CHAPTER 3
WHAT THINNESS TAKES
In January 2020, Oprah Winfrey announced a new nationwide tour. Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus tour would include nine stops around the country, from Fort Lauderdale to Denver, St. Paul to Dallas. According to O, the Oprah Magazine, the 2020 Vision tour would introduce attendees to “powerhouse leaders in wellness” and “make 2020 the year of transformation for you—mind, body, and spirit.” The tour took place in giant arenas, with tickets costing anywhere from $69.50 to $299.99.1 The all-star guest lineup included Lady Gaga, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Michelle Obama, Dwayne Johnson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kate Hudson, Jennifer Lopez, Gayle King, and Julianne Hough. It was all very remember your spirit and precisely what longtime fans look to Oprah Winfrey for: intimate facetime with their favorite celebrities, a sense that personal transformation was possible, and the tools to make their best lives a reality. “This is going to be a day-long party for everyone,” said Winfrey.
But despite its messaging of empowerment, the 2020 Vision tour wasn’t just Oprah’s usual lifestyle leadership. It was presented by WW (formerly Weight Watchers) as part of the rebranding for a struggling company that had fallen out of favor as public opinions of weight-loss diets took a downturn. It was a bold move for a company that, just five years earlier, was “having one of the worst Januaries that anyone could have imagined,” according to its senior leadership.2 By 2019 headlines announced that Weight Watchers “shares crater[ed] 30 percent.”3 Weight Watchers was in trouble, and it needed an infusion of cash and customers.
At the time of the 2020 Vision tour, Winfrey herself owned 8 percent of the company. The tour wouldn’t just sell tickets—it would boost the value of Winfrey’s then 5.4 million shares in the floundering company.4
Like the diet industry before it, this wellness tour would line its shareholders’ pockets on multiple levels. And like the diet industry, it didn’t promise data-driven, long-term, major weight loss—only anecdotal successes that preyed on members’ long-standing sense of failure for simply having the bodies they have.
It wasn’t the company’s first attempt at bolstering sales. In 2019, the company introduced Kurbo, a diet app for children as young as eight. A year earlier, in 2018, Weight Watchers announced that it would offer free membership for teens thirteen to seventeen. In both cases, the backlash from eating-disorder advocates and registered dietitians alike was swift and strong. On Twitter, the response came with a hashtag: #WakeUpWeightWatchers.5
To anyone wondering why we’re tweeting about #WakeUpWeight Watchers: Scientific research has shown that putting kids on diets and commenting on their weight puts them at risk of #eatingdisorders and a lifetime of behaviors FAR worse for their health than being at a high weight.
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD
The link between dieting & #eatingdisorders is clear and we are concerned about the new @WeightWatchers promotion for teens. Our voices are being heard. They have reached out to us. Stay tuned for updates. #WakeUpWeightWatchers
The National Eating Disorders Association
Despite this moment of hope, Weight Watchers’ Twitter response offered a simple acknowledgment of the controversy, but no change to the program it had introduced.
Earlier this week, we shared the future vision of Weight Watchers, including some changes we are making to bring health and wellness to all, not just the few. As part of that, we announced we would open WW to teens for free. We hear you NEDA and take our responsibility seriously. We know that the teenage years are a critical life stage and opening WW to teens with consent from a parent/guardian is about families getting healthier. What we will be providing for teens is a program that guides healthy habits for life, not a diet. We have and will continue to talk with healthcare professionals as we get ready to launch this program.6
Like its diet app for children and its free memberships for teens, the 2020 Vision tour aimed to make the company relevant again by boosting press and memberships. And like its other programs, it illustrated some troubling aspects of diet culture’s transformation into “wellness.”
Yes, the 2020 Vision tour trumpeted a holistic approach to wellness and personal transformation. It offered attendees a workbook, asking them to identify their goals for “2020 and beyond.” At its New Jersey stop, Winfrey welcomed NYPD officers on stage to congratulate them for their “wellness transformations,” including a video component highlighting those who lost the most weight. Even as it rebrands itself, diet culture’s “wellness transformation” is overt at best and clumsy at worst—a clear search-and-replace substituted “wellness” for “weight loss.”
But more than that, the 2020 Vision tour featured a perplexing set of celebrity guests for a tour sponsored by a weight-loss company. Guests such as Jennifer Lopez, Julianne Hough, and Dwayne Johnson owed their celebrity, at least in part, to their thin, muscular bodies. Others, such as Lady Gaga and Tracee Ellis Ross, had been thin for the entirety of their life in the public eye. Despite its attempts to build the customer base of a weight-loss company, the 2020 Vision tour featured precious few people who had actually lost significant weight. In the world of diet-culture-turned-wellness, the experience of weight loss doesn’t matter. When it comes to evidence of “wellness,” all that matters is being thin.
