Thin privilege is people (even some of those smaller fats in the FA movement) believing that because I’m not a “good” fat, I deserve less respect.

I’m a 300 pound woman. I like to eat.I eat the kind of food that makes me gain weight in the kind of quantities that most people wouldn’t. Chocolate and bread are my two favorite things.

I don’t exercise. I hate exercising. My cholesterol is terrible and my blood pressure is through the roof.

HOWEVER - my body is still MINE. I am still a HUMAN BEING and I am still deserving of the same basic DIGNITY and RESPECT as every other human on this planet. Just because I choose to eat unhealthy food and not exercise doesn’t give anybody the right to taunt me. It doesn’t make my body a piece of public property to be commented on. My fat body is MINE, just as any thin, unhealthy person’s body is theirs. Their thin, unhelathy bodies don’t receive constant unwanted advice and comments, so why should mine? Smokers aren’t shamed. Thin people eating junk food are considered cute or quirky. I’m just considered a pig.

I feel most hurt by the constant need to address health in the FA movement. On this site I often see people proclaiming that despite being fat they love vegetables and fruit and eat them all the time, or exercise daily. It’s fantastic if those things are done but I feel shamed for being an unhealthy, “bad” fat person - the kind of fat person who doesn’t do these things and thus deserves the bad treatment she receives.

Would it be okay if users tagged the posts where they mentioned the kind of exercise they do and healthy foods they eat? Perhaps there could be a healthy food or vegetables tag, or even if any of the posts including food could be tagged with health or something similar so that I can avoid them? It might be a bit much to ask but I really enjoy this site and coming across posts like that often brings me to tears from shame for not being “a healthy big girl” (my mom’s words).

Thanks for this site. For the first time in years I actually feel comfortable with my body. I’ve come a long way despite still feeling ashamed of myself for ever eating.

Mod response:

I keep coming back around to this in the inbox, and trying to figure out the best way to deal with the problem. Because yes, absolutely, this submitter is correct. Fat activist spaces end up devoting so much energy and space to repeating HAES messages and “good fatty” affirmations, and while that has its uses – which we’ve discussed before – it also serves to continue to shame “bad fatties.” (Also, by the fucking way, I cannot express how incredibly sick I am of people insisting that someone eats soooooooo healthy, because see, they’re vegetarian/vegan! Veg*n eating does not equal healthy, both because health is not a monolith, and because there are lots of ways to eat that includes no animal products that are simply do not give any body enough nutrients.)



And I, too, fucking hate exercise, and eat whatever the fuck I want. And I do get really really sick of the waves of “bad fatty” shame.



I’m happy to institute tags for things, although of course this has the same problem all tagging does on TITP: most of the posts here are submissions, we have multiple people queueing things, some stuff is always going to get missed, and this space is always going to talk about some topics so commonly that it’s impossible to tag effectively for them (food comes to mind; if you can’t read about mentions of food, this is just never going to be a safe space to read for you). The problem I have is, I don’t know what tags to use. Submitters can only use tags that already exist, as far as I know, so we have to initiate those tags here, and they need to be tags that people who want to filter for them can use effectively. So, we need to come up with some tags. Certainly we can use “#exercise” (which already exists, we’d just have to try to step up consistency in tagging), although I think that tagging for ever possible type of exercise may be too complicated for us. But I don’t care for the tag “#healthy eating”, and I think “#vegetables” is useless for the kind of filtering we’re talking about, being actually too narrow, since many “good fatty” type posts will never mention vegetables as such.



So. Suggestions for tags?



-MG

