As a young teenager, I was always worried that I would morph into what I thought was the worst possible thing: a fat adult. I remember sitting at a cafeteria table among friends in seventh grade when a friend said that, when you’re a little kid, going over 100 pounds is bad, but that at our age, going over 200 was really bad. At the time, I was over 200. And my waist size was nudging past a 38, slightly toward a 40.

My burgeoning body countered the more sentimental mythology that I had heard at home: I didn’t need to worry that much about my weight as an 8 ,9 or 10 year old because as I grew older, the fat on my body would wane. One day, as the myth went, my pudge would melt away and a slimmer, average-bodied adult would emerge. My family would sigh in relief. What I had was called, with affection, baby fat.

Telling me that my fat was simply “baby fat” was meant not only to assuage my concerns about my weight, but also meant to calm my mother and sister’s worries that one day I’d become a fat adult. But my fat never melted away as the myth said it would. I stayed fat, confirming those fears for both me and my family.

A 1998 study suggested that children can learn implicit weight bias as early as age 3. And so many TV shows and movies promote weight stigma, even those directed at kids. In Matilda, the hefty, muscular and gender-defiant Ms. Trunchbull threatens the security of Matilda (who has a villainous, pudgy dad and an overweight antagonistic brother, much like the family makeup in the Harry Potter series) and the innocent, feminine, and skinny Miss Honey. Daddy Pig on Peppa Pig is constantly shamed for his weight, promoting the idea among that fat people’s bodies are fair game for comments and taunts. One 2013 U.K. study even found that children more likely to ascribe negative traits to an overweight children’s book character by age 4.

Adults foist their own fatphobia onto children in numerous ways, not the least of which is by watching what they eat. The link between food consumption, fat, and lack of good health, which many studies have found inconclusive, then becomes hardwired at an early age.

“When we start policing children around food and telling them they’ll get big if they eat too much, we start the concept of ‘too much food equals a fat person’ and that’s a false equivalency,” says Virgie Tovar, a fat activist and author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat.

The term baby fat is, at its core, an oxymoron. American culture views childhood, especially infancy, as the pinnacle of innocence. Fatness is the absence of morality. Babies don’t have choice. But, as the belief goes, fat people choose to be fat, every day, by what they put in their mouth and how they move their bodies.

“Fat is always considered a state of lack of innocence,” Tovar says. “We believe that fat people have lost their moral compass.”

Literal baby fat, however, is both very real and mythological. Infants, like hibernating mammals, boast high levels of brown adipose tissue or “brown fat” that helps keep them warm. So, yes, babies have fat. But it’s just fat, there’s nothing particularly infant-like about it. The mythological part comes when we draw a distinction between so-called baby fat and other types of fat, seemingly saying that there is good and bad fat: the fat that happens to us as a baby is good, but the fat that we acquire as an adult, not so much. According to Dr. Jennifer Gaudiani, M.D., author of Sick Enough and an internist who specializes in eating disorders, making an allowance for baby fat at the expense of denigrating adult fat is an equation where no one wins.