and gorgeous is what life is all about. Yet, he confides that as he goes to the gym, he is depressed. As he looks in the mirror, he is glad he looks “great,” but he can’t carry a mirror around with him every second of the day. He’s worked on his exterior, but his interior is miserable. Like Mojo, Hannah, Michaela, Tenisha and Imogen they have all been enslaved to the octopus (the diet culture and its attendant industries) who siphons off their emotional well being and eventually their physical well being. Sadly, the brainwashing of not being able to measure up to perfection has been internalized. Each discusses how daily, they’ve lived with judgment, self-condemnation, self-loathing and fear.

Vosumets’ editing is thematic and she builds in an arc employing the commentary of her stars to chronicle the beginning of the problem, usually with parents and upbringing. The stories then evolve so that we understand how the subjects began to realize what they were up against in themselves from rebellion, to acceptance, to self-love. Interspersed with these interviews of Mojo, Hannah, Rory, Tenisha and Imogen she interviews researchers, doctors, therapists, journalists who have written on the subject or who counsel individuals with eating disorders. They identify first hand from the testimony of their clients the noxious attitudes of the diet culture octopus. And they explain how once internalized early on, the attitudes and voices become the self-destroying tormentors within the souls of those who wrangle with emotional issues at the heart of body image problems and eating disorders.

One of the most enlightening and uplifting final segments in the film is the sequence with Rebecca Young’s Anti-Diet Riot Club and the Cat Walk. With the Cat Walk, men and women, some disabled, many of all shapes and sizes and colors and races go on a Cat Walk wearing whatever they like to proudly present who they are. They are not their bodies only but their beings who ask that they be recognized holistically. It is truly a celebratory experience to see them receive the applause from an appreciative audience of onlookers. Vosumets also examines the Anti-Diet Riot Club as a force for change. Weight and rejection of bodies has been a political and economic and health issue, it seems, since colonialism rose and is finally setting into a sea of oblivion, eventualy.

Researchers make important points that must be considered. Eating disorder issues arise when there are tremendous gaps between the rich and the poor. For example fast foods are mostly found in lower socioeconomic areas (food deserts) where there aren’t markets like Whole Foods. Thus the unhealthier food is offered to encourage the lower classes to fit the inferior body image that the more wealthy class can look down on in addition to shaming them with regard to health. Mojo poses interesting questions about why around dinner time there are so many McDonald’s commercials and fast food commercials but few commercials about organic foods and no commercials about Whole Foods. Also, the point is made that fast foods are easy and convenient to feed families when single parents are working two jobs. Families who are wealthier can have home cooked meals that take longer to prepare.

Things are changing. For some not fast enough because the younger generations are suffering from the abuses of the older paternalistic, Colonialistic, white supremacist generations whose fascist images of perfection have been used to exploit people and make them feel inferior for profit. However, Vosumets ends on an uplifting note. Change is coming and the backlash will be present as old myths and money die hard. But change must come because too many have lived lives of quiet desperation internalizing the lies of the criminal profiteers who have sold their souls to enslave others for money. The young are aware and they are throwing off the lies and myths so the generations after them can live and breathe with the freedom and joy of self-love.

The Body Fights Back is a must-see film especially if you have ever felt to go on a diet to lose weight or you looked in the mirror and were not overjoyed at the image that stared back at you. It is streaming on all platforms. For more information and to stream CLICK HERE.