INTRODUCTION

I have always been fat.

Not chubby or fluffy or husky or curvy—fat. As I write this, I weigh 342 pounds and wear a women’s size 26. My body mass index (BMI) describes my body as “super morbidly obese” or “extremely obese.” Although my body is not the fattest in existence, it is the fattest the BMI can fathom. Three years ago, I weighed just over 400 pounds and wore a size 30 or 32, depending on the cut of the clothing. At my high school graduation, I wore a red wrap top in the highest size I could find at the time—a women’s 24.

For me, the size of my body is a simple fact. I do not struggle with self-esteem or negative body image. I do not lay awake at night, longing for a thinner body or some life that lies a hundred pounds out of reach. For me, my body isn’t good or bad, it just is. But for the rest of the world, it seems, my body presents major problems.

Friends, family, strangers, and coworkers alike offer unsolicited diet advice and recommend bariatric surgeons. Other shoppers pick over my cart at the grocery store, freely removing items they don’t think I should eat. Doctors refuse to treat me, and some offices set weight limits on the patients they’ll see—weight limits that my body reliably exceeds. I pray that I do not need an MRI or a CAT scan, not because of the complex and frightening health troubles those tests may illuminate but because I likely will not fit into the equipment’s narrow tunnels and fixed walls. Strangers tell me, both online and in person, that my body is a death sentence and that every bite I take is a step toward a slow suicide. When I drive, disembodied shouts often echo from passing cars: GET OUT AND TRY WALKING FOR A CHANGE. These days, I mostly leave my windows rolled up.

Bodies like mine are seen by others as an open invitation to express disgust, fear, and insidious concern. They are seen as an invitation to laugh, a prop for hackneyed would-be comics to recite the same punchlines over and over again. They are fodder not just for cruel teenagers or overgrown adult bullies, but for everyone. Loved ones tut-tut when they see me reach for a second helping of anything, anxious that I may think myself deserving of as much food as them. The bulk of the anti-fat attitudes I have faced have come at the hands of thin people who deeply believed they were doing right and doing good, emboldened by a culture that wholeheartedly agreed with them.

In books, political cartoons, films, and TV shows, fat bodies make up the failings of America, capitalism, beauty standards, excess, and consumerism. Fat bodies represent at once the poorest of the poor and the pinnacle of unchecked power, consumption, and decay. Our bodies have borne the blame for so much. Whole artistic worlds are built on the premise that bodies like mine are monstrous, repulsive, and—worst of all—contagious. From individuals to institutions, academia to the evening news, fat people are made bogeymen. And that spills into daily experiences of abuse, driven by intentions both good and ill, but always with the same outcome: an intense shame for simply daring to exist in the bodies many of us have always had.

There is a minefield of abuse reserved for the very fat. I have come to view the world through the prism of that abuse, negotiating my days around reducing it. Who will shout at me? Which doctors will refuse to see me? Which dates will mock my body? Which strangers will photograph me, make a meme of my skin? I avoid eye contact with strangers, knowing that our locking eyes are too often misconstrued as an invitation to shout or detail their judgments of my body. I deploy a charm offensive, calming agitated aggressors before they get the chance to unleash their fury. I have learned how to keep abusers at bay alone, knowing that no one else will intervene to support or defend me. I have developed this sad and necessary skill set because, in my soft and certain marrow, I know that the abuse faced by fat people is not understood to warrant a reckoning.

But the most difficult part of anti-fat attitudes isn’t bullying, harassment, fear, or violence. I have come to expect epithets and aggression, have come to weather their heat and pressure. But I have never become accustomed to the complete lack of empathy from so many around me. As a white, queer woman, describing the challenges I may face from misogyny and homophobia may be difficult, but it’s increasingly met with some measure of sympathy. But when I disclose the abuse I have faced as a fat person, I am frequently met with a steely refusal to believe it. Did you do something to aggravate them? Maybe they thought they were helping. They were probably just concerned for your health. When anti-fatness turns institutional, as with staggeringly prevalent employment discrimination or punitive airline policies, others’ responses curdle, turning from indifference to outright defense. Suddenly, people who otherwise relish complaining about delayed flights and cramped legroom become airlines’ staunchest defenders.

People who don’t wear plus sizes may struggle to hear the severity and irrationality of anti-fat abuse and bias. It may be difficult to believe, even unfathomable, that there’s a world so different from their own. But anti-fat bias has always been there, as noxious and ubiquitous as polluted air. Still, thinner people aren’t forced to reckon with it. As ubiquitous as it may be, for many thinner people, anti-fatness doesn’t present a barrier to healthcare, employment, transportation, or meeting other basic needs. Life in a thinner body means that the world is redacted, presented only in part.

