Establishing the Fat Narrative
By: Anahita Sharma
Tags: Fatphobia, Fat, Body Positive, Fat Positive, Body Politics

Photo by Charles 🇵🇭 on Unsplash

(Content warning: surgery, medical malpractice, description of medical procedures; fatphobia, sizeism, body-shaming, eating disorder triggers possible)

A few years ago, I had a very minor surgical procedure intended to explore my abdomen and search for signs of endometriosis. Thankfully, the surgeon didn’t find any lesions, but she did accidentally nick my small intestine while closing up. She didn’t notice, and I was sent home to recover. Hours later, I returned to the hospital in excruciating pain. Nobody believed that anything was wrong with me. I had nurses ask me if I could please just stop screaming and crying. I had doctors tell me over and over again that there was probably nothing wrong with me. I laid in a hospital bed for two days, dying, with my lungs collapsing, unable to walk and hardly able to breathe. After several body scans, they finally realized that I was quickly turning septic, and rushed me into an emergency bowel resection.

Part of the recovery from a bowel resection involved having a nasogastric tube, or an NG tube, inserted through my nose into my stomach. This tube constantly sucked out the contents of my stomach so that my body wouldn’t attempt to digest anything while it healed. Predictably, unable to digest anything and receiving all my nutrients through fluids, I lost weight while in the hospital. My weight went down an entire twenty-two pounds within the two weeks I was in the hospital.

I returned to college about a month after the first surgery, forced to drop out of most of my classes and unable to retain my scholarship. Over the rest of the semester, I received overwhelming compliments about my astounding weight loss in such a short amount of time. One notable experience was when I was telling a close friend about how I’d lost over twenty pounds, and their first reaction was to congratulate me before remembering what led to that weight loss. The knee-jerk reaction of almost every single person around me, including my family, was to view weight loss in a fat person as an automatic accomplishment, even knowing the trauma I had been through to lose that weight. I began to realize just how insidious medical sizeism is. It’s already been proven that doctors don’t believe in women’s pain; could my medical care team’s sizeism have played a part in their gaslighting of me?

Look at any fat-positive article on Facebook, and you can be sure that it’ll be littered with laugh reacts and nasty comments about health “concerns”. Any social media post with before-and-after pictures of weight loss “transformations” will be covered in comments of support and admiration. Celebrities are met with ridicule when they gain weight, and it’s almost always seen as a symptom of a low point in their careers; they’re back on the rise when they lose the weight. Think Mariah Carey, Demi Lovato, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian. Prison Break star Wentworth Miller was the unwilling subject of a viral meme showing a picture of him having gained weight next to a promotional photo of him thinner and shirtless during his Prison Break days. The caption read: “When you break out of prison and discover McDonald’s.” Miller later made a post about how his depression and suicidal thoughts had propelled his weight gain, and how he turned to food for comfort at the lowest point of his life. Fatness has always been seen as a symptom of emotional pain or a lack of moral character, always something that comes with strings and a reason, never something that exists “just because”, always something that must change.

For people who exist in their daily lives as fat, the minor weight gain and loss of celebrities is only a reminder of our place in society. We are always seen as living embodiments of the worst attributes one can be assigned in our capitalist society: large, lazy, unhygienic, a drain on resources, and “unfit to reproduce”. We exist in constant states of change propelled by hatred because everybody assumes that we hate our bodies the way that they are. Because of the general public’s visceral negative reaction to fat bodies, I have been forced to define the “fat narrative”: a list of nearly universal experiences central to fatness.

The fat narrative, in my experience and the experience of my fat friends and family, revolves around shared experiences of fatphobia and sizeism that all of us have experienced.

The first experience is the most dangerous one: doctors dismiss our health concerns as always definitely related to obesity. This has resulted in the worsened illness and even the death of fat bodies, and leads to the question: when we systematically deny care to a specifically defined group of people, at what point does it border on genocide? I was lucky in my own experience, where I was able to continue to insist that there was something wrong with my body. However, it easily could have gone the other way and resulted in my death.

The second experience mirrors the first in less insidious ways: people who are not fat can easily disguise their sizeism as concern for fat bodies. I have even seen people claim that their violent shaming of fat bodies comes out of a place of goodness, of wanting to motivate the victim into weight loss, for their own good. I want to know: why are so many people concerned with the supposed health of fat people and people of size, and not about people experiencing addiction, or homelessness, or limited access to healthcare, or anything that actually requires public concern to be ameliorated?

The third experience is about the general existence of fatness in public spaces. Clothing stores, gyms, airplanes, and restaurants are all places where fatness is put on full display as an inconvenience or entertainment. In clothing stores, fat people are relegated to small corners of the store that contain its meager plus size selection. This physical displacement and separation is symbolic and indicative of reactions to fat bodies. At gyms, onlookers regard fat bodies as sources of humor or disgust; everybody is reluctant to use a machine after a fat person has. In restaurants, there is always a sense of judgment based on what you order to eat, no matter what it is: a high calorie, high fat meal will be seen with disgust, while a salad will be seen with pity. On airplanes, nobody wants to be seated next to people of size, and asking flight attendants for seat belt extenders is almost a white flag of surrender, an announcement that says “I’m the person nobody wants to be seated by, the person you’d switch seats to avoid, the person you’d move away from even if it meant being seated by a crying baby.”

Much of the fat narrative lies within three dichotomies: first, that society assumes that all fat people must want to change, that nobody exists comfortably in fatness, but fat people who do try to lose weight are met with ridicule and disgust. Second, there are “good” fat people and “bad” fat people: “good” fat people are the ones whose fatness wasn’t a result of choices or actions. People with chronic illnesses that result in weight gain, people who are unable to exercise because of mobility restrictions. “Bad” fat people are the ones who are fat as a result of “bad choices,” people who aren’t doing anything to change their fatness by choice. “Good” fat people are the only ones who are excused in their fatness, the only ones allowed to exist as fat with excuses. “Bad” fat people are demonized at every turn, especially in intersections with race and class: the incredibly racist and often fat “welfare queen” stereotype feasts on steak and wine every night on food stamps while her hard-working American Joe neighbor can only afford a can of soup and sliced bread. The third dichotomy is between people who are currently fat and people who used to be fat: the latter often contribute just as harshly to fatphobia, likely due to internalized sizeism accrued from when they themselves were fat. They are also upheld as paragons of change, used by general society as reasons why every fat person can and should work against their own bodies: if this woman could lose over four hundred pounds, why can’t you lose a measly fifty?

In conclusion, I have more questions than were ever answered in this essay. Where does this public entitlement to the fat narrative come from? Why does every notably fat character on television struggle with their fatness, or struggle to eventually come to terms with it? Why can’t they just exist as fat, happily, without it being a defining characteristic of their personality? Why doesn’t the public care just as aggressively about other supposedly “preventable” health problems, like people who are severely underweight or experiencing addiction? How many fat people have died because of medical sizeism? Would I have died if I hadn’t fought for my own survival?