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

by Aubrey Gordon

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.