Doctor Tweets Perfect Example of Weight Stigma

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A tweet from a PhD Psychologist was brought to my attention. With thanks to those who pointed it out to me, I’ll start by saying that I’m not going to name the person because I don’t want to give them any traffic and they are certainly not the only person in their position to make this mistake, so while I’ll address these tweets specifically, understand that my answers are meant to apply broadly.

In this case they seem to want to be kind of a “celebrity psychologist.” They are the founder of a center, host of a podcast, author of three books (soon to be four,) and have a Twitter handle that starts with “Dr”.

The initial tweet was:

I can’t stand fat shaming but I also don’t believe in fat enabling. Let’s encourage everyone to eat healthy, exercise regularly, and live an active lifestyle. I believe in positive encouragement for anyone trying to better themselves, no matter where they are starting!

So apropos of nothing, this person decides that this is what they need to tell the world.  A couple things to point out here. First, I can’t stand fat-shaming is a complete sentence. If the next word, as it is here, is “but” then it indicates that you can stand fat-shaming in at least some forms, in fact, as it does here, it suggests that you are about to participate in fat-shaming.

The next sentence tells us that this person is operating from pure stereotypes. But even if we (kindly and generously) assume that they weren’t suggesting that all fat people don’t eat “healthy,” exercise regularly, and live an “active lifestyle,” and if we then take them at face value that they want to “encourage everyone” to do these things, then the first sentence is absolutely unnecessary since this, ostensibly, has absolutely nothing to do with fat people.

The fact that they started out by talking about fat-shaming vs fat-enabling tells us that they are operating from stereotypes and that they want to do their best to reinforce those stereotypes. Here again, we have the ridiculous notion that it’s somehow not fat-shaming to suggest that you want to create a world with no fat people in it.

Of course, beyond all of this is the fact that health (and weight, which are two separate things) are not an obligation or barometer of worthiness, are far from being entirely within our control, and are not other people’s business unless we ask them to make it their business (which is to say that there’s no need to go larking about randomly “encouraging” fat people to live as you think they should and assume they don’t, on Twitter or anywhere else.)

But this person wasn’t done, there was a second Tweet:

I'm all for an appreciation of body diversity but ignoring health issues in the name of "body positivity" is a serious health problem in my view. We need accurate information about health and help people maintain a healthy body weight with love and support.

Tell me you have no idea what you’re talking about in 280 characters or less.

You can’t “appreciate body diversity” and be invested in the idea that everyone should be a “healthy weight,” in fact, you can’t be invested in logic and buy into the idea of a “healthy weight” since there are people of all sizes at every point along the health spectrum, there are people of the exact same weight with different health statuses, and people of very different weights with the exact same health statuses. Weight and health are two different things, anyone who doesn’t understand that should not be tweeting as if they are an authority on weight or health.

So we’ve determined that contrary to their own claims, this person is into fat-shaming and is not all for appreciating the diversity of body sizes.

People pointed many of these things out to them in replies and instead of taking an opportunity to learn and grow, they doubled down:

I think it's complex and you are right that structural issues contribute to fat-enabling. But fat-enabling can also come from within any community that ignores the health issues in the service of "body positivity". Both are true in my view.

Both of these are, in fact, false, predominantly because there is literally no such thing as fat-enabling. This is a term that this person has made up to justify their weight stigma. It’s the same old thing as “glorifying ob*sity.” It boils down to an ideology that fat people’s lives should center on a desire to be thin (which the person making this mistake things is the same as “healthy”) and anything else is a misuse of our lives. This would be wrong under any guise, but is particularly bleak when you know that a century of research has found that intentional weight loss fails about 95% of the time and has the opposite of the intended effect up to 66% of the time.

Now, this is not entirely the fault of our tweeter, certainly plenty of education, including the education of psychologists, misleads people about weight and health. But when you are billing yourself as an expert as this person does, I think you have a higher level of responsibility to check your own biases rather than firing off a tweet to put them on public display and try to get others to join you.

There is no such thing as fat-enabling, but there is stereotype-enabling, weight stigma-enabling, and paternalism-enabling and it’s exactly what’s happening here.

What’s true is that weight and health are not the same thing. By whatever definitions someone is using, there are some fat people who eat “healthier,” exercise more, and lead more “active lifestyles” than some thin people. To claim otherwise is simply untrue.

But that’s not what’s most important here. What’s most important is that no matter what someone thinks about weight and health, fat-shaming is wrong, period. Even if devoting our lives to attempting intentional weight loss would make us thinner and healthier (two different things) we would still not be obligated to devote our lives to that (and anyone making a “but my tax dollars” argument can head over here.”)

The truth is that fat people have the right to exist without shame, stigma, bullying, or oppression (and that includes not having PhD Psychologists tweeting that we should be constantly stereotyped and “positively encouraged” to comply with their priorities for us.) It doesn’t matter why we are fat, it doesn’t matter if there are “health impacts” of being fat, it doesn’t matter if we could, or even want to, become thin.

The person who wrote this tweet is in a position to impact a lot of people, I can only hope that the rest of their understanding and work is better than this, and that they take this opportunity to be educated. In the meantime, my main concern is for the fat people who will be harmed by their contact with this person, may they find the support and affirmation that they deserve. I can’t stand fat-shaming is a complete sentence. There is no but.

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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.