What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

by Aubrey Gordon

That is, healthism as a framework often disregards the influence of social determinants of health, institutional policies, and oppression on individual health.

Many who shame fat people for our bodies, our food, and our movement rely on a logic of healthism that implies that we are duty-bound to appear healthy—that is, thin.

In The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that as overt racism, sexism, and classism fell out of favor among white and wealthy Americans, anti-fat bias offered a stand-in: a dog whistle that allowed disdain and bigotry aimed at poor people and people of color to persist, uninterrupted and simply renamed.

But despite its ubiquity in conversations about fatness and fat people, that is the logic of abuse. You made me do this. I wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t make me. Just because we are accustomed to hearing it doesn’t make it healthy, productive, humane, or helpful. Its functions are threefold: One, to absolve us of any responsibility to address a widespread social problem. Two, to free us from having to re-examine our own beliefs and biases. And three, to silence and isolate fat people, to show us that any complaint we lodge and any issue we raise will be for naught, and may even cost us relationships, respect, comfort, and safety.

Notably, the report stopped short of recommendations that would regulate foods, or the subsidies that provided such cheap and plentiful forms of dietary fat, salt, sugars, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Notably, fresh fruits and vegetables are not considered commodity crops, nor are lean proteins, ensuring that healthier foods will remain at a higher price point, reserving the privilege of health for those with the income to support it. While the Farm Bill ostensibly aims to serve consumer interests, the federal government’s left hand aggressively deprioritizes the public health interests promoted by its right.

In 2003 the CDC released a report finding higher rates of fatness among Black women. It would later be revealed that, despite higher rates of fatness in Black communities, those rates did not correlate to an increased risk of disease or mortality. That is, Black women were more likely to be fat, but they were not more likely to be sick as a result of being fat.

It will require their willingness to entertain the idea that their bodies are not accomplishments and that fat bodies are not failures.

That our bodies are just bodies, not synecdoche for our character, not a badge of work ethic—just bodies.