Throughout the publicity for the tour, few remarked on the bizarre disconnect of famously thin people selling an approach to weight loss that they’d likely never experienced. Instead, most of us take up our expected roles as disciples in the gospel of thinness. In it, bodies like mine are venal sins. Fat people are morality tales, our bodies feral prophets of the fatness that would follow any pious thin person who abandoned their vigilance even briefly.
But the 2020 Vision tour was far from the first attempt by the weight-loss industry to align thinness with moral exceptionalism and self-actualization. That perceived moral high ground of thinness was a project in the making for centuries.
Diets and diet drugs have long been a mainstay of American culture. Dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, publishers have offered an endless parade of diet books billed as “reducing guides.” Following World War II, weight loss was further popularized through weight loss “salons,” such as the national Slenderella chain. (Slenderella now sells diet supplements.)
Diet drugs themselves have long been a constant in the US, especially for women. In the early 1900s, diet pills claiming to be miracle cures flooded the market. “Figuroids” were billed as “the scientific obesity cure” and were marketed alongside pills such as Bile Beans, Gordon’s Elegant Pills, and Corpu-lean.7 Many were laxatives, though others had strikingly dangerous side effects, including “the industrial chemical dinitrophenol, which raises body temperature and can cause blindness. Drugs based on thyroid extract increase the body’s rate of energy burning but cause heart problems. Deaths were reported from both.”8 America’s obsession with weight loss only strengthened over time. The nation’s first amphetamine epidemic was ushered in by the prescribed use of drugs for both psychiatric and weight-loss purposes. Within less than ten years of their introduction, by 1945, amphetamines were in use by over half a million Americans.9
By the 1990s the diet industry had become a juggernaut, impervious even to increased consumer protection laws. A 1990 lawsuit against Nutrisystem, a weight-loss meal plan, alleged that the meals had caused gallbladder disease in its customers.10 By the end of the following year, the diet company had quietly settled with all 199 plaintiffs, and remains on the market today.11
Perhaps no story better encapsulates the American fixation with weight loss at any cost than the rise and fall of Fen-Phen and Redux. These twin drugs were widely lauded as miracle drugs throughout the 1990s. Fen-Phen, a shortened name for a fenflurmine-phentermine cocktail, rose to prominence following a 1992 study published in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics.12 Within a few years, ads for Fen-Phen were everywhere, from Allure to Reader’s Digest.13 Prescriptions for the much touted miracle drug flooded the market. The popularity of Fen-Phen encouraged manufacturers to push for an accelerated approval by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995. An FDA advisory committee hotly debated the safety of the drug, citing the International Primary Pulmonary Hypertension Study, which linked the drug to “primary pulmonary hypertension, a disease that thickens the capillaries in the lungs and makes breathing very difficult.”14 “What was particularly shocking to me was that on the heels of reporting that this drug caused a fatal, incurable disease in Europe, the company was planning to put it on the American marketplace,” says Stuart Rich, who co-authored the pulmonary hypertension study.15 Despite testimony from Dr. Rich and the opinions of two experts on neurotoxicity, the FDA approved dexfenfluramine in April 1996. “Just three months after the introduction of Redux, doctors are writing 85,000 prescriptions a week,” Time reported in a cover story titled “The New Miracle Drug?”16 Ultimately, the drug was approved. Its manufacturer, now known as Wyeth, launched a $52 million marketing campaign and grossed $300 million in 1996 alone.17 At age fourteen, I was among its eighteen million users.
Just two years later, in August 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article by Heidi Connelly, a doctor with the Mayo Clinic, which reported “24 cases of unusual valvular disease in patients taking fenfluramine-phentermine,” with some patients seeing onset within just one month of taking the drug. Patients’ heart valve problems sometimes required risky and costly heart surgery. In the coming months, another seventy-five cases were reported to the FDA. By the end of 1997, Wyeth had withdrawn both drugs from the market. A 2003 Forbes article reported that the company had paid $13 billion in settlements for heart problems caused by Fen-Phen and Redux.18 When the drugs were removed from the market, a family friend sighed. “Sure, they caused trouble for some people,” she said woefully, referring to patients’ heart failure, “but they were the only thing that really worked.”
