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

by Aubrey Gordon

We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous. We can build a world that conspires against eating disorders and body dysmorphia, working toward more safety for eating disorder survivors of all sizes. We can build a world in which fat bodies are valued and supported just as much as thin ones.

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

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.

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

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.

All of this happens because anti-fat bias exists in all of us. It exists in all of us because it exists in every corner of our culture: our institutions, media, and public policy. How could we avoid it? Ninety-seven million Americans diet, despite the $66 billion industry’s failure rate of up to 98 percent.40

The lecture built a scaffolding for us, a vast and rickety framework to hold up our failing bodies. I struggled to make sense of it, because so much of it was designed to solve problems that weren’t my own. My parents rarely ordered fast food, primarily cooking whole foods at home. I didn’t binge eat, though the lecturer seemed to presume we all did. I didn’t like running, but I loved swimming and planned to join my neighborhood swim team later that summer. I raced my neighbor regularly, challenging her to beat me in freestyle laps, then backstroke, then butterfly. I did all of that with a round belly, soft arms, and a fat and rosy face. I didn’t know who this instruction was for, but I was increasingly certain it wasn’t for me.

This theme—that weight loss is the solution to bullying—was frequently echoed throughout the workbook, as if the bullied were to blame for their own suffering.

Shame taught me to overeat and to fetishize food. The more it was withheld, the more tempting it became.

First passed in 1933, the Farm Bill aimed to standardize and steady food prices during and after the Great Depression by offering financial rewards in the form of subsidies to farmers who grew so-called “commodity crops.” Today, those commodity crops include wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans—top ingredients in higher-calorie, lower-nutrient, shelf-stable foods like sugary beverages, chips, and candy bars. Notably, fresh fruits and vegetables are not considered commodity crops, nor are lean proteins, ensuring that healthier foods will remain at a higher price point, reserving the privilege of health for those with the income to support it.

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. Thin people “looked healthy”; fat people were met with concern for our health. Weight loss became not about “slimming down” but about “getting healthy.” 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. And fat people’s health—by which this public health initiative clearly, explicitly meant size—was now an urgent, nationwide priority.

My strengths and passions didn’t define my path in life—others’ responses to my body did. And over time, those responses built me a cage.

the BMI isn’t a reliable indicator of the fatness or health of people of color—not by accident, but because it was never designed to be.

When people got bigger in every way, the medical standard for body size got smaller.

The oversimplicity of the BMI has also fed into a ruthless, black-and-white cultural conversation about health and weight loss. The logic goes like this: every thin person is healthier than every fat person, every fat person can become thin if they try hard enough, fat people simply eat too much, and our greed and gluttony have made us fat. As such, size becomes an indicator of character and willpower—and even nefarious intentions.

Despite constant insistence that we lose weight for our health and track the simple arithmetic of calories in, calories out, there is no data illustrating that dieting achieves long-term weight loss. 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.

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.

All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. 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 deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness. We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bo...

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.

Research increasingly demonstrates that fat peoples’ experiences with weight stigma and our internalization of anti-fat stereotypes worsen our health on all fronts, from the functioning of our brains to the very blood in our veins. Contrary to popular belief, the constant stream of cruel and judgmental comments and tactics aimed at fat people cannot be simply brushed off, nor are they without repercussions—even when they’re cloaked in a concern for our health.

According to the American Journal of Public Health, women with BMIs categorized as obese have an extraordinarily slim chance of reaching their BMI-mandated “normal” weight. Just 0.8 percent of fat women become thin in their lifetime.24 The few that do will face a grueling uphill battle, since weight cycling and dieting may dramatically and permanently alter their metabolisms, making it harder to maintain weight loss.

However anti-fatness shows up, even in ways that seem benign, each paves the way for the next, laying a foundation that makes more overtly anti-fat behavior possible. Laughing at fat jokes lets the people around us know that they’re okay to tell. Telling fat jokes makes more room for disregarding fat people’s humanity. Disregarding our humanity opens the door to treating us callously, parroting hurtful stereotypes back to us under the guise of concern for our health. This callous treatment makes way for overt discrimination, harassment, violence, and death threats, each softening the ground for the next. Whether the wolf (ban this, you fat fuck) or sheep’s clothing (I’m just concerned for your health), the story ends the same way. The wolf bares its teeth, then devours its prey. However anti-fatness presents itself, it will swallow me whole.

Anti-fatness isn’t about saving fat people, expressing concern for our health, or even about hurting us. Hurting us is a byproduct of reinforcing the egos of the privileged thin.

In this way, thinness becomes a system of supremacy—a way of organizing the world around us and once again casting ourselves in a graceful light. At every turn, thin people are defined by their virtue: the restraint and vigilance to stay thin, the tenacity and dedication to monitor their bodies at every moment, the goodness to spread the gospel of thinness to wretched fatter people, and the restraint to stop short of death threats. Everything about hating me reinforces what thin people need to hear about themselves. They don’t want to hurt me; they want to stop hurting themselves. They don’t want to hurt me, but they do.

But the truth is that concern and choice are cover for a convenient and tempting set of stories that establish a hierarchy of people by establishing a hierarchy of bodies. They are judge and jury so that every thin person may play executioner for any fat person. But by every measure, choice is false and unfounded, and concern isn’t helping. If thin people are just concerned with our health, they can tackle the bias that is hurting fat people much more than our bodies themselves.

“public harassment by a stranger isn’t about making you feel good. It’s about putting you in your place, and reminding you that as a woman, your social purpose is to look appealing to guys.”6

the average American woman wears a size 16. And those plus-size women—the lion’s share of a nation—have yet to be heard.

Often, feminist discourse stays focused on sexual harassment and assault that don’t reflect the fullness of fat women’s experiences—nor do they reliably reflect the experiences of trans women, immigrant women, older women, poor women. There is a violence that comes with catcalling and sexual violence targeted at people who are culturally and sexually defined by their lack of desirability.

Acknowledging the pain of fat women would mean acknowledging their own complicity, often unthinking and unintentional. It would mean implicating their own bodies and sacrificing the privileges they feel certain they’ve earned. If we used the full force of feminist movements to argue against the validity of the privileges that come with living in a thin body, those privileges might fall away.

Making space for an emerging constituency in any movement is a straightforward, albeit difficult, task. Its ingredients are simple: listening, believing, adjusting, and collaborating. But sharing power has never been easy, and, like acknowledging other axes of oppression, making room for fat women within feminism will require some discomfort of the thinner women around who it has been historically centered. It will require their willingness to entertain the idea that their bodies are not accomplishments and that fat bodies are not failures. It will call upon the willingness to believe that they themselves might become fat someday and might still need feminism then. And it will rely upon those feminists’ willingness to sit with the discomfiting knowledge that, despite the relentless, whipping winds of misogyny all around them, their bodies have still afforded them some shelter that others don’t have. To those feminists, my question is this: Can you love fat people enough to sacrifice your comfort?

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. Over

I came to body positivity because I cared about being human. As a fat person, my humanity was—and is—too readily erased, eclipsed by either beauty or health. I came to body positivity because it held the promise of something radical—the possibility that I, as a very fat person, could be seen and understood for who I am. Not because I am happy or healthy, thin, or beautiful, but because I am human. But