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

by Aubrey Gordon

The term “obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for their bodies.13 The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively correct weight for every body. A growing number of fat activists consider obese to be a slur. Both terms are derived from a medical model that considers fat bodies as deviations that must be corrected, so both are used sparingly throughout this book.

39.8 percent of adults in the United States have BMIs that are considered obese, compared to 34.3 percent a decade earlier.

Hysteria, literally meaning uterus madness, stemmed from an ancient Greek belief that uteruses moved freely through the body, eventually inducing disease or causing strangulation.

Studies based on twins show that genetics could account for as much as 80 percent of a person’s size.

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.

a minimum of “30 million people of all ages suffer from an eating disorder in the U.S.”31 and roughly once an hour “at least one person dies as a direct result from an eating disorder.”

2.8 percent of Americans of all genders will have binge eating disorder at some point in their lives, though these numbers are limited by reporting structures.

orthorexia. The term, coined in 1998, refers to an obsessive focus on “healthy eating,” often marked by an increasingly specific and restrictive set of rules. Though orthorexia has yet to be codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, advocacy organizations and treatment centers have embraced it as a growing concern within the eating disorder community. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, symptoms include the following: Compulsive checking of ingredient lists and nutritional labels An increase in concern about the health of ingredients Cutting out an increasing number of food groups (all sugar, all carbs, all dairy, all meat, all animal products) An inability to eat anything but a narrow group of foods that are deemed “healthy” or “pure” Unusual interest in the health of what others are eating Spending hours per day thinking about what food might be served at upcoming events Showing high levels of distress when “safe” or “healthy” foods aren’t available Obsessive following of food and “healthy lifestyle” blogs on Twitter and Instagram Body image concerns that may or may not be present

disorders, genetics are significant contributors, often accounting for 50 percent or more of the risk of a given eating disorder.37 Genetics are the gun, and for many, dieting is its trigger.

By the end of 2023, researchers predict, the global weight-loss market will be worth a staggering $278.95 billion worldwide.46 Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, American consumers seem too desperate for a miraculous, lasting weight-loss solution, and many of us are willing to pay top dollar for even moderate weight loss. No matter how damning the evidence against it, the weight-loss industry remains a juggernaut. It may just be too big to fail.

Women of all ages report astronomical levels of body dissatisfaction, ranging from a low of 71.9 percent of women ages seventy-five and up to a high of 93.2 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four.

According to a survey conducted by Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, nearly half of respondents would rather give up a year of their lives than be fat.48 “The 4,000 respondents in varying numbers between 15% and 30% also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.”

In spite of overwhelming evidence from mainstream sources that body size is largely out of our control, nearly every concern troll I’ve asked shares one simple belief: that fat people choose to be fat.

But despite being beneficial for cardiac health, circulation, mental health, and other areas of personal health, exercise has long been known to be ineffective as a weight-loss method.22 It simply doesn’t burn enough calories to lead to significant weight loss, and many types of physical activity lead to an increase in muscle mass—which won’t lower the number on the scale. And on top of that, many of us eat more after working out, offsetting the few calories we just burned.

While many of us know people who have undergone major weight loss through diet or exercise, those anecdotal cases are an extreme statistical minority, making up less than 5 percent of all dieters. Contrary to popular opinion, neither diet nor exercise leads to long-term weight loss for the vast majority of us. That’s borne out by larger-scale data

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 dramatic...

As of 2016, researchers at OMNI have catalogued fifty-nine different types of obesity—each with their own causes, contributing factors, unknowns, and possible treatments.27 According to the head of the department of clinical biochemistry and medicine at Cambridge University, “investigators have found more than 25 genes with such powerful effects that if one is mutated, a person is pretty much guaranteed to become obese[.]”

the way that thinner people treat fatter people is abuse. Choice whispers to thinner people that they wouldn’t hurt me if I didn’t make them. It tells them they’re doing me a favor—more than that, that they’d be doing a disservice if they didn’t express deep contempt for bodies like mine. Like so much abuse, its cruelty disguises itself as something not only benign, but beneficial. 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.

In A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam analyzed history’s largest data bank on pornography viewers. They found that regardless of gender and sexual orientation, porn searches for fat bodies significantly outpaced searches for thin bodies. In fact, fat porn was the sixteenth most popular category, outranking categories like “anal sex” (#18), “group sex” (#24), “fellatio” (#28), and “skinny” (#30).1 “For every search for a ‘skinny’ girl, there are almost three searches for a ‘fat’ girl.”2 Gay men’s searches, too, revealed far more searches for “bears” (burly or fat men) than “twinks” (young, thin men).