Many Americans were willing to try anything to lose weight, including drugs. While amphetamines are less present in today’s diet landscape, laxatives have become increasingly popular, with A-list celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Cardi B endorsing products like “flat tummy tea,” a laxative that causes temporary weight loss.
Americans have long sought miracle diet foods, too, longing for the alchemical power to turn food into weight loss. Nutrisystem and Jenny Craig gained popularity in the 1980s by focusing on providing precooked, prepackaged meals designed to provide dieters with an easy way to manage their food intake—and to build corporate profits. Brands like SnackWell’s promised low-fat cookies and desserts, replacing their then-demonized fat content with staggering amounts of sugar. The 1990s saw the introduction of Olestra, then celebrated as a miracle ingredient that could make potato chips “fat free.” What consumers didn’t know was that Olestra wasn’t fat free—it was a kind of fat so saturated that the human body couldn’t digest it. As such, the FDA required, in a 1996 ruling, that Olestra products be labeled with a warning that it “may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools (anal leakage).” Later, scientists found that consumption of Olestra potato chips led to greater weight gain than traditional potato chips.19 Like so many miracle weight-loss products, Olestra had proven to be a mirage.
Despite decades of trying (and failing) to lose weight, Americans still line up for self-proclaimed miracle drugs and foolproof diets. Since the 1990s, we have known about the dismal success rates of weight-loss programs of all stripes. A wide range of mainstream scientific and medical studies have demonstrated, time and time again, the ineffectiveness of dieting to lose weight. Some studies indicate a weight-loss failure rate of 95 percent, while others paint an even more dismal picture, with 98 percent of dieters failing to lose weight and failing to keep it off.20 Studies based on twins show that genetics could account for as much as 80 percent of a person’s size.21 One landmark study, published in 1986 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that adopted children overwhelmingly ended up with body types like their birth parents—despite being raised by a family with different body types who predominantly shaped their eating and exercise habits.22 Others show that the body defends against weight loss by significantly slowing the metabolism.23, 24 A handful of studies have found more favorable conclusions for dieting (or other nonsurgical weight-loss methods) that have since been found to be bankrolled by diet pill manufacturers, diet food delivery services, and other corporations that stood to profit from more dramatically advantageous findings.25 Despite their questionable origins, bankrolled diet industry studies have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and other prominent and well-regarded medical journals.26
Not only is long-term weight loss extremely unlikely, dieting for weight loss may actually be hazardous to our health. What we have long considered the health conditions associated with being fat in actuality may be the effects of long-term dieting, which very fat people are pressured heavily to do. One Yale University study found that adult women (ages eighteen to forty-nine) who have used common, over-the-counter appetite suppressants faced a 1,558 percent increased risk for hemorrhagic stroke.27 Even in the absence of appetite suppressants, weight cycling—that is, a history of gaining and losing significant amounts of weight, sometimes referred to as yo-yo dieting—has been associated with an increased risk of heart disease and cardiac arrest in women,28 and an increased risk of death regardless of gender.29 Still, given the US’s cultural obsession with the societal war on obesity and the individual battle of the bulge, weight cycling has become a way of life for most Americans and a cultural mandate for those of us who are fat by every measure. Despite extraordinarily small odds of success and a lack of proven nonsurgical methods for safe and lasting weight loss, Americans remain fixated on the dogged pursuit of a near-impossibility, a nation of Don Quixotes tilting at windmills.
Dieting doesn’t work, nor do diet drugs, but they do contribute to a growing wave of eating disorders in the US and worldwide. According to the Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt in Baltimore, “Dieting is the most common precipitating factor in the development of an eating disorder. [. . .] Restrictive dieting is not effective for weight loss and is an unhealthy behavior for anyone, especially children and adolescents. For individuals who are genetically predisposed to eating disorders, dieting can be the catalyst for heightened obsessions about weight and food.”30 The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders report that a minimum of “30 million people of all ages suffer from an eating disorder in the U.S.”31 and roughly once an hour “at least one person dies as a direct result from an eating disorder.”32 A total of 0.9 percent of American women will have anorexia nervosa in their lifetime and 1.5 percent will have bulimia nervosa, while 2.8 percent of Americans of all genders will have binge eating disorder at some point in their lives, though these numbers are limited by reporting structures.33 For example, estimates may only reflect people who have health insurance that covers eating disorder treatment, those who have enough awareness and support to seek that treatment, and those who are willing to acknowledge that treatment to researchers. For thinner people, these disordered behaviors are cause for a caring kind of concern, immediate treatment, and lasting emotional support. But for fat people, they are cause for a cold kind of congratulations, a carrying out of our duty to become thin at any cost. When you’re fat, restrictive eating is a cultural mandate, which consequently means that many fat peoples’ eating disorders go undiagnosed and untreated. Adolescents with BMIs in the overweight or obese ranges make up a significant slice of young people with eating disorders, but those disorders frequently take years longer to be identified and treated in fat patients than in thin ones.34 Even the diagnosis for anorexia nervosa requires an underweight BMI of seventeen or lower, relegating fat anorexics to a lesser known diagnosis of atypical anorexia and reinforcing the idea that fat people simply cannot have restrictive eating disorders—that is, not until we’re thin.
