#bfso

Thank you for existing. I am plus size and have a bad anxiety disorder that has led to so much stress about health. My parents always told me that my weight was gonna make me sick, unhealthy, cause me to get diabetes and all of this other shit. Now because of them pressuring me I have so many panic attacks about my health but I'm trying to get better. Blogs like this ease my anxiety, so thank you.

You are more than welcome. I’m so glad this blog helps!

I can assure you that being fat does not automatically mean you will develop a chronic illness, that you will die young, or that you will definitely suffer poor health. Those fat-phobic beliefs are gross exaggerations or misinterpretations of the research literature and they ignore the multi-determined and multi-faceted nature of health. 

They are also healthist beliefs, which are harmful and oppressive because they imply that being healthy is a moral obligation (which it is not!) and that being healthy is largely a result of individual behaviors (it is not!).      

I hope that you have been able to set boundaries with your family about this issue and that you are not still suffering this weight-based abuse. Keep on immersing yourself in the fat acceptance community. It can really do wonders for your outlook on life as a fat person!

Take care,

A common fat-phobic belief is that fat people are fat because they overeat. A recent submission to @facebooksexism​ perfectly illustrates this stereotype and the harmful classist attitudes it perpetuates: 

Like most fat-phobic beliefs, this stereotype is completely wrong.

It is well accepted in public health science that food insecurity – which is the lack of consistent, dependable access to enough food for active, healthy living – predicts higher body weight. 

Some reasons for this association include:

Limited resources and lack of access to nutritious, affordable foods. Heavily processed, low-nutrition foods are usually cheaper, but are more calorie dense and less satisfying to eat.  

Cycles of food deprivation and overeating. Low income people often run out of money for necessities like food before their next paycheck arrives, resulting in extended periods of hunger and starvation followed by periods of compensatory eating when the paycheck arrives. Such eating patterns cause weight gain over time.

High levels of stress, anxiety, & depression, all of which cause physiological changes resulting in weight gain over time.

Limited access to health care. Many chronic health conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, thyroid dysfunction, and type II diabetes, cause weight gain when left untreated. 

All of this means that systematic oppression causes people to be fat for reasons that are outside of their personal control, and that poor fat people are not lying when they report that they cannot afford to put food on the table. Stop spreading the harmful, oppressive, and fat-phobic belief that you can judge a person’s nutrition or eating habits by the size of their body.   

Modern fat phobia emerged in America during the 1800s in response to industrialization and globalization, but its broad cultural appeal rested largely on racism and white supremacy. 

White, western “scientists” in the 1800s categorized people into social hierarchies on the basis of their distinguishing physical characteristics, including relative fatness. Unsurprisingly, they places white Europeans at the top of this social hierarchy, and their distinguishing physical characteristics – including relative thinness – were deemed to be signs of civilization, and cultural, moral, and intellectual supremacy. 

In contrast, Black people, the indigenous peoples of North America and Australia, and many other non-Black peoples of color were placed at the bottom of this hierarchy, and the physical characteristics attributed to these groups – including fatness – were deemed to be signs of primitivity, and cultural, moral, and intellectual inferiority.

Thus, it became essential for white people to maintain a thin physique to distinguish themselves from other “primitive” races, and to physically embody their own racial supremacy. 

Furthermore, because fatness distinguished non-European immigrants and poor people of color from rich white people, any discussion of the social, economic, moral, and medical harms of fatness became coded language for discussing the “problem” of the “uncivilized” races. This coded language is still in use today. Case and point: The “obesity epidemic” is used to blame mostly poor people of color for social ills ranging from global warming to economic depression, and weight-loss is prescribed to solve health problems more logically attributed to poverty and systematic oppression.      

Fat phobia was born of racism, classism, and white supremacy, and continues to service these oppressive systems today. Never forget that.

I haven’t read either of those reasons myself, but they sound very plausible.

Another interesting and less-known explanation may have to do with patterns of immigration. Turns out that the children of immigrants tend to weigh more than the children of non-immigrants. Perhaps the stress of immigration and racial or ethnic discrimination activate the body’s natural stress response of storing fat. So if there are more first-generation Americans in the population now than there were in the 1960s, which is probably true, then such a change in demographics could explain average increases in weight for the whole population.

Similarly, the stress of living in poverty predicts higher body weight, so if there are more people living below the poverty line now than in 1960, which is also probably true, then average population weights would be higher.

It is interesting that few of these explanations receive much press. It is much easier (and psychologically reassuring) to focus on controllable, behavioural explanations that reinforce fat-phobic narratives – like eating and activity habits – than to acknowledge the effects of systematic demographic changes and social inequality.

-Mod D

It’s fairly well established in the scientific literature that people are fatter now than they were a generation ago. The fat-phobic movie, Wall-E, does a good job illustrating most people’s vision of this so-called “obesity epidemic.”

But how much fatter are we?

Estimates vary, but the consensus is that the average person today weighs about 8 - 15lbs more than the average person in the 1960s. That’s it. About 10 lbs., or one clothing size.  

What caused us to get fatter?

Despite all the speculation concerning the causes of this population change – sugary drinks, processed foods, sedentary jobs, the moon – the fact is that we don’t know why it happened. Similar gains have been observed among non-human animals, leading some people to speculate that environmental toxins are to “blame.” But it may remain a mystery. 

“But what about the cost of all the fatties?!?!”

Frankly, that line of argument is gross and discriminatory. It is appalling to single out a group of people and try to calculate how much it “costs” to provide health care to that group. 

In addition, such calculations rest on a number of faulty assumptions, the most glaring of which being the assumptions that fat causes the health conditions that are associated with higher body weight, that weight loss is possible, and that weight loss improves health, none of which are supported by the scientific literature. 

So the fact that those arguments are common doesn’t make them valid, it just reveals how fat-phobic most people are.