Aubrey and Michael can be hilarious, and the podcast is can be both informative and entertaining. I do take issue with the mockery of people’s experiences, which can be a bit dismissive (especially if it goes against their core belief system or their personal experiences). They also seem to question most scientific studies or findings (which is important to do) but at the same time use scientific studies or articles that are aligned with their own core beliefs pretty unquestionably. For example, they complained in the gender dysmorphia episode about all of the studies only talking to parents and not kids, but then IMMEDIATELY dismissed Delta’s experience because they did not like the conclusions Delta came to about their OWN experience. Additionally, as a person of color, it can be exhausting hearing Aubrey mention how marginalized we are all the time. For example, if a diet requires you to spend money at the grocery store or someone mentions people who eat fast food, she’ll be like “And who they’re really excluding are poor people of color.” or “who they’re really talking about when they say people who eat fast food are poor people of color.” Like girl I get it, but also, stop trying to sum up all of our experiences based on what you think you know about people of color’s experiences, situations, or interests (FYI plenty of black people are into wellness stuff too). This podcast has potential but I think they are too focused on proving how wrong every one is to really create a great podcast.

I’m honestly impressed with so many things about this podcast. It’s well researched. It discusses nuance. It’s full of dumb jokes AND wit. The episodes bring me joy *and* educate me further. It’s perfect! I think it’s time to get into the Patreon.

Thank you so so so so much for making this show. I love the research put in and I live for Aubrey’s giggles. It has helped me immensely with unpacking my own internalized fatphobia and fatphobia in general. I just started as a full time primary care doctor and I have been fat all my life. I felt so ashamed of being fat and felt like an imposter trying to teach people on how to be “healthy.” This podcast helped me better understand what “health” means for people at any size and has helped me connect with both “skinny” and “fat” patients to help them deconstruct the false equivalence of low BMI = good health. I feel that I am a better physician because of this show and it helps me not continue the traumatic cycle of fatphobia furthered by the healthcare industry. I can’t recommend this podcast enough. I recommend it to many of my patients!

While diet culture is problematic, unfortunately this podcast is often about people finding justification to not do anything. They focus narrowly on whatever tells them that eating sugar is healthy and exercise is overrated. Counter points to the dominant mainstream narrative are certainly necessary, but this is just an echo chamber that exists to comfort itself.

This was not my favorite podcast right away. It’s super incisive, well-researched and fantastically entertaining. You learn something important every episode. But it has a whiff of Mean Girls vibe, and I wasn’t sure I was in the club. Turns out we all are! It takes a minute to figure out, but we’re all welcome and appreciated. The obvious ease and affection the hosts have for each other is a feature, not a bug. Totally my #1 pod right now, and Michael & Aubrey are freaking national treasures.

Such a great podcast. I’ve never done a paid subscription to a podcast before Maintenance Phase, but I could not get enough and needed more episodes! Even the episodes that are rough are so good; challenging, funny, heartfelt, and deeply compassionate. I love this podcast!!!

So smart, so funny. I’ve listened to the whole catalogue at least twice. Adding: and thank you THANK YOU for these episodes about the ongoing trans panic we’re experiencing. As a trans person with a very trans family, I don’t think I could bring myself to dig this deeply into what’s going on myself but it’s important to understand. These episodes feel like sitting with two good friends who are holding my hand and walking me thru everything I need to know, laughing and crying right along with me.

I love this podcast so much! I just watched Your Fat Friend, the documentary that features Aubrey, and it made me miss the beginning days of Maintenance Phase!! Please never stop podcasting <3

This is a breath of fresh air in the podcast universe. Smart, well-researched, and witty, this is now my favorite podcast. Thank you for tackling such interesting topics. (I beg of you to keep politics and your political views out of the conversation unless it’s relevant to the research. I want to be able to listen as long as possible!)

I’ve found myself looking forward to thoughtful discussions of research, only to be disappointed when 25-30% of the episode is dramatizing opposing viewpoints and creating conservative straw men.

I feel upon this podcast after hearing about Audrey’s book and documentary movie which she is a subject of. I love Audrey’s voice, thoughts and dedication to sound research and arguments so much that I had to find more ways to listen and I found this podcast. I am currently just listening to the episodes one after the other and I am learning so much! I am definitely someone who has fallen for a lot of “wellness” campaigns over the years and found myself bouncing around all sorts of concepts I was recentering my life around. Now I feel like I can see the forest through the trees by understanding how wellness is marketed and profited on even when the person or organization isn’t directly selling anything. I also understand the deep and negative impact wellness and diet rhetoric has on the experience of fat people and people in general. I feel I am becoming a more whole, reasoned and justice-focused person around public health and individual health decisions. Thank you so much Audrey and Michael for taking so much of your time and energy and intelligence to present this topic is such an informative, research-based medium. And thank you for making it so funny and entertaining in the process. I cannot get enough!

