How to Tell if You are Truly Concerned About Fat People’s Health

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Fat people are often shamed, stigmatized, bullied, harassed, and oppressed by people who do so under the guise of being “concerned about our health.” Some of these people simply enjoy mistreating fat people and use the “concern for your health” line as an attempted justification/excuse. Others are truly well-intentioned and misguided by weight stigma. Here are some quick ways to know if what you are feeling is truly concern for fat people’s health, or if it’s just re-packaged weight stigma.

Do you care about anything other than body size?

The truth is that intentional weight loss almost always fails and that weight-neutral options provide more benefits with fewer risks (understanding that health is an amorphous concept, and is not an obligation, barometer of worthiness, or entirely within our control.) But even if you believe that weight loss is a path to health, if you are myopically focused on body size and you’re not concerned about things like ending weight stigma and other oppression, the dangers of weight cycling (the most common outcome of intentional weight loss attempts,) social connection, healthcare access, sleep, thriving wage, ample vacation time, access to food and movement options that someone might want etc. then you are operating from weight stigma and not true concern.

Do you use stigmatizing language

If you use terms like “ob*se,” “overw*ight” (or their ridiculous “person-first” versions person with ob*sity, person affected by ob*sity etc.) or if you talk about fat people existing as an “epidemic” or a “problem” to be solved or having “excess weight,” then you are fully invested in weight stigma.

Do you believe in near-magical healing powers of thinness?

Do you believe that becoming thin will solve all of a fat person’s health problems (even though thin people have all the same health problems?) That’s weight stigma.

Are you suggesting that they should solve stigma and oppression by changing themselves?

If you believe that fat people should have to make themselves thin in order to have equal access to the world, to be treated with basic human respect, or to solve weight stigma, then you are operating out of weight stigma.

Does your concern come out in ways that are harmful?

Shame, stigma, bullying, harassment, and oppression are not health-promoting, they are harmful. If you are truly concerned about fat people’s health, you’ll scrupulously avoid making fat people feel bad about themselves and their bodies.

If you are recommending that fat people attempt intentional weight loss, then you are recommending an intervention that almost never leads to long-term thinness or health (two different things) but often creates harm.

You can’t be invested in fat-shaming and/or diet culture and support fat people’s health.

Do you promote the eradication of fat people, or that the world would be better if there were no fat people in it?

You can’t be invested in anti-fatness and also support fat people’s health, they are mutually exclusive positions. There is no non-stigmatizing way to say that you want to eradicate fat people from the earth and prevent any more from existing. If you believe the world would be better without fat people in it, you are operating from weight stigma.

Overall, if your “concern for fat people’s health” comes out as diet culture or anti-fatness, you are harming the people about whom you are saying you are concerned. If that’s where you find yourself, then it’s time to stop voicing your concern and start listening and learning from fat people who are truly anti-weight stigma and doing the work, in particular those fat people who have multiple marginalized identities. Some places to start are 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, Mikey Mercedes’ Patreon, the Pipewrench Fat Issue and Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology.

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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.