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

by Aubrey Gordon

When anti-fatness turns institutional, as with staggeringly prevalent employment discrimination or punitive airline policies, others’ responses curdle, turning from indifference to outright defense. Suddenly, people who otherwise relish complaining about delayed flights and cramped legroom become airlines’ staunchest defenders. People

Fat people are frequently spoken about or at, but we’re rarely heard. Instead, bodies and experiences like mine become caricatured and symbolic, either as a kind of effigy or as a pornography of suffering. Bodies and experiences like mine are rarely allowed to just be ours.

Where our cultural conversation focuses relentlessly on personal responsibility and the perceived failures of fat people, this book seeks to zoom out, offering personal stories while simultaneously identifying the macro-level social, institutional, and political forces that powerfully shape the way each of us thinks of fat people, both in general and in particular.

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.

Some fat activists strive for body neutrality, a viewpoint that holds that bodies should be prized for their function, not their appearance, and that simply feeling impartial about our bodies would represent a significant step forward for those of us whose bodies are most marginalized.5 Others fight for 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. Some urge us toward body sovereignty, “the concept that each person has the full right to control their own body.”6 Fat activists’ frameworks are as varied as fat people ourselves.

Fat hasn’t become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable or bad—it has fallen out of public favor because of what we attach to it. We take fat to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies—and

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.”

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.

For a third time, they were denied the seats they paid for. Even in the midst of a health crisis, not one airline accommodated Vilma and Janos. While they waited and waited, tried and tried, Vilma’s health continued to deteriorate. Within a matter of weeks, she was dead, half a world away from her home and her doctor.

Errol Narvaez weighed 385 pounds when he was removed from his flight. Vilma Soltesz was 407 pounds when she passed away. When I read their stories, I weighed 400 pounds. The message from stories like these was clear: no one will protect bodies like ours. As long as we’re fat, we might as well be dead.

But fundamentally, both videos argue the same points and lay out a road map of core cultural beliefs about fat people—especially fat people in public spaces: Fat people shouldn’t be so fat. Fat people inconvenience thin people with our bodies. Fatness is a choice for most.

While most measures of implicit bias decreased or remained stable, one measure exploded: anti-fat bias. In those nine years, pro-thin, anti-fat bias increased by a full 40 percent. Not only that, but weight-based bias was the slowest changing of all explicit attitudes—that is, the attitudes that test takers self-reported.

In the popular imagination of many white folks, racism is relegated to virulent, organized white supremacists. Misogyny is the work of overt, proud chauvinist men. Homophobia is the domain of Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson, a cruel and outspoken minority. Few of us think of ourselves as biased because we’re not like them. Few of us think of ourselves as hating any group of people. Still, our implicit biases often belie that self-image and the more comforting stories we tell ourselves.

By London’s logic, a fat person can’t be murdered, given the widespread and false belief that being fat is simply a death sentence.

Whatever we may think of our own beliefs, however hard it may be to stretch beyond our own experience of the world as an unbiased meritocracy, this growing body of research proves that for fat people, it simply isn’t.

And the United States has not poured endless federal and state dollars into public education campaigns aimed at regulating corporate food production, subsidizing nutritious foods, or ending poverty and economic instability—top predictors of individual health, according to the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.43 Instead, fat bodies themselves are targeted in the “war on obesity” and the “childhood obesity epidemic.”

If we are passive, we absorb the bias in the world around us, overwhelmingly suggested to us by people and institutions that stand to gain power and profits by scapegoating fat people.

And should these problems become untenable for me, it is my responsibility to “just lose weight.” The decent thing, after all, is to transform my body for the sake of those around me. It is no one’s responsibility to hear me. It is no one’s responsibility to care for my body.

While we eat slightly more vegetables and fruit than we used to, we still fall dramatically short of the dietary guidelines in all but two areas: meat, eggs, and nuts, and those “commodity crop” grains.8 But more meaningful, precise reforms would have required a well-resourced, savvy lobbying effort. It would’ve called for an overhaul of a powerful and wealthy industry, and it would’ve demanded money, social capital, and political will to take on the big businesses that had grown wealthy as a result of the very legislation that needed to be dismantled and reimagined. Instead, the PHS opted for a lexicon of personal responsibility—“most people should.”

While most people should eat more whole grains, the report didn’t suggest significant upstream solutions that would help people with what they should do. But then, root cause analyses have never been the work of the war on obesity. Even this early in its development, its approach was already a patchwork of individualized solutions to systemic problems. It was a series of shoulds, as it would be for years to come.

“Moral panics are marked by concern about an imagined threat; hostility in the form of moral outrage toward individuals and agencies responsible for the problem; consensus that something must be done about the serious threat; disproportionality in reports of harm; and volatility in terms of the eruption of panic.”

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. I

The BMI, then eponymously referred to as Quetelet’s Index, wasn’t used to measure individual health. To the contrary, the calculation was used sociologically, to assess populations overall at a time when sociology, anthropology, and medical science were all rife with racist and misogynist research.

In 2017 Newsweek magazine’s article “There’s a Dangerous Racial Bias in the Body Mass Index” detailed the ways in which people of a “healthy” BMI are assumed not to be at risk for cardiovascular or pancreatic issues, leaving people of Asian descent at a disproportionate risk of undiagnosed heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses.

Similarly, according to the Endocrine Society, the popularization of the BMI as a measure of body fat has led to an overestimation of “obesity” among Black people.

Notably, race-informed studies have found that African-American people with an “overweight” BMI have the lowest mor...

They also note Quetelet never actually advocated his ratio as any kind of general measure of body ‘build’ or fat.”41 Despite that, the BMI has since risen to prominence as Western medicine’s primary measure of fatness—and fatness has since risen to prominence as its primary indicator of health.

Despite being designed as a sociological tool to identify shared characteristics of nineteenth-century Belgians, the BMI was now the predominant tool for measuring individual weight.

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.

Similarly, research on fat health only rarely accounts for the impacts of extreme dieting on individual health—despite ample evidence that diet drugs, for example, can significantly increase blood pressure.

“Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics, and has little to do with sloth or gluttony.”

Even in the absence of appetite suppressants, weight cycling—that is, a history of gaining and losing significant amounts of weight, sometimes referred to as yo-yo dieting—has been associated with an increased risk of heart disease and cardiac arrest in women,28 and an increased risk of death regardless of gender.

When you’re fat, restrictive eating is a cultural mandate,

Even the diagnosis for anorexia nervosa requires an underweight BMI of seventeen or lower, relegating fat anorexics to a lesser known diagnosis of atypical anorexia and reinforcing the idea that fat people simply cannot have restrictive eating disorders—that is, not until we’re thin.

With these cultural changes has come an emerging new eating disorder diagnosis: orthorexia. The term, coined in 1998, refers to an obsessive focus on “healthy eating,”

By the end of 2023, researchers predict, the global weight-loss market will be worth a staggering $278.95 billion worldwide.46

As a fat person, I have faced constant judgment, harsh rejection, and invasive questions, which always close with the same stale phrase: I’m just concerned for your health. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you, again and again, that you’re going to die. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you that no one will love you at your size. I’m concerned for your health, so I cannot treat you with basic respect.