I love hearing whatever these two have to say. They are genuine, deeply thoughtful, intelligent, and politically sophisticated. I have completely changed my attitude about so many things from Weight Watchers to BMI now that they have educated me. Keep up the great content! Love their honesty and vulnerability and background research. Professor Sally from Tulane

Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon are exceptionally talented writers and podcasters. Wicked smart, funny, and hardworking - to routinely put together a densely packed, tightly edited show while also making it sound like the two of them just sat down to spill tea over coffee is no small feat. That said, I had to unfollow this show, as I did Michael’s books podcast a few months ago. It’s just not fun to listen to Michael and his cohosts set up their own conservative boogie-man straw men and take them down show after show. It’s literally like watching someone celebrate dunking on an open court. Hope to return someday when Michael looks up long enough from Twitter to realize that while that content might be cathartic for a small segment of the uncritical and chronically online, it’s boring and grating for the rest of us.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say that literally every person should be listening to this podcast. The world would be a better place if everyone listened.

If Michael Hobbes started a cult I would follow and never look back.

Thank you so much for this podcast. I’ve been feeling bad about my body, and I needed something to debunk all the fatphobic thoughts swirling around in my head. This is an amazing resource, and I wish everyone would listen to it 🙏🏽

The perfect balance of levity and knowledge! Listened to old episodes for months on the way to a terrible job and pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it as long as I did without this pod for my commute. Thankfully have left the job but still listening! I just don’t have to listen at 5am on an hour-long commute anymore.

Both hosts speak with a laughable self assurance. They are very authoritative without being actual authorities. Wrong on the facts many times. They are insufferable in their certitude which is ideological rather than scientific. They also have sneers in their voices. They know. They’re smart. And everyone else is benighted. They are exemplars of stupidity being made more stupid through arrogance. They come across as deeply icky people. Smug dumb and intolerant. There is hate-watching TV shows. This is a hate-listen. A sort of schadenfreude of listening to a couple of dopes who think they are smarter than everyone

I just finished this episode and I had to say THANK YOU for your work thank you for your voice EVERYONE should listen to this episode. Podcasts like MP, YWA, IBCK have truly given me an education in media literacy that is invaluable as a human moving through this world.

I prefer podcasts with hosts that aren't catty and swearing and gasping all the time. Total cringe.

Let me start off by saying, I have listened to almost all of the episodes (I’m behind on a couple) and have even subscribed to get bonus content. I really do enjoy this podcast. I think Michael and Aubrey have great chemistry and are very funny. Overall very enjoyable to listen to. I think they have very good takes on battling weight stigma and diet culture. I think where they excel is talking about the 90s diet fads, wellness scams and the historical systematic underfunding and under education of schools in regards to nutrition. Where they do not excel however is talking about science and research. As self-proclaimed “methodology queens” they only seem interested in maligning the research that contradicts their worldview and ignore the very valid academic criticisms of the research that agrees with them. The obesity paradox is one of the main culprits of this. The link between obesity and health is not black and white, it’s not everything and it’s not nothing. It’s murky and nuanced. For anyone thinking about listening I would still highly recommend this podcast with the stipulation that this is just one viewpoint of many. Do not get your entire worldview about health and wellness from this podcast alone. Look up the studies on pubmed, read their criticisms. Realize that the debunking is not absolute in every sense.

