Just past the halfway mark of Emma Specter’s debut memoir, More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for Enough, she recalls a period when she finally allowed herself to break free from all the rules around food that she’d set herself. “I never used butter or white bread or Parmesan or any of the carbs or high-fat items I associated with the dishes I craved the most,” she writes. “Today, every time I cook a truly satisfying meal, I send a silent message to my younger self across space and time: One day you will cook with butter, and it won’t feel like such a big deal.”

For over a decade, diet culture and dieting were “the theme of [her] life,” but it’s been a few years since Specter left them behind. Now a culture journalist for Vogue, she lives in Los Angeles with her partner – and far fewer culinary restrictions. More, Please – an “anti-diet book” as she describes it – explores corporeal experiences and the dimensions of desire, mixing first-person narrative and in-depth reportage to masterfully unpick social pressures and the wider implications of disordered eating, particularly through the lens of Specter’s own binge-eating disorder.

“The things you’re exposed to when you’re a young person live in your mind and don’t go away,” says Specter, speaking about how fatphobia and homophobia can inform each other. “I just think when fatphobia is so rampant in everything from fashion to politics to healthcare, it’s really hard to get a conception of yourself and your body that isn’t at least a little informed by that. And it’s so easy, when you’re a young queer kid or a young fat kid – or any kid that doesn’t necessarily fit the mould – to feel like, ‘It’s my fault, I’m doing something wrong.’”

Here, Specter chats to Dazed about her book’s research, the problem with Ozempic, and where she finds solidarity in a thin-pilled fashion industry.

I think More, Please is such a beautiful title for a memoir. Can you tell me how you came to it?

Emma Specter: The title arrived really early. I’m not usually good at those: my ideas for what news stories and features should be titled are often not it. I was more focused on it being like something a kid asks for, without the sort of limitations that we set up around the concept of ‘more’. But my editor pointed out that it’s also about wanting more from recovery and getting better in a way that feels big and full – recovering by adding things into your life rather than taking things out.

I was wondering if you’ve had much interaction with diet books in your research? I’m aware there are some really gonzo ones from the past few decades or so out there, by people like Marianne Williamson and Karl Lagerfeld.

Emma Specter: I’ve had more interaction than I can possibly say with diet culture and dieting – that was really the theme of my life for over a decade – but in terms of actual books, I haven’t really. To me, any diet program that is oriented around radically changing the way you eat while not really changing your resources or your income or anything else just seems a little bit destined to fail. I’m hoping that I’ve written an anti-diet book.

I really appreciate that! I love the triumph in what you say about cooking with butter, for instance. 

Emma Specter: So Virginia Sole-Smith is one of the people I interviewed for the book, and she has a Substack tier called Extra Butter. I just love that so much, the concept of giving yourself that extra hit of fat, giving that hit of flavour… I’m getting very Top Chef here but I just feel like my whole life has been improved by the idea that I don’t have to measure out pleasure in teaspoons. A meal is not something I have to run screaming from. 

For a long time, I was like, why am I literally afraid of butter? This is ridiculous, what do I think that this stick of butter – which is an inanimate object and has no agenda – is going to do to me? I think I was really scared of losing what I felt was my grip on my body. But the grip you think you have on yourself is quite possibly not delivering the kind of joy you can find [elsewhere]. 

I keep coming back to this Emmeline Clein quote: “Diets simply don’t work, because a diet is basically just a tricycle version of an eating disorder.”

Emma Specter: I love that, I love Emmeline and her book [Dead Weight] so much. That’s so real. I was talking about that at my event last night: I know that I can’t really save anyone from making the same mistakes that I did in terms of dieting, and the room that I allowed diet culture to take up in my life. I think that has to be an individual process for people, and no one’s going to listen to some lady just being like, “Hey! Don’t diet!” But, for myself, I regret the money and time I spent chasing that dream, which was not actually ever going to bring me happiness.

To jump off another Emmeline Clein quote, I thought her angle on GLP-1 agonists was really incisive. She said they essentially replicate the conditions of an eating disorder: “You’re able to eat a really small amount and you’re in contact with a doctor who is teaching you to take pride in that extreme abstention and to do all of this numerical self-surveillance.” What do you think isn’t being said in the Ozempic conversation?

Emma Specter: I’ve written about how I don’t want to take Ozempic, and I am scared about what these drugs can and are already doing to people’s bodies and lives. I don’t want to pass judgement at all, but I think it would be good to have a better understanding of what exactly Ozempic does, especially if it’s going to have this place in our culture where it seems like half of Hollywood is on it. 

I feel like I’m being a little derisive, but I don’t really blame anyone: if you’re an actress who’s been told a million times that you’re too overweight to get roles, for example. I wish that there was a magical solution that involves finding your power and not caring about the industry, but I'm not going to tell someone not to do something that makes their life or their body feel more manageable. I am just a big champion of the idea that your medical life and decisions should be yours, and you should have the resources and access to make the most informed decision you can and not have to explain it to anyone.

You work in fashion, which is an industry that seems, at this point, irrevocably thin-pilled. Should we expect more from larger fashion houses in terms of fat solidarity, or is that like asking if Mastercard is my friend or whatever?

Emma Specter: Maybe it is like that. I mean, my fashion life is so tailored towards shopping in places where I know there will be clothes that fit me, whether that’s Thick Thrift, this all-fat vintage market my friend runs a few times a month, or stores like WRAY that I know will have really hot stuff (not just boring beige stuff) in my size. I do think a lot of traditional fashion brands and houses, if they think about the fat consumer at all, think about us in terms of how we need to be hiding our bodies. Like we’d want your navy schmatta dress that hides us from neck to floor.

It's still hard to find plus-size vintage a lot of the time, but I do feel like I have brands and stores that I really like for that. It's such a joy to be able to wear small, independent designers, and it’s just nice to feel excited about getting dressed when, to your point, I think there is not a lot of excitement around how fat people are dressing and what we get to put on. 

I think I glimpsed on Instagram that you have a stylist now? What’s that relationship like?

Emma Specter: I do! I feel very cool saying yes, I have a stylist – my friend Sophie Strauss is a stylist for ‘regular people’, as she puts it. When I first met her and heard what she did I was like, “I mean, I like shopping… Why would I need someone to help me do something I already like to do and spend too much money and time doing?” But her approach to getting dressed is so sustainable in the truest sense of the word.

She also does postpartum work with people who might be in a new body size and shape figuring out how to dress for that body size and shape in a way that makes them feel like themselves. Sophie helped me source a lot of independent designers and vintage and handmade stuff for this book tour, and I cannot say enough good things about working with a really fat positive, informed, and sensitive stylist who just wants you to look like the truest version of you.

Tell me about the clothes that have been exciting you recently.

Emma Specter: Oh, I love that question. I wore some pants by this designer Nancy Stella Soto yesterday that made me look like an adult clown in the best possible way. I also got this knit dress from the Mara Hoffman sample sale that’s much more slinky and adult than a lot of the clothes I wear. I am getting so much joy out of vintage pieces like this purple python print skirt I got from The Bearded Beagle in LA. I love wondering who owned those clothes before me; what other confident fat person was just living their best life in python print.