So many skinny people will not gain a pound without extremely overeating and barely put in any effort into staying skinny and then they'll assume that that's a universal experience. That fat people must be stuffing their mouths at every moment they're not actively seen by a thin person. That all it takes to be skinny is thirty minutes of yoga a day. They wouldn't be able to fathom the fact that there are naturally fat people or that so many fat people are starving themselves every day but are still fat. They think having a smoothie and going to the gym for an hour three times a week is all it takes to maintain thinness. So the only thing they can think is that fat people MUST be eating a full pizza and ten snacks a day.

I really need to make a banner that explains the basics about fatphobia and diet culture and add that banner to all of my posts. I write stuff not thinking it'll be spread past the followers of this blog, who most already know all of the facts about fatphobia and diet culture, so I just phrase my posts for people who already understand the context. And then suddenly I'll have posts every so often that go further than my immediate circles to have 1,000-20,000 notes, which then ends up with people reblogging and liking while only knowing the small snippet of information I just talked about. I end up having to reblog a lot of people's additions with explanations about fatphobia and diet culture, which is the purpose of my reblog right now.

The results aren't showing because dieting doesn't work, and it has been proven not to work for actual, literal decades. There is no scientifically proven way to sustainably lose weight. No diet, no exercise, no pill, no surgery, no "mindset," no "willpower," no amount of self hatred. At most, you will keep the weight off for five years before regaining all of the weight and sometimes even more weight than what you started with. No amount of being active or cutting out "junk" will turn you into a thin person. Even thin and mid-size people cannot forcibly change their bodies long term.

Here is a post I made a long time ago with links to sources about how 95% of all weight loss fails (and that's the actual statistic, not an exaggeration) and how weight is extremely determined by genetics. Your body wants to choose its size, and it will always revert back to the shape it wants to be after being forcibly changed. Some of the sources in that post are links to posts by the blog @bigfatscience, which is a blog that analyzes, explains, and gives context for studies that are the most devoid of bias and have good methodology. Their posts include links to the studies themselves, so I am not just linking random Tumblr opinions as proof to you. I'm linking their posts specifically so that you can have both the actual study and an analysis by a person who has professional experience in research and gives more context on their blog than I do.

Diet culture is a lie. I have other posts that point out its flawed logic, but you can read about diet culture on that blog I linked or the other sources I'm going to give you. But just think: Why profit off of someone once by fixing a problem when you can instead make up a problem, blame your products' failures at solving that made up problem on consumer error, and then keep that money-making tree for life as they keep buying your "solution" again and again and again since you also fuel all of the content telling the person to hate themself for having the made up problem? Why is the world getting fatter if weight loss/diet companies actually sell products that work? Why do you see people who have been on diets since childhood and are now trying for their 15th time? Wouldn't they have "learned how to do it" by now? Wouldn't they have had enough "willpower" by now after an entire lifetime of being abused, harassed, starved, mutilated, shamed, ridiculed, underrepresented, vilified, and used as the punchline of everyone's jokes?

And then when you account for how fat people have a wage gap, are given worse healthcare than thin people if they're given any at all (which often kills them), are categorized as a disease despite contradictory evidence and no studies that go beyond common logical fallacies, are not accommodated for in any aspect of society (clothes, chairs, airplanes, exercise equipment, desks, etc.), how would someone who has endured all of that hardship their whole life still be fat if they could just choose not to be and no longer have to endure any of it?

If you want to liberate yourself from diet culture, I suggest researching intuitive eating and fat activism. Here are some other resources for you. I have over 20,000 posts on my blog of fat positivity and posts talking about these topics, so I don't feel like writing pages and pages of an essay explaining everything I already have explained numerous times before. But I hope you'll use these resources and do your own research to educate yourself and finally let your body be free to be the shape it wants:

@bigfatscience

@heavyweightheart

Heal with Kailin

Maintenance Phase Podcast

Aubrey Gordon

All of these resources have already compiled studies and research for you, so they are good places to start.

People have been giving this old post notes recently, so I'm updating this post with a link to more writing, studies, books, and resources about fatphobia and diet culture.

Here you go

Please talk to people in your life about fatphobia so we can finally start acknowledging this form of oppression! Fatphobia kills and is as horrific and complex as any other form of oppression! Please make this a mainstream activism movement!

Extremely important for people to know. If your doctor tells you you are too fat for top surgery, they are wrong.

@vaspider @scientia-rex @living400lbs

i’ve started looking at weight and health the way i look at class and income and it really puts a lot of things into a new perspective.

let me explain: in america at least, the lower class have significantly worse health outcomes, even when accounting for other factors. just being poor is enough to make your overall health worse. we don’t know that being fat makes your health directly worse, like the data just isn’t there, but for a moment, pretend it does.

imagine going to the doctor with a health problem and the doctor looking at your chart and saying well, this problem will be less severe if you go up an income bracket. have you thought about becoming rich? it would really help. start by saving a little money every month.

ridiculous, right?? very few people successfully go from working class to rich, it just doesn’t happen on a large scale in society. maybe for a time you pick up some overtime hours, spend a little beyond your means, and appear rich. but eventually you burn out, your car needs to be repaired, and you return to being working class.

we do have this data: only some people can successfully lose large amounts of weight, and only a tiny fraction of people who lose that weight actually keep it off for more than a year. telling people to lose weight for their health is just absurd because they almost certainly can’t do it any more than they can double their income for their health.

and yet i see it everywhere. a little poster in my work breakroom tells me to improve my blood pressure by losing weight! a psa on the radio says you need to take care of your heart by losing weight! we can’t even conclusively prove that weight is the cause rather than just correlated with a lot of these problems but here it is offered anyway: have you tried being rich?

You hit the nail on the head. A lot of people tend to try and invalidate fatphobia as a form of oppression by saying its not an immutible quality like race or sexuality or gender. The old “you can lose weight, i can’t become white/straight/cis” argument.

That’s because fatphobia is a lot more like classism; i.e. it’s a form of bigotry that is only TECHNICALLY changeable. They’re both seen as a lot more changeable than they actually are, for all the reasons you’ve listed.

gd how many times and ways can i say this but fatness is an actual objective experience, not a fucking feeling, and this doesn’t magically change bc we have eating disorders.

fat people are paid less, hired less, and have less economic mobility. they are brutally abused in social contexts, including, many times, by their own families. they suffer deadly medical discrimination. from public transportation to classrooms to clothing, the world is physically built in a way that marginalizes them. fat people are poorer. fatphobia intersects w other axes of oppression in even more violent ways.

fat people with eating disorders are grossly mistreated and usually misdiagnosed in clinical contexts, if they are lucky enough to get insurance coverage. they should not have to sit silently while those of us who are thin and have EDs spew bigotry against them bc we’re unwilling to examine our behavior and beliefs.

fatphobia is rooted in imperialist white supremacist capitalist patrarichy. mental illness is not a justification for perpetuating it once we know better. there are literally countless ways to express and process our disorders without harming others w unrestrained, unexamined fatphobia.

Susan Sontag, Illness As Metaphor

look I’m all for diversity because that’s just how the world is, but y’all better realize that includes fat characters too and no using them for fat jokes doesn’t count

thin people can reblog this by the way

i don’t think brainless stan twitter is ready for this tea yet but i really do think people (skinny people in particular cuz y’all are some weirdos) took “skinny legend” and ran with it because they always have and always will idolize thinness as the most beautiful, most desirable, etc like y’all always hyperfixate on thin bodies and it’s weird. i’m sure FKA twigs isn’t the only person who’s been made to feel uncomfortable by that statement either which is a shame honestly

The “deserved better” squad ™

people are sooo against eating disorders until they take away the names and switch it to “dieting” or “health tips”

like ohh you don’t support eating disorders and think they’re terribly tragic? then why are you constantly talking about how you eat too much? why do you separate foods into categories like “guilty pleasures” and “guilt free treats”? why do you insist that the ultimate healthy diet is eating less and working out more? why do you think you have to work out a lot more if you ate something “"bad”“

why are eating disorders only bad if we’re being hospitalized, but if we’re drastically losing weight and dont have a diagnosis we’re “doing great”

why did i have to hear more and more compliments about my weight loss than people concerned because i was getting weaker and becoming even more tired than usual? why did people make me want to go back to starving myself because i want the compliments that they gave me when i was rapidly losing weight?

eating disorders are only seen in a bad light when people are either dead or dying, but if we’re just getting skinnier it doesn’t matter how we lost the weight- we’re seen as a success story because we turned out thin and thats what really matters right? being thin? thats the only goddamn important thing in this world

Multiply this by a thousand if you’re fat.

Most of “dieting culture” is actually deeply rooted in orthorexia, an obsession with only eating “pure” and “healthy” foods in controlled amounts.  It’s currently not classed as an eating disorder in itself, but rather a symptom of disordered eating behavior that goes hand in hand with anorexia or bulimia. 

It’s an obsession with eating only “the right foods” or a perception of “healthy, pure foods” and having “cleanse” days and “detoxing” when you slip up and eat either the wrong food or too much of something. Now, tell me that doesn’t sound like something you might read under Cosmo’s “top ten tips to lose belly fat for summer”, or hell, literally any health vlogger on youtube with thousands of subscribers claiming they cured their depression/cancer by doing the banana cleanse, which yes, is actually a real thing. Don’t do it. Please. Love yourselves.  

A UK based study (can’t find it right now but I will add it in if I can) on eating disorders noted that those most likely to suffer from the symptoms of orthorexia are people who think they are “just dieting” or trying to be really healthy by following popular “pure” food movements like veganism and paleo, but to unhealthy extremes. Usually because they’ve been suckered in by popular food vloggers who argue violently against the validity of the term, or the notion you can ever eat “too healthily”, despite the term being coined by Dr Steven Bratman back in 1996, a physician well known for being an advocate for safe, alternative medicines and therapies for better health—so not just a “western physician” ragging on “pure alternatives” like a lot of these diet frauds claim.

Eating healthily is not about deprivation. The human body needs fat, it needs carbohydrates, it needs salt, and a whole host of other things people will try to convince you you need to eat 0 of, in order to be healthy. 

Most of you know I got super sick at the start of the year from an horrendous virus that meant I couldn’t eat solids for almost six weeks, I lost a lot of weight very quickly, over 20lbs. And while I’ve managed to gain some of that back as I’ve gradually been able to increase my food intake (I am now up to roughly 1200 calories a day which is still too low for my size and age, but much better than the 200 I was living on for over a month) I’m still suffering the side effects of being forced to eat nothing but organic oatmeal and bone broth for all those weeks, including but not limited to hair loss, broken nails, skin that looks like absolute shit, and not to even mention the mental and physical fatigue I’m still suffering from over six months later. 

And don’t get me wrong, I was eating healthy foods, I was enduring the “detox” dream so many magazines and health vloggers rave about. But the truth of it is, healthy humans aren’t made to live on those things alone, (and that’s not actually how the body detoxes itself, but that’s another rant for another time)—regardless of how healthy those things are. 

You need to eat.

You are allowed to eat. 

Fuck these disordered ideas of societal norms. You can be healthy and happy and worthy, without being thin.

Even if you are eating enough to get by, this doesn’t even begin to touch on the other mental health implications of disordered eating.

I was on a very strict diet for years, for athletic purposes. Yeah, it was enough calories and nutrients to get by, and it did what it was ‘supposed’ to do, but here I am 7 years later and I struggle with food. I’m a healthy weight, but I don’t handle social situations well when someone else serves. The first visit to my SO’s family 5 years ago, I had a breakdown after two days because their mother insisted on serving me, but it wasn’t food my body could handle well (lots of oil) and more importantly, I wasn’t in control of what I was expected to eat. Years later, I still can’t handle situations where I’m not control of what I’m expected to eat.

And that’s what it’s boiled down to for me, tbh.It’s a measure of control over my life. And I know I’m not the only one. Disordered eating impacts both your physical and mental health.

Anyway. That’s my piece. Be kind to yourself, cause society sure isn’t.

Huge thanks to @thenib for having me make this comic! If Tumblr’s resizing makes parts illegible, you can also read the nicer original version over on The Nib’s website: “Fatness, Femininity, and the Media We Deserve”

Representation matters.

Queer representation like

what are your thoughts on ‘skinny shaming’?

As someone who has been “thin-shamed” I can say it does Not at all go hand in hand with fat shaming. People “thin-shaming” me was mostly verbal harassment- you’re too skinny, you look like a boy, eat a fucking cheeseburger, what’s wrong with you why don’t you like food?

But guess what, I don’t have a problem finding clothes that fit me. There aren’t companies that refuse to make clothes for my size. There is no shortage of messages telling me that despite the harassment of some, I am still beautiful and ideal even if I’m unhealthy. Despite being thin-shamed, I still PANICKED when I started a medicine that made me gain weight, and I had to really analyze that, because no matter what my culture will still say that “fat is unideal” “fat is bad” and “honestly its fine to starve yourself / but shameful and bad to overeat.”

So “thin-shaming” is shitty because it’s shitty to be judged and have people make assumptions about you. But Fat-shaming is institutional, it’s not just individuals harassment and judgement, it’s potential jobs, it’s clothing companies, it’s media and advertisement, all telling you you’re bad as you are. Like what a way shittier thing.

This is the difference.

refinery29:

Watch: Danielle Brooks just gave the most heartfelt speech about what it’s like to finally see your body represented in the media

I made a comic about every comment thread under any content involving a fat person existing. Ever. This counts as my inktober #1 because I spent way more time on it than I should have.

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

This casual rant is like a primer on weight science. Amazing. I second their book recommendations, and would add to the list Body Respect by Drs Bacon & Aphramor, Body of Truth by journalist Harriet Brown, and What’s Wrong with Fat? by UCLA professor of sociology Abigail Saguy.

#truth