I'm fat but I struggle a lot with justifying fat-shaming which is why I want to ask this because I want to make sure I'm not making an excuse for fat-shaming. I realize that thin shaming is nowhere near comparable, but when we talk about cont.

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le-sob-blog

Cont. shaming thin girls who have eating disorders does it become comparable? I’m not sure because as someone who has struggled with an eating disorder I feel it definitely impacts the way we view mental health and people who are ill as stupid

So, first thing’s first: “stupid” is ableist…maybe a better word is “broken” in this case.

And you’re close to seeing the real issue here, which isn’t about thin people with restrictive eating disorders, but with stigmatization of mental health issues. Mental health ableism affects fat people too, but usually fat people have to deal both with the stigma of having an eating disorder and a fatphobic culture that doesn’t believe they can have restrictive or purge-type eating disorders.

I know the culture is hung up on this myth that the size of your body is absolutely and linearly tied to food minus exercise, and that causes a lot of issues like the conflation of very thin and very fat people with restrictive or binge-type eating disorders. But we can’t, in turn, conflate ableistic shaming of people with eating disorders with their size.

In short…it’s complicated. There are a lot of cultural narratives combining to create this issue. Saying that shaming thin people with restrictive EDs is thin-shaming erases fat people with restrictive EDs, and ignores how stigmatized mental health issues are more generally.

I hope that made sense.

-ArteToLife