Status Updates From “You Just Need to Lose Weig...

Research shows that these exchanges [social negative body talk] make us feel worse. Such talk creates greater body dissatisfaction.

“The office break room, a dressing room, and meals with friends all become sites for expressing discontent with our bodies. I hate my thighs. I’m not swimming, nobody needs to see me in a bathing suit. U look amazing, I look terrible! Comments like these abound, often seen as a way of blowing off steam, releasing the disappointment we feel about our own bodies, & hopefully making us feel better in the process.”

“Implicit bias powers what psychologists call ‘Normative Discontent’, the idea that people socially express bodily dissatisfaction, especially with regard to their weight. This is buttressed by a series of powerful social scripts to which many of us have become accustomed: voicing disapproval of our own bodies and expecting others to do the same.”

“Whether we mean to or not, most of us have learned to stigmatize fatness and that stigma often translates to both personal dislike of fat people and promotion of explicitly anti-fat rhetoric and policies.”

“A 2013 study found that when presented with a fat woman defendant and a thin woman defendant, thin men on juries were more likely to believe fat women were guilty and that those fat women would reoffend.”

Having mixed feelings about this book.
Binary between fat/thin people continually used, but no true definition for what either mean. What does it mean to be thin? What does it mean to be fat? If the BMI is to be ignored (super valid), then what are we basing these allegations on?

Also, use of “we” when speaking about fat people conveys a personalized tone, but doesn’t bode well w/the science based approach.

“They found that Anti fat bias wasn’t correlated to income, ethnicity, gender, or personal history of being the targets of anti-fat comments or treatment. Anti gayness was correlated to body size, thinner participants were more likely to express harsh judgments about fat people and to exhibit higher levels of explicit anti-fat bias.”

“Fat people should be allowed to tell the stories of our own bodies.”

3/3 They only function when we lash together our drives to stigmatize mental illness, fatness, and trauma and they allow us to do what so many of us are already driven to do: ruthlessly judge fat people, even in the name of compassion.”

2/3 Fat people are neither created nor defined by trauma, disordered eating, or some vague idea of emotional dysfunction. These ideas only function if we believe that fatness is a failure, a derivation from the natural ideal that is thinness.

1/3 “We simply do not know why some people are fat and others are thin and the closer we get to an answer, the more complex the picture becomes. Pathologizing fatness as an expression of emotional brokenness is another way to marginalize fat people; first presuming that our bodies are cause for blame, then laying that blame squarely at our feet.

“Fat people have existed in every corner of our world, in every moment of our history. Like thin people, some of us experience traumas that stay with us for a lifetime, others don’t. Like thin people, some of us eat to comfort ourselves, others don’t. While all of the studies in this chapter offer sound scientific understanding of a correlation, it is only that. A correlation.”

mental health/trauma + weight

“That doctor diagnosed Nees with Obesity Pain. Later, Nees found out she had progressive scoliosis, a condition that isn’t caused by being fat, but can be caused by consistent physical activity in adulthood.”

Man, the framing of this sentence is disappointing, coming from a writer who works to break down health misinformation. Makes it sound like consistent physical activity is a detriment to our health.

2/2 - None account for the widespread and widely documented substandard healthcare received by fat people, which can lead to postponement of care, misdiagnosis of crucial health conditions, and denial of care altogether in some cases.”

1/2 “Each of these mortality estimates is just that, an estimate, based on existing available datasets. Few control for family histories of conditions they readily attribute to body weight, like type 2 diabetes or heart disease. -