In recent years, as “wellness” has come to replace “dieting,” it’s created the potential for more thoughtful, anchored conversations about size, eating, and health. But as “health” has come to take the place of “thinness” in the search-and-replace of diet culture, little has changed. The world of “wellness” doesn’t address “dieting”; it instead refers to “cleanses” and “detoxes” while using the same restrictive practices and pseudoscience to claim untenable and unrealistic weight-loss goals. The wellness industry, far-reaching and ill-defined, includes trends as wide ranging as athleisure, essential oils, “wellness real estate,” “wellness tourism,” and even Weight Watchers. As of 2018 its worth is estimated to be a staggering $4.5 trillion worldwide.35 With these cultural changes has come an emerging new eating disorder diagnosis: orthorexia. The term, coined in 1998, refers to an obsessive focus on “healthy eating,” often marked by an increasingly specific and restrictive set of rules. Though orthorexia has yet to be codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, advocacy organizations and treatment centers have embraced it as a growing concern within the eating disorder community. According to the National Eating Disorder Association, symptoms include the following:
Compulsive checking of ingredient lists and nutritional labels
An increase in concern about the health of ingredients
Cutting out an increasing number of food groups (all sugar, all carbs, all dairy, all meat, all animal products)
An inability to eat anything but a narrow group of foods that are deemed “healthy” or “pure”
Unusual interest in the health of what others are eating
Spending hours per day thinking about what food might be served at upcoming events
Showing high levels of distress when “safe” or “healthy” foods aren’t available
Obsessive following of food and “healthy lifestyle” blogs on Twitter and Instagram
Body image concerns that may or may not be present36
As diet culture disguises itself, shapeshifting into a more palatable “wellness” approach with the same old goals, orthorexia emerges as its corollary eating disorder. At a time when cleanses and detoxes are increasingly de rigueur, orthorexia often manages to fly under the radar, masquerading as an understandable and even laudable concern for health. But as with so many eating disorders, it is hardly so benign. For each of these eating disorders, genetics are significant contributors, often accounting for 50 percent or more of the risk of a given eating disorder.37 Genetics are the gun, and for many, dieting is its trigger.
Even as the language of weight loss changes from dieting to wellness, consumers remain vulnerable to unscrupulous claims for dietary supplements that are significantly less regulated than prescription drugs. One 2011 survey by the Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with regulating accurate advertising, found that more Americans had fallen prey to false weight-loss advertising than any other kind of fraud tracked by the Commission.38
Dr. Mehmet Oz, whose television career got an early boost from weight-loss evangelist Oprah Winfrey, has made frequent and sweeping proclamations about the effectiveness of weight-loss supplements on his daily afternoon talk show. At first blush, Dr. Oz seems like a perfect, impartial source for accurate weight-loss information: a cardiothoracic surgeon, Columbia University professor, with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and an MD and MBA from the University of Pennsylvania. Oz became a mainstay on television in 2003 when Second Opinion with Dr. Oz premiered with Oprah Winfrey as the show’s first guest. In 2009 he became a phenomenon with a syndicated, daily network health talk show, The Dr. Oz Show, where he regularly recommended supplements and treatments to his viewing audience and frequently focused on the obesity epidemic, the dangers of fatness, and remedies for it.
In 2016, those claims caught up to him, and Dr. Oz was called to testify in front of the US Senate’s Subcommittee on Manufacturing, Trade, and Consumer Protection for his constant endorsements. Dr. Oz was a longtime proponent of green coffee extract, leading to a boom in production of the supplement.
