Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia

There should be no shame in not being healthy.

Your body is for you, and the ways it has been impugned stem from the many people and practices and structures that have missed this fundamental idea, instead perpetuating the lie that your body is meant to please or serve or placate others.

And it’s not that we abhor fatness because we discovered it is unhealthy. By and large, we decided it is unhealthy because we came, over time, to abhor it—for

Even if these interventions were perfectly safe and costless and painless—which they’re currently far from being—I would still find them objectionable at a social level of analysis. For they flatten out difference, in the form of human bodily diversity, which I believe we ought to value. They flatten out such difference not at random, moreover, but

Misogyny, as I’ve argued, finds in fatphobia a powerful and convenient ally: it constructs a ready-to-hand hierarchy among girls and women based on the infinitely gradable metric of body mass, usefully complicated by body shape, breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, and various markers of privilege.

The lessons are clear: First, people routinely misinterpret their visceral disgust reactions as moral disgust, leading them to judge morally bad actions more harshly, and even to deem neutral actions morally problematic. Second, when this occurs, people reach for reasons to justify their moral ill feelings, engaging in post hoc rationalization of a

The thought that has helped me the most, in navigating all of this, is that my body is for me. Your body is for you. My body is not decoration. Your body is not decoration.[4] Our bodies are our homes, as the slogan has it.

There’s also an individualistic—and, arguably, masculinist—assumption at work in diet culture, which minimizes the role of food in shared pleasures, both daily and during special celebrations. But there is something immensely valuable about being tied to the world, and our bodies, and each other, by the thrice-or-so daily practice of satisfying our

Fatphobia is an inherently structural phenomenon, which sees people in fatter bodies navigating a different world, containing numerous distinct material, social, and institutional barriers to our flourishing.

Fatness serves as a potent class and race signifier. And so, when we wring our hands or jeer at fatness, we are often tacitly and unwittingly expressing classism and racism.