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chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
MouthyHooker [she/her] @hexbear.net
CW: Fatphobia possible ED triggers

Yo can we deal with the rampant unchecked fatphobia on this platform ASAP?

Took a little break from the internet and touched some grass and it was great. Wander back in here after my hiatus and what do I find? Just a thread with a bunch of fatphobia.

Cute.

For a community that is incredibly careful about protecting its users from the -phobias and the -isms, there sure is a hell of a lot of unchecked fatphobia here basically any time fatness gets brought up.

It’s something I’ve noticed on the left in general as well. The leftist org I’m in has almost no fat people in it and something tells me that’s not because there aren’t any fat leftists out there.

Fatphobia is rooted in anti-Blackness and ableism.

I’d highly recommend the “Maintenance Phase” podcast with Michael Hobbes and Aubrey Gordon, as well as Aubrey Gordon’s books “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” and “You Just Need To Lose Weight.”

TL;DR: There’s mounting evidence that anti-fat bias in medicine is more to blame for poor medical outcomes in fat people rather than just the fat itself.

Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people. As a leftist, are you really gonna sit here and blame this on individual choices rather than systemic issues? Are you really gonna try to convince us that 95% of people are just lacking willpower?

Please note that this thread is not an invitation to convince me I’m wrong or share your own personal anecdotal story of successful long-term weight loss with the implication that others can do it because you did it. This post is a request that any thin person (or thin-adjacent person) reading this who wants to argue about how being fat is bad for your health do some research and some self-crit. This post is a request that this community rethink the way it engages with discussions about fatness, diet, fatphobia, and anti-fat bias.

Anti-fat bias literally kills people.

146 comments

  • I hope what I said was fine (I think it was). I was simply responding to the prompt and just relaying my own actual near-death experience with my poor relationship with food.

    Diet and exercise don’t result in long-term weight loss for something like 95% of people

    I genuinely don't believe this unless you're willing to present me a study on it. Everyone I've known that's lost weight and kept it off did so with said method. I genuinely don't know anyone that put the weight back on with creating a calorie deficit and exercising regularly. Please, by all means prove me wrong on this, but I just can't believe it until otherwise proven.

    • I assume the argument might be related to the amount of people who relapse to their old lifestyle, but then that's not really about diet or exercise not making you lose weight.

      Edit for the next person who's gonna misinterpret me and then get incredibly hostile over something I didn't write: I don't agree with this argument. I don't think being overweight is comparable to addiction, the "relapse" terminology is what I've heard used in defense of this argument however, which is why I used it.

    • What you said was not fine, for the record. Frankly, formerly fat people are some of the worst about this.

      https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5764193/

      Again, I highly recommend the resources listed above as a starting point. u/khizuo listed some great info as well.

      • That article doesn't claim any numbers and only discusses the physiological and psychological responses that cause people to stop maintaining their diets - the central concept is that diet and exercise will result in long term weight loss, but issues around perception (both of self and how much they're consuming), appetite, support, coping mechanisms and more make it difficult for many people to maintain the diet and exercise long term without additional intervention. Literally, they put the weight back on because they stopped the dieting and exercise.

        Health is more complex than just your weight, and going on a diet isn't an easy or simple undertaking, but we're not doing fucking calorie-denialism here.

      • Thank you. I’ll give this a look over on the other side of my shift.

        I honestly didn’t see it as being potentially harmful. Just…giving my experience. :\ Sorry.

    • (I think it was).

      Narrator: It wasn't.

      Because it was literally more of the same. You were also telling OP to [will themselves to] make lifestyle changes. The point plenty of others are making is that forcing oneself to act contrary to how they act without addressing the conditions that caused the original behaviour is often a road to disappointment. Recognising those conditions is vital, and a lot of people have very little real power over them.

      • I didn’t tell OP to do anything though. I was passing along my own experience. Unless you mean the closing statement, but that wasn’t telling them to do anything, but rather what is general knowledge of how to lose weight. It was only said as a counterpoint to my friend who does have a wildly high metabolism and what people generally do to lose weight.

  • What really gets my goat about this is that everyone here seems to be hyperaware about the reasons and consequences of the policing of bodies when it comes to transphobia or racism (to a certain extent), but then turn around and say shit that would make Foucault blush. I know here people don't have the highest opinion of critical theory and postmodern thinkers, but y'all need to shoot the cop inside your own heads asap and start recognizing when you're reinforcing systems of oppression or just uncritically allowing them to reproduce (not you OP, the people being fatphobic and similar).

