I’m in school to be an echocardiographer, which is ultrasound for hearts. I absolutely loooove it. It’s very challenging and a lot of fun. We’re near the end of the echo classes (I still have 2 modules worth of classes on the vascular system), so we’re covering “miscellaneous” topics that didn’t fit under anything else we’ve talked about so far. Unfortunately, one of the topics we covered today was “obesity.” My teacher, who is a sonographer as well as an anesthesiologist, kept saying shit like “All obese people have high blood pressure or diabetes” and it just really rubbed me the wrong way. I guess I’m a smaller fat at size 16-18 or so, but I have a pretty large stomach. I wanted to say something so bad, but I’m the only person in my class that would think that way. All my other classmates have various forms of thin privilege, and the other women are always going on about how they need to lose their baby weight or lose that extra 5 lbs (I’ve tried to get them to stop saying such ugly things about themselves, buuut I guess they feel more comfortable to keep trying to make themselves smaller, which I can’t blame them for, really). One of the two men is an exercise fanatic (who has a myriad of heart problems, so there’s some more evidence that thin doesn’t equal healthy) and the other is very thin because he has a hole in his heart that shunts blood from one side to the other, so his heart has to work much harder to pump the extra volume of blood. I wish I’d had the courage to say something. Luckily, it was a very short section and we moved on pretty quickly… Ugh….

Thin privilege is being able to learn about important medical information you’ll need to know in the future without being labeled as a problematic disease.