I have historically enjoyed this podcast….I have found the chemistry between the two hosts to be good, and the topics are interesting and often compelling. Often I have found them to be smart, informative, entertaining, and enjoyable to listen to for an hour or more as they covered topics of interest to me. I thought it started out strong in the beginning, but in the past year or so I feel like it has become formulaic and cheap. First, shame on me, but I always accepted what Michael and Aubrey said as credible and believed it to be true. However, I have come to realize that much of what they have passed on as absolute truths were either way more complex than they presented, or at times, flat out wrong. I just don’t feel I can trust what they say as accurate anymore, and I have lost faith in their “research.” They seem to be very black and white thinkers, and don’t seem to be able to (or interested in) recognizing nuance or complexity very well. They do not seem to be open or curious about other perspectives and dismiss the experiences of others as unimportant or uninformed, unless it fits perfectly in with their experience. What has really turned me off the most is recognizing that they seem to be doing what social media does best….stoking and inflaming without good evidence, in a way that feels like the audience is being manipulated for reasons related to self-promotion. Honestly, the slant is different, but I listening to them makes me feel the same way I feel when I am exposed to Fox News….being manipulated and fed half-truths. They are dismissive and disrespectful of people who have concerns that don’t line up with theirs, and come across as patronizing and smug. One of the things that drew me in initially was that they seemed compassionate and interested in reducing stigma and shame, but now they have been coming across as callous and dehumanizing. They often make mass generalizations and paint with broad strokes. I think I failed to notice it for a long time (or maybe it has gotten worse) because my values typically align with theirs, but they are….dare I say it….toxic. And often hypocritical, as they do to others they exact things they rail against themselves. Lots of potential, but these hosts are letting their listeners down.

It might be time to hang it up, Mike and Aubrey. You’re both rapidly becoming insufferable. You have an extreme bias that you haven’t explored because of your smug self-importance. Your hyper liberal agenda turns even this progressive person’s stomach. And I was once a fan of this show. (Thank you for your early work providing facts about diet culture and its harms. I sincerely hope you’ll avoid lecturing your audience about how cool Osama Bin Laden was on 9/11.)

Maintenance Phase is a gift to humanity as far as I’m concerned.

As a dedicated listener and trans ally, I was eager to listen to the latest episode, hoping for insightful discussions aligned with the show's usual theme. However, I was profoundly disappointed by the content presented. Rather than fostering constructive dialogue and promoting understanding, the episode felt biased and lacking in factual accuracy. It seemed to stray far from the show's usual theme, leaving me disheartened and disconnected as a listener. The episode's approach to differing opinions appeared counterproductive, as it seemed to belittle opposing viewpoints rather than engaging with them constructively. Instead of encouraging open-mindedness and growth, it risked perpetuating division and reinforcing existing beliefs. As a staunch advocate for inclusivity and respectful discourse, I believe that content creators have a responsibility to uphold these values, particularly in today's polarized climate. I urge the creators to reconsider their approach and strive for more balanced, fact-checked content in future episodes.

I love this pod, I learn so much. It gives me info I can make better health decisions with as well as present to people to combat fat phobia and wellness industry bogus. Thanks for being so awesome!

Someone recommended this podcast because of my annoyance with “girl wash your face” and I LOVE the dynamic between Aubrey and Mike. Can’t wait to binge listen more episodes

Regrettably not a euphemism 🤣🤣🤣

So tired of these podcasts, opinions are not science and you can’t cherry pick studies or data to fit your arguments. Neither of the hosts are qualified to even discuss these topics or studies. I don’t care what side anyone is on but if you want actual scientific data and evidence this is NOT the podcast for you.

So happy that you are keeping it going! Slower is great! I love this show!!

Time to read the Cass Review and also see where your “regret rate” percentages come from. Look at r/detrans. Literally anything.

As someone who knows a lot about trans medicine, todays episode is so bad I could hardly believe it. Michael Hobbes is so wildly disingenuous on this topic it makes my head spin. The studies about ‘trans medicalization satisfaction’ are just online surveys from patients and 30% of the people being followed did not respond….thats garbage data to tout for the ‘1% regret rate’. And surprise surprise, there’s no link. They know nothing about children and teens if they say ‘it’s not ok for teens to feel uncomfortable in their body’ LIKE JESUS CHRIST WHO ACTUALLY LIKED PUBERTY?!! Your brain doesn’t stop developing until you are 25 and ethically, children cannot consent to these ‘medical’ interventions.

Just listened to the rapid onset of gender dysphoria episode. As a parent of a trans kiddo, I’ve been on the front lines of seeing a child at the age of 8 beginning to realize who they are. They are almost 20 now. Alive, healthy, living well. Without therapy and treatment I’m 100% certain they wouldn’t be with us today

Michael and Aubrey are fantastic. This is the only podcast I don’t listen to at 1.5 speed.

If you like cherry-picked data, straw-man arguments, and pseudoscience shared by people completely lacking credentials, then this is the podcast for you! I will say some of the more social elements align with current academic discussions of social structures and violence, but even those are twisted to fit the hosts’ agendas. Michael Hobbes’s presence on this podcast has made me unsubscribe from other podcasts he’s involved with (e.g. On the Media) because his involvement here has made him lose all credibility with me.

Love this pod. Michael and Aubrey are magic together!

