Visit theallusionist.org/fat2 to listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, keep my friends close, but keep language closer.
Previously on the Allusionist: I talked with Aubrey Gordon about the word ‘fat’, and euphemisms for fat, why people avoid saying ‘fat’, what else people mean when they say ‘fat’ and how it would be quite good if people said ‘fat’ as just a descriptive term for ‘fat’. Now get ready for more fat chat from me and Aubrey - as well as some of you. Thanks to all of you who sent in your thoughts and feelings about the word ‘fat’.
Content note: this episode contains discussions of body size, body image, weight, anti-fatness, illness including cancer, diet culture, weight loss - intentional and un - and eating disorders. And there are some category A swears. In case you are unfamiliar with episode four of this show, category A is the strong stuff, the DEFCON 1 of swears! I always have to look up whether DEFCON 1 or 5 is the defconniest level, it’s 1. Swearcon 1.
On with the show.
DELTA: Hi, I'm Delta and I'm fat. And the euphemism that I really hate is big boned because my bones are not bigger than anyone else's. I'm just fat. It's the fat on my body and not the bones.
HZ: Eleanor also wrote in about 'big-boned'. "It just doesn't make sense! To be fair, I think it is one people have tried to use to be less judgemental but I’m not sure the outcome is meeting intention. Calling someone (or someone calling me) podgy would not be good, because the word ‘fat’ is there and let's just use it, but I'm weirdly fond of calling fat bits of the body ‘podge’ or ‘podgy’ as it's such a silly-sounding word, it feels neutral.
REBECCA: There are a number of Irish euphemisms for being fat, which I remember from a very young age. But prime amongst them is to ‘become strong’ or ‘to be strong’ specifically as a woman, means that you are of size definitely, or perceived to be of size. One that my grandmother particularly liked was "getting broad at the beam", which meant, I suppose, that you were filling out in an undesirable way. She would also describe people as being "beef to the heel, like a mullingar heifer", which I suppose targeted your legs more than anything, to not have shapely legs and one that is often, I suppose for children, I suppose for, for chubby or or fat children, which I definitely was one, was "no sock (?) on the road", which has a wonderful kind of agricultural overtone to it.
HZ: Matt in Australia says: "I've always struggled with my weight, and my size has fluctuated for decades. The term that bristles most for me is "tub of lard". I played rugby league as a youngster (because I was a fat and perceived to be good at rugby league) and in one game, I was upended by a much smaller boy, who winded me as we smashed down to earth. I struggled to get up, and he called me a "tub of lard", which -- coming from an 11-year-old in a country town in Australia -- wasn't what I was used to being called. I'm sure there are other terms that have offended me over the years, but that's the one I dislike most."
VERITY: Hello! I am a fat lady, and the euphemism for ‘fat’ that I absolutely despised when I was a fat child was ‘voluptuous’. And the context in which it would be used would be, "oh, you're not fat darling, you’re voluptuous! Men love the voluptuous women!” And I was thinking about why that word 'voluptuous' made me feel so uncomfortable, and I think it's because it’s got a vaguely sort of sexual - or maybe not even vaguely, an obviously sexual overtone. No 12-year-old really wants to be voluptuous. I hated it. I think the other reason I hated it is it, it, it comes from this line of like, "Oh, you know, there are some men who love bigger women," which was of no relevance to me cause I am a lesbian, and I've always been. So, yeah, 'voluptuous' is my pet hate. The word I actually like is 'rotund'. 'Rotund' is round and friendly and I am both of those things.
HZ: Cary says: "I’m the type of fat who can’t shop in a store for clothes. When I travel I have to buy two plane tickets and I’m terrified my suitcase will get lost cause if it does I’m screwed. I hate the words ‘obese’ and ‘fluffy’. They sound like henchmen to some kind of evil fat villain who’s shaped like a potato. I prefer the word ‘fat’. I’ve also noticed a shift in the meaning of ‘super fat’. Someone came up with ‘infinifat’ because ‘super fat’ which used to mean someone over 350 lbs now means someone less than 500lbs. I’m honestly not sure. I just remember lots of debates about the meaning of these words and how fat itself wasn’t good enough because people who I wouldn’t consider fat (size 12 or 14, I consider this just normal American size) were using it to describe themselves and taking over fat spaces online that super fats had started out of necessity."
