#Medical Fatphobia

[fatliberation]

hi, i'm a fat person who is just starting to learn to love and appreciate my body and i'm very new to the fat community and all that.

i was wondering if you could maybe explain the term ob*se and how it is a slur. i've never heard anything about it being a slur before(like i said, i'm very new here) and was wondering if you could tell me the origin and history of the word or mayy provide links to resources about it? i want to know more about fat history and how to support my community but i'm unsure of how to start

Welcome!

Obesity is recognized as a slur by fat communities because it's a stigmatizing term that medicalizes fat bodies, typically in the absence of disease. Aside from the word literally translating to "having eaten oneself fat" in latin, obesity (as a medical diagnosis) straight up doesn't actually exist. The only measure that we have to diagnose people with obesity is the BMI, which has been widely proven to be an ineffective measure of health.

The BMI was created in the 1800s by a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, who did NOT sudy medicine, to gather statistics of the average height and weight of ONLY white, european, upper-middle class men to assist the government in allocating resources. It was never intended as a measure of individual body fat, build, or health. 

Quetelet is also credited with founding the field of anthropometry, including the racist pseudoscience of phrenology. Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics.

Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called "normal weight" people are "unhealthy" whereas about 50% of so-called "overweight" people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone. "Healthy" lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.  

While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national "obesity" rates, the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as "overweight" overnight—to match international guidelines. Articles about the "obesity epidemic" often use this pseudo-statistic to create a false fear mongering rate at which the United States is becoming fatter. Critics have also noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. Interesting!!!

So... how can you diagnose a person with a disease (and sell them medications) solely based upon an outdated measure that was never meant to indicate health in the first place? Especially when "obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition?

There is a reason as to why fatness was declared a disease by the NIH in 1998, and some of it had to do with acknowledging fatness as something that is NOT just about a lack of willpower - but that's a very complicated post for another time. You can learn more about it in the two part series of Maintenance Phase titled The Body Mass Index and The Obesity Epidemic.

Aside from being overtly incorrect as a medical tool, the BMI is used to deny certain medical treatments and gender-affirming care, as well insurance coverage. Employers still often offer bonuses to workers who lower their BMI. Although science recognizes the BMI as deeply flawed, it's going to be tough to get rid of. It has been a long standing and effective tool for the oppression of fat people and the profit of the weight loss industry.

More sources and extra reading material:

How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI by Aubrey Gordon

The Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass Index by Adele Jackson-Gibson

What's Wrong With The War on Obesity? by Lily O'Hara, et al.

Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings

[fatphobiabusters]

They refused to give my dad top surgery bc of his weight, citing risks regarding anasthesia and possible hemorrage. They want him to do a bypass surgery first...... which has exactly the same risks. Because he is fat he has to be punished by mutilation to be allowed to have his top surgery. They are ready to take the risks in order to make him skinny, but refuse the same risks that would make him happy.

If people can't understand how oppressive this is and how it's literally intersectional oppression in my dad's case, idk what to say.

Yeah, it's absolute hypocrisy to be willing to mutilate the healthy organs of fat people for the sake of potential thinness and lifelong chronic health conditions but then put up roadblocks for any surgeries that actually help fat people. I still remember when the NHS decided to save money by comparing fat people to people who smoke and denying fat people surgery until we magically lose weight. It's a horrific world we live in, and not even people who claim to be progressive want to open their eyes to what fat people endure.

-Mod Worthy

[feelingemotjons]

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*for decades, fat people in media are constantly shown as bullies even tho fat people are more likely to be bullied and harassed in real life*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*fat people in communities and fandoms are pushed out of them due to constant fatphobic harassment*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*fat people not being able to show their talents or interests online without people constantly bringing up their weight*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*fat people struggling to find clothes in their size especially online and when they do find clothes in their size their either overpriced or look ugly*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*people actually debating whether or not fat people should exist and even saying that fat people are a disease*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*fat people getting called cows, pigs, literal animals*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*skinny people being put in fat body suits for movies, tv shows, etc instead of just getting a fat actress*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*the ongoing dangerous stereotype about fat people being gr00mers/p€d0philes that just gets reduced to a joke*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*fat characters in books will be made skinny for movies, tv shows, etc*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

*fat people die every day due doctors not actually helping them until they lose weight*

“Fat people aren’t oppressed 🙄”

Do you guys not see a pattern here? Cause I see it and it's clear as day

[thebibliosphere]

Man, fuck doctors sometimes. I was finally able to see a neurologist with the intent of figuring out why about a month or so after a surgery I suddenly couldn't stand or sit upright without lower back pain. Like, very, VERY suddenly this came on.