This used to be one of my favorite podcasts even though Aubrey is super annoying most of the time but without any warning this podcast suddenly became for subscribers only and they only put out an episode once a month?! They were barely putting out episodes before when it was for everyone and I was always patiently waiting for the next one to come out but now you want me to pay for very little content? They could have at least told us at some point that they were changing things. Every time it shows up in the feed that there is a new episode I’m immediately let down because after waiting such a long time for another episode I am smacked in the face with the words “subscribers only” Lame!! Shocking - another month for subscribers only. And you still have yet to ever address this with the audience.

Pretty disappointed in this podcast. Advocacy trumps science in most episodes

Interesting topics. I really WANT to like this show! I’m fine with opinions, they aren’t presenting themselves as experts or scientists. That being said, they should probably do a better job fact-checking when discussing serious topics. Also… please stop the yelling and yell-laughing OR hire an audio engineer to adjust the levels. I love that they are having fun but it makes it uncomfortable to listen to when someone is constantly cackling and yelling. The Jamie Oliver episode just motivated me to write this review because I was interested in getting an overview but the constant yelling and harsh laughing (at nothing?) is too much. :-(

See spurious semicolon on Substack for a very thorough debunking of Michael and Aubrey’s total lack of rigor, written by an epidemiologist and biostatistician.

No matter what podcast these two would make I would listen because they are so goddamned smart and funny. Best combination of journalistic integrity and that special podcast sauce of people you wish were your friends irl. Love this show thanks for making it.

On premise this podcast seemed interesting, but unfortunately it’s nothing more than two people swapping personal opinions under a loose topic structure. I gave it a shot and was surprised at how lacking in depth, knowledge and facts it was. Not to mention, the hosts establish immediately that they are the loudest, most obnoxious people you know and are here to make your ears bleed. (It’s giving strong sweaty, overweight, theater kids vibes. Yuck.) I would love if we’d stop giving people like this (loud, rude, wildly opinionated) a platform and instead, elevate scientifically backed voices who can approach topics with sound reasoning, experience, and most of all, an even tone. The only people who will enjoy this content are fat people who will go to every length to find echo chambers of opinions that prove they’re “healthy” rather than actually changing their behavior to lose weight. 🙄

If you like complaining and biased opinions, this one’s for you. Ughhh likes nails on a chalkboard.

They are making over 1.5 million annually in subscriptions. To the hosts: YOU CAN AFFORD A FIELD SPECIFIC FACT CHECKER please hire a couple. You have a responsibility to your subscribers to present the truth. ———————-my past review —————————- Very entertaining, has a lay person’s perspective on the nuanced systems that create our health environment and the hosts generally approach their biopics with empathy and compassion, though at times it feels like they edge into derision, in a way that is unkind. My major complaint is that while entertainingly presented, the actual numbers they present are more often than not misinformation or misrepresentations of the facts. I think they do present things in good faith, but have busy lives and don’t have the time or scientific literacy to read into statistical basics or the entire background of articles, even for the sources they provide. I get it—a lot of jargon is just “turn your brain off” boring until you’ve read a lot. This results in a lot of biased telling and misinformation—it's an opnion podcast so like, who cares, and their non technical or background knowledge is great, but they frequently joke about being “methodology queens” which is a misrepresentation even if it’s a joke. As always—do your own research, and consider people’s motivations :) it would be useful if they spoke with a scientist or fact checker and cited the entirety of the studies they present. It would also be great to read a statistical primer and do a quick review of the basics of each issue before diving into the study. They’re diving into a lot of unfamiliar topics, and a nice basis before reading into the journals might help them not misrepresent the facts. Also: they suddenly became subscriber only and the subscription is super expensive??

Looked at this and it was complete garbage. Normally wouldn’t care, there’s lots of garbage podcasts out there, but it showed up as “recommended” on the Apple Podcasts front page. I don’t know who is doing the “recommending” but they probably need to be replaced.

Please make an episode about Susan Powter 😂😂😂

I love the subject matter and commentator’s knowledge. But why all the “F-Bombs”? I always felt those with a full vocabulary didn’t need to resort to a handful of crude words in order to communicate.

I loved this podcast until they changed every episode to subscription only.

Oh, Aubrey and Mike. You’re my best friends I’ve never met. What a fun, super smart, poignant and important show. Thank you so much for making me less of a dumdum.

After making my way through much of their library, I’ve found myself reflecting on my own anti-fat bias and trying to be better. HIGHLY RECOMMEND