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

by Aubrey Gordon

anti-fat bias has changed the most slowly of all explicit stated attitudes. And when it comes to implicit bias—that is, the bias we unconsciously act on—anti-fatness is getting significantly worse. “It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time.”4 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.

Because body positivity is so deeply focused on internal, individual change, conversations about power, privilege, and oppression often don’t come naturally to self-proclaimed body positive people. When people in more marginalized bodies—particularly fat people, disabled people, transgender and nonbinary people, and people of color—request conversations that grapple with the thornier realities of our lives, which are formed more by other people’s behaviors than our own internal self-image, those requests are often roundly rejected by many body positive activists.

I yearn for more than neutrality, acceptance, and tolerance—all of which strike me as meek pleas to simply stop harming us, rather than asking for help in healing that harm or requesting that each of us unearth and examine our existing biases against fat people.

We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous.

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 a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple and unimportant fact. Body

fatphobia as an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against obesity or people with obesity.”8

“preoccupation with personal health as a primary—often the primary—focus for the definition and achievement of well-being. [. . .] 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.

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

As “wellness” replaces “dieting” as a way of talking about weight loss, understanding healthism is key to pulling apart the ways in which size and health are used to write-off people who don’t or can’t perform health.

Even in body positive spaces, healthism persists as a way to marginalize fat people through the frequent refrain I’m body positive as long as you’re healthy.

The term “obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for their bodies.

Wherever I go, the message is clear: my body is too much for this world to bear. And it’s reinforced by the people around me. Like the man on the plane, strangers take it upon themselves to tell me what I already know: that I won’t fit and that I’m not welcome.

And at the height of all that stress—boarding—my wide, soft body becomes their target. Rather than being a compatriot stuck in the same cramped, uncomfortable position as everyone else, I become a scapegoat for all their frustration. In moments like those, it’s hard to get angry with a corporation, its executives, and industrial designers; it’s much easier to get angry with the fat person who dared to fly.

In 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.

“NYPD Union Lawyers Argue That Eric Garner Would Have Died Anyway Because He Was Obese.”

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. Michigan, Washington State, and San Francisco are the United States’ three jurisdictions to ban size-based discrimination.

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.”

No matter the problem, no matter the actions of an aggressor, the fault is mine. Regardless of the politics or life experience of the person I am talking to, the answer comes like clockwork. I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight. But despite its ubiquity in conversations about fatness and fat people, that is the logic of abuse. You made me do this. I wouldn’t hurt you if you didn’t make me.

The focus was never on enjoying nutritious foods, just on deprivation, will, and lack. Ours was an orthodoxy of hunger, a never-ending fast. It was self-flagellation, a forced performance to display my commitment to changing an unacceptable body.

While the Farm Bill ostensibly aims to serve consumer interests, the federal government’s left hand aggressively deprioritizes the public health interests promoted by its right. Instead, regardless of its initial intent, the Farm Bill functionally lines the pockets of companies like Frito Lay, Coca-Cola, and other corporate food purveyors. The majority of those same corporations rely on low-wage labor, which means that often their workers are also their consumers. As it happens, over the last fifty years, Americans’ food intake has continued to drift further from the PHS’s nutrition recommendations.

As with Weight Watchers, Let’s Move! was bolstered by corporate food producers with a stake in maintaining a status quo that bolstered sales of their products. Companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Hershey’s, Kraft, and Kellogg’s signed on to the First Lady’s “healthy weight commitment” as part of the Let’s Move! campaign, agreeing to reformulate their foods to become “healthier”—that is, less caloric. Ultimately, many of those changed foods only resulted in minor calorie reductions (ten or twenty calories per portion) and offered corporations a new marketing platform that appeared to give their products the White House’s seal of approval.

Let’s Move! communications frequently referred to the program as “America’s move to raise a healthier generation of kids” through advocating that children lose weight.12 This subtle but definite shift in language continued to prop up the thinking that conflated weight with health.

Call it a campaign against childhood couch-sitting. Call it a drive to get kids to go outside and play. Call it a movement to educate children on basic nutrition and how their amazing growing bodies work for them. But don’t single out the fat kids.

As of 2017, fully half of US states require that schools track students’ BMIs.16 Half of those require so-called “BMI report cards” to be sent home

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. And over time, those responses built me

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.

Quetelet’s research largely took place in Western Europe, the index is focused on predominantly white bodies and has repeatedly been shown to be less applicable—or not applicable at all—to people of color.

In 1998 the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) redefined BMI categories, significantly lowering the threshold for Americans to be classified as “overweight” or “obese.”

declared a public war on obesity, citing skyrocketing fatness among Americans—all without noting that the goalposts had been significantly moved. Even today, the bulk of the data on the so-called obesity epidemic fails to account for this change in standard, showing a sharp spike in fatness in 1998, as if everyone in the US suddenly gained dozens of pounds.

Our oversimplified conversation about the BMI tricks us into believing that nearly every thin person is healthier than nearly every fat person.

