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

by Aubrey Gordon

By elevating health to a super value, a metaphor for all that is good in life, healthism reinforces the privatization of the struggle for generalized well-being.”9 That is, healthism as a framework often disregards the influence of social determinants of health, institutional policies, and oppression on individual health.

Diet culture disproportionately benefits people whose bodies are naturally predisposed to be thin and people with the wealth and privilege to pay the high prices of customized diet foods, personal trainers, weight-loss surgery, and more.

I had spent a lifetime learning not to put my hand on the hot stove of men’s agitation.

Strictly size-based health approaches can offer a false sense of security, implying that a lower weight is tantamount to a clean bill of health for those whose behaviors don’t contribute to their individual health and largely go unnoticed due to their more socially acceptable size.

According to researchers, environmental causes have a major impact on our size, and include things like where we live, where we can most easily access food, our income level, and the stress we shoulder as a result of the forms of oppression and discrimination we may face.

We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination.

We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.

In that world, each of us is judged based on our actions, not our bodies. We do not draw conclusions about others’ character based on the way they look, what they eat, how they move, or how they live their lives differently than ours. Bodies are not believed to be meritocracies and thinness is not understood to be a crowning achievement.

Unlike its diluted predecessor, body positivity, the movement for body justice understands that each system of oppression needs to be understood on its own terms, and as part of an interdependent web of oppressions that impacts all of us. This movement knows that we cannot attain and preserve body sovereignty by broad platitudes and whitewashing the differences between our experiences.