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

“We need a world that insists upon safety and dignity for all of us—not because we are beautiful, healthy, blameless, exceptional, or beyond reproach, but because we are human beings.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This cultural obsession with weight loss doesn’t just impact our physical and mental health; it also impacts our sense of self and, consequently, our relationships with others of different sizes.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I’m just concerned for your health. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you, again and again, that you’re going to die. I’m concerned for your health, so I have to tell you that no one will love you at your size. I’m concerned for your health, so I cannot treat you with basic respect.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“In books, political cartoons, films, and TV shows, fat bodies make up the failings of America, capitalism, beauty standards, excess, and consumerism. Fat bodies represent at once the poorest of the poor and the pinnacle of unchecked power, consumption, and decay. Our bodies have borne the blame for so much. Whole artistic worlds are built on the premise that bodies like mine are monstrous, repulsive, and—worst of all—contagious. From individuals to institutions, academia to the evening news, fat people are made bogeymen. And that spills into daily experiences of abuse, driven by intentions both good and ill, but always with the same outcome: an intense shame for simply daring to exist in the bodies many of us have always had.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Fat people are frequently spoken about or at, but we’re rarely heard. Instead, bodies and experiences like mine become caricatured and symbolic, either as a kind of effigy or as a pornography of suffering. Bodies and experiences like mine are rarely allowed to just be ours.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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 bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“fat hate starts young, that its trauma can last a lifetime, and that early intervention will be essential to raising a generation of more compassionate people.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Despite growing evidence to the contrary, we all share a cultural belief that fat bodies are an individual failing that each of us can and must control. 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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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 around us, used as grounds for ejecting us from employment, healthcare, and other areas of life.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“When we reduce fat people to their bodies, to “before and after,” or to bellies and rolls, we come to think of fat people as bodies without personhood. Fat bodies become symbols of disembodied disgust.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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,”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“We can build a world in which fat bodies are valued and supported just as much as thin ones.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“But our insecurities don’t stop at our own skin. The ways in which straight-size people see fat people are increasingly limited by their own insecurity. In body positive spaces, for example, thin people will often struggle to hear fat people’s stories of discrimination. The concrete, external harms of anti-fatness are often reframed and reinterpreted as insecurity by thinner people, especially women. After all, thinner women simply aren’t subjected to the same levels of societal prejudice, harassment, bullying, and overt discrimination as fatter people. 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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“That is, what we think of as health risks associated with being fat may in fact be health risks of experiencing discrimination and internalizing stigma.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“I choose to believe that fat people can be genuinely attractive, truly loved, actually lovable, sincerely wanted.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Rather than motivating fat people to lose weight, weight stigma had led to more isolation, more avoidance, and fewer social and material supports.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“There are no prerequisites for human dignity. For that reason, there can be no caveats in body justice or fat justice.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“And 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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Regardless of our size, working toward fat justice will call upon our most honest, compassionate selves. It will require deep vulnerability, candor, and empathy. Together, we can create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike. We can find more peace in the skin we live in, declaring a truce with the bodies that only try to care for us. But more than that, we can build a more just and equitable world that doesn’t determine our access to resources and respect based on how we look. 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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“The depth and breadth of anti-fatness can be difficult to believe, too, because anti-fat attitudes, comments, policies, and practices are ubiquitous. We cannot see the air we’ve been breathing for years, cannot touch the shifting ground beneath our feet. Anti-fatness has become invisible,”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Food wasn’t there to satiate hunger, to fuel activity, or to enjoy. Instead, it became emotionally and morally laden. A slice of cheddar cheese became a referendum on my willpower, work ethic, character. A bite of ice cream was a moment of weakness. One scoop was cause for concern; two scoops called for an intervention.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“And when it came from those closest to me, even the most explicit judgment was reliably shielded by a missionary claim of concern for my health.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Americans have long prided ourselves on a sense of self-reliance: with a little elbow grease and a lot of effort, we can be whatever we want.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat