Fat stuff

anti-fatness is not just body shaming.

anti-fatness is discrimination. anti-fatness is having next to no legal protections for being discriminated against. anti-fatness is being denied housing, jobs, receiving less pay and promotions (legally) because of your size. anti-fatness is being denied access to clothing, seating, transportation, and other human rights because infrastructure has been designed to exclude you. anti-fatness is less likelihood of receiving a fair trial. anti-fatness is dehumanization. anti-fatness is being denied necessary surgeries, but not surgery that amputates the digestive tract with the intent to starve and shrink you (it doesn’t work either). anti-fatness is mutilation. anti-fatness is being subject to torture devices that bolt your mouth shut. anti-fatness is being told by close friends, family, and professionals that you are better off living with an eating disorder or other life-threatening illness. anti-fatness sells you starvation as a guaranteed opt-out of oppression, but doesn’t tell you that bodies will always regain weight to survive. anti-fatness blames and punishes you for failing at an achievement that is quite literally impossible. anti-fatness is a $90 billion dollar industry. anti-fatness is being denied gender-affirming care. anti-fatness is being barred from in vitro fertilization and reproductive healthcare. anti-fatness is being barred from adopting children. anti-fatness is being removed from your loving parents because they couldn’t make you thin. anti-fatness is intentionally starving your own baby so they won’t get fat. anti-fatness is disproportionately high suicide rates. anti-fatness is being killed at the hands of medical neglect and mistreatment. anti-fatness is the world preferring a dead body over a fat one.

"Shaming and bullying fat people does not motivate them to lose weight!!" Ok but also... shaming and bullying people is bad, full stop? Even if it DID lead people to lose weight, that's not actually a valid reason to be cruel? Fatness is not some curse we need to throw whatever works at

Also even if it did cause weight loss, it would be an example of ableism (along with the fatphobia) where we're told that only physical health matters and mental health can be put on the backburner. Believing bullying, harassing, ridiculing, and mocking fat people is okay if it results in weight loss is saying "We fixed this fat person's health by trading in their fatness for a mental illness that will lead to negative effects on their life and eventual suicide! We did it!!!!" Not only is fatness not inherently unhealthy, but it's fucked up that society believes a fat person with good mental health is worse than a starved fat person on their way to a couple of years of thinness with depression and an eating disorder that will eventually kill them. And because weight loss is proven to not be sustainable, the person will probably have regained the weight by the time their mental illnesses take their life. But don't worry, the world will phrase it as a consequence of "ob*sity," not oppression that led to debilitating and lethal mental disorders.

i do not know who else needs to hear this aside from just me but i am writing it down because it helps:

there is no weight limit for liking your body.

there is no rule that says if you’re over a certain bmi you have to hate yourself. you’re not required to think you’re ugly if you’re not skinny, and you’re not required to want to lose weight.

you are allowed to not want to be thin.

this world we live in tells us that we should only like thin bodies and therefore should only like ourselves if we are thin. but your body is yours, and nobody should get to tell you what to think about it.

give yourself permission to love it.

The number of times I've earnestly seen the take "but it's good for fat people to be mean to them! It motivates them to lose weight!"

Also whenever you provide even light pushback that maybe bullying people does not magically make them skinny but instead makes them depressed, they immediately demand scientific sources as if "bullying fat people is good for them" is scientific concensus and you therefore owe them a peer reviewed paper.

No babe I'm so sorry you're not actually doing people a service by being an asshole to them you just want an acceptable target and have decided that fat people are one. You don't get to be a bad person until you've produced 3 peer reviewed meta analyses that being a dick to random fat people improves their health, OK? I'm sure people will thank you for your invaluable service of being an asshole.

I don't know how to articulate this well, but I really fucking hate the way a lot of thin writers write fat characters. Like how men write women "breasting boobily" there is something so dehumanizing about how fat characters are often written. "He waddled", "he lumbered", the writer of the book I'm reading always mentions this characters "fleshy hand" when he does something with his hand. Like, we already know that he's fat. There is no need to describe everything he does as "doing it fatly".

a lot of newer christmas movies are fun and silly, making santa cool and/or jacked and like, I'm here for that! but like. why can't they ever be fucking fat. why do i only ever see fat santas in ads or like, rankin bass stuff. it's one of his defining features! he's FAT. let him be fat!!!!!!! why can't he be cool and fat? jacked and fat? there are some where like, he's big, which is cool, like Klaus, but it's always this stylized boxy-proportion made to look big but not fat. im just. so tired. he can be fat if he's funny, or silly, or old. haha. look at the jolly fat man. but when he's supposed to be cool? or powerful? nope! can't have a fat character be shown as cool or powerful or attractive!! even if it's a DEFINING CHARACTER FEATURE.

god forbid people be fat. god forbid fat people be shown as anything other than silly or a joke.

im fuckin tired, man

Is there a word for the feeling of having to compensate for being fat? I so often feel - and I know I'm not the only one - that since I'm fat, I can't afford any other breeches of conventional appeal, and I have to pull out all the stops to convince the world that I'm not repulsive, actually. I must be well-dressed and smell nice all the time, have smooth and flawless skin, have beautiful hair and chic makeup, not to mention a wonderful, confident personality.

And I don't! I often leave the house in something sloppy and comfortable. I happen to sweat sometimes. I don't like to wear makeup a lot. My skin is pale, easily irritated and flushed, dry in places, purple and green veins showing everywhere, celulite, dark body hair, stretch marks - it has most of the things you never see in media. I'm bad at styling my hair. I'm shy and awkward and difficult to talk to if I don't know you super well.

Those are all normal human things, but I feel like by having the audacity to be fat, I have forfeited my rights to any other so-called imperfections.

NO NO WAIT YOU ACTUALLY PUT IT INTO WORDS

I’ve always had the “okay I’m fat so I have to be as perfect as possible in every other way” so I’m always worried about my breath. I always check after eating if there’s something in my teeth. I always put on lots of deodorant and shower more often than my partner. I don’t let myself make too many jokes about my other imperfections even when they don’t hurt me and go over well with peers. I’m not willing to play a DND character who isn’t also self-conscious and trying to put her best foot forward because otherwise I’m roleplaying a character who doesn’t have good manners. It doesn’t end there either, I could keep going.

It’s just strange because I kind of thought I was alone in this.

Research has shown that pleasure affects nutrient absorption. In a 1970s study of Swedish and Thai women, it was found that when the Thai women were eating their own (preferred) cuisine, they absorbed about 50% more iron from the meal than they did from eating the unfamiliar Swedish food. And the same was true in the reverse for the Swedish women. When both groups were split internally and one group given a paste made from the exact same meal and the other was given the meal itself, those eating the paste absorbed 70% less iron than those eating the food in its normal state.

Pleasure affects our metabolic pathways; it’s a facet of the complex gut-brain connection. If you’re eating foods you don’t like because you think it’s healthy, it’s not actually doing your body much good (it’s also unsustainable, we’re pleasure-seeking creatures). Eat food you enjoy, it’s a win-win.

what

no seriously

what?

PLEASURE IS A NECESSARY PART OF HUMAN HEALTH, BOTH PSYCHOLOGICALLY AND PHYSICALLY

this is why you should be eating your chips with salsa and guac instead of beating yourself up for not eating a salad with tomato and avocado (unless you are a salad bitch like me then enjoy both of them!)

here’s a recent systemic review of all the research done on the subject

for those of you wondering if the studies cited above are legit and if so where we can read about them, here’s a link to one of the (more than a dozen!) papers written on the topic of nutrient absorption and how you eat your food:

hey look, additional info!

So forcing kids to eat things they can’t stand is *also* related to malnutrition huh

Hey, look!

Literal proof that pleasure-denying religions are literally evil!

Fat people deserve to love ourselves and be confident as fuck.

-Mod Worthy

absolutely enamored by rose quartz's body type and character design. especially after the pink diamond reveal. like, girl CHOSE to become a fat woman. and everyone around her (rightfully) thought she was incredibly hot for it. queen shit.

Carrie Metz-Caporusso

I have never in my life seen back roll tattoos and now I'm in love 😭💖

— -artetolife on the AMA classification of obesity as a disease via ThisIsThinPrivilege.

fat men deserve appreciation outside of people pointing out how we're "actually" (supposedly) really strong and how people with (insert specific fat body type here) are "actually" stronger than bodybuilders with chiseled abs.

strength/ability/fitness/etc. =/= worthiness.

It will never not baffle me how hard society tries to insist that fatness is an abnormality. The average western woman wears plus size clothing. One of the smallest garments on the scale is called a medium. Most people with anorexia are in the overweight bmi category, yet somehow that's known as "atypical anorexia". Fatness is often labeled the cause of a number of diseases, but there are literally no diseases exclusive to fat bodies. Looking at movies and television, you'd think the world was 98% thin people. It's not.

My point isn't that if it was pretty rare to be fat, fatphobia would be okay. Of course not.

My point is that we're surrounded by all these artificial indicators that fatness is unnatural and uncommon and it's just not true?? Humans are not always thin and we've never all been thin and we're not all meant to be thin. Fat humans are a normal type of human. Fatness is a feature, not a bug.

wanna add on to this beautifully written post! atypical ana depends where u live. sometimes its "ur overweight" sometimes its "ur not underweight" (it varies on who you ask) and sometimes its "you have ana for sure but are missing something somewhere for that entire diagnosis"

^^been in ED groups before and its a common misconception. i believe america is the land of the encouraging anorexics to be even more skinny for the 'better' diagnosis (yikes), but again depends on whatever book you use!!!

It's so frustrating when people refuse to challenge their biases and actually look at the current science. Fat scholars and scientists keep presenting good, legitimate research that confirms that you can have a healthy and normal food intake and be fat, and all some of you have to say is "lol the fatties are lying on the internet". And it feeds into the narrative stereotype that fat people are immoral, untrustworthy, out of control and just kind of dumb.

(To be clear, I'm not saying eating nothing but salad is normal and healthy. I'm just responding to the implication.)

reasons why this commenter is wrong :)