The depth and breadth of anti-fatness can be difficult to believe, too, because anti-fat attitudes, comments, policies, and practices are ubiquitous. We cannot see the air we’ve been breathing for years, cannot touch the shifting ground beneath our feet. Anti-fatness has become invisible, a natural law. To many people who don’t wear plus sizes, objecting to fat hate is as irrational as debating gravity. Why waste outrage on a simple fact of the world we live in? The thin Greek chorus in my life, when faced with the ubiquitous sharp edges of fat hate, have too readily insisted that you can’t change the world, you can only change yourself, by which they have meant me.

For the most part, our woefully limited cultural conversation about fat people backs them up. Fatness is reliably demonized, discussed only in the context of how not to be fat (weight loss) or how fat will kill us immediately (the “obesity epidemic”). Fat experiences are only shared to contrast a more real story from a thin person or as a pitiable and wretched reality to conjure thin gratitude. Fat people are frequently spoken about or at, but we’re rarely heard. Instead, bodies and experiences like mine become caricatured and symbolic, either as a kind of effigy or as a pornography of suffering. Bodies and experiences like mine are rarely allowed to just be ours.

In recent years, a growing number of fat memoirs have joined the fold, but this book isn’t that. It isn’t a memoir of fat pain that will offer thin people comfort or relief that they’re not that fat. It isn’t another entry in the canon of books about the perils of being fat or the frightening specter of the “obesity epidemic.” It isn’t a weight loss book. You won’t read about my longing for a thinner body or the lengths I’ll go to in order to lose weight. This book will not reassure you that at least she’s trying to lose weight. It is not rooted in the near-ubiquitous cultural dogma that fat people are duty-bound to become thin before asking to be treated with respect and dignity.

This book diverges from the well-trod path when it comes to fatness and fat people. In it, you’ll find a mix of memoir, research, and cultural criticism all focused on unearthing our social and cultural attitudes toward fat people, along with the impacts those attitudes can have on fat people, ourselves. Where our cultural conversation focuses relentlessly on personal responsibility and the perceived failures of fat people, this book seeks to zoom out, offering personal stories while simultaneously identifying the macro-level social, institutional, and political forces that powerfully shape the way each of us thinks of fat people, both in general and in particular.

In recent years, the long-standing body positivity movement has taken center stage, focused on in talk shows and sitcoms, utilized by the magazines and advertisers that for so long weaponized the images of very thin bodies against so many of us. This may seem like a potent force for fat justice and liberation. It is not.

While the modern body positivity movement has deep roots in the fat acceptance and fat liberation movements, its most recent wave of popularity owes its success to two women who don’t wear plus sizes. Connie Sobczak, an author, and Elizabeth Scott, a licensed clinical social worker, founded an organization called the Body Positive in 1996.¹ Sobczak had personally struggled with an eating disorder, and Scott specialized in treating them. The organization’s mission is simple: “The Body Positive teaches people how to reconnect to their innate body wisdom so they can have more balanced, joyful self-care, and a relationship with their whole selves that is guided by love, forgiveness, and humor.”² The Body Positive trains its members to build five core competencies:

1. Reclaim Health

2. Practice Intuitive Self-Care

3. Cultivate Self-Love

4. Declare Your Own Authentic Beauty

5. Build Community³

Given the founders’ background in eating disorder recovery work, The Body Positive’s stated goals and framework make a lot of sense. Many eating disorder survivors, fat and thin, struggle with low self-esteem, insufficient self-love, and reckoning with their body image enough to “declare [their] own authentic beauty.” The broader body positivity movement has run with that framework, too, focusing its work on building self-esteem and positive body image. Its rise has certainly been a net gain for many. Opening up spaces to talk about our relationships with our bodies and the insecurities we may grapple with is a significant step forward. For survivors of eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder, body positivity has been a true lifeline for their mental health and recovery.

Like thin people, fat people can struggle with our body image and self-esteem. But unlike thinner people, that’s only the start of our body-related challenges. As you will read in the pages ahead, fat people face overwhelming discrimination in employment, healthcare, transit, the treatment of eating disorders, and more. While body image is certainly a piece of the puzzle for fat people, it is a relatively small one. While the body positivity movement’s aims are laudable, they’re simply a solution for a very small part of the much larger looming problems faced by fat people—especially fat people at the larger end of the plus-size spectrum.