    • What really gets my goat about this is that everyone here seems to be hyperaware about the reasons and consequences of the policing of bodies when it comes to transphobia

      Not my experience. People will have a clear positioning on where they generally stand on trans issues, but what that actually means when we're talking about human bodies is often lackluster even among our trans comrades. Recognizing that trans women in sports actually isn't a complicated issue or that gender affirming care is a human right doesn't mean you can't have brainworms about what a woman is supposed to look like, even if you are a woman who is affected and harmed by that every single day. The brainworms run deep and ridding yourself of a lifetime of cishetnormative, misogynist, ableist and racist body propaganda is a fairly demanding task.

      I need to stress that i do not mean this post (or my previous one ITT) as a callout. I'd say that you actually can't just shoot the cop inside your head, it's more like slowly strangling that fucker. It's a process, it takes time, and i try to be generous here. But you need to start somewhere and you don't do that by babystepping people, you need to make it clear that some stuff just doesn't fly.

  • can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone talking about unhealthy food.

    can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to concern troll about the "obesity epidemic".

    can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to promote losing weight.

    can't have a post talking about fatphobia without someone wanting to position their experiences with weight and weight loss as universal.

    y'all literally can't help yourselves!!! come to terms with how your implicit fatphobia is harmful and learn and grow from it!!!!! listen to the effort posting from people with marginalized bodies and look into to the sources they are kindly giving you!!!

  • just chiming in to say this is definitely a thing on here and it should be talked about more and addressed. glad you made this post! it's one of the more negative holdovers from reddit where it was very endemic in the site culture. as well as just being totally normalised still in mainstream culture of course.

  • yeah anytime fatness is brought up here i feel like i have to brace myself and i've been purposely avoiding that recent thread because i knew it would devolve into fatphobia. it's genuinely so demoralizing to see on hexbear.

    thank you for calling it out cause i was much to anxious to and i'm really hoping people do self-crit about this.

    anyways i love my fat queer body ok!

  • Thank you for posting this. For a leftist platform the neoliberal individual responsibility stuff that comes up when weight is discussed here is disgusting.

    I know there has been discussions here on why not many women are comfortable here and this imo is one of the reasons. This is really not a safe space for people with EDs, body size trauma and medical trauma. I've seen medical experts valorized and people with said trauma belittled.

    There is a reason I block the self-improvement and fitness coms. But it seaps out from those like the thread yesterday. Such reddity strong self-hating or just fat hating people who need to read Fearing the Black Body or any feminist writings on how policing body size is tied to pathriarchy, capitalism, protestantism, eugenism and how this neoliberal self-governance stuff they do is not the Maoist taking care of the body and mind they think it is, but upholds a system of othering. The way all this impacts people in marginalized bodies is a big deal.

    • GOOD post

      edit: worth noting that there are a lot of women on hexbear, your phrasing may imply exclusion of trans women which I assume isn't your intention; ofc the chauvinism you describe affects trans women as well, including i'm sure many trans women who use the site.

      • Diet culture absolutely is a problem in our trans community, as it is in any trans community i've ever been in. Trans women on this site are both affected by the chauvinist policing of women's bodies by other users and engage in such policing themselves. Disordered eating is much more common among trans people than among cis people. Fatphobia, gender dysphoria and patriarchal standards intersect in incredibly nasty ways, and a lot of us fully internalize these pressures.

      • your phrasing may imply exclusion of trans women which I assume isn't your intention

        You're use of the word 'may' is being very generous here.

        Like half the site is women lol

        And trans women will experience anxiety about the size of our bodies very acutely for obvious reasons

    • This site has triggered the fuck out of my eating disorder and people do not put trigger warnings on their shitty diet advice. 🙃

  • I understand being overweight is a systematic and structural situation, I understand everyone is free to possess their body in whichever form they are comfortable in and nobody should receive unsolicited advice or unrequired criticism regarding their bodily autonomy, I understand at every turn there are circumstances beyond one's own control and responsibility regarding weight and weight loss. I also understand that it can be difficult to diet and exercise even if one is actively trying to lose weight and nobody is obliged to lose weight in the first place if they don't feel they need to. I also have seen examples of institutional and medical fatphobia on top of widespread fatphobia in popular cultural and media in general. I see all the time people give unsolicited advice with personal anecdotes independent of context of the interaction and abuse fat people receive just for existing and control others try to exert over their life and their situation.

