“You Just Need to Lose Weight” Quotes

“All of us deserve peaceful relationships with our own bodies, regardless of whether or not others perceive us as happy or healthy.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“I don’t really want to hear everything you’re doing to avoid looking like me.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Whether being fat is a choice for an individual or not, they do not deserve discrimination, harassment, or unkind treatment because of the size of their bodies. None of us should have to change our appearance in order to “earn” basic respect and dignity.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Fat hasn’t become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable but because of what we attach to it. 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 fact, bearing little relevance to our worth or worthiness but a great deal of relevance to how we’re treated by individuals and institutions.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“A diet is a cure that doesn’t work for a disease that doesn’t exist.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“This should not be the only book you read by a fat person about fatness and anti-fatness. Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more. Whether you’re new to thinking critically about anti-fatness or a longstanding fat activist, be sure to locate this book, accurately, as just one of many fat perspectives available to you. Writers who aren’t fat have made substantial contributions here too. Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic. Each of these works offer vital analysis of the mechanics and history of anti-fatness. And each will deepen your thinking about anti-fatness and your clarity in countering anti-fatness.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“But not remembering treating fat people badly isn’t necessarily a sign of having treated fat people well—it’s just as likely a sign of having so deeply normalized poor treatment of fat people that we don’t even remember when we’ve done it.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“If a marginalized identity or experience can be established to be a choice, then solving the problems that marginalized individuals face falls to those individuals themselves rather than a broader collective.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“We do not consider the many causes of weight loss. We don’t remember troubling weight loss is sometimes prompted by grief from a breakup, divorce, or death. We don’t think about weight loss caused by cancer or chemotherapy. We don’t consider that the person in front of us might be going through a medical crisis, their weight loss a sign of abrupt and troubling change rather than hard-fought victory. And we don’t consider that weight loss is sometimes linked to declining mental health or a new wave of disordered eating. In our eagerness to compliment what we assume is desired weight loss, many of us end up congratulating restrictive eating disorders, grief, and trauma in the process, revealing that we are in a constant state of surveillance, monitoring and assessing the bodies of those around us. We keep our disappointment and displeasure quiet, revealing our disapproval of fatness only in our celebration of thinness.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“We are told that our choices are our own, and our bodies are reflections of the rightness of those choices. If we are thin, we will be presumed to have made good choices. If we are fat, we must have chosen poorly. Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Healthism is itself a facet of ableism, the web of beliefs, behaviors, and institutional practices that marginalize disabled people. Our cultural perceptions of health and beauty have long been rooted in the rejection of disabled people. For example, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, municipalities across the United States passed so-called “ugly laws,” banning the public appearance of disabled people. According to Canada’s Eugenics Archive, “ugly laws were concerned with more than appearance, prohibiting both the activity of street begging and the appearance in public of ‘certain persons.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Our bodies are believed to be meritocracies, direct reflections of the work we’re willing to put in. We are expected to judge ourselves on what we’re told are the objective measures of our bodies, and we are reminded that others will judge us based on our bodies too.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“I do not know how to convince you to acknowledge—regularly and readily, to yourself and others—that you can feel hurt and also hurt others.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Thinner people are seen as working hard to achieve their thinness, therefore as dedicated and tenacious. Fatter people are seen, consequently, as failing to put in the effort needed to become thin, or healthy and virtuous.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“. In its contemporary iteration, our cultural definition of health depends on thinness. “Get healthy” is used as a euphemistic shorthand for losing weight. Fat people are pressured to change our appearance out of a purported concern for our health, diagnosed solely by looking at us.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“In the cases of Lizzo, Anna O’Brien, and Angelina Duplisea, they were objecting to fat people receiving media attention without performing a pursuit of weight loss or expressing a deep and abiding shame about their appearances. Simply put, they don’t want to look at us. And if they have to, they certainly don’t want to see us depicted neutrally, sexually, or joyfully.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“During and after the American Civil War, racist science boomed, asserting a litany of pseudoscientific, intellectualized justifications for racism and enslavement, allowing white people to prove to ourselves, once again, that our supremacy was innate, earned, and somehow right. That boom time in racist science also left us with the body mass index, a measurement derived solely from the heights and weights of white men conscripts in the nineteenth century and never tested or meaningfully adjusted for anyone else.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Strings shows that white supremacy produces standards of health and beauty that align with whiteness and thinness, and that alignment is far from accidental”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Just lose weight is deeply dismissive, incuriously judgmental. It assumes that fat people have neither considered nor attempted weight loss and, more than that, that thin experts need to teach us about the wrongness of our bodies and how to make them right.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Thinner people are seen as working hard to achieve their thinness, therefore as dedicated and tenacious. Fatter people are seen, consequently, as failing to put in the effort needed to become thin, or healthy and virtuous. We are defined as categorically unhealthy, and therefore as categorically irresponsible.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Cultural conversations prompt us to regard thinness as a major life accomplishment; these myths lend credence to that belief. Many of these myths center around treating fat people as failed thin people, implying that thin people are superior to fat people. These myths aren’t just incorrect or outdated perceptions: they’re tools of power and dominance.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“The term “obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for our bodies. A growing number of fat activists consider the term to be a slur, and many avoid it altogether. The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively, externally determined correct weight for every body. Both terms are derived from a medical model that considers fat bodies as deviations in need of correction. Both are also defined terms used frequently within medical and academic research.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“The fear of being fat is the fear of joining an underclass that you have so readily dismissed, looked down on, looked past, or found yourself grateful not to be a part of. It is a fear of being seen as slothful, gluttonous, greedy, unambitious, unwanted, and, worst of all, unlovable.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Denying that some of us are fat may feel comforting, especially for those who aren’t universally regarded as fat. But to me, it feels like a denial of a fundamental life experience that has significantly impacted me. It’s not just a denial of my size but a denial of the biased attitudes and overt discrimination fat people contend with all too often.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“For many of us, culturally dominant definitions of happy and healthy are out of reach. For people with mental illnesses, happiness can be more a battle than a point of arrival. For chronically ill people, health may feel forever out of reach, all stick and no carrot. And for any of us, regardless of ability or mental health, happiness and health are never static states. All of us fall ill, all of us experience emotions beyond some point of arrival called “happiness.” And when those things happen—when we get sick, when we get sad—they shouldn’t impinge on our perceived right to embrace and care for our own bodies. Ultimately, “as long as you’re happy and healthy” just moves the goalposts from a beauty standard to equally finicky and unattainable standards of health and happiness. All of us deserve peaceful relationships with our own bodies, regardless of whether or not others perceive us as happy or healthy.”
― Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Those in workplaces with human resources departments can advocate for the end of anti-fat “workplace wellness” programs, or workplace “biggest loser” weight-loss competitions.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People

“For me, pressure to lose weight from thin loved ones hurt more than even the harshest jibes from strangers or the cruelest internet trolls. It’s easy to disregard strangers: we know one another for only moments at a time. Few things sting like rejection from those we love most, or conditional love offered with the insistence that they just want to help. “I love you” doesn’t ring so true when it’s followed by “I just want to fix you.”
― Aubrey Gordon, "You Just Need to Lose Weight": And 19 Other Myths About Fat People