By the numbers, while body positivity may be increasing individual self-esteem, it doesn’t seem to have made a dent in the prevalence of anti-fat attitudes and behaviors. Harvard University analyzed results from its famed implicit bias tests, looking at data from those who took its tests between 2007 and 2016—during the precipitous rise of the body positivity movement. They found that implicit bias was on the decline in nearly every category. According to Harvard’s lead researcher on the study, anti-fat bias has changed the most slowly of all explicit stated attitudes. And when it comes to implicit bias—that is, the bias we unconsciously act on—anti-fatness is getting significantly worse. “It is the only attitude out of the six that we looked at that showed any hint of getting more biased over time.”⁴ While body positivity seems to be everywhere, it doesn’t appear to be changing our deeply held, deeply harmful beliefs about fatness and fat people.

The rise of body positivity has also led to extremely challenging dynamics within the movement. Because body positivity is so deeply focused on internal, individual change, conversations about power, privilege, and oppression often don’t come naturally to self-proclaimed body positive people. When people in more marginalized bodies—particularly fat people, disabled people, transgender and nonbinary people, and people of color—request conversations that grapple with the thornier realities of our lives, which are formed more by other people’s behaviors than our own internal self-image, those requests are often roundly rejected by many body positive activists. When fat people open up about our experiences, thinner body positive activists often rewrite those accounts of institutional discrimination and interpersonal abuse as “insecurities,” whitewashing the vast differences between our diverging experiences. Fat people who tag photos with #BodyPositive are regularly met with accusations of “glorifying obesity” or “promoting an unhealthy lifestyle.” Mainstream social media accounts still post before and after weight loss photos, claiming body positivity while celebrating bodies for looking less fat. The most recognized faces of body positivity, frequently models and actors, are disproportionately white or light-skinned, able-bodied, and either straight size (that is, not plus size) or at the smallest end of plus size. While it may not be an intentional one, for many fat activists, the message is clear: body positivity isn’t for us.

As a result, fat activists use a variety of terms to describe our work and distinguish it from the body positivity movement’s largely interior focus on self-esteem. Some fat activists strive for body neutrality, a viewpoint that holds that bodies should be prized for their function, not their appearance, and that simply feeling impartial about our bodies would represent a significant step forward for those of us whose bodies are most marginalized.⁵ Others fight for fat acceptance, which seeks to counter anti-fat bias with a tolerance-based model of simply accepting the existence of fat people and ceasing our constant attempts to make fat bodies into thin ones. Some urge us toward body sovereignty, “the concept that each person has the full right to control their own body.”⁶ Fat activists’ frameworks are as varied as fat people ourselves.

While these approaches work for many, I describe mine as work for fat justice. Body positivity has shown me that our work for liberation must explicitly name fatness as its battleground—because when we don’t, each of us are likely to fall back on our deep-seated, faulty cultural beliefs about fatness and fat people, claiming to stand for “all bodies” while we implicitly and explicitly exclude the fattest among us. I yearn for more than neutrality, acceptance, and tolerance—all of which strike me as meek pleas to simply stop harming us, rather than asking for help in healing that harm or requesting that each of us unearth and examine our existing biases against fat people. Acceptance is a step forward, but it’s a far cry from centering fat people’s humanity in our cruel and ceaseless conversations about fat bodies.

A conversation about fat justice, though, will require so much of each of us. People who don’t wear plus sizes will need to hear and believe fat people’s experiences—experiences that may differ from their own so dramatically as to strain credulity. They will hear stories of strangers mooing from a passing car or passersby throwing trash at fat people walking down a city street. They will hear stories of doctors telling their patients to stop shoving food in your face long enough to pay attention. Remarks like these are so deeply unkind that it’s hard to imagine why someone would think they’re acceptable to say out loud. But by the simple virtue of living in our bodies, fat people are seeing things straight-size people can’t yet—things that only happen in the presence of bodies like ours. Straight-size people will need to resist the urge to reject fat experiences out of hand because of a lack of context. Instead, they’ll need to find the context. They’ll need to look harder, to sharpen their vision. They’ll need to learn to see anti-fatness everywhere, because it is. Anti-fatness may not make sense to straight-size people. It doesn’t make sense to me, either. But straight-size people’s tasks will be threefold: not to buckle under the weight of their own discomfort, to stay in the conversation long enough to learn, and to take proactive action to counter anti-fat bias and help defend fat people.