    However one thing that I don't understand here is the suggestion that being overweight doesn't cause any issues at all. I am not here to judge but it seems well-researched and readily apparent that being overweight is cause for great deal of health complications and losing weight can alleviate those complications that are caused by being overweight. This again is not a disagreement that there is fatphobia in medicine where people have their issues unrelated to weight or weight loss go untreated because any health issue is simply treated as caused by being overweight and fat people don't get same attention and care regarding their health by medical personnel. I am just simply not understanding how so much research regarding complications caused by being overweight can all be false independent of that. This is regarding specifically only things which weight loss has been documented to directly alleviate and no other correlational complications which may or may not be related to one's weight.

    • The reason I suggested the “Maintenance Phase” podcast is that they dive into a lot of the scientific “evidence” about how being fat is bad for you and suggest that anti-fat bias in medicine is actually the cause of poor health outcomes for fat people. And I do want to help people understand but it’s honestly exhausting to have the same conversations over and over.

      • Thank you. I am assuming her books also go over this topic? I tend to prefer reading over either listening or watching to acquire information for educational purposes and leave podcasts for entertainment only. I'll specifically check the books.

    • Does anyone suggest being overweight causes no issues? I don't think they do. (well, I'm sure some people do, cause anyone will say anything, but I don't think its a widespread view)

      I think the argument is A) the issues are exaggerated and over policed, B) we celebrate some other unhealthy behaviors (such as some aspects of weightlifting and professional sports, and some ED among the celebrity/model crowd), and C) so what if being overweight causes issues? Its not your body

      • I don't think they do [suggest being overweight causes no issues], but the well has been poisoned elsewhere by preemptively assuming that if we even present this as a societal issue and a negative outcome that we're 'concern trolling' and secretly only care because we hate fat people.

        I grew up in Mississippi. Huge food desert, poor population, awful education, terribly obese, and the entire country is constantly being shitty to the people there like they chose it. And the healthcare sucks because doctors don't try to treat fat people. So sure, it's not my body, it's not a literal warzone, and there are other behaviors that need to die, but I have a lot of proximity to this and some of the people I've grown up with have essentially no mobility and are constantly having health scares. It's not just a 'so what' to me, these were my neighbors and the common perception is that they experienced some sort of moral failing and not that they are being exploited into an early grave. It's not my body, but I care about more than just my own body.

      • I definitely agree that it's a topic that's overpoliced and there are certain unhealthy behaviors that are glorified. In particular I have been myself tired and critical of all the health influencer and social media information peddlers who specialize over health topics while being sensationalist and seem to made with aim of making people panic. In particular, bodybuilders and weightlifters being such an extensive part of this when it is precisely those that can promote behaviors that are unhealthy both mentally and physically is something I came to greatly dislike recently with my observation that so much information and advice regarding self-care being monopolized by lifters who may or may not be on substances not to even mention crooks and grifters selling things like carnivore diets and what not.

        However it seems that there is an argument being made specifically that being overweight is not the cause of certain health complications ascribed to it, which I'll try to look up now.

  • This is something I really want to work on as a mod and I’ve brought it up to the mod team (also I brought it up on hexbear before I was a mod.) I think this is a serious issue on this site for sure.

  • It's so bad here, it's actually sad. I've been avoiding discussions of weight as a rule for a while.

    And thank you for the podcast rec. I'm at that stage where I know enough to know that I don't known shit, so I appreciate you sharing.

  • Fat comrades, I have a question to ask: I have so far left up the fatphobic comments because I thought that it might be useful for uninformed people to see these arguments get debunked and to see exactly what our counterarguments are addressing. However I also realize that this is much more distressing for you all than it is for me and I recognize I have thin privilege here. Please let me know if you believe we should take the comments down and if you have ideas for any other mod actions you think we should take to combat the pervasive anti-fatness issue on hexbear.

    • As a fat person I think this entire thread and many of the existing mod reactions are already an overreaction.

    • I'm not sure what to say, but for one this isn't currently a very fruitful discussion because the comments that are made are exactly the same tired ones that are always made everywhere and have been adressed a million times over. Sadly this is what these discussions always tend to turn into.

