weight loss talk: there’s no neutral.
you can’t talk about your intentional weight loss and be neutral.
it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about goals, wishes, hopes, process, success, or failure. it doesn’t matter what tone of voice you use. it doesn’t matter whether you’re sounding serious or playful, confident or self-deprecating.
we live in such a virulently fatphobic culture that talking about your personal intentional weight loss reinforces the hegemony. can’t help but. i left a disability community because of this: people wanted to share their personal weight loss successes and they wanted those statements to count as “only personal.” they wanted to talk about their intentional weight loss without being considered to be talking about anyone else’s fatness.
it can’t be neutral, and it can’t be just personal. we hear too many fatphobic messages every single day at gale wind force for anyone’s personal weight loss talk to be neutral or just personal. we’re subject to too many punishments for fatness. talking about your intentional weight loss contributes to the cultural value that fatness is bad, terrible, disgusting, unhealthy, immature, a “before” picture, a sign of a house not in order.
(unless you’re being analytical about something you’ve done in the past, and using a fat politics lens. that’s not what this post is about.)
you get to do whatever you want with your body. if someone tells you that fat activists want to prevent you from trying intentional weight loss, that’s a straw man and a lie. it’s also fucking laughable to frame fat activists as the power side of that any binary. you get to do what you want, and you get to talk about whatever you want – but your words count, and they have impact.
so if you go ahead and talk about your intentional weight loss, know that you’re not being neutral in the world. you’re supporting the fatphobia that slams people every day. the fatphobia that kills fat people. no, you won’t kill a specific person from talking about your diet. but you’re on that side of the war.
and consider this: why do you have the urge to talk about it? what social and cultural rewards do you get from talking about it? pin those down and you’ll start to see the problem.
dailybridgerton
jbbartram-illu
tangentwithtanner
titsay
dededos
ellievsbear
romaincrisis
