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

My 9 highlights

• Whatever we may think of our own beliefs, however hard it may be to stretch beyond our own experience of the world as an unbiased meritocracy, this growing body of research proves that for fat people, it simply isn’t. We get fewer jobs and earn significantly less money. In court, we are more likely to be found guilty by jurors and judges alike. All of this happens because anti-fat bias exists in all of us. It exists in all of us because it exists in every corner of our culture: our institutions, media, and public policy.

• Individuals who began dieting earlier in life reported more stigmatizing situations that people who started dieting later.

• 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.

• “healthy weight” diabetics have “double the risk of dying from heart disease and other causes than overweight people with type 2 diabetes,”

• 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.

• a patchwork of individualized solutions to systemic problems.

• Rather than motivating fat people to lose weight, weight stigma had led to more isolation, more avoidance, and fewer social and material supports.

• Weight Watchers was also my introduction to diet culture, a system of cultural beliefs and practices that equates thinness not just with health, but with moral virtue, and which advocates for weight loss at any cost. Diet culture isn’t just a matter of being on a diet, but of the social forces that make dieting (or lifestyle changes or wellness) culturally mandatory for so many of us.

• Whatever we may want to think about ourselves, we’ve got to make the shift from thinking of anti-fat bias as something we decide to do out of animus to something that exists within us unless and until we uproot it.