On 10 September 2026 the Swiss weekly WOZ ran an essay by Alice Galizia titled “Hungern müssen wir allein” (“We Have to Starve Alone”), online since 9 September. The opening is familiar: Ariana Grande’s body, the thinness trend, the GLP-1 drugs. We have already covered that part of the debate, when the autumn/winter 2026 runways showed the same movement.
The last section of the essay does something else. It turns the critique inward, against the political milieu the author writes from. That is why we are writing about this text.
The charge
Galizia’s observation is plainly stated and uncomfortable. In left-wing and feminist spaces, she writes, sexism and racism have been examined for years; fatphobia has barely been discussed. She names specific places, the Lorrainebad public pool in Bern, scene bars, demonstrations, gallery openings, raves, and describes what is on view there: thin, trained, well-dressed, conventionally attractive and, she adds, often white bodies.
The mechanism she describes is not open rejection but relief. Nobody makes nasty remarks about the few non-thin bodies present, she writes, but everyone is quietly thankful not to look that way themselves. On top of that comes a doubled shame: for one’s own body, judged not thin enough, and for the shame itself, because one knows in theory how misogynist the yardstick is.
The real point hangs on that, and it is linguistic rather than statistical. The principle borrowed from body positivity, that you do not comment on other people’s bodies, removed hateful language from these circles but put nothing in its place. What remains is speechlessness: something is happening in front of everyone, she writes, and nobody knows how to talk about it.
What is evidenced and what is not
This is an essay, not a survey, and the distinction is worth keeping.
The observation about bodies at the public pool is an observation. There is no dataset on body diversity in Swiss left-wing spaces, and Galizia does not claim to have one. Readers who share the finding share it from their own experience. Readers who dispute it can do the same. That does not devalue the argument, but it fixes its status: it is a claim about a milieu, not a measurement.
The historical line is the one part with a literature base. Galizia draws on Sabrina Strings, “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” (2019), and reports the thesis accurately: white beauty ideals moralised from the eighteenth century onwards in contrast to the Black body, fatness coded as excess, thinness as discipline, and the classist afterlife of that coding today. This matches what we set out when we read the book ourselves.
One qualification is missing in her version that we noted in ours: fat stigma is overdetermined. Greco-Roman ideals of moderation, the Christian doctrine of gluttony and class anxiety about excess all feed it. Strings describes a real and important strand of that history, not the sole cause of all fat stigma everywhere. In the essay the thesis stands without that caveat.
We are not carrying one figure from the essay. Galizia writes that hospital admissions for eating disorders among minors in Switzerland doubled between 2018 and 2025. On 15 September 2026 we were unable to locate that figure in the publicly available statistics of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office. That does not mean it is wrong; it means we cannot verify it, and we do not pass on numbers we have not seen at the source. The caution we spelled out for the German eating disorder statistics applies as well: treatment cases are not people, and a change in diagnostic practice explains part of any such curve.
Finally, geography. The essay is about Switzerland, and in places very specifically about Bern. Whether its finding about the milieu holds for Berlin, London or Chicago is not in this text and cannot be derived from it.
Why it counts anyway
Because the most testable part of the argument is not the finding but the diagnosis of speechlessness, and any reader can test that on themselves.
“Do not comment on other people’s bodies” was meant as protection. It worked in enlightened rooms as far as removing open contempt went. But it put nothing in the vacated place. When there is no word for describing a body without grading it, what is left is either silence or the old aesthetic yardstick, and silence is not a position. It is a gap the yardstick crawls back into.
That is exactly where Galizia’s counter-proposal lands, and it is a modest one: pay more attention to what a body can do and how it feels than to how it looks. That is the basic idea of body neutrality. We have described elsewhere what the medical case for that concept overlooks, and those limits still apply. As a proposal for how to speak about bodies in a room that currently has no way to, it is still more useful than giving up on language.
The essay’s closing line turns this into a political argument rather than a therapeutic one: starving happens alone, eating at best happens together. Diet culture isolates, and isolation costs people the energy to organise. That is the old thought behind the slogan “Riot, don’t diet”, and it is why this essay ran in a political newspaper and not in a health magazine.
Where we stand
Fatosphere reports on this essay; we recommend nothing. The text deals with weight-loss drugs in several passages. Our subject here is solely their social effect, not their efficacy, and we advise neither for nor against.
Alice Galizia is a living author. The statements attributed to her above are drawn from the original German text, which we read in full on 15 September 2026; the German edition of this article quotes the relevant passages verbatim. We attribute nothing to her that is not in the text.
If this affects you: In Germany, the Federal Institute of Public Health (BIÖG, formerly BZgA) runs a free eating disorder helpline on 0221 89 20 31, Monday to Thursday 10:00 to 22:00 and Friday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00. Only standard call charges apply. Email counselling is available at essstoerung@bioeg.de. Outside Germany, look for the national helpline in your own country.
Read more on Fatosphere
- Runway size inclusivity FW26: the thin ideal is winning again
- Where fat hatred comes from: the racial history behind the thin ideal
- Body neutrality instead of body positivity: what the medical case misses
- Germany’s eating disorder statistics: the ICD-10 gap
- Fat bodies and mental health
Sources
- Alice Galizia, “Essay: Hungern müssen wir allein”, WOZ Die Wochenzeitung No. 37, 10 September 2026 (online 9 September 2026), full text read on 15 September 2026: https://www.woz.ch/2637/essay/hungern-muessen-wir-allein/!AD7JKB4X0JZB
- Sabrina Strings, “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia”, NYU Press 2019.
- Swiss Federal Statistical Office, Medical Statistics of Hospitals, checked on 15 September 2026: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/de/home/statistiken/gesundheit/erhebungen/ms.html