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

by Aubrey Gordon

It is not rooted in the near-ubiquitous cultural dogma that fat people are duty-bound to become thin before asking to be treated with respect and dignity.

Healthism includes the idea that anyone who isn’t healthy just isn’t trying hard enough or has some moral failing or sin to account for.”

I constantly inoculated those around me with an endless string of caveats and excuses for daring to be seen when I wasn’t yet thin.

Suddenly, fat people weren’t just neighbors, friends, or family members—we were enemy combatants in some strange new war.

Rather than motivating fat people to lose weight, weight stigma had led to more isolation, more avoidance, and fewer social and material supports.

My strengths and passions didn’t define my path in life—others’ responses to my body did.

As a fat middle schooler, desperate to realize the promise of a more real, thinner life, Weight Watchers further trained me in a belief system that was culturally ubiquitous. It taught me that fat people were incomplete, that food was to be feared and mistrusted, that my body was a failure, and that a life in a body like mine was no life at all. At eleven, I clung desperately to the idea that my body could and would change—that, somehow, I would become thin. Then and only then could my real life begin.

even minor weight gain would throw me into the netherworld of clothing and, I assumed, personhood. Who could clothe someone so fat? And who could respect her?

Anti-fat bias was also used to police the line of whiteness—that is, which immigrants could be considered white in the United States and which would remain an underclass. That boundary, and the anti-fatness used to reinforce it, often broke along lines of skin tone, painting darker-skinned Southern European immigrants as fatter and, therefore, less white.36

race-informed studies have found that African-American people with an “overweight” BMI have the lowest mortality rates of any BMI category.

“healthy weight” diabetics have “double the risk of dying from heart disease and other causes than overweight people with type 2 diabetes,”