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

by Aubrey Gordon

I had spent a lifetime learning not to put my hand on the hot stove of men’s agitation.

No fat person, it seemed, could be as healthy as any thin person, regardless of our mental health, reproductive health, blood pressure, blood sugar, T-cell count, or any other measure of a vast, multifaceted, and still underexplored bodily system’s measure of health.

Lead roles for women in productions were often love interests, and who could fall for a fat girl? The audience could only extend its imagination so far.

This was a coming-of-age moment. I was being ushered into womanhood through one of its most enduring aspects: the unending, thankless quest to lose weight.

Little did I know that those endless diets would later be shown to cause permanent damage to my metabolism,26 ensuring a lifetime as a fat person whose efforts to lose weight would prove increasingly futile over time.

To the contrary, constant dieting may make weight loss more difficult, as our metabolisms fight back, searching for the stasis of a familiar, fatter body.

As one Slate writer put it, addressing dieters, “You’ll likely lose weight in the short term, but your chances of keeping it off for five years or more is about the same as your chance of surviving metastatic lung cancer: 5 percent. And when you do gain back the weight, everyone will blame you. Including you.”59

Throughout the publicity for the tour, few remarked on the bizarre disconnect of famously thin people selling an approach to weight loss that they’d likely never experienced.

One landmark study, published in 1986 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that adopted children overwhelmingly ended up with body types like their birth parents—despite being raised by a family with different body types who predominantly shaped their eating and exercise habits.

Others show that the body defends against weight loss by significantly slowing the metabolism.23, 24

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.

But those conversations rarely bear the hallmarks of concern. Concern is curious, tender, loving. Concern is direct and heartfelt. Concern does its work delicately, with great care.

They beat me up the way most of us only talk to ourselves.

It is too distressing to recognize that their fat friend lives with such a dramatically different reality. And it is too alienating to acknowledge the simple fact that their bodies have spared them from a tumult they never imagined. It is illogical. So, to them, it is impossible.

But for fat people, the world we walk through is unpredictable and unforgiving. Even walking down the street becomes complicated, uncertain, unsafe, as we pass through the gauntlet of a Greek chorus singing our tragedies back to us. No one will ever love you. Can you hear me? I deserve an answer.

If every prescription was to suddenly stop having the body I had always had, I said, that wasn’t going to happen.