Here are some values I hold:
- fat people deserve to live
- fat people deserve to live free of harassment and discrimination
- fat people deserve access to quality health care
- individual health is not a moral duty or something we owe society
- fat people are worthy of love and respect
And just for shits n’ gigs, here are some facts that should be simply self-evident but are somehow controversial:
- you can’t know a person’s health status just by looking at them
- individual health exists along a spectrum, and is a continually changing state
- fat people can and do live long lives
- thin people can and do live short lives
- most of us will become disabled before we die
- all of us will die, so projecting the fear of death onto fat people is weird (ok, that second clause is not a fact but a value judgement)
- there are no diseases that only fat people get
- weight cycling, aka yo-yo dieting, is physically harmful
- not all thin people are healthy
- not all fat people are unhealthy
- eating disorders are profoundly unhealthy
- eating disorders are the deadliest of all mental illnesses
- many fat people have disordered eating or eating disorders because of the social, political and medical pressure put on them to become thin
- medical discrimination exists in the health care system to a significant degree
- it is difficult for a fat person to access weight-neutral health care
- many fat people avoid medical care due to fear of medical discrimination and weight stigma
- not receiving medical care has a direct impact on an individual’s health
- a fat person who has anorexia (labelled by medicine as “atypical anorexia”) is often praised for their “healthy eating” (i.e. presumed weight loss efforts)
- one’s weight in relation to their height is not an indicator of disease (i.e. BMI is trash)
- fat is not a behaviour
- the presence or absence of fat on the body is the result of a variety of factors, including genetics, hormones, income inequality, and environmental factors
- individual health is impacted by social determinants to a much greater degree than whether or not you eat “processed” food
- fat and fat bodies are not an aberration but are in fact on the spectrum of normal human shapes/sizes. They can be seen in people, art and artifacts around the world going back thousands of years (here is a wonderful one that is 8,000 years old, unearthed in what is now central Turkey). Thus fat bodies are not unique to post-WW II North America
So many folks are deeply invested in making health claims that can be used to legitimate discrimination against fat people that having a genuinely good faith conversation about weight and health is rarer than finding a unicorn with a rainbow for an asshole. All too often, “health” is played like a trump card against people who are perceived as being in poor health, i.e. fat people. And for me, the bottom line is that I just don’t engage in conversations where the very humanity of larger-bodied people is up for debate.
Conversations I am open to having? One-on-one conversations with people who genuinely are open to exploring the possibility that what they’ve learned about fat from billion-dollar diet-industrial complex may be wrong, and coaching clients who want to pursue their health goals in a physically and psychologically non-harmful way. If you are one of these two types of people, I’d be happy to hear from you.