And they told me to try losing weight about it after giving me a once-over.

And when I directly asked them if I wasn't what sh considered 'overweight', would she order many tests? Yes, she said she would.

I -did- get to make her backpedal by explaining I had worked hard to gain weight since for most of my life I was extremely underweight due to neglect, at least.

All this to say I relate to your tylenol woes. May we both find the help we need soon.

Man, doctors have such sticks up their asses about weight. I'm so sorry that was your experience.

I remember when I first moved here, and I started seeing a new healthcare provider. My symptoms weren't as bad yet, but they were heading that way, and the advice they kept giving me was to "lose weight."

I was 125lbs soaking wet. If that.

When I dropped... gosh, I think it was 30, almost 40lbs in about 3 months last year, I actually had a nurse congratulate me on it. Like no, Deborah, that's a sign there is something very, very wrong. (spoiler alert, it was my mast cells burning down my GI tract.)

Fatphobia literally kills.

[foone]

me: doc! I'm feeling like shit. I've got nausea and dizziness, constipation and diarrhea, fatigue, and my blood sugar is all over the place.

doc: yep that looks like a hernia. we can fix that with surgery... but you're too fat. we're gonna put you on the miracle weight loss drug.

me: okay... any side-effects?

doc: yeah. it can cause: nausea and dizziness, constipation and diarrhea, fatigue, and mess with your blood sugar.

me: looks into the camera like I'm on the office

[goldyke]

LAP Bands should be illegal

This post is going to deal with medical fatphobia, weight loss surgery, coercion, emetophobia, food issues, disordered eating, and just all around bad shit. But it’s important.

Shortly after I reached adulthood, I was coerced into weight loss surgery. I weighed about 250 pounds and was considered morbidly obese.

The Lap Band is a disgrace to the medical profession and is just another example of how the medical profession does not care about the lives of fat people.

To preface this: the surgery works. I lost 70 pounds and people treated me differently and I hated them all for it.

The Lap Band made my life miserable. When it was filled, I could not eat until noon without getting stuck. Even then, getting stuck was always a risk. There was a strict diet to follow and you were supposed to be safe from that if you followed it. On top of that, there were rules for how you ate. One standard I saw was not to eat in bites larger than your fingernail. Can you see yourself doing that for a week, let alone years and years?

Getting stuck is a horror you can't imagine. The food lodges in the top of your stomach, blocking off your system. You continue to produce saliva and swallow it down. Slowly, the mucous in your saliva builds up. It feels like you're drowning. Eventually, you have to essentially throw it all up. A disgusting experience (and a mortifying one if you're in public.) The saliva is thick and ropy. This experience is often called "sliming" on the forums.

I became frightened of eating in public. In a way, I became frightened of food altogether. I knew something had to give the day I reacted to someone biting a hamburger in a tv show the way a regular person would react to a killer jumping out in a horror movie. I developed the disgusting and unhealthy habit of chewing and spitting out food. I completely lost my enjoyment of many foods I had previously enjoyed because of how problematic they were (I can no longer enjoy a chicken thigh for example.) I stopped eating meals and began grazing. I developed eating habits worse than the ones that "made me fat"

After 3 years, I had the band emptied of fluid, which significantly decreased, but did not stop, these problems. I regained the weight, and found it didn't bother me. (Along the way I discovered that my discomfort with my body had never been weight related)

I had my band removed after 6.5 years earlier this year. I am in a support group on facebook for victims of this malpractice. There are 5.6 thousand members, each with their own horror stories. Some of them cannot get the band removed because insurance will not cover the procedure, though they happily covered the band's placement. Some have tried to go through with removal but have had surgeons try to coerce them into getting a different weight-loss surgery instead of just removing it. Many have long-term damage from the band eroding the walls of their stomach or esophagus, or from the band adhering to multiple organs. Many of them had the band for 12-14 years, before removal because none of our doctors told us it needs to be removed within 10.

Many practices no longer perform Lap Band surgery and now believe it is unethical. The surgeon who removed my band still performs this surgery regularly.

