In the realm of weight loss, one of the phrases I see thrown around most often is “but it’s not healthy to be fat! I’m just concerned for their health!” When I bring up questions of fatphobia and weight discrimination, one of the first things I always hear is that it’s important to educate people about losing weight because being overweight is unhealthy. And more often than not, this is really just some Grade A concern trolling.
There are lots of pieces of evidence to suggest that the majority of people who promote weight loss for health aren’t actually interested in the health of the fat person. One of the first and most obvious pieces is that many of the tactics promoted for weight loss are actually incredibly unhealthy. Bariatric surgery comes with serious complications, including vomiting, inability to eat solid foods, and oh yeah, death. No worries though, it’s for your health.
There are many, many diets that are also incredibly unhealthy. Juice cleanses do nothing to actually cleanse and put the body into a starvation state because they give too few calories. People still use the BMI scale, despite the wide knowledge that it’s based on a statistician’s attempts to understand large populations, not individual health. New guidelines for doctors treating overweight patients even promote weight loss before treating whatever complaint the patient may have come in for (unsurprisingly, the doctors who worked on these appear to have close ties with pharmaceutical companies that market weight loss drugs). Basically every restrictive diet ever rests on the principle of putting the body into a starvation state so that it will start to eat away at its own fat. In the long term this doesn’t generally lead to weight loss (it changes the metabolism such that the body tends to gain back the weight plus some), and it’s simply not very healthy.
But perhaps most obvious is the fact that nobody seems to give a crap what thin people do with their bodies. I can confidently say this as a thin person: I have openly admitted to people that I eat almost nothing but sugar, that I never get enough protein, that I sometimes feel out of breath walking up a flight of stairs, and the only response I get is slight laughter and jealousy that I can eat so many sweets and stay thin. I know many people who engage in potentially unhealthy or dangerous behaviors, everything from drinking a little too regularly to rock climbing, and the number of times I see anyone express concern for their health is zero (I am sure that somewhere out there there are thin people who have been harassed about not being healthy enough, but on a regular, societal basis it does not happen in the same way).
People who are overweight are fully capable of having problems with restricting their intake too much. Fat individuals with eating disorders are often ignored or even praised for behaviors that would get a thin person thrown in the hospital, because the result of weight loss is so important to many people. Dangerous behaviors that border on (or even look exactly the same as) eating disorders are even promoted. Shows like The Biggest Loser promote exercising to injury, crash dieting, starvation, and for some contestants even purging. Yet amazingly, the show is viewed as inspirational and healthy because it leads contestants to lose weight.
Combined with all of this, we have strong evidence that weight loss just isn’t very effective and usually leads to gaining back more weight, and that shaming people is really bad for their health. So why do people continue to make unwanted comments under the guise of “it’s about health!”? Well probably because saying “I don’t like fat people” is really socially unacceptable at this point, and that’s a good thing. We’ve at least learned that bodies don’t determine worth well enough that you can’t say it straight out, even if we still behave as if they do in many contexts.
It doesn’t matter if you phrase your double standard as “health concern” it’s still a double standard. Fat people are expected to perform their healthy behaviors visibly and thin people are excused all sorts of unhealthy behaviors.
But where the rubber really hits the road is the question of whether we owe our health to other people, and if so how much? We all probably agree that in a society we have responsibilities to not put ourselves at completely undue risks. When other people get sick, we as a society bear some of the literal cost as well as the metaphorical costs of caring for them and trying to fill the roles that they took on when they were healthy. This is why we have requirements about seatbelts and age limitations for drinking or smoking. But how far do the expectations of “behave in as healthy a manner as possible” extend? Does it mean that you can’t play sports like football because it has a high likelihood of causing injuries? Does it mean you can never eat dessert? Life probably isn’t worth it if we curtail people’s freedoms that far, but is the promotion of healthy eating (and fining or otherwise punishing people who don’t) too far?
There are certainly people out there who say no, but using weight as a measurement when losing weight is almost impossible does seem to be too far.