Advancing fat justice will require a lot of fat people too. It will require us to take the risks we’ve taken so many fruitless times before—the risks of sharing our most challenging experiences of anti-fat bias, of opening our bodies and lives up to even more public conversation and debate. Ours will be the work of courageous and frightening vulnerability, of holding a standard of humanity, dignity, and respect that so many tell us we simply do not deserve. And it will be the work of building a bold vision for a more liberated world—for fat people, and for people of all sizes.

Regardless of our size, working toward fat justice will call upon our most honest, compassionate selves. It will require deep vulnerability, candor, and empathy. Together, we can create a tectonic shift in the way we see, talk about, and treat our bodies, fat and thin alike. We can find more peace in the skin we live in, declaring a truce with the bodies that only try to care for us. But more than that, we can build a more just and equitable world that doesn’t determine our access to resources and respect based on how we look. We can build a world that doesn’t assume fat people are failed thin people, or that thin people are categorically healthy and virtuous. We can build a world that conspires against eating disorders and body dysmorphia, working toward more safety for eating disorder survivors of all sizes. We can build a world in which fat bodies are valued and supported just as much as thin ones.

A FAT JUSTICE GLOSSARY

Throughout this book, you will read a number of terms that may not be familiar to you, or whose use you may struggle to embrace. Different fat activists may each offer their own definitions for these commonly used terms, so these definitions are far from universal. Here’s how I define and use them in the pages that follow.

Fat

A neutral descriptor for predominantly plus-size people. While fat is frequently used to insult people of all sizes, many fat activists—those of us who are undeniably, indubitably fat by any measure—reclaim the term as an objective adjective to describe our bodies, like tall or short. It is used accordingly in a matter-of-fact way throughout the pages ahead. Fat stands in contrast to an endless parade of euphemisms—fluffy, curvy, big guy, big girl, zaftig, big boned, husky, voluptuous, thick, heavy set, pleasantly plump, chubby, cuddly, more to love, overweight, obese—all of which just serve as a reminder of how terrified so many thin people are to see our bodies, name them, have them.

Fat hasn’t become a bad word because fatness is somehow inherently undesirable or bad—it has fallen out of public favor because of what we attach to it. We take fat to mean unlovable, unwanted, unattractive, unintelligent, unhealthy. But fatness itself is simply one aspect of our bodies—and a very small part of who each of us is. It deserves to be described as a simple and unimportant fact.

Body size, like so many aspects of human experience and identity, exists on a spectrum, so there are no hard and fast rules for who qualifies as “fat enough to be fat.” When I look for my fat people—the community I call home—I look for people who are united by experiences of widespread exclusion. I don’t just look for people who’ve been called fat, as all of us have, but folks who are shut out of meeting their basic needs because of the simple fact of their size. Not just people who struggle to find clothing they like, but people who struggle to find clothing at all. Not just people who feel uncomfortable on buses or airplanes, but people who are publicly ridiculed for daring to board public transit at all. For my fat people, our size isn’t just an internal worry, it’s an inescapable external reality. We aren’t held captive by our own perceptions but by others’ beliefs that we are immoral, unlovable, irredeemable. All of us have felt the sting of the rejection of our bodies—either at our own hand, or another’s. But not all of us have been repeatedly, materially harmed by the universality of that rejection. That’s an experience shared by those of us who are unquestionably, undeniably fat. But that’s one of many, many approaches to defining fatness. There are nearly as many definitions of fat as there are people in the world.

Smaller Fat People and Very Fat People

Different levels of fatness invite different experiences. People who wear smaller plus sizes (say, a size 14 or 16 in the US) regularly hear comments about how they’ve got such a pretty face—you’d be a knockout if you just lost twenty pounds. But people who wear extended plus sizes (a size 34, for example) face open street harassment, hearing slurs, and jeers from passing cars. Ash, the host of The Fat Lip podcast, has established a framework for understanding and pinpointing these important gradations, based on US women’s clothing sizes:

Small fat: 1X–2X, sizes 18 and lower, Torrid 00 to 1. Find clothes that fit at mainstream brands and can shop in many stores.

Mid-fat: 2X–3X, sizes 20 to 24, Torrid 2 to 3. Shop at some mainstream brands, but mostly dedicated plus brands and online.

Superfat: 4X–5X, sizes 26-32, Torrid 4 to 6. Wear the highest sizes at plus brands. Can often only shop online.

Infinifat: 6X and higher, sizes 34 and higher, some Torrid 6. Very difficult to find anything that fits, even online. Often require custom sizing.⁷

These gradations are frequently used within fat spaces to help pinpoint the privileges we experience by virtue of our relative proximity to thinness. Because they can be a lot to remember, throughout this book I use “smaller fat people” to refer to small and mid-fats and “very fat people” or “larger fat people” to refer to superfats and infinifats.

