If You're Thinking About Offering Advice to a Fat Person About Their Health...

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If you’re thinking about offering unsolicited advice/thoughts to a fat person about their health, here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Did this person ask for my advice?

If the answer to this one is no, you can feel free to just stop here.

At the absolute least, you need to ask “Do you want to hear my thoughts about your health?” If the answer is no, then you’re done.

2. Am I truly an expert in what I’m about to say?

To be clear, being an expert means that you actually have good and correct information to impart that is evidence-based and about which you have deep and full knowledge. (Plenty of healthcare providers are still stuck in diet culture and the weight-centric model and don’t have good information to offer around weight and health.) So, where did you get this information that you are eager to impart? If you read it in an article or heard it from Dr. Oz, then consider that you might not be in a position to offer expert advice on someone’s health.

3. Do I really think I have new information for this person?

If you’re about to launch into a diatribe that is indistinguishable from diet industry marketing, if you’re about to deliver an “eat less and exercise more or calories in/calories out” recommendation, just skip it. No fat person in the world has missed out on hearing this nonsense, and none of us needs to hear it again, especially from someone whose thoughts we never solicited.

4. Am I really “concerned about this person’s health”

Do you want to make sure that this person gets sufficient sleep, that they are paid a thriving wage and has ample vacation time, that they have access to the food that they want to eat and/or the movement options they might want to participate in, that they don’t experience size-based or other oppression?

If your “concern” begins and ends with someone’s body size and/or if you aren’t working toward (or are actively working against) structural changes that would improve social determinants of health (including anti-oppression work including true anti-weight stigma work) then you’re coming from a place of weight stigma and, as such, you are not in a position to support this person’s health. Instead of sharing the toxic ideas about being fat people that you’ve internalized with someone who will almost certainly be harmed by them, consider this an opportunity to do your own work to dismantle your personal weight stigma

Look, unsolicited advice is very rarely a good idea, that amount becomes pretty much infinitesimal when we’re talking about unsolicited health advice to fat people. Think before you do it, think again, and then stop or, at the very least, get consent.

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More Research

For a full bank of research, check out 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 Harrisons Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.