PERPETUA MOTION: Hi Helen. My name's Perpetua Motion. I also struggle with not having a good word for non-fat people, because I really, as a queer person, dislike the use of the phrase ‘straight-sized’. I wonder if ‘standardized size’ or ‘high street size’ or just ‘not fat’ works, because obviously the word thin also has baggage with it.
JUDE: This is Jude here from New Zealand. You were asking about feelings about the word fat. Well, I'm about to turn 50 and my feelings have turned towards: what if I was to die now? I would've died never ever feeling good about my body. Because even when I was 12 years old, and in a body that I would now die to have - I would be so happy to have my figure from back then - at the time I was still bigger than other girls and felt ashamed of my body and thought I was fat and was told I was fat. And I think, isn't that tragic that I've really gonna have gone all of my life, never feeling happy about the way I look?
HZ: Ina says: "When I was child in the 90s people in Germany used to call fat persons - especially women - „mollig“. The adjective „mollig“ can also be used (and is nowadays mostly used) in combination with „warm“ to describe something agreeably warm & cozy, for example a blanket, a sweater or even a bath. So people in my country used to compare fat ladies to comfy (fluffy?) clothes and hot bathtubs…"
KATE: Hi Helen. My name is Kate. I'm calling in from Massachusetts, and I just want to let you know that I have fairly positive feelings about the word 'fat'. It seems comfortable, it seems normal, and it's better than other adjectives which are often applied to my body as a person with a disability. At least people understand 'fat' - and honestly, I appreciate having at least enough to give myself a well-padded bottom. It makes it easier to sit in a wheelchair all day long without spending thousands of dollars - no exaggeration - on specialty seats or on caregivers to help shift my weight every few hours. Thank you so much! Have a good day.
HZ: Joyce mentions an interesting conundrum, perhaps some of you would be able to advise: "I teach English as a Second Language to adults in the United States, and I am always torn when we get to the chapter with adjectives to describe people's looks. Do I teach the word ‘fat’? Or some other, more polite (?) term? Has it been thoroughly enough reclaimed as a neutral descriptor? I don't want my students to be inadvertently rude or possibly even cruel because they don't know all our cultural baggage around the word."
PERPETUA MOTION: I look forward to the day when the word ‘fat’ is truly reclaimed. I think we will know that it has been fully reclaimed when it's able to be used in a value-neutral context. Currently people are horrified when someone self-describes as fat. And I think that privileges the feelings of onlookers over the right for someone to describe themself in a way that feels accurate and comfortable for them.
HZ: Very Tired says: "I would like to get more comfortable with using the word "fat" to describe myself, and to help normalise it being a neutral term, but inevitably I end up using terms like "bigger" or "plus sized" because of how people react to the word ‘fat’. It ranges from looking uncomfortable or flinching to giving me weight loss "advice" to assuming it is self-deprecating and joining in with how much they dislike their own body, to reassuring me I'm not fat even though I weigh literally 3 times as much as them. I find this all upsetting and exhausting, so I stick to euphemisms to avoid the hassle, despite feeling guilty that I'm not doing my part to combat anti-fatness."
That's OK - you didn't ask to have to be in combat.
And another Allusionaut says: "I wish I could hear the word fat without hurting."
DELTA: And something interesting about the word fat to me is that so many of us have been bullied with that word by so many people in our lives, and so it's interesting to me that this word that's almost been used as a slur has been chosen as a neutral word to describe our community. It's not that I don't like the word ‘fat’, but it definitely took some getting used to when I first started accepting my fat body and interacting with fat communities, that this word is being used in a neutral way and not as the insult.
HZ: It's interesting to feel like fat is the neutral one when fat is a word that has like completely shaped my life in such a way that I don't think I'll ever be free of feelings of self-hatred and failure, and that for some people, no matter what I achieve, it will be irrelevant because of my fat.
AUBREY GORDON: Absolutely. Yeah, it's a rough thing. I will say I… had a moment where I went to a party that was ostensibly being thrown in my honour, which was very sweet, when I got a book deal for my first book.
HZ: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon - her off Maintenance Phase podcast and author of the new book You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People and star of the upcoming documentary Your Fat Friend.
AUBREY GORDON: I was very excited to go, very excited to see everybody, very excited to like have a good time. And when I walked in the room, who had been invited did not know that I had signed a book deal. They did know that I had lost weight. And they all wanted to know how, and they all wanted to talk about why I looked different than I used to look.
