Again, fat person here. Being fat is not healthy, physically or mentally. No we shouldn’t attack or criticize people for being fat, but acting like being fat is perfectly fine is wrong. BMI might not be a good system, but that doesn’t mean the idea behind it isn’t.

“obese” arbitrarily medicalises fatness

Fatness is medical. Fatness comes with a host of health problems. To say it’s not medical is some anti-science bullshit.

This isn’t related to the excerpts but i’ve been thinking a lot about is how capitalism and capitalist adjacent societies denigrates bodies who are or look unfit to work/produce. I’m reading caliban and the witch right now, and learning about the scale of how often women (well, people who had a uterus and AFAB during those times) were punished for simply trying to retain control of their bodies. They were denigrated to the role of a womb and if their womb was not producing the right kinds of children, with the right people and often enough, you were in danger of being deemed a witch and punished for it.

Of course, controlling whether your uterus is capable of producing healthy children and the health of those children in a time before vaccines was completely out of control of these parents.

Later on, during the slave trade era, black slave women would be seen as equal worker to any man on top of well, the much fouler and triggering stuff involving wombs and chattel slavery. In every case, the assigned-woman worker here is seen as having value only related to their bodies and what they can be used for, as if every human is just another cog in the capitalist machine, and the value of the cog is entirely decided by what the external body looks like (completely out of the human’s control).

Woman shaped cog can be used for babies. Strong shaped cog can be used for labor. If you don’t fit those, you are useless, valueless and we will persecute you for not fitting in our machine how we like. Even today if you have an intellectual type job, it’s still difficult to get those if you are visibly physically disabled in some way or there is a social stigma attached to you.

Speaking of how being fat relates to this, being fat makes you less likely to be hired and impacts your income negatively, most especially if you are being perceived as a woman.

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/aug/30/demoted-dismissed-weight-size-ceiling-work-discrimination

Shown hypothetical CVs with photographs depicting fat and thin people, the participants clearly perceived men and women of average weight to be the most suitable for employment. Obese women were the least likely to be hired. The researchers concluded that stereotypes of obese people being “less physically capable and slothful” were likely to have played a role in this outcome.

The result of this prejudice is not only that overweight people stand less chance of getting a job; they are paid less, too. In 2016, researchers at the University of Exeter found that a woman who was a stone heavier would on average earn £1,500 less a year than a comparable woman of the same height. Overweight people also work longer hours, are considered less qualified for leadership positions and are expected to be less successful, according to numerous studies.

But this shouldn’t be a surprise. Over and over, we see powerful people picking and choosing who and what is acceptable to them and basically creating a restrictive culture around it. And of course those powerful people are going to mainly be focused on how to exploit workers and extract profit. Fatphobia succeeds in that completely, AND creates an industry that profits billions off people’s shame that they are or might become fat.

I have been way too skinny all my life. In school we once had to calculate our BMI (school is a fucked up place) and our teacher told me my BMI was impossible and NOBODY could live with a BMI like that. I tried everything to gain weight but nothing worked. Then I found out I have been depressed for the majority of my life. My doctor put me on antidepressants and for the first time in my life I understood people who could always eat. I ate more than ever before and gained more than 20lb in three weeks. What I’m trying to say is: Your hunger, your drive to eat something and all these things are determined by your hormones, nothing else. Every person has unique brain with a unique mix of hormones. Eating less has nothing to do with a lack of will. You can’t decide how much you have to eat, your hormones do that and dictate your life. So don’t be ashamed when your the one eating the most at a dinner (or every dinner). Maybe don’t eat too much sugar tho. The sugar industry made fat the villain when actually a high fat, low sugar diet is probably the best for humans.

Some excerpts to tickle your fancy:

From Gaining is the fetish that changes how we think about the male body:

I do not think it is always helpful to unarchive the roots of fetishes, since this tends only to pathologise queer and non-normative forms of desire (after all, no one ever asked a heterosexual man why he likes boobs so much)

From Feederism: Eating, Weight Gain, and Sexual Pleasure :

It is argued that attempting to understand feederism using a psychological framework of pathology is inappropriate. The childhood attraction to fat and lifelong interest and erotic feelings for it into adulthood suggests a form of sexuality more so than a fetish

From Fearing the Black Body :

I argue that two critical historical developments contributed to a fetish for svelteness and a phobia about fatness: the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the spread of Protestantism. … Not until the early nineteenth century in the US in the context of slavery, religious revivals, … did these notions come together under a coherent ideology

[T]he phobia about fatness and the preference for thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health.