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Anti-fatness has become invisible, a natural law.
you can’t change the world, you can only change yourself, by which they have meant me.
fat people face overwhelming discrimination in employment, healthcare, transit, the treatment of eating disorders, and more.
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.
body neutrality, a viewpoint that holds that bodies should be prized for their function, not their appearance,
fat acceptance, which seeks to counter anti-fat bias with a tolerance-based model of simply accepting the existence of fat people and ceasing our constant attempts to make fat bodies into thin ones.
body sovereignty, “the concept that each person has the full right to control their own body.”
But straight-size people’s tasks will be threefold: not to buckle under the weight of their own discomfort, to stay in the conversation long enough to learn, and to take proactive action to counter anti-fat bias and help defend fat people.
We take fat to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy.
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.”10
“obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for their bodies.13 The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively correct weight for every body.
diet culture “demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hypervigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.”
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.
Another Wharton study found that “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence. People judge obese people to be less competent even when it’s not the case.”
As of 2020, in forty-eight states, it is perfectly legal to fire someone, refuse to hire them, deny them housing, or turn them down for a table at a restaurant or a room in a hotel simply because they’re fat.
But what if, instead of doing what we know how to do—instead of comfortably, distantly blaming fat people—we looked at ourselves? What would happen if we interrogated our own beliefs?
What if, for once, we spoke with fat people instead of about fat people?
Food wasn’t there to satiate hunger, to fuel activity, or to enjoy. Instead, it became emotionally and morally laden. A slice of cheddar cheese became a referendum on my willpower, work ethic, character. A bite of ice cream was a moment of weakness. One scoop was cause for concern; two scoops called for an intervention.
blame children and parents for what were clearly the results of predominantly systemic forces.
long-standing sense of failure for simply having the bodies they have.
What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting,
But as “health” has come to take the place of “thinness” in the search-and-replace of diet culture, little has changed.
orthorexia. The term, coined in 1998, refers to an obsessive focus on “healthy eating,” often marked by an increasingly specific and restrictive set of rules.
Thinsecurity is a seductive thing. It tells thin people that feeling badly about one’s own body is the worst—and only—outcome of difficult experiences with our bodies. They cannot fathom what are such commonplace experiences for very fat people:
But thinsecurity has rerouted the way this stranger sees me. She cannot imagine living in a body like mine, cannot imagine being seen in public, cannot imagine daring to leave the house in skin that is so obviously and objectively hideous. She imagines that I am wildly insecure and in desperate need of immediate comfort. And so, without asking about my experience, she offers an unsolicited compliment for braving the fear she’s mapped onto my scrim of a body: You’re so brave. I wish I had your confidence.
More than that, we reflect their bodies back to them, their imperfect thinness made beautiful by its proximity to the abject failure of our fatness.
We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect.