A study performed in 2011 with 151 lap band patients, found that 22% of patients experienced minor complications and 39% experienced major complications. The person who coerced me into surgery actually experienced major complications and needed an emergency removal.

I experienced no serious complications. Everything I described above is considered normal. And It still drastically lowered my quality of life.

I don't know why I'm sharing this or who I'm sharing it for, but here I am. If you know anyone considering the lap band surgery, don't let them go through with it without knowing the truth. And please be kinder to your body than the medical profession wants you to be.

[ed-recovery-affirmations]

Sending all the love and support to fat chronically ill people who are told that all their health problems would disappear if they just lost weight. Sending all the love and support to fat people with physical disabilities who are told they wouldn't be disabled if they just lost weight. Sending all the love and support to fat people with any illness or physical disability who has been pushed to try diet and exercise regimens that are not safe for their health condition, and who are judged for not taking this advice.

ESPECIALLY sending love and support to fat people who have been given conflicting or dangerous information from the medical professionals who are supposed to be supporting them.

[tobeabatman]

medical professionals listen to fat people!

It’s f*cked up how it’s the norm for medical workers to tell us fat people that we need to modify our bodies, to the point of coercion. 

This is my body. This isn’t a wrong type of body that you should try to convince me to change. This is the flesh I’ve been throughout my whole life; this fat is me:

I’m not a thin person in a fat suit. All medical workers need to get out of their asses and realize that fat people own fat bodies, not bodies that are ”thin-to-be”. I deserve the same care without mentions of how it would be the correct thing to modify my body, because this body has always been with me and always will. I grew in a fat body and this fat body is mine. 

Where I live, it’s recommended for doctors to gently try to talk to fat patients about weight loss. And as a fat person I don’t give a sh*t how gently you try to convince me, your main goal is still to change the way I am. You’re biased and your care reflects that. 

So stop f*cking trying to coerce us by fear-mongering. Read the many research papers that contradict current ideas of fatness in relation to health, and most importantly: listen to us fat people. 

I’m fat, and you have been convinced to throw away your work ethics as a medical professional just because our world says it’s okay to coerce fat people into weight loss, and that as a medical professional you should encourage people to drastically change their bodies but ONLY if they’re fat. Listen to yourselves. 

Toodles. 

[fatliberation]

Did u have a post abt how ozempic doesnt work somewhere on here? Tryna find it rn.

I don't post a whole lot about o/zempic or w/egovy in depth because it's a (somewhat) triggering topic for me. my dad is a lobbyist for n/ovo n/ordisk and he has continued to try to get me to take his drug because I have a "disease" that needs to be "treated." we've gotten into countless fights over it. I'm not in a place where I have the emotional energy to post about it, but here are some podcasts on the subject I have listened to and trust:

but yes, in short: it doesn't work, not for weight loss at least. it's prescribed with a diet and exercise (when their marketing relies on the fact that diets don't work. funny.) it doesn't make fat people thin, but it does make you lose a small percentage of your body weight (about 5 percent) because it's an appetite supressant. supposedly you would have to be on the drug for the rest of your life to keep that 5% off, and it's only been tested for a few years so we really have no clue of the long-term effects, and capitalism loves dependance! the side effects are horrible and are often too unbearable for folks to continue the drug. complete loss of interest and joy in eating, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, stomach pain, headache, dizziness, fatigue, even gallbladder and pancreas problems, gastroparesis, and blocked intestines. and there could be a risk of thyroid cancer.

[fatphobiabusters]

[Text: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BMI is an "inexpensive and easy screening method" that is "strongly correlated" with weight-related medical conditions. But in recent years, BMI has come increasingly under fire with critics denouncing the method as not just unreliable but sexist and racist.]

I am so goddamn tired of people ignoring fatphobia. Fat people have been talking about the problems with BMI for decades and decades. BMI is fatphobic as fuck and does an incredible amount of harm to fat people, and the BMI scale is fatphobic in ways beyond just being "unreliable."

Yet the world only cares when the BMI is sexist and racist. The problems with the BMI scale don't matter until it's about the oppression of other groups that "actually matter."

I'm glad that people are talking about the ways that BMI perpetuates racism and sexism. Simultaneously, people should have cared decades before that was pointed out. People should have cared when it was fat voices being silenced.