The findings in A Billion Wicked Thoughts show us that, at the very least, attraction to fat people of all genders isn’t a niche occupied solely by those who celebrate their desire. Rather, it points to the idea that fat bodies may be among the most widely desired, but that desire may be repressed—possibly thanks to pervasive stigma.

In “Guys Who Like Fat Chicks,” reporter Camille Dodero shares the stories of several straight thin men who are predominantly attracted to fat women—and the social sanctions that threaten their masculinity and their social relationships. As one man put it, he was afraid to say he didn’t notice a thin, conventionally attractive woman in school for fear of being met with “What are you, some sort of fag?”

(Note: all available research indicates that fat shaming leads to weight gain, not weight loss, and worse health outcomes—as do shaming and bullying for any reason.)

These findings are noteworthy given that the sample was comprised of professionals who treat and study obesity, a group that understands that obesity is caused by genetic and environmental factors and is not simply a function of individual behavior. Hence, the stigma of obesity is so strong that even those most knowledgeable about the condition infer that obese people have blameworthy behavioral characteristics that contribute to their problem (i.e., being lazy). Furthermore, these biases extend to core characteristics of intelligence and personal worth.

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 that was before the skyrocketing popularity of body positivity. It was before their slouched stomachs with one small fat roll were called brave. This was before fat shaming was defined in the popular imagination by the inaccurate judgment of thin women as fat: straight-size women who embodied the beauty standard like pop stars Jessica Simpson and Kelly Clarkson, or Donald Trump scapegoat and Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado. Before fat shaming came to mean hurting thin women’s feelings by incorrectly calling them fat.

It was before marketing campaigns quietly wrote the rest of us out of body positivity and before so many thin people’s body positivity came with caveats: As long as you’re happy and healthy. As long as you’re not, you know, obese. As long as you’re not glorifying obesity. It was before body positivity became pride in thin, fair, feminine, able bodies. It was before that grand vision of a shining city on a hill became a mirage.

Over time, body positivity has made its constituency clear. It has widened the warm and fickle embrace of beauty standards ever so slightly. Now it showers its affections not only on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 4 but on beautiful, able-bodied, fair-skinned women under a size 12.

Body positivity has widened the circle of acceptable bodies, yes, but it still leaves so many of us by the wayside. Its rallying cry, love your body, presumes that our greatest challenges are internal, a poisoned kind of thought about our own bodies. It cannot adapt to those of us who love our bodies, but whose bodies are rejected by those aroun...

Diet culture hinges on all of us seeking to become thin, thinner, thinnest, engaged in an endless quest to shrink ourselves at all costs. When we are left to our own devices, we retreat to focusing on the problem of our own mindsets rather than the problem of our internalized biases, the harms we (often unintentionally) cause to those around us, and the ways in which others’ bodies invite different experiences than our own.

Thin people especially struggle to say “fat,” the hypothetical that has hurt them so deeply. But as an undeniably fat person, the word isn’t hurtful to me. It cannot be, because I do not have the luxury of escaping it. Instead, I am beholden to someone else’s discomfort with a word that has never accurately described them. Even as a very fat person, when I enter body positive spaces, I cannot be trusted to describe myself as fat, and I cannot expect support when the truth of my body is hurled at me as an insult. I cannot be responsible for naming my own skin. Body positivity quarantines the words used to describe bodies like mine and, in the process, shuts out those bodies themselves.

We need the courage to say the word “fat” and the wherewithal to see all of our bodies accurately. Without it, we cannot name our bodies, nor can we truly embrace and understand all of us who have sought out this movement that felt so essential.

This newly popularized body positivity drowns out so many of us, reducing problems of social exclusion to issues of self-esteem and body image. It focuses on normalizing the moments in which thin bodies appear fat, rather than tackling the more intransigent and troubling systems of privilege and oppression that marginalize those of us who are fat. It disproportionately centers the experiences of cis women who are thin, white, Western, abled, straight. And in so doing, it writes out those of us more than one standard deviation from the m...

acknowledge that fatness isn’t a failure of personal responsibility but the result of a complex set of factors that may include our environments, our genes, our existing physical and mental health diagnoses, and the shame and marginalization we experience.