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

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We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. You see it on TV, like when Miranda from Sex and the City joins Weight Watchers right after having a baby.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat - ScienceDirect What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat - ScienceDirect

This kind of discrimination against fat people is part of a larger cultural obsession with thinness, which has roots in White supremacy. A concern troll might ask a fat person what diets they’ve tried before asking them if they even want to lose weight, or even ask for their consent to engage in what might be a sensitive topic. And if you are a fat person who has thought about this a lot, my hope is to have created something that allows fat folks to see themselves reflected in a way that doesn’t usually happen. What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting, which very fat people are pressured heavily to do. As organizers, our job is to build a collective vision, make sure that folks are enrolled in that collective vision, and push together in concert to make some changes.People are MAYBE allowed to be fat, but they have to be healthy, or actively trying to become healthy.

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat - Harvard

Anti-fatness isn’t about saving fat people, expressing concern for our health, or even about hurting us.

The ways that we treat fat people are kind of terrible, and they don’t actually make fat people thinner, or healthier, or happier. She recommends some easy policy changes, like including body size as a protected class in schools where states have banned bullying. Unlike the recent wave of memoirs and quasi self-help books that encourage readers to love and accept themselves, Gordon pushes the discussion further towards authentic fat activism, which includes ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increased access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence. A world where the words ‘obesity epidemic’ are shared everywhere as fact without really anything to back up the reality that, even if there is an increase in obesity, there’s literally no proven way for the vast majority of people to lose weight and keep it off. There’s no question that anti-fat bias, and anti-fatness as a structure, is a direct outgrowth of anti-Black racism,” Gordon says.