TW: mention of just about every awful thing fat people suffer in a later paragraph

Hello again. I’m No-Diet Day #4, still new at FA and reveling in it after spending most of my life hating myself. I know being new, I should be quiet until I’m more informed, but I can’t help but have made a few observations about the staggering difference between what the advocates for fat acceptance say and what the protectors of thin privilege hear.

We say: It’s unhelpful to assign morality to food. The very act of treating high-nutrient food as the boring fiscally stable fiancé you bring home to your mother and processed, sugary, fatty “junk food” as the wild illicit lover you’re daydreaming about the whole visit makes the latter more alluring than it would be if you acknowledged they were both just plain old food and compared their flavors and the way eating them made you feel objectively. You’re more likely to choose genuinely nutritious food when you’re hungry and stop eating it when you’re full if you don’t tack a bunch of moral and emotional baggage onto it… and if you have access to it in the first place, which some do not.



They hear: Since I don’t think burgers, fries, and cake are sinful solidifications of hellfire, and since I don’t perform purifying verbal self-flagellation every time I encounter them, I’m free to eat them all day, every day, until my stomach bursts, and I do, and I encourage everyone else to.

We say: Different people are fat for different reasons. Some gain weight as a side effect of illnesses or medicines, some are simply genetically predisposed to be large no matter their habits, some actually do have poor diets and sedentary habits – and so do some thin people. All of them (thin people included) benefit from healthy eating, exercise, and respectful medical care; none of them deserve to be mocked, shamed, or targeted for violence because of their size. None of them owe society some nebulous, arbitrary, cosmetic definition of “health.”

They hear: I want to actively prevent fat people with unhealthy habits from adopting better ones.

We say: For all but 5-10% of the people who attempt weight loss, it is futile, as studies show they will regain anything they lose within 2-3 years, even if they stay on the diet, due to their metabolism slowing to adjust to the changes. Furthermore, such extreme diet and exercise “lifestyle changes” do your body more damage than your weight would even if all the dire health warnings about weight were true, which they aren’t. Furthermore, health improvements attributed to weight loss are usually actually from improved diet and exercise, and happen with improved diet and exercise even when no weight is lost.

They hear: I am denying weight ever fluctuates. I am also saying people shouldn’t ever exercise or think critically about what they’re eating, since why do either if it won’t result in weight loss?

We say: There is deeply institutionalized thin privilege that makes it harder for fat people to meet their basic needs. They are targeted for acts of violence because of their size, and the perpetrators are often not pursued or punished, even when the violence is particularly brutal, or when the victims are children. Fat employees are assumed to be lazier, stupider, and less ambitious than thin co-workers, even when they outperform them, and are often locked out of promotions when they can even manage to get hired in the first place. They are denied representation in the media, the few comical, insulting, stereotypical roles for fat people given to thin actors in fat suits. Fat people can post videos of themselves running and tumbling and thin people will still insist it’s impossible for them to do these things. Fat people can post their perfect numbers and thin people will still insist they’re unhealthy. Fat people can post their unremarkable daily calorie totals and thin people will still insist they are overeating. Fat people are denied health care. Fat people are blamed for global warming and poverty in war zones. Thin adults feel entitled to fat children’s seats on airplanes. Babies are left with parents who starve them to the point of death because they look fat in their cradles, while babies with diagnosed glandular disorders are taken away from loving parents and put into foster care… because they look fat in their cradles. Fat children are committing suicide because they see no other way to escape the bullying and stigma - weight-related bullying being excluded from most anti-bullying campaigns. Fat people are told, with a straight face, they should be kept in concentration camps until they either get thin or die. These things need to stop. Yesterday.

They hear: The mere fact I am emboldened enough to complain about these things to your superior thin self with my inferior fat mouth means your efforts to keep us down are not extreme enough. Better tighten those thumbscrews even more, or fat people are going to take over the world and persecute thin people.

So fatphobes take these things we didn’t say but they heard anyway and construct a false view of fat acceptance, formulating arguments against their own warped, fictitious version of the movement, and pat themselves on the back for knocking us arrogant fatties back down a few pegs.

Now, what do you call that sort of thing?

If you said “strawman,” you’re right.

Someone should make a drawing of a fat strawman. I bet it’d be cute.