Body Positivity is Annoying When You’re Fat
What if I told you I don’t care if people find me attractive?
Like I’ve discussed in other posts, both of my parents come from families that struggle with weight and overeating. I have multiple family members with diabetes, and my sister also came horrifyingly close to contracting the disease herself.
I think fat people can be beautiful, and I have loved and continue to love many fat people in my life, hell I have been fat myself on and off my entire life. However, the body positivity movement is something that can be quite annoying to deal with when you’re at a point of trying to become healthier.
“Stop telling me I’m beautiful; it has nothing to do with why I want to lose weight” — My sister
My sister has been on a weight-loss journey for years and is currently down 100 pounds. Before, she was pre-diabetic and developing sleep apnea, among other worrying comorbidities.
The diagnosis of prediabetes scared her into getting serious about weight loss, but she complains that many of her friends, in trying to be supportive, are really just annoying.
“I will order a salad when we’re out at a restaurant, and they will give me these pitying stares.” My sister said.
“They’ll say ‘you’re beautiful the way you are, you don’t have to eat a salad’” My sister continued, mocking their tone and rolling her eyes.
“I just want to say “shut the f* up! I know I’m beautiful. I’m trying to be healthy!”
Maybe it seems strange to have an adverse reaction to somebody telling you that you don’t need to watch your weight, but even as a man, I can relate.
“Hey There, Big Guy.”
Being a big guy comes with some expectations and roles that you’re expected to play. I am often looked at like I am the garbage disposal; if there is extra food left in a meal, it’s always me that gets called on to finish it.
When a friend wants to indulge in some rich food, it’s always me they try to tempt into joining them.
And then whenever I tell people I’m on a diet or that I’m watching my weight, I swear they almost seem concerned. “You have to eat, Jimmy,” my friend said to me as if I was starving myself. “I KNOW!” I wanted to yell, “Believe me, in my thirty-some years of life, I have rarely, if ever, missed a meal.”
Instead of just respecting that I don’t want to eat something, it becomes this long, drawn-out conversation where I end up feeling like I have to divulge my struggle with food and health concerns, a conversation I don’t exactly want to have every time I’m eating with somebody.
One of the hardest things I had to learn in trying to lose weight is that I have to tell people “no” a lot, sternly. “No, I don’t want seconds. No, it’s not my fault you made too much food. No, I already ate. I’m not eating again.”
It’s like people don’t want you to feel bad because acknowledging you’re overweight must mean that you have some deep-seated issues with body image and need to be reassured that you’re not a hideous monster.
“I never struggled with my body image; that was the problem.”
My sister says this, laughing. “I always thought I looked good, and I was always confident. That’s why it’s so annoying for me when people tell me I’m beautiful when I don’t take a slice of pizza at the office party. I’m like, yeah, I know.”
Even though it's becoming common knowledge these days that it’s best to not comment on people’s bodies, people are still ironically commenting on your body when they tell you that you don’t need to lose weight.
It goes back to when I was a little fat kid. My parents both worked stressful jobs, and cooking was left up to my mom. I have a lot of sympathy for my poor mother, who was beyond burnt out. She would often just take us to McDonald's, buy a pizza, or make something simple like Mac N Cheese.
Whether it was learned or baked into my DNA, eating became my way of coping and comforting myself. For better or worse, it was one of the main bonding activities between my mother, my sister, and I. It revolted my dad, who had become quite fatphobic after seeing his father’s health ravaged by diabetes.
My father didn’t try very hard to hide his disgust either. “Why do you eat so much?” he asked me once with a scowl. “I don’t know,” I whimpered, feeling like a pig.
This created a whole messed up complex where I would hide food and not want people to see me eating. It was almost like trying to smoke weed in the house when your parents are asleep. I would go into the kitchen late at night and make triple-decker PB&J sandwiches when I was safe and alone.
Of course, I endured my fair share of bullying at school as well. Friends would yell “Eww!” when I took my shirt off to swim. Classmates would poke my belly or do what we used to call a “titty lift” (it’s exactly what it sounds like).
As a result, I became ashamed of my body as it was just proof of my own personal failure to not overeat.
It is wrong and horribly damaging to body shame people, especially adolescents. It does nothing to stop overeating or poor diet; all it leads to is hiding, shame, and self-hatred.
I’ve come a long way with my relationship to food and my body, so it can be really frustrating when somebody comments on it as if they know better than you. It can bring me back to that feeling of having my eating monitored and judged by my dad.
I just want people to know that one can recognize that their weight is unhealthy without them being insecure about their looks. I am far more concerned with sleep apnea, pre-diabetes, and mobility than I am with whether or not strangers think I’m hot.
Incels will disagree but many women find fat guys attractive these days. There was the culturally celebrated “‘dadbod” and micro-celebs like Matty Matheson and Stavos Hakrias are also considered hot.
Funny enough, in my own anecdotal experience, I had the most success dating when I was at my unhealthiest. Believe it or not, that was evidence for me that I didn’t need to lose weight. Men only do that to attract women, right? “What losers,” I thought; “I don’t have to do any of that”.
This was clearly a horrible metric for my health. Who cares if people find me attractive or not? I was housing entire pizzas before passing out drunk on my bed. Should I rationalize giving myself heart disease just because some women like bigger guys?
Again, it has nothing to do with looks, it has everything to do with health.
I don’t think anything good comes from shaming and bullying. People deserve to be fat in public without being social pariahs.
People judge women a lot more for being fat as well. My sister tells me about how she gets treated differently now that she’s lost weight. Now, she’s become more visible to men
“I don’t like it to be honest”, she tells me. “When I was bigger, I was either invisible to men, or they’d treat me more like a friend. Now that I lost weight, I get more attention; at first it was overwhelming and honestly disturbing…” I asked her to elaborate.
“It just felt…fake. You didn’t talk to me like this before, and now you do. It just made the shallowness of society way more apparent to me.”
There is obviously an insane amount of baggage that is entangled with weight and appearance. So much so, that even when we try to not make it about looks, it still is, and we shouldn’t assume that people necessarily want to be attractive either.
The truth is, we don’t know why somebody is eating the way they are. Even my partner, who has struggled with being underweight, gets comments about being a dainty eater, and then she has to explain that she has celiac disease and can’t eat pasta, bread, pastries, etc.
The moral is to stop making assumptions about people’s motives around their eating or exercise habits. Sure, eating disorders are rampant and something to be aware of, but if nobody’s asking for your opinion, maybe keep your comments to yourself.
Maybe that thicky is eating a salad because of a medical condition she doesn’t want to disclose. When you try to be supportive by telling her she’s beautiful, you’re communicating that you think she doesn’t feel beautiful. Or you’re acknowledging that there is a reason she shouldn’t feel beautiful.
It’s ultimately nobody’s business but her own, and while you may mean well, such “supportive” comments can reinforce the same harmful attitudes that link weight with attractiveness.
If you take nothing else away from this post, just remember:
When in doubt, don’t comment on people’s bodies or eating habits.