And it was one of the starkest moments that I have had of like, oh, right, it's not just me. Like we tend to treat body image like some kind of like brain virus that you get somehow and you just gotta figure out how to push it out of your mind. And we don't really reckon with the ways in which that brain virus is being installed all the time from people we know and love, right? And that was a real moment of like, oh my God, this is a group of people who got together and wanted to celebrate me - and in this moment, rather than picking, “You're gonna write a book which you've wanted to do for forever!” they picked, “You seem to have lost 30 pounds, 40 pounds! How'd you do it?” And it was just this moment of like, oh, right. It's not just in my own mind. For other people in my life, nothing about me will matter as much as my size. There's not anything that I can do that will change that in their minds. And that feels really bleak and sad, it feels really bleak and sad to me to me. I went from being very, very fat to just very fat, and people really wanted to talk about that.
HZ: “Now, we love you more. (But still not much.)”
AUBREY GORDON: That's exactly right. I mean, I don't think, again, like when people sort of think and talk about congratulating weight loss as sort of a default setting, all of that kind of stuff: I really don't think people contend with the ways in which they are sending a message to everyone around them that there is a weight limit for people that they will love and for how they will show up for people in their lives and that sort of thing. It's not just excluding a fat person - although it is doing that profoundly and publicly - it's also sending a message to everyone else that is like, “Don't get this fat, or it's all I'm gonna talk about with you!” Pffft.
HZ: People are still kind of compelled to comment on other people's bodies all the time to them. I wonder if there are some techniques people should practice where, if they want to pay someone a compliment because they think they've lost weight, what should they say to themselves instead? Or is there something else they can say to discharge the urge to do the compliment without being like, "Smaller bodies are better bodies and let's never forget that."
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, that's a tricky one. I am pretty hard in the camp just with myself of like, I'm just not commenting on other people's weight at any point. That's my goal. That's my personal Holy Grail. And I think it's worth spending some time with yourself, if that's a compliment that you feel compelled to pay, and thinking about what do you think that's offering to that person? How are you trying to make them feel? And what's another way that you can make them feel that way that is not tied to their body, right? Is there a way, if you want your friend to feel great about themselves, could you tell them they did a great job on something? Could you pay a compliment to how they show up as a friend? Could you talk about their actual behaviours and qualities about them that you really appreciate? Could you do that even when they're gaining weight? Could you do that? Could you do that all the time, instead of just when people are losing weight? Helen has a very quizzical expression on right now, and it's great. If you want your friends and family to feel good about themselves, then just do that all the time. That is a thing that is always available to you regardless of that person's weight, is what I would say to that. It's a hard thing to get out of the habit of. I think often, folks are very concerned that people will be angry with them if they don't compliment their weight loss. What I have found is that plenty of other people are doing that, and one person not doing it doesn't tend to stick out in a big way.
HZ: So you just need a crowd.
AUBREY GORDON: And, when that has happened, that people have gotten upset, I'll have a conversation with them and say, “I know that I'm the fattest person you know; why is it so particularly important to have me say ‘congratulations on looking less like me’? And that feels really hard and painful to me. I'll be here for you every other time, every other place. But I can't show up for you on this thing.” Which leads to, you know, a stronger boundaries conversation, which ideally leads to stronger friendships and relationships and connections with people.
HZ: Nikki from Oregon says: "Sitting in the chair getting my hair cut by a good friend, someone I loved, and her talking about how she had hit a size 20 in jeans and "felt like such a cow, you know?!? And I just had to do something about it." And I'm sitting there in my very-much-bigger than size 20 pants and realizing I'd never ever forget those words; it'd change how I felt she saw me forever and I'd never feel the same way about any ‘compliment’ she gave me ever again."
AUBREY GORDON: And at no point does anyone actually just ask a fat person in their life, “Hey, when I do this, is that okay with you? How do you feel when I say this thing?” Like that baseline level of human courtesy just doesn't really happen with fat people.
HZ: Although I don't particularly want to be their survey group either.
AUBREY GORDON: Fair; fair and reasonable. I guess my point is it doesn't seem to occur to anyone to even assess like, “What's the impact of my behaviour on the person I'm acting this way toward?” on any level, whether they ask or read body language or whatever. It just is like not interesting to many, many people.