      The issue I suppose is that the othering of fat bodies is seen as a valid opinion and it is so deeply ingrained in our culture that this discussion always ends up going in circles around itself. There is very little empathy towards fat people and concern trolling is the norm. The way people refuse to engage in investigating this in themselves is hard to combat. The way fat people are dismissed is visible even in this thread imo.

      If people can't see how relevant the issue of body size is to the issues of gender, norms, capitalist control, I don't know what good it does to read the endless debatelord comments about deficits, habits or whatever people think it is about. It also puts us fat people in positions where we have to justify ourselves existing in our bodies over and over and I hate how even I justified my fatness as the good kind by stating how much I exercise.

      The thing is that every human has the same value, this includes fat people who do nothing at all to fit into norms. It is a norm at the end of the day. The discussion around this should be a lot deeper then what someone does or doesn't eat. This goes so much deeper into everything and would require the kind of educational discussion where people are ready to listen and take on board the experiences of those who are harmed. First people would need to see that harm is being done and without solidarity this is very hard.

      I am sorry I don't have any good answers, but the thread is nonetheless currently very painfull.

    • I’d like fatphobic comments to be treated like transphobic and racist comments. I’d like the community to start using spoiler tags in all posts and replies about dieting, weight loss, calories, fitness “journeys,” etc.

      Idk which comments should be removed vs left up, but I don’t think any comment with any level of fatphobia should be left up without some kind of refutation.

      I’d like to see a compilation of resources and suggested reading for people here to learn some very basic fat politics.

    • Also we should just not use the word obe*ity. It is problematic. It should be put to the list of words that aren't ok.

      I am very nervous to bring this up because this typically causes terrible blowback so if anyone here has issues with this request, do think twice about what it is you decide needs to be said about it.

    • (I'm not fat myself so keep that in mind, just a proposal) could we see like 2 or 3 example comments which are anonymized or made up to demonstrate what would be problematic? People might not want to hunt them down in the modlog for obvious reasons.

  • I agree and I appreciate you posting this. I usually don’t talk about weight stuff with anyone anywhere, because I don’t think the discussion would be handled well, but maybe I/we should expect more when it comes to a site like this.

  • Please note I went into the following trying to challenge my assumptions and I was successful in doing so:

    I went looking for proof that "mounting evidence that anti-fat bias is more to blame... than just the fat itself" for negative health outcomes and I found this study that I could not fully access: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615601103

    The abstract does seem to partially support the claim, although I don't know if the two factors are compared in strength of effect. But it is clear that weight discrimination does increase risk of mortality and negative health outcomes.

    I also saw a different study showing that weight/size discrimination increases risk of suicide.

    This article summarizes what we know from science about size discrimination and cites studies throughout.

    • My first reaction was to take issue with the claim about fat-phobia causing death, before I decided to actually check if there was any evidence. I think that my attachment to fatness equaling negative health outcomes is from my own fat-phobia. But I was able to hide it behind science. But the people designing experiments and drawing conclusions are on average just as fat phobic as the rest of society. Not to mention that I had a hand in deciding which studies I read, by using search terms guiding me to fat-phobic conclusions.

      It's honestly fucked up that I would have preferred fatness itself to be unhealthy rather than medical fat-phobia, which is a far easier problem to solve than systematically making all fat people thin.

      Thankfully I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut about OP's lived experiences.

  • All I'll say to add to the discussion is I'm a bit fat for sure. Always have been. I also workout daily and climb mountains and hike backcountry environments in all seasons.

    That is I have pretty clear evidence myself that being fit does not mean being not fat. I have friends far slimmer than me who couldn't conceive of spending a 12 hr day in the mountains comfortably.

    Would I be faster hiker if I didn't carry more weight? Who knows maybe but it's not coming off unless I... I don't know... Maybe follow some strict diet?

    But why I'm already capable of doing the things I want shaped like this.

  • I'm a pretty thin person (used to be underweight) partially because of my mom's constant dieting and comments towards other people's weight (for me it used to be directed towards gaining weight until I told her I stopped weighting myself because it was worsening my anxiety)

    The only situation where you should bring up other people's weight is if they suddenly start rapidly loosing or gaining it

    People on both sides of the "healthy" spectrum are well aware that they are not the average, your comments won't change or help anything

146 comments