This Not, Actually, Tell-Tale Heart
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This meme seems to making the rounds again.
It’s a picture of a human heart held over a blue basin in two gloved hands with the caption “This is the heart of an ob*se* person.. Remember folks, this is what happens when you get fat. Fat tissue builds up around the heart and clogs/chokes it. Fat is not beautiful, it is not be glorified.”
BOOM, SCIENCE! I guess that’s the end of the weight-inclusive health and the Size Acceptance movement then. Bonus points for enacting the “glorifying obesity” nonsense in which it’s suggested that fat people who choose not to live our lives in a state of perpetual self-loathing have it all wrong. As I’ve pursued the life I want in a fat body, I’ve often been accused of “glorifying obesity,” oddly, I am also short and yet I have never once been accused of glorifying shortness. That’s because this is about fatphobia and has nothing to do with health.
But wait – it turns out that, just like “glorifying obesity” is a a tired old myth, so is this meme. This picture is actually a healthy heart that was about to be transplanted into a patient at Cedars-Sinai in 2012.
I’ll bet Ms. Moore thinks that is some beautiful, glorious fat. Discussions about health are complicated and aren’t helped by fatphobes who slept through every science class they ever took creating misleading internet memes. In a world where weight stigma runs so rampant that someone who knows nothing about human hearts can see a picture of one, decide that it has something to do with fat people and start a completely incorrect meme that goes fairly viral, any negative message about fat people is always reader beware because, trust me, these people will say anything.
You may remember that Dr. Oz made a similar mistake, claiming that fat people must have bad hearts because every fat person he had performed heart surgery on had a bad heart, as if he was cracking the chests of thin people just to say “Yup, another healthy thin-person heart!” and then sewing them back up.
Even if that was a fat person’s heart, and even if it was indicative of health issues, it has absolutely nothing to do with beauty or morality. If you think people who are “unhealthy” (by whatever definition you are using) are in any way less deserving/moral/beautiful, then you are a healthist, a Grade A jerk, and just plain wrong. Health is not an obligation, it’s not entirely within our control, it’s not a barometer of worthiness or beauty, and it’s not anyone else’s business.
There’s a time and place for discussions about health, but those discussions don’t have anything to do with the right of fat people to exist in fat bodies without shame, stigma, bullying and harassment and it doesn’t matter why we’re fat, if there are “health impacts” of being fat, if we’re “glorifying obesity,” or if we could become thin.
The things we need to stop glorifying are weight stigma and completely inaccurate internet memes.
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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 Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.