HZ: Well, I think so many people have no idea that they carry around this bias. I'd imagine most people don't.
AUBREY GORDON: Mm-hmm.
ANONYMOUS: Hi. Yeah, I've just listened to Fat part one. I just wanted to say thank you. I had no idea that I was a fat hater. I think I did have an idea, but I didn't admit to myself how horribly, horribly wrong that is. This is the beginning of a long and difficult journey, but I'm looking forward to it.
HZ: Thank you, and to be fair to you, I don’t think many of us have been unaffected by the anti-fat culture, whether or not we’re aware of it.
AUBREY GORDON: And, I would say, folks who are aware of it are often very proud of it and think that they're doing a good thing. That anti-fat bias isn't seen as bias against a group of people, which it absolutely is: folks who are profoundly biased against fat people reconfigure that as, "I'm actually doing the work of public health institutions, and I'm helping doctors, is what I'm doing, not being an absolute gremlin to any fat person who crosses my path," right? But folks will use this sort of veneer of "This is for your health" to reconfigure what is pretty patently just bullying as a kind of missionary effort to convert the wretched - that's us - into saved thin people.
HZ: Perhaps they could be the saviour, the chosen one who - unlike every other person or societal force we’ve encountered in our chubby lives - compels us to haul open our meaty eyelids and see the light! Hallelujah! But, then there’s no miracle to make us thin. Which means the proselytising can carry on forever. Everyone’s an expert on other people’s bodies, right?
AUBREY GORDON: It’s a fascinating one. I will say I had a family member at one point, who has been very insistent on recommending bariatric surgeons to me.
HZ: <sharp gasp>
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, it's happened quite a bit. And one of the pitches that she made at one point was, “Just think about it - you could wear whatever you want!” And I was actually wearing the pants that I'm wearing today. Hang on, hang on, hang on.
[Via their video call, Aubrey stands up to show Helen the pants she is wearing.]
HZ: Oh, nice. So there's a green and cream checkerboard pattern. Beautiful.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. High waisted trousers.
HZ: Spectacular.
AUBREY GORDON: And I had to be like, “I already wear whatever I want; that's already happening. This has not stopped me.”
And it's really fascinating to me that many of our social scripts around how to treat fat people are overtly very cruel and judgemental to fat people. And then we act - not we, but predominantly thin people, act as if they are doing fat people a favour by like publicly humiliating us and by making us feel terrible and by isolating us and by ostracizing us, and all of this other sort of stuff that comes along with it.
HZ: And guess what: none of that makes us less fat!
The excess baggage that accompanies the word ‘fat’, like we talked about in part one, that the word is used synonymously with ‘immoral’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘unhealthy’, obscures the fact that ample research shows health outcomes for fat people would not be worse just by being fat - they're worse because medical practitioners won't treat us because we're fat. They don't treat the bodies we actually have, they tell us to "just lose weight" as if that had never occured to us before and then maybe they'll treat this imaginary body we might have in a year's time, or two years, or never.
AUBREY GORDON: And when you start to dig into research, there's quite a bit of data that shows that people in the quote unquote ‘overweight’ category live longer than people in the quote unquote ‘normal’ weight category, that we’re less likely to have bone fractures in old age. There's like a bunch of - not health benefits, but there are places where quote unquote overweight and quote unquote obese people are outpacing thin people on some measures of health.
HZ: You don't hear about that as much.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, you don't hear about that as much because it doesn't comport with our social narrative. We are sort of reverse engineering the science we're willing to talk about based on what we're willing to believe and entertain and whose humanity we're willing to take in. And the response to fat people's humanity seems to be pretty roundly, “Nope, not these guys; moving on.”
HZ: There’s a term for this: ‘obesity paradox’.
AUBREY GORDON: A term that researchers came up with when they were confronted with the idea that some fat people are actually healthy in some ways and some fat people aren healthier than thin people in some ways.
HZ: Impossible!
AUBREY GORDON: The “obesity paradox”, quote unquote, is only a paradox if your paradigm for understanding bodies is only thin ones can be healthy, or can experience any health benefits whatsoever. Calling it a paradox is a way of acknowledging a scientific reality without ceding the ground that thin people really have a kind of death grip on: that is, “we are healthier and therefore more morally righteous and therefore have earned our place in society in all of these sorts of ways,” it snowballs.
