My own up-front reason for my lifetime diet struggle to lose weight and maintain weight loss is ... 
to avoid spending more time as an object of the abuse that happens due to our culture’s stigmatization of fat people.

I’ve called this “vanity”, but vanity is defined as the quality of people who have too much pride in their own appearance.  Is vanity really the word that describes avoiding abuse and seeking the comfort and protection of a positive status in our current culture?

It is currently popular to say we are working to lose or maintain weight “for our health” or “to be healthy”.  The opposite of “healthy” is “sickly” or “diseased”, and of course nobody wants to be that, but MOST dieters aren’t “sickly” or “diseased” and aren’t even in much danger of becoming that.  Of course, there’s also no guarantee that losing weight will make or keep anyone “healthy”.

I don’t believe “health” is REALLY the reason that most people diet.  I think saying that we diet to be “healthy” is often just another way to sell-ourselves-out and buy-in to our culture’s diet marketing industry … and make no mistake, the medical profession is a very active participant in this billion dollar marketing industry.

All fat people know that the article below is true, and yet strangely… (or not so strangely),  a great many fat people ..and formerly fat people… pretend that their struggle to be and stay thin has little to do with their desire to avoid being a member of this stigmatized group.

Drive-by Fat Shaming

            by Ragen Chastain, danceswithfat

Today I’m not talking about the kind of drive-by fat shaming where people moo at us from their cars (though they do, sometimes they even throw eggs, and it’s super messed up.) Today I’m talking about the small incidents of fat shaming that happen daily, often as casual asides.

This post was inspired by my attempt to watch the show Jessica Jones. Roughly a million people have recommended this show to me as being  amazingly feminist and all girl power-y. With the first few minutes there is an incident of fat shaming. It is apropos of absolutely nothing, it doesn’t “advance the plot”  she is surveilling someone in her job as a private inves...

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