With fifty-nine types of obesity and twenty-five contributing genes, calories in, calories out can hardly be a “cure” for them all.

Despite a mountain of evidence linking physical and mental health to social discrimination, the conversation about fat and health stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the possible influence of stigma in determining fat people’s health. Decreasing stress improves blood pressure and our reactions to stress can significantly increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and other medical problems.50 Some heart attacks are the direct result of sudden emotional stress.51 And stress hormones, such as cortisol, can influence the endocrine system, which also manages blood sugar levels.

A growing body of NIH research, too, illustrates that extreme dieting may permanently damage our metabolisms, in some cases guaranteeing a lifetime of fatness.

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. These findings bear little influence on public opinion; still, those surveyed insisted that a fat body was a sign of these venal sins.

And, as Paul Campos notes in The Obesity Myth, white and class-privileged people’s harsh judgment of fat bodies in particular can often serve as a rerouting of the negative attitudes toward poor people and people of color that are no longer acceptable for predominantly wealthy, predominantly white people to voice aloud.

The feelings of disgust elicited in others by traditional pariah-class individuals do not simply disappear as soon as it becomes unacceptable to express those feelings openly. [. . .] The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics, and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority engendered in thin people by the sight of fat people. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected onto some other distinguishing characteristic.

What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting, which very fat people are pressured heavily to do. One Yale University study found that adult women (ages eighteen to forty-nine) who have used common, over-the-counter appetite suppressants faced a 1,558 percent increased risk for hemorrhagic stroke.27 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.

As such, feeling insecure is among the worst things many thinner women can imagine, so many interpret fat people’s stories of explicit, interpersonal, or institutional anti-fatness as insecurity. The phenomenon of repackaging a fat person’s discrimination as a more palatable, more understandable kind of internal struggle with body image is one I’ve come to refer to as thinsecurity.

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 are reminders of what could be. Thinner people embrace fatter people as a way of finding their relative virtue. At least I’m not that fat.

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 don’t often ask ourselves what our response to fatness says about us, but it says so much about our empathy and our character. We spend so much time examining fat bodies in front of us that we fail to examine our response to them. We learn not to feel the heat and pressure that so many fat people face, and in so doing, we ignore our contributions to it. We can’t understand how our actions undercut our love for the fat people in our lives.

concern trolls position themselves as sympathetic supporters who “just have a few concerns.” Concern trolls are experts at erecting strawmen, insisting that they want to be supportive, as if their support is a vote a marginalized person needs to win. Concern trolls tell people of color that they’ll never win anyone over if they’re so angry all the time. They insist on making sure transgender people are really sure about transitioning, because you know it’s not reversible, right? I just don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.

Concern trolls lament our size, offering compliments only with judgmental caveats attached. You’ve got such a pretty face. If only you’d lose some weight. Their eyes follow our fork from our plate to our mouth and back again, sometimes even freely commenting on what we eat, whether we eat, and how much. When challenged, many become defensive, even indignant. I’m just trying to help. Food surveillance and policing are especially insidious and pernicious tactics of many concern trolls. For many fat people, concern trolling doesn’t end at overt comments about our food, size, or perceived motivation. Sometimes, that concern turns into invasive, deeply personal cross-examinations that I’ve come to call thinterrogations. Some thinterrogations are confined to dieting. Have you tried paleo? What about keto? Did you track your macros? Did you work out? Did you cut out bread? Did you cheat? You must have been sneaking sugar. You probably aren’t doing it right. Others become deeply intimate, with thinterrogators asking after the trauma they’re certain must be at the root of my size. Were you abused? Molested? When did it happen? How? Are you in therapy? Is it comfort eating? I’m an emotional eater, too, and here’s how I beat it. Have you tried Overeaters Anonymous? EMDR? These trauma voyeurs, often strangers or acquaintances, have invented an etiology of my body: a troubled past, a mental or experiential defect that has led me to maladaptive behavior. A fat body must be the result of...

weight stigma is related to elevated ambulatory blood pressure, unhealthy weight control and binge eating behaviors, bulimic symptoms, negative body image, low self-esteem, and depression among children, adolescents, and adults.10

Furthermore, messages that were perceived to be most positive and motivating made no mention of the word ‘obesity’ at all, and instead focused on making healthy behavioral changes without reference to body weight.12

Regardless of the topic, shame doesn’t motivate change; it instead conveys that the shamed party is simply a bad person, and nothing can be done about that.

stigma and social status are major drivers of health, especially for poor people. “Socioeconomic differences in health are not confined to poor health for those at the bottom and health for everyone else. Rather, there is a social gradient in health in individuals who are not poor: the higher the social position, the better the health.”

They believe that they have chosen their body, so seeing a fat person eat something they deem unhealthy reminds them of their stronger willpower, greater tenacity, and superior character. We don’t just look different, the thinking goes; we are different. Thinner people outwit their bodies. Fatter people succumb to them. Encounters with fatter people offer a welcome opportunity to retell that narrative and remind themselves of their superiority.