HZ: It all tracks; I'm very immoral.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah yeah yeah. Listen, be gay, do crimes, I'm extremely immoral. But it's a really fascinating little window into the minds of the researchers who are spending the most time on researching fat folks on our health, which is the starting point is, and the research questions are all framed by: “We know it's terrible to be fat, but how terrible is it?” Not: “What would it take to give effective healthcare to fat people? How can we manage health markers without changing someone's weight, because we don't know how to change someone's weight?” There are many, many, many other ways to skin this particular cat, but we're not doing any of those. Instead, we're hyper-focused on itemizing the many ways in which we're convinced that it's terrible to be fat.
HZ: TMI time: I’ve been very lucky that my fat casing has mostly been pretty low-difficulty, healthwise. The three times in my adult life when my body has been at its least fat - but make no mistake, still fat - have coincided with when I’ve felt the least healthy. The first time was in 2008: my doctor put me on a weight-loss drug that was banned not long after (as it turned out, it was amphetamines). Sure, I lost weight, the medication killed my appetite; it also killed my ability to sleep or feel any emotions. Then in 2010, the doctor sent me to an endocrinologist who put me on the Atkins diet; as well as forsaking starches, meant I was only allowed to eat a very limited amount of vegetables and hardly any fruit - which made me feel unpleasant nutritionally, but also mentally spinning pretty much all the waking hours - restricted eating does more to your brain than just pop some lists of allowed foods on your mental fridge door. The third time I was smallest and unhealthiest was in 2018, when a life-threatening retropharyngeal abscess impinged on my throatpipes so I couldn’t swallow anything, and in order to keep breathing, I was intubated and put in a medically induced coma. Valley of the Dolls makes medically induced comas sound like a fun way to rejuvenate and lose a few pounds: let me tell you, they are not! And do you know where you don’t find healthy people? Hooked up to machinery in intensive care units! So yeah, ‘healthy’ as a synonym, as a euphemism, for ‘less fat’ is a very fraught concept, and outright dangerous - for people of all sizes.
AUBREY GORDON: The number of stories of even people that I know who have gone to the doctor for really, really troubling and alarming symptoms and have been told to come back when they lose weight and have spent years tracking down care, only to find that the quote unquote ‘weight’ that they needed to lose was a massive tumour, or that their cancer had progressed from stage 1B to stage 4 in the time that doctors had been refusing to treat them and insisting on weight loss.
HZ: had a friend who, for like a year and a half, she had this chronic projectile vomiting condition and people are like, “Oh my God, you've lost weight, you look great!” And she was like, “Fuck you, this is the worst time in my life.”
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. Totally. Listen, I had a friend who had cancer and people kept asking her what her secret was, and she was like, “The big C, that's what.” And another friend who went through a divorce and people kept telling her she looked great, and she was like, “I feel terrible. Thanks!” And I think folks don't really reckon with - look, even when weight loss is intentional, we all know people who have lost weight in profoundly unhealthy ways. There is this idea that there is sort of a zero sum game to be had that all thinness is healthy and all fatness is unhealthy.
HZ: It’s just not a direct correlation between the size of a body and the wellbeing of its inner workings.
TILLA: My school and all my friends were worried because they could see that I obviously had issues around eating. I was essentially just having hot salty water for lunches and I tried to bring this up with my mum. I sort of nervously sat her down, I was like, "Hey mum. So my friends and teachers at school are worried that I'm anorexic." And she laughed a bit and, and looked at me. She's like, "You're not anorexic! I mean, just look at your thighs!"
HZ: Here’s another term for your big book of body-relevant terminology: “healthism”.
AUBREY GORDON: ‘Healthism’ is a term that was coined by a sociologist named Robert Crawford in the early 1980s. And it was Crawford's way of describing the value judgments and the morality that we tend to project onto not other people's health, but our perception of other people's health. Usually that's done visually. If someone is using mobility aids ,like braces or a wheelchair, we assume that person is disabled and anyone without those things is not. And if someone is fat, we assume that that person is unhealthy, and that any thin person is healthy. Crawford essentially argued that this started to be viewed as almost a civic duty, and part of the social contract was not to be healthy, but to appear healthy to others.
HZ: To perform health.
AUBREY GORDON: Absolutely. That all of this is rooted much more in social performance than it is in any real knowledge of someone's a1c, their T-cell count, their resting heart rate, anything else that you might use as a more concrete measure of someone's actual health. Of all the people who have told me they are concerned for my health, not a one of 'em have looked at my chart in my doctor's office. Not a single one of 'em knows a single one of my diagnoses or lack thereof.
HZ: It'd be invasive if they did.
AUBREY GORDON: It would be wild! In the US it would be illegal. We have health privacy laws. Your records cannot be shared legally with other people.
HZ: The healthism that Robert Crawford identified was a rising trend that your health is your personal responsibility. Regardless of factors like your economic situation, access to healthcare, access to nutrition; disability, genetics, discrimination on the basis of race and gender, the environment where you live… The problem isn’t at a systemic level, no no no; it’s self-determined. whatever situation you’re in, you must deserve it - oh, it’s bad? Try harder. So if you’re unhealthy, it’s your fault.
AUBREY GORDON: Crawford was essentially getting at this idea that health becomes a stand-in for our perception of someone else's worth their ability to contribute to society, uh, and their morality. And I think it's a really useful concept in disability justice work, and with fat folks and with fat justice work.
HZ: Yeah, because the intersection of anti-fat bias and culture with ableism and racism is immense.
AUBREY GORDON: It is. There's been quite a bit written about the ways in which rejecting fat people became a stand-in for rejecting poor people, black people, indigenous people, and people of colour, at a time when that was sort of not quite done in polite society. That chapter has clearly closed. Like overt racism, overt classism, all of that kind of stuff is just like right out there in the open. But our anti-fatness became a way to sublimate all of the sort of latent racism, classism, ableism, all of that kind of stuff, and just pin it on folks who we could convince ourselves, quote unquote, “did it to themselves” and therefore deserve whatever's coming to them. Which is sort of the attitude toward fat people: “If you really didn't wanna be treated this way, you'd just lose weight,” without any real recognition of what it takes to lose weight. Have you seen people diet? Have you dieted? If you have, you know it is not a straight line.
I think the other thing that feels really tricky about all of this is, aside from surgical methods - and even within some surgical methods - we do not know, scientifically, reliably how to make fat people thin in the long term. And many physicians know that. Many insurers know that. And yet still the instruction is when you encounter a fat patient, your job - you are in dereliction of duty if you don't tell that person that they're fat and they need to lose weight. And it has become incredibly commonplace to essentially hold care hostage until fat people lose weight. And it's a very bleak landscape as a fat person to know that if something happens with my health, it will almost certainly worsen. It will almost certainly not be treated, and it may lead to my death because folks are not willing to believe that I might have a health condition that's not a direct result of being a fat person. And folks are not willing to believe, even if that's the case, that weight loss is not a cinch, is not a very easy thing where you just need to put down the Mars bar, fatty.
HZ: “Just” lose weight.
AUBREY GORDON: One of the most dismissive phrases I can fathom.
HZ: Like we can shrug off our lard carapaces, our husky husks, and step out svelte. Just lose weight! Like diets work. According to BMJ, the vast majority, the fluffy majority of dieters after 2-5 years have regained the weight and often even more.
FILM TRAILER:
It’s back.
And it’s BIGGER than ever.
Flab 2: Return of the Flab.
SOME DUDE: Have you tried paleo?
AUBREY GORDON: The most forgiving studies on ‘diets don't work’, the most promising results are that 80% of them don't work, and the least forgiving are 97% of them don't work. If a doctor is proposing a treatment to me that has a one in five success rate and goes down from there, I'm not really holding my breath for that particular therapy to be especially effective.
HZ: Yeah, but you should punish yourself just anyway.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're disgusting to look at. Yes. It’s a really tricky thing to sort of have all of these conversations about fatness and fat people and have people get into this sort of entrenched “but the science!” thing, and realize that many of the folks who are most attached to that narrative just aren't actually paying attention to any of the science around weight loss. According to the National Institutes of Health, someone my size, a cis woman my size, has a less than one tenth of 1% chance of attaining my BMI-recommended weight in my lifetime. A fraction of 1% is the chance that I will become a thin person.
HZ: One in a thousand chance! Do everything to do that!
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah, totally. Just spend your whole life throwing all your money and time and self worth into it, rather than just trying to live a healthy life, trying to do your best, and trying to be a good person, and trying to get healthcare. No, no, no, no, no.
