Aubrey Gordon - You Just Need to Lose Weight: And 19 Other Myths about Fat People

For Rita and Henry

A s is the case for many fat people, myths about my body have followed me for nearly all my life, rattling behind me, loud as a string of tin cans. Since grade school, I have been taught that some bodies are meant to be seen, and that mine isnt one of them. Ive worn plus sizes since adolescence. Ive worn the larger end of plus sizes, size 26 and up, since college. In that time, my politics around fatness have been increasingly clearly articulated to my friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. They know that I am fat, and that I have long since stopped trying to make myself thin. Some have worked to better understand and respect my experience as a fat person. Despite all that wind at my back, even in my closest relationships, I am followed closely by a series of nagging myths about what it means to have a body like mine. Even those who have known me for years still wonder aloud about my health and mortality. Some wince or correct me when I refer to my own body as fat. And holidays with family still include open complaining from thin members who sat next to a fat person on a plane.

Even after years of researching, writing about, and trying to understand anti-fatness, I continue to be caught off guard by their comments. Theyre rarely a surprise, but I still sometimes find myself straining to explain why what they just said was profoundly misguided and hurtful. And I know Im not alone. Fat friends regularly reach out to troubleshoot moments of anti-fatness in their closest relationships. Many of us are followed nearly everywhere by anti-fat myths about fat people. And most of us do our best to muddle through those conversations, but were also aware thats just what were doing: muddling through.

Still, myths about fatness and fat people abound. Only bad parents let their children get fat. Any fat person can become thin if they try hard enough. Fatness is the leading cause of death in the United States. Anti-fatness is the last socially acceptable form of discrimination. These myths persist not because they are factual nor because they help us better understand people who are fatter than us. Instead, they allow us to confirm what we already think we know about fatness and fat people. Cultural conversations prompt us to regard thinness as a major life accomplishment; these myths lend credence to that belief. Many of these myths center around treating fat people as failed thin people, implying that thin people are superior to fat people. These myths arent just incorrect or outdated perceptions: theyre tools of power and dominance.

Like many current and past community organizers, I struggle with the strategy behind myth busting. Debunking myths starts with repeating those myths. Doing so can seem like uncritically accepting an opponents premise. Depending on the myth in question, it can also mean quietly assenting to debating the humanity of the community being discussed. And political researchers have long known that facts dont change our positions on social issueshuman stories do. Most of us dont make up our minds on key social issues because weve reviewed all available research, looked at crosstabs, written executive summaries for ourselves. We make decisions about when and whether to support social issues based on their human impact, as its presented to us. Those of us who arent directly, personally impacted by those social issues are much less fact-driven than we like to think. Why, then, give these myths more airtime?

On the other hand, these myths continue to persist, despite the deep harm they cause and the erroneous and oppressive beliefs theyre built upon. Every day, fat people are pushed to defend our health, our desirability, our bodies, our place in the movements we built. Even if the premises of those myths are flawed, they continue to restrict and confine the spaces that fat people are allowed to occupy. As a former community organizer, I know that when many of us dont feel like weve got the facts we need in conversations about oppression, we can clam up. We avoid conversations about oppression and marginalization that dont directly impact us, and not feeling well versed in a topic certainly doesnt help us take those essential conversations head-on. If you feel ill-equipped in tackling regressive conversations about fatness and fat people, research and resources can help provide a touchstone. In the pages ahead, I hope youll find a place both to anchor and spur your own thinking. I hope, too, that youll use the recommendations herein to find or continue your way to more fat perspectives on these topics. Myth busting can be a fraught strategy, but it is ultimately one that widens the path for more of us to take action against anti-fatness.

Its a complicated time for our public discourse around fatness, fat people, and weight loss. Increasingly, the rhetoric of dieting and weight loss is seen as falling out of favor. Even one of the most enduring diets in the United States, Weight Watchers, has changed its name to WW, and reoriented its marketing toward more holistic wellness branding. Weight-loss methods arent marketed as diets but as lifestyle changes, detoxes, cleanses, and cognitive behavioral therapy. That shifting language allows the weight-loss industry to cloak its same old diets in the languages of holistic wellness and self-care. We may talk about diets differently today, but social mandates to become thin are as strong as ever. Alongside that shift in the diet industry is a growing popular interest in critical conversations about fatness. Recent years seem to have brought a new wave of thin people thinking more broadly about their own body politics and, more precisely, about their role in ending anti-fatness. And that influx of new attention is prompting vital conversations about the goals and strategies of fat activist movements. What are fat peoples visions for harm reduction, justice, and liberation? What strategies will most effectively get us there? Can differing or conflicting strategies coexist? Under what circumstances? Do thin people have a role to play in ending anti-fatness? What should their role beor not be? As I write this in early 2022, a range of answers to each of those questions is being advanced by fat activists every day. These conversations are at once endemic and vital to any movement for social justice. They collectively drive us toward clearer visions of a more just world and more focused strategies to deliver us to those visions. And against that increasingly complex backdrop, fat people are still navigating anti-fatness on a daily basis. We are still besieged with incessant and unsolicited instruction about our perceived health, our clothing, our love lives, and more.

What lies ahead is an offering for anyone, fat or thin, struggling to interrupt moments of anti-fatness in their daily lives. Its a compilation of research and thinking on some pernicious and persistent myths that perpetuate anti-fatness, disregard fat peoples humanity, and pathologize our bodies. Its an invitation to revisit the anti-fat biases nearly all of us carry with us and to reground our ideas about fatness in personal experience, data, and the fundamental dignity of fat people. As with any resource or offering, take whats useful here, and leave whats not. Put this to use as you see fit. But however you use this book, let it propel your advocacy for fat people beyond what you find comfortable or easy. Let it drive you toward confronting anti-fatness more regularly and confidently.