Anti-Fatness and Anti-Fat Bias

Anti-fatness and anti-fat bias are umbrella terms that describe the attitudes, behaviors, and social systems that specifically marginalize, exclude, underserve, and oppress fat bodies. They refer both to individual bigotry as well as institutional policies designed to marginalize fat people. Anti-fatness and anti-fat bias are also sometimes referred to as fatphobia, fatmisia, sizeism, weight stigma, or fattism. The Macmillan Dictionary defines fatphobia as an “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against obesity or people with obesity.”⁸

Healthism

Closely linked to both anti-fatness and ableism, healthism posits that health is both a virtue and a moral imperative. The term, coined by Robert Crawford in 1980, was originally defined in the International Journal of Health Services as a “preoccupation with personal health as a primary—often the primary—focus for the definition and achievement of well-being. [. . .] By elevating health to a super value, a metaphor for all that is good in life, healthism reinforces the privatization of the struggle for generalized well-being.”⁹ That is, healthism as a framework often disregards the influence of social determinants of health, institutional policies, and oppression on individual health. Fall Ferguson, attorney and former president of the Association of Size Diversity and Health, later added that healthism “emerges as the assumption that people should pursue health. It’s the contempt in the nonsmoker’s attitude toward smokers; it’s the ubiquitous sneer against couch potatoes. Healthism includes the idea that anyone who isn’t healthy just isn’t trying hard enough or has some moral failing or sin to account for.”¹⁰

Many who shame fat people for our bodies, our food, and our movement rely on a logic of healthism that implies that we are duty-bound to appear healthy—that is, thin. Healthism is a pervasive system of social thinking that has harmful implications for disabled people, chronically ill people, mentally ill people, fat people, and others. As “wellness” replaces “dieting” as a way of talking about weight loss, understanding healthism is key to pulling apart the ways in which size and health are used to write-off people who don’t or can’t perform health. Even in body positive spaces, healthism persists as a way to marginalize fat people through the frequent refrain I’m body positive as long as you’re healthy.

Plus-Size Clothing

Clothing that cannot be reliably purchased in department stores and from mainstream clothing retailers and must be purchased from either a limited plus-size section or from specialty plus-size retailers, such as Torrid or Lane Bryant. In the US, this generally refers to women’s sizes 16 to 28. As of 2018, people who wear plus sizes have just 2.3 percent of the clothing options that thinner people have.¹¹

Extended Plus-Size Clothing

Clothing that cannot be purchased from mainstream retailers or from most plus-size retailers. In the US, women’s extended plus sizes are usually size 30 and up. Even basic essentials, such as jeans and blazers, are often unavailable in extended plus sizes. When extended plus-size clothing is available, it is almost exclusively available for purchase at exorbitant prices and only online. In some cases, extended plus-size clothing requires custom sizing or construction.

Straight-Size Clothing

A term from the fashion industry, straight size refers to clothing that can be purchased from nearly any clothing retailer. US straight sizes are usually sizes 00 to 14 and are available at almost every store in a given shopping mall. Straight size is a way of referring to people with relative size privilege, instead of using value-laden terms such as “normal” or “regular” or inaccurate terms like “average” (in the US, the average size is plus size¹²). If you don’t know whether you wear straight or plus sizes, you’re probably straight size. Those of us who wear plus sizes and extended plus sizes rarely have the relative luxury of forgetting.

Obese and Overweight

Weight classification determined by the BMI as being fat enough to present health risks. The term “obese” is derived from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten oneself fat,” inherently blaming fat people for their bodies.¹³ The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively correct weight for every body. A growing number of fat activists consider obese to be a slur. Both terms are derived from a medical model that considers fat bodies as deviations that must be corrected, so both are used sparingly throughout this book.

Diet Culture

Diet culture is a system of beliefs and practices that elevates thin bodies above all others, often interpreting thinness as a sign of both health and virtue. It mandates weight loss as a way of increasing social status, strengthening character, and accessing social privilege. Christy Harrison, a registered dietitian and MPH, adds that diet culture “demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hypervigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.”¹⁴ Diet culture disproportionately benefits people whose bodies are naturally predisposed to be thin and people with the wealth and privilege to pay the high prices of customized diet foods, personal trainers, weight-loss surgery, and more. Even as “wellness” gains popularity as a way to talk about weight loss, it bears a striking resemblance to diet culture.