This world is so goddamn desperate to sweep fat people's oppression under the rug while allowing mainstream activism movements for everybody else. If you do not give a shit when your fat siblings are being killed by medical fatphobia, then you do not truly give a shit when the topic switches to the groups you actually care about.

It's time to give a fuck about fat people.

-Mod Worthy

[spacedocmom]

Doctor Beverly Crusher @SpaceDocMom I truly do not understand why so many doctors in your era seem to hate chronically ill patients so much, enough to body-shame them and/or refuse to diagnose them properly and/or treat them with any degree of consistent care. Why become a doctor only to not care? emojis: black heart, blue heart, masked 2:24 PM · Mar 15, 2024

[wither-is-suffering]

If one more fucking doctor looks at me and says starving is fine because I'm fat I'm going to kill someone

[grahamkennedy]

I'm an alcoholic. Like its not something I talk about a lot because of the crazy stigma around addiction but I've been drinking heavily for several years and I've been in and out of treatment since 2020.

The nastiest bit of medical fatphobia I've experienced was when my alcoholism was at its peak and I was drinking a bottle of gin every night. My doctor at the time told me I should stop drinking, not because of it's effects on my brain, liver, kidneys, etc etc etc, but because it was making me put on weight. I was physically and emotionally dependant on booze and quitting was not an option at the time. But her main worry was that I was getting fat.

Instead of me cutting down my drinking, it made me restrict for several months to maintain a "healthy" BMI and now I'm at an increased risk of early onset dementia because eating less (or nothing) while binge drinking for extended periods of time is really dangerous.

The fatphobia addicts experience, whether it be the stigma of their addictions making them gain weight, or the stigma of addicts putting on weight if they get sober (have you seen the way some people talk about Pete Doherty's weight gain?), is definitely killing people and making them sick, and it's something no one ever talks about.

[shamebats]

The new episode of Matt Bernstein's A bit Fruity podcast, which had Aubrey Gordon of Maintenance Phase fame as a guest to discuss Ozempic, made so many really good points but the one I can't stop thinking about is how we're now in a spot culturally where people are becoming conscious of the fact that dieting & exercising doesn't do much in terms of weightloss, that's why the appetite suppressing drugs are so popular to begin with & why ppl pay so much money to be on them, but we still have to pretend that losing weight "naturally" with diet & exercise is the good & virtuous thing to do. So you have celebrities going yes I'm on Ozempic but I exercise 5 times a week! I'm losing weight the right way unlike the other LAZY fat people (who are also on Ozempic & losing weight the same as I am because the exercise doesn't actually contribute much).

It's really revealing how much of diet culture is just proving your worth as a human by making yourself miserable to the point where even when there's a solution that works much better than the "hard work" we're supposed to be putting in at the gym & with how we eat ever could, people will still insist that they both work just the same. Even if they've spent their entire life dieting & exercising but were never able to actually lose weight & keep it off until they started taking the drug. They know that if they went off the drug but kept up the exercise & dieting, they'd gain the lost weight back. They know that weightloss is not a natural process and that the body will reverse it without medical intervention.

But it's still too early for the medical system & the media to start admitting that dieting doesn't fucking work & they've been forcing it on fat people for no reason other than bigotry, traumatizing everyone & killing many in the process.

[phleb0tomist]

medical weight discrimination is such a huge problem and it’s such bull. i’ve been skinny disabled and i’ve been fat disabled, and guess what. my physical health was literally better when i was 200 lbs, I had the most muscle in my life, and i could move easier. I’m thin now and i do NOT feel better, i have less muscle, and i literally miss being fat. random people in your life will tell you that your chronic illness would magically leave if you lost weight. kill them

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

Love the fact that even though top surgery has been shown to be perfectly safe for fat people, the NHS are like "oh, your weight is concerning" like fuck you so much.

There's scientific evidence showing that there is no greater risk for fat people. This is just fatphobia.

And also, it's so frustrating in my case because now they're gonna ask me, someone who is both chronically ill and genetically predisposed to eating disorders, to go on a diet and do exercise.

They're literally dangling it in front of me like a carrot on a stick saying "oh, just put yourself through loads of pain and psychological distress and you can have it. You can finally go outside and know that you won't be immediately misgendered, just traumatise yourself first!"

I'm so fucking exhausted.