Madeline m’s Reviews > “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People > Status Update

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.

“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.