I hear a lot about how fatness is a “risk factor” for certain illnesses and diseases. I don’t hear much about how so are age, socioeconomic status, experiences of abuse, starvation, sex, race, queerness, and so many other aspects of a person’s life. And that’s because the world already for the most part accepts that a lot of these factors cannot be changed and that many of these factors are not what actually causes an illness or disease.
You don’t develop a medical condition because your bank account suddenly shows a different, smaller number. You developed that medical condition because poverty means unbearable stress every day, less access to healthcare, worse housing, inability to clothe yourself for protection from the elements, having to overwork yourself to be able to afford your basic necessities, going without food, and so many other aspects of oppression. You don’t weigh your wallet to measure your health because the amount of money you have is not what actually causes a medical condition.
But no one wants to look at the studies with legitimate methodology and admit that fatness is also in this category—that fatness is not something that we can just choose and will away, that fat people face immense systemic oppression just like any other oppressed group, that the correlation of fatness and illness is not some simple relationship of causation. And that’s because doing so would mean no longer making hundreds of billions of dollars off of fat people’s oppression and having to admit it’s not actually okay to treat fat people as an acceptable punching bag.
When I look at medical information for whatever illnesses, see the risk factors laid out, and the only risk factor the website says to change is fatness? I think about all of the research I’ve read that shows actual permanent weight loss is as likely as finding Atlantis. The amount of hypocrisy at not telling someone to drink a youth potion as a form of treatment at the same time as they lose weight becomes so palpable that I can taste the dirty money being made off of this website telling people to “just lose weight, fatty.” It’s as cruel as selling an ill person a random crystal that you tell them will fix their health, which they then rely on instead of actual medical care, causing them to get worse and even die. And if you think that comparison is a stretch, you do not realize how many people die every day because they were told weight loss was the answer or were forced to lose weight before the doctor would actually respect them enough to run tests or so much as touch their fat body.
We live in a world where people with PCOS are told to “just lose weight” to solve their infertility, where that is the very first bullet point listed on a website about a medical condition that makes weight loss even more impossible than the already 95% failure rate for the general population. A world where fat people have to stick their own fat bodies with needles during a doctor’s appointment because the doctor is too disgusted by fat rolls to even look at the person’s body to give them a shot. A world where fat people with eating disorders are encouraged, applauded, and told to keep going while the thin person with an eating disorder has the “luxury” of receiving help, compassion, and a diagnosis that isn’t separated in the DSM with the word “atypical.” A world where a fat person accidentally given chemotherapy is told by the doctor “At least it helped you lose weight!” A world where weight loss corporations are making the exact same promises they did in advertisements from 1910, yet somehow over 100 years later we have an “ob*sity epidemic” because diets, weight loss products, and exercise regimens “Really work!!!”
If this single “solution” to ill health has not worked despite well over a century of desperate, constant attempts, maybe we should stop trying to jam a triangle into a square hole.
-Mod Worthy
For anyone who had doubts about how dire fatphobia is, here is your horrific reminder. This is happening all over the world, every day. It’s time for fat people’s oppression to end. Thank you to the person who wrote these tags for allowing me to feature them. That doctor who tried to kill you both and managed to murder your friend should never be allowed to work in the medical field again.
