Rethinking fat: ‘My life is worth living and loving now — not 200 pounds from now’
Aubrey Gordon, the brains behind ‘Your Fat Friend’ and co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase on why we need to rethink our biases around weight, health and how she feels about the relentless advice of strangers
Anyone who is, or has been, fat will know that you are treated differently by the world.
And by differently, I mean worse. The fatter you are, the worse you are treated. At best, you are concern-trolled by well-meaning people about diets, at worst you are fat-called in the street, lose out in the employment market, receive inferior medical care, and are treated as a second-class citizen. People who date you must be fat fetishists. In school, fat kids are disproportionately bullied — as though bullying might make them thin.
As a fat American, Aubrey Gordon knows all about this. She is “fat-fat” — 24 stone. The podcaster formerly known as Your Fat Friend has just published her second book, “You Just Need To Lose Weight” & 19 Other Myths About Fat People, which drills down into issues first explored in her 2020 book, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat. It’s divided into four sections, which respond with academic research and lived experience to common ideas and questions around size and weight: “Being fat is a choice”; “But what about your health?”; “Fat acceptance glorifies obesity”; and “Fat people should…”
White Western society, she says, has long been conditioned to fear and loathe fat, both on our own bodies and on the bodies of others. Fat, once a signifier of wealth and ease, now indicates poverty — if not literally, via your bad, cheap diet, then metaphorically, with your gluttonous lack of morals. People want to know why you’re fat, says Gordon: “I learned that being fat meant providing explanations of my size to thin people who would then explain to me why I was wrong and how I could look more like them.”
Until the advent of digital media, and the representation of all different kinds of bodies online instead of just thin ones in magazines, we internalised our fat phobia. (I’ve had weight loss surgery twice – you can’t get much more internalised than that). Fat bodies are either a punchline or a cautionary tale, comical or villainous; we have been trained to regard “have you lost weight?” as a compliment, rather than the bizarre and intrusive question it really is.
Online media changed that — body shaming is now as fashionable as Enid Blyton, with Lizzo flying the flag of joyous, celebratory self-love. Yet we also have films like The Whale, causing commentator Roxanne Gay to note in The New York Times how “it was crystal clear” that the both film’s writer and director “considered fatness to be the ultimate human failure, something despicable, to be avoided at all costs.” Adds Gordon, “It’s hard to conjure a more stigmatising portrayal of a fat person or a gay person. What I worry about, far more than the movie itself, is its critical acclaim and legitimisation.”
In deconstructing fat myths, Gordon explores how race and anti-fat bias are interlinked. She looks at the origins of Body Mass Index, and how it was “never intended as a measure of individual health”, but was created in 1830 by a Belgian sociologist using a small group of white European men as the norm to be applied to all bodies everywhere. She cites sociologist Sabrina Strings, who explores the racist origins of anti-fatness in her book Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, which traces its roots back to enslavement and colonisation.
“White supremacy is foundational to anti-fat bias,” Gordon tells me via Zoom from Portland, Oregon. “Stigmatising fatter bodies was a way of stigmatising black people.” Or as Harper’s Bazaar put it in 1896, “Stoutness, corpulence, surplusage of flesh” are never desirable “except among African savages.”
She mentions the death of Eric Garner, a black man killed by police in New York, for selling loose cigarettes. The defence of the police was that he was so fat he would have died anyway. (Garner was asthmatic and died in a chokehold).
“It’s worth noting that Eric Garner was less fat than I am,” says Gordon. “Anti-fatness is continuing to be used to prop up anti-blackness, and to lend validity to anti-black racism in the US and beyond.”
In person, Gordon is funny, clever and charming; but she is also exasperated. She would like to live in a world where being thin is not regarded as a “major life accomplishment”, and where being fat does not get people dismissed as incapable, lazy, incompetent, ignorant, irresponsible, or unemployable.
She challenges assumptions that being fat is always unhealthy, and that fatness automatically equals premature death. She also challenges accepted ideas such as calories in/calories out, that doctors are impartial, that fat acceptance is wrong, and that fat people should pay for two airline seats (she calls this “flying while fat”, which sounds not unlike “driving while black”).
So what would she do in the first instance? What would she change?
“If someone in charge was listening to me, there are a couple of things I’d advise,” she says. “In the US there are only two states — Michigan and Washington — which have banned discrimination on the basis of your weight. So it’s perfectly legal everywhere else to deny someone a job, housing, a promotion, a raise, or straight up fire them, because of their size. This is a straightforward thing we could do — to say, actually, you can’t fire someone because you think they’re too fat.
“Another straightforward thing would be shifting our health care system away from a weight-centred paradigm.” Gordon explains that every time you visit the doctor in the US, being weighed is compulsory, and if your BMI is in the overweight category, there follows a lecture on weight loss, required by insurance companies. This happens here too, albeit less officially.
“What that means for people like me is that I go in with symptoms of a sprained ankle, and instead of getting attentive and thoughtful care for these symptoms, I get lectured about weight loss.”
A third thing is attitudes to bullying in schools, when kids are bullied because of their size. Gordon says that this type of bullying is often dismissed by adults as kids being kids, despite other forms of bullying being tackled robustly. The attitude to fat kids, says Gordon, is: “Oh, if it’s a problem for you, just lose some weight.”
“Even if long-term weight loss were possible, it might take that kid months or years — what are they supposed to do in the meantime? So these are all straightforward harm reduction things we could do, like, yesterday. But there just isn’t the political will.”
Of her own weight, she says it would take her three years to reach a “BMI-mandated healthy weight”. She writes: “Three years to transform my body into one I have never, ever had. Three years to stop strangers’ stares at restaurants, their surreptitious photographs at swimming pools, their open laughter at gyms. Three years until I would be worth defending. Three years until I would be worth hearing out.” She adds: “I believe that my life is worth living, worth embracing, worth loving, and celebrating. And it’s worth all of that now — not two hundred pounds from now.”
This is the crux of Gordon’s argument. Stop regarding fat people as problems to solve; stop dehumanising them, othering them, stigmatising and discriminating against them. And to recognise that as a society, when it comes to fatness, “You’ve just been working with bad information, an incomplete picture”.
The biggest one, she says, is the number frequently bandied about in the US, which says that 400,000 Americans die of obesity each year. “We get so fat we just drop dead,” she deadpans.
She hopes that society is “going towards acknowledging that fat people are treated differently from thin people. People still struggle to admit that, despite seeing it all around us every day.” She speaks of the “violent disgust” thin people have for fat people.
Gordon would like to live in a world where fat people have to deal with irritants and micro-aggressions, the same as everyone else, rather than being kicked off planes and fired from jobs. She urges people to “show up for your fat friends in meaningful ways, on a day-to-day basis.” Small things — a friend recently asked her where she’d like to sit when they met for dinner, literally inviting her to choose what kind of seat would suit her body best.
“It felt like a powerful but subtle acknowledgement that I had different needs from her in that moment,” she says.
What Aubrey Gordon would like to see happen for fat people:
End the legal, widespread practice of weight discrimination in the workplace
Improve heath care for fat people by teaching anti-fat bias to health care providers
Stop using BMI as a measurement
Stop approving the use of weight loss drugs with dangerous side effects
Stand up for fat children and teens, particularly in schools
Increase access to public spaces, from restaurants to planes
End anti-fat violence — fatcalling, bullying and harassment