Within weeks of Dr. Oz’s comments about green coffee—which refers to the unroasted seeds or beans of coffee—a Florida-based operation began marketing a dietary supplement called Pure Green Coffee, with claims that the chlorogenic acid found in the coffee beans could help people lose 17 pounds and cut body fat by 16 percent in 22 weeks. [. . .] [T]he Federal Trade Commission sued the sellers behind Pure Green Coffee and accused them of making bogus claims and deceiving consumers.39
Press coverage of the doctor’s appearance on Capitol Hill led with splashy headlines: “The ‘Dr. Oz Effect’: Senators Scold Mehmet Oz for Diet Scams,” trumpeted NBC News;40 “Watch Congress Make ‘An Example Of’ Dr. Oz,” read Business Insider;41 “Senators to Dr. Oz: Stop Promising Weight-Loss Miracles,” said The Atlantic.42 And true to the headlines, Senator Claire McCaskill took the doctor to task.
McCaskill read Oz’s words from past segments of The Dr. Oz Show back to him with a clinical formality that underscored their absurdity:
“You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight loss cure for every body type: It’s green coffee extract.”
“I’ve got the number-one miracle in a bottle to burn your fat: It’s raspberry ketone.”
“Garcinia cambogia: It may be the simple solution you’ve been looking for to bust your body fat for good.”
McCaskill continued, as if reproaching a child. “I don’t know why you need to say this stuff, because you know it’s not true. Why—when you have this amazing megaphone and this amazing ability to communicate—would you cheapen your show by saying things like that?”43
Despite broad coverage and damning admissions, Dr. Oz’s questioning on Capitol Hill doesn’t appear to have shifted Americans’ consciousness or our buying habits when it comes to diet products. Weight-loss supplement Hydroxycut remains in business despite class-action lawsuits and consumer deaths.44 While diet pill sales are down, meal replacements and other weight-loss products are up, leaving the industry worth $72 billion in the US alone in 2019.45 By the end of 2023, researchers predict, the global weight-loss market will be worth a staggering $278.95 billion worldwide.46 Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, American consumers seem too desperate for a miraculous, lasting weight-loss solution, and many of us are willing to pay top dollar for even moderate weight loss. No matter how damning the evidence against it, the weight-loss industry remains a juggernaut. It may just be too big to fail.
This cultural obsession with weight loss doesn’t just impact our physical and mental health; it also impacts our sense of self and, consequently, our relationships with others of different sizes. Women of all ages report astronomical levels of body dissatisfaction, ranging from a low of 71.9 percent of women ages seventy-five and up to a high of 93.2 percent of women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four.47 According to a survey conducted by Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, nearly half of respondents would rather give up a year of their lives than be fat.48 “The 4,000 respondents in varying numbers between 15% and 30% also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.”
But our insecurities don’t stop at our own skin. The ways in which straight-size people see fat people are increasingly limited by their own insecurity. In body positive spaces, for example, thin people will often struggle to hear fat people’s stories of discrimination. The concrete, external harms of anti-fatness are often reframed and reinterpreted as insecurity by thinner people, especially women. After all, thinner women simply aren’t subjected to the same levels of societal prejudice, harassment, bullying, and overt discrimination as fatter people. As such, feeling insecure is among the worst things many thinner women can imagine, so many interpret fat people’s stories of explicit, interpersonal, or institutional anti-fatness as insecurity. The phenomenon of repackaging a fat person’s discrimination as a more palatable, more understandable kind of internal struggle with body image is one I’ve come to refer to as thinsecurity.
Thinsecurity-driven misinterpretations of fat activism are constants. Frequently, when I share my experiences with thinner people, I’m met with a confidential nod and a misplaced sense of shared experience. I’ll tell a thin man about my experience being reseated on a plane, and he’ll say, “I get it. We all have our insecurities.” A thin woman will meet my story about a stranger shouting slurs at me with a hand over her heart. “Bad body image days are the worst.” Thinsecurity is a seductive thing. It tells thin people that feeling badly about one’s own body is the worst—and only—outcome of difficult experiences with our bodies. They cannot fathom what are such commonplace experiences for very fat people: A stranger recommending a surgeon. A family member withholding food until you look like you need it. Fat camp. Being recommended for The Biggest Loser. And on and on and on. Those experiences are too far from their own, unimaginable to someone who has so long been locked in place by their perception of their own body. So straight size people reinterpret them, make them something easier to understand. Rather than talking about body-based oppression, they revert the conversation to their thinsecurities.
But the misinterpretation doesn’t stop there. When fat activists talk about body-based oppression, thinner body positivity activists paint it over, replacing it with a more palatable insecurity. But when we don’t talk about body-based oppression, we’re strangely lauded for our confidence.
