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

“At night, I dreamed of laying my belly on a cold, metal table (a laboratory or a coroner’s office?) and slicing it off with a fish knife in one smooth stroke, bloodied but finally free. Sometimes I still do.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This movement... understands that accessibility and disability justice are central to body justice, and that failing to make the movement accessible means failing to make the movement.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Anti-fatness is like air pollution. Some days we may see it; others, we may not. But it always surrounds us, and whether we mean to or not, we are always breathing it in.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“But the first step for all of us will be to let go of the magical thinking of thinness. Stop believing that a thinner body will bring us better relationships, dream jobs, obedient children, beautiful homes. Stop waiting to do the things we love until we’ve lost ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred pounds. Come to truly believe what we already know, and what so much data tells us: the vast majority of us don’t lose significant amounts of weight and the few who do don’t maintain weight loss in the long term.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Diet culture hinges on all of us seeking to become thin, thinner, thinnest, engaged in an endless quest to shrink ourselves at all costs.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Fall Ferguson, attorney and former president of the Association of Size Diversity and Health, later added that healthism “emerges as the assumption that people should pursue health. It’s the contempt in the nonsmoker’s attitude toward smokers; it’s the ubiquitous sneer against couch potatoes. 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”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Mainstream social media accounts still post before and after weight loss photos, claiming body positivity while celebrating bodies for looking less fat.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Whatever the behavior—strawman debates, food policing, trauma voyeurism, “tough love,” or “motivation”—concern trolling relies on the logic and tactics of abuse. Concern trolling tells fat people that whatever befalls us is our fault and that no thin person can be held accountable for their own behavior when faced with the sight of a fat person’s body. It tells fat people that concern trolls wouldn’t have to hurt you if you didn’t make me. Concern trolling is the trojan horse of anti-fatness, seductively telling thinner people that everything they’re doing is for a fat person’s own good.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“We take fat to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies—and a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple and unimportant fact.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“When fat people open up about our experiences, thinner body positive activists often rewrite those accounts of institutional discrimination and interpersonal abuse as “insecurities,” whitewashing the vast differences between our diverging experiences.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“And when it comes to implicit bias—that is, the bias we unconsciously act on—anti-fatness is getting significantly worse. “It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time.”4 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

“If we are passive, we absorb the bias in the world around us, overwhelmingly suggested to us by people and institutions that stand to gain power and profits by scapegoating fat people. It is up to us to both change those systems and to unlearn these enculturated attitudes.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Another Wharton study found that “obesity serves as a proxy for low competence. People judge obese people to be less competent even when it’s not the case.”30”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

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

“So let’s get to work.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This, then, is my life as a fat person. I am expected to absorb the discomfort and outright bias against my body in a world built for thin people. The responsibility is mine and mine alone. Should my body cost an airline more, it is my responsibility to pay them. Should my body cause discomfort for anyone around me, it is my responsibility to apologize and to comfort them. Should I begin to question why my body is forever a problem, it is my responsibility to keep quiet. And should these problems become untenable for me, it is my responsibility to “just lose weight.” The decent thing, after all, is to transform my body for the sake of those around me. It is no one’s responsibility to hear me. It is no one’s responsibility to care for my body. It is no one’s responsibility to ask about my comfort. At times, someone may do me the service of offering “tough love,” berating the body I have always had and the practices they assume created it, but I am never owed consideration, much less an apology. If there is a problem, I caused it with my gluttony and sloth. My body is my original sin. Every road leads back to the penance I must do for the body I have always had. No matter the problem, no matter the actions of an aggressor, the fault is mine. Regardless of the politics or life experience of the person I am talking to, the answer comes like clockwork. I guess if you hate it that much, you should just lose weight.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This, then, is my life as a fat person. I am expected to absorb the discomfort and outright bias against my body in a world built for thin people. The responsibility is mine and mine alone. Should my body cost an airline more, it is my responsibility to pay them. Should my body cause discomfort for anyone around me, it is my responsibility to apologize and to comfort them. Should I begin to question why my body is forever a problem, it is my responsibility to keep quiet. And should these problems become untenable for me, it is my responsibility to “just lose weight.” The decent thing, after all, is to transform my body for the sake of those around me.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“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

“No matter the problem, no matter the actions of an aggressor, the fault is mine. Regardless of the politics or life experience of the person I am talking to, the answer comes like clockwork. 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. Just because we are accustomed to hearing it doesn’t make it healthy, productive, humane, or helpful. Its functions are threefold: One, to absolve us of any responsibility to address a widespread social problem. Two, to free us from having to re-examine our own beliefs and biases. And three, to silence and isolate fat people, to show us that any complaint we lodge and any issue we raise will be for naught, and may even cost us relationships, respect, comfort, and safety.”
― 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. 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.57 A major study following contestants from the television show The Biggest Loser showed that despite their dramatic weight loss on camera, most contestants were unable to maintain their smaller size, despite hours of working out each day. The study’s results were staggering: after their extreme televised dieting, every contestant’s body burned fewer calories at rest than it did at the beginning of the competition—and one contestant was shown to burn eight hundred fewer calories each day than expected for a peer of the same gender and size.58 Those results aren’t limited to reality TV contestants. 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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Despite alarmist news headlines and rote beliefs about the unhealthiness of fat, even a cursory look into the newest science of weight paints a much more complex picture.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“This, then, is my life as a fat person. I am expected to absorb the discomfort and outright bias against my body in a world built for thin people.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“Sometimes, those compliments—meant to assuage unconfirmed insecurities—don’t end with a simple, awkward remark. Increasingly, strangers, friends, and family will enlist me in the work of breaking down their own insecurities, often without my consent. Thin people—especially thin women—expect fat people like me to act as midwives for their confidence. How do you do it? Teach me your ways! They expect fat women in particular to become midwives for their waning self-confidence. We are the hired help who never asked for the job and are certainly not paid for it. We are expected to accompany thinner friends to stores that do not carry our sizes, watching as they try on clothing that makes them feel insecure and boosting their confidence with constant reassurances. We become set pieces, two-dimensional props for their more real lives. More than that, we reflect their bodies back to them, their imperfect thinness made beautiful by its proximity to the abject failure of our fatness. We are reminders of what could be. Thinner people embrace fatter people as a way of finding their relative virtue. At least I’m not that fat.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“We can insist that the medical field catch up to its own research and 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.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“choose to believe that my fat friends and family members who are in love are loved fully, are fulfilled in those relationships, and that their partners are not somehow damaged for wanting them.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“What drew him to me was that I appeared to be an easy mark, and I was. What drew him to me was that I wouldn’t be believed, so I wouldn’t say anything—and I didn’t.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

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

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

“Notably, women of all sizes expressed concern about being targeted by anti-fat bias and stigma, though they experienced that fear differently and drew conclusions that directly contradicted the study’s findings. “Among those who are not overweight and who have a hard time understanding what it is like to be overweight, stigma feels like it would help strengthen other people’s resolve to eat less because it strengthens their own.”24”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat

“are disproportionately white or light-skinned, able-bodied, and either straight size (that is, not plus size) or at the smallest end of plus size. While it may not be an intentional one, for many fat activists, the message is clear: body positivity isn’t for us.”
― Aubrey Gordon, What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat