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

by Aubrey Gordon

While body positivity seems to be everywhere, it doesn’t appear to be changing our deeply held, deeply harmful beliefs about fatness and fat people.

Anti-fatness is like air pollution. Some days we may see it; others, we may not. But it always surrounds us, and whether we mean to or not, we are always breathing it in.

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.

With fifty-nine types of obesity and twenty-five contributing genes, calories in, calories out can hardly be a “cure” for them all. Still, thanks to our BMI-fueled unforgiving cultural attitudes toward fatness and fat people, we are regularly held to account for the only bodies many of us have ever had.

While many of us know people who have undergone major weight loss through diet or exercise, those anecdotal cases are an extreme statistical minority, making up less than 5 percent of all dieters. Contrary to popular opinion, neither diet nor exercise leads to long-term weight loss for the vast majority of us.

This is among the greatest triumphs of anti-fatness: it stops us before we start. Its greatest victory isn’t diet industry sales or lives postponed just until I lose a few more pounds. It’s the belief that our bodies make us so worthless that we aren’t deserving of love, or even touch.

The stories of fat white women are scarce; LGBTQ fat people, fat disabled people, and fat people of color are exponentially scarcer. Even when fat stories are produced, we’re only offered one standard deviation from privilege.

Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.

When we are not pushed to see our bodies as they are, we are all left to our default perception—the deep, enduring belief that each of us is unforgivably fat.

In most states, size is not a protected class, which means that states with anti-bullying laws often don’t extend those protections to fat children and teens. We have to recognize that fat hate starts young, that its trauma can last a lifetime, and that early intervention will be essential to raising a generation of more compassionate people.