“You’re so brave to wear that,” a stranger tells me at a bus stop. “I wish I had your confidence. Get it, girl!”
I am covered from head to toe in a purple knit cotton dress with a high neckline and a knee-length hem. Beneath it, I wear opaque tights and boots. By any measure, I am dressed conservatively and, frankly, unremarkably. But thinsecurity has rerouted the way this stranger sees me. She cannot imagine living in a body like mine, cannot imagine being seen in public, cannot imagine daring to leave the house in skin that is so obviously and objectively hideous. She imagines that I am wildly insecure and in desperate need of immediate comfort. And so, without asking about my experience, she offers an unsolicited compliment for braving the fear she’s mapped onto my scrim of a body: You’re so brave. I wish I had your confidence.
Sometimes, those compliments—meant to assuage unconfirmed insecurities—don’t end with a simple, awkward remark. Increasingly, strangers, friends, and family will enlist me in the work of breaking down their own insecurities, often without my consent. Thin people—especially thin women—expect fat people like me to act as midwives for their confidence. How do you do it? Teach me your ways! They expect fat women in particular to become midwives for their waning self-confidence. We are the hired help who never asked for the job and are certainly not paid for it. We are expected to accompany thinner friends to stores that do not carry our sizes, watching as they try on clothing that makes them feel insecure and boosting their confidence with constant reassurances. We become set pieces, two-dimensional props for their more real lives. More than that, we reflect their bodies back to them, their imperfect thinness made beautiful by its proximity to the abject failure of our fatness. We are reminders of what could be. Thinner people embrace fatter people as a way of finding their relative virtue. At least I’m not that fat.
Thinness is a bizarre and alienating construct. Plus size or straight size, seemingly none of us believe that we qualify for the distant perfection of thinness. Straight-size people do verbal acrobatics to avoid describing themselves as thin, opting instead for scare quotes around words like slim and average, while simultaneously endlessly dieting to realize the promise of the impossible thinness that is just out of reach. Plus-size people forgo even the cold comfort of proximity to thinness and are left to fend for ourselves in a world that tells us that our bodies, hopelessly and irredeemably fat, cannot be named and cannot be saved. Thinness takes from all of us.
Thinness takes so much from so many straight-size people. It takes their money for diet pills, meal delivery, workout tapes, and weight-loss supplements. It takes away their ability to see their own bodies as they are, replacing that image with some distorted funhouse mirror reflection—and in so doing, it takes so much of their self-esteem along with it. It takes away interesting conversation, relegating us to the rote and interminably boring script of weight loss: who’s on what diet, who was good, who was bad. Thinness takes away so many straight-size people’s ability to hear fat people, to acknowledge our experiences even when they differ from those of straight-size listeners. And when it takes away our ability to hear one another, it slowly erodes straight-size people’s relationships with fat family members, friends, colleagues, and others, quarantining core conversations as off-limits and forever maintaining an unspoken and uneasy distance.
Thinness takes so much from fat people too. It takes away those same relationships with thinner people, teaching us that we will never truly be heard or understood. It takes away our ability to describe our own bodies, replacing our own descriptions with something thin people can understand—something that makes them feel comfortable, less threatened, and less privileged. And when it takes away our descriptions of our own bodies, it also takes away our ability to describe our own experiences and know that they’ll be heard on their own terms. It takes away quiet, everyday activities too: eating, working out, buying groceries, and shopping for clothes all become seen as unspoken invitations to comment on our bodies, our practices, the weight loss in which we must be in hot pursuit.
All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management. We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people. We deserve spaces for thin people to build their self-confidence with one another so that the task no longer falls to fat people who are already contending with widespread judgment, harassment, and even discrimination. We deserve more spaces for fat people too—fat-specific spaces and fat-only spaces, where we can have conversations that can thrive in specificity, acknowledging that our experiences of external discrimination are distinct from internal self-confidence and body image issues (though we may have those too). We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness.
We deserve more spaces to think and talk critically about our bodies as they are, not as we wish they were, or as an unforgiving and unrealistic culture pressures them to change. We deserve spaces and movements that allow us to think and talk critically about the messages each of us receive about our bodies—both on a large scale, from media and advertising, and on a small scale, interpersonally, with friends and family. But we can only do this if we acknowledge the differences in our bodies and the differences in our experiences that spring from bodies. We deserve to see each other as we are so that we can hear each other. And the perfect, unreachable standard of thinness is taking that from us.
Thinness takes so much, and we deserve to take it back.