Looks like, "Your fat friend" wrote a new article for self magazine. The article is called; When I Speak Out Against Fat-Shaming, I’m Told to ‘Just Lose Weight’.
Here are the highlights:
“What do you do?” I am at a party, and this kind stranger smiles, offering me a drink. I tell him about my day job when a friend cuts in.
“She’s being modest,” she says. “She’s a writer.”
He lifts his glass in a silent toast. “Right on. What do you write about?”
I tell him I write about the social realities of moving through the world as a fat person. He wrinkles his nose at the word, but mercifully lets it pass, and asks for examples instead. I tell him about the overwhelming disparities faced by fat people:
bias in health care,
discrimination in hiring, not to mention
sexual assault and harassment. I tell him it’s an issue worth confronting, worth uprooting.
He shrugs. “Some of it has got to be motivating, though, right?”
“Motivating?” I echo back to him. I brace myself for what comes next, too tense to let myself reel at the implication that the solution to pervasive discrimination somehow lies with the person left to fend it off. As if my body were to blame for such widespread societal ills.
“Yeah. To make a lifestyle change.”
“You mean weight loss?”
“Yeah! Just takes a little elbow grease. A little tenacity and you’ll be there in no time.”
I tell him that not everyone can lose weight — nor does everyone want to. Besides, I tell him, who wants to be the kind of person who treats people differently based on how they look?
He shrugs again. “I guess, but that’s just the way the world works.”
“Things can change,” I offer. “Just because that’s how it works now doesn’t mean it
has to work that way.”
A third shrug. “But you know what to do, right? I mean, if it’s so bad, just lose weight.”
A familiar exhaustion washes through my veins and marrow. Even small talk at a party is invaded by this dramatic oversimplification of 20 years of my life — dieting, appetite suppressants, anything to become thin. Instead, all those weight-loss attempts had altered the functioning of my body, my metabolism slowed dramatically, and ironically, all those diets left me just as fat as ever, and sometimes fatter. And I’m not alone: Studies have repeatedly shown that
the majority of weight-loss diets fail, and paradoxically are
even associated with weight gain.
Here, with this inquisitive stranger, I run up against the exhausting and faulty logic that seems to follow me everywhere. It comes not just from strangers at parties but from commenters online, strangers on the street, health care providers, coworkers—even friends and family. As a fat person,
just lose weight is everywhere I turn.
Just lose weight, as if the 10 pounds they shed for their New Year’s resolution abided by the same laws as the 220-pound weight loss mandated for me by the body mass index (BMI). As if it was that simple to become the rare (
one in 608, according to analysis) very fat woman who gets thin and stays that way. And as if treating me like a human being, an equal worthy of respect, was so unthinkably burdensome that, instead, I should spend the better part of a decade praying at the altar of a thinness that had never come and that, statistically, might never come.
That faulty logic is everywhere, and it is deeply resistant to new information, to facts, to the science of weight loss. It relies on truisms, repeated so often that they feel like facts. “It’s simple. Calories in, calories out. Burn more than you consume.” It ignores the real-life struggles of millions of fat Americans who, with all their devotion and resources aimed at weight loss, still can’t manage to lose weight and keep it off. It ignores the simple fact that no diet or exercise program has been proven to be effective for widespread, sustainable long-term weight loss for all people.
But perhaps most infuriatingly, our faulty cultural logic of weight loss insulates its speaker from any accountability for their treatment of fat people. Its whisper is a seductive one: “You don’t need to worry about how doctors, teachers, employers, the media treats fat people — they brought it on themselves. You aren’t responsible for what they shove in their fat faces. If they could just muster a little willpower, they could have whatever they wanted.” And in the meantime, countless fat people face poor treatment from overtly judgmental health care providers.
Ultimately,
just lose weight reveals more about the speaker than the fat person it’s aimed at.
Just lose weight reveals a naivety that borders on proud ignorance — a denial of what so much science tells us now. It reveals an arrogant and baseless expertise — the idea that
any thin person knows
every fat person’s body better than the fat people themselves, and the belief that we must be too ignorant or dull not to have tried dieting. And it reveals an eager kind of condescension. The tossed off
just, often followed by a casual
have you heard of keto? or
did you ever try paleo? As if almost every fat person doesn’t already have an unwanted, unwilling expertise in every diet. As if it had never occurred to us that life might be easier as a thin person. As if we could only have gotten this fat through sheer ignorance.
Just lose weight often falls back on surgery. “If dieting doesn’t work, why don’t you just get a lap band?” As if
$14,000 (plus the cost of any follow-up procedures, not to mention any missed days at work, as a caretaker or parent, and more) were laying in my bank account, and as if thinness were my raison d’être. As if weight-loss surgery were a simple, tossed-off decision, easily made when staring down the barrel of the possibility of looking like me, for forever. As if surgery didn’t have health risks of its own. As if it’s a risk-free decision to be made easily and freely by anyone smart enough to consider their own health. As if it had never crossed my mind.
Ultimately, the logic of
just lose weight is infuriatingly self-preserving. It shields its speaker from any accountability at all, from any self-reflection or growth. And it foists the blame for anti-fatness back on fat people, in spite of overwhelming evidence that many of us cannot
just lose weight.
That logic, ubiquitous and ruthless, sets the expectation that fat people like me must embark on a painful, never-ending quest for simple personhood. It mandates that we endlessly self-flagellate, making a performance of our penance for all to see. After all, if we’re going to stay fat, the least we can do is remind thinner people of our inferiority.
But
just is so much simpler for people who have never worn plus sizes, never tried to seek care from a doctor who refused to touch them, never felt a stranger’s hand tugging at their clothing, pulling down a shirt that dared to expose even a half inch of soft fat.
Just is seductive, tempting, a comforting reminder of the supremacy of thinner bodies, and a simple way to brush off the more complex and troubling experiences of those of us who haven’t had the relative luxury of thinness.
Link to article:
https://www.self.com/story/fat-sham...=self&utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social