HZ: All irrelevant, irrelevant! Try a thousand diets and one of them statistically will be the one.
AUBREY GORDON: Absolutely. You tried paleo, you tried vegan, did you try the pegan diet? Which is absolutely one that is making the rounds here now and makes me want to die. Just really bleurgh! But yeah, it all acts as this more socially acceptable stand-in for other, and often deeper, social biases.
HZ: It was kind of easier before I started reading about how anti-fatness works, because at least when it was just, in my mind, my fault, it felt less unbearable than this huge system where it is like, "Oh, you're never going to get medical treatment that you need."
AUBREY GORDON: It's a tough one. It feels like a very grey-eyed Athena moment when you sort of get there and figure out how all of these systems are working together to make sure that fat people just like don't get what we need. Mostly just out of straight up good old-fashioned bias and disgust: not really rooted in meaningful science, and when it is, that science itself is rooted in pretty profound bias; not really rooted in a social phenomenon that we have any meaningful control over; just rooted in, “I'm having to see more fat people and I don't wanna look at fat people.”
HZ: Yeah, but it's our fault really, because we could just unzip our fat and take it off. We're just keeping it on to be obstinate.
AUBREY GORDON: Yeah! We could be like that statue of a thin woman chiseling herself out of a fat woman's body. That one, that absolute horror show. Yeah.
HZ: Yeah. We do the opposite of that every day though, we've got a butter knife and we just put the fat on and we're like, “This is gonna really piss people off!”
AUBREY GORDON: It is fascinating when you sort of look at how dominant ideas of fat people operate, really, if you spend like 20 seconds on them, they kind of fall apart. In the popular imagination, there's this idea that fat people every day are eating like 5,000 calories-worth of food. And if you think about how much food that is, that really falls apart really quickly.
HZ: We don't have the time!
AUBREY GORDON: Like that's a difficult amount of food to eat. And also sometimes you see fat people eating and we're not eating, I don't know, like 17 sausage rolls in one sitting. Imagine! We're not eating three whole cakes for dessert. We're eating similar amounts to other people. But again, the desire to be repulsed by fat people and to feel entitled to be publicly repulsed by fat people really tends to win the day on quite a bit of this. I think there's quite a bit that we don't really reckon with culturally - I think we think our anti-fatness says a lot about fat people and we don't really realize how much it says about us, that we are willing to set weight limits for people we treat with respect is a really horrifying and overtly cruel way to treat people. "If I don't think you're attractive enough or if I don't think you're healthy enough, I will not be treating you with basic dignity" leads you to dark places. Like if you're treating people poorly based on their health, are you doing this with people who are in the hospital? Are you doing this with people who are going through medical crises? Are those people also people who are out in the cold for you? What are we doing here? What is the end game here? And I kind of think that extending anti-fatness to its logical conclusion in any of those states reveals really gruesome things about who we're willing to engage with and who we aren't.
Here’s another pod to add to your podpile: The Moon Under Water. It’s a show where guests design their dream pub, and I’ve just appeared on it, which was a fun challenge, because I don’t drink alcohol or go out much, but I think I did a pretty good job of designing a nice pub. My brother Andy was on it a few months ago, and my friend Alex said that he designed the worst pub in the world. So I think I did better than that. Also the host John Robins and I both studied Old and Medieval English at the same university at the same time, but we didn’t know each other. Anyway, find the two episodes I’m on at moonunderpod.com and in the podplaces.
And if you want to hang out with me in a social place where the drinks and snacks are determined by you, and the environment, and the furnishings - because we’re online - then join the Allusioverse, where you get the Allusionist community on Discord, you get regular livestreams with me and my dictionaries, and you get extra information about the making of each show. Go to theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
tret, noun, historical: an allowance of extra weight made to purchasers of certain goods to compensate for waste during transportation.
Try using ‘tret’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The original music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. The cast of The Flab II was Felix Trench of Wooden Overcoats podcast and acting and writing - find his work at felixtrench.com. Thanks so much to all of you who sent your thoughts and feelings about fat. And of course you heard from Aubrey Gordon, who cohosts the podcast Maintenance Phase, and writes - her books include You Just need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People and What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat. The documentary about her, Your Fat Friend, premieres in June 2023 at Tribeca Festival, DC Dox, and Sheffield Docfest. Find Aubrey at AubreyGordon.net and MaintenancePhase.com.
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