Consider This from NPR - Author Aubrey Gordon Wants To Debunk Myths About Fat People

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

People sometimes object when Aubrey Gordon describes herself as fat. It's not that they're disputing her size, she says. Rather, they're acting out on their assumptions about what it means to be a fat person. Gordon is the author of "'You Just Need To Lose Weight' and 19 other Myths about Fat People." In the book, she explores and debunks pervasive societal myths about fat people. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. Writer and podcast host Aubrey Gordon says she's been treated differently throughout her life because of her size. But one particularly painful memory stands out. I had an experience some years ago of getting on an airplane and having a passenger very angrily and loudly in front of the whole cabin request that he be reseated so that he wouldn't have to sit next to me. And in this plane full of people,

many people were watching and were sort of mortified by the whole thing. And nobody said anything. Nobody talked to me. Nobody looked at me. Nobody talked to him. It was this moment where everyone was witnessing this really terrible and kind of cruel thing happen. And no one thought enough of me to ask how I was doing, and no one thought poorly enough of his behavior to address it with him. Gordon says that these kinds of experiences happen all the time to people like her, and they often go unchecked. As a fat person, in all of the sort of moments of public humiliation or street harassment or what have you that I have faced and that most of my fat friends have faced, most of us have done that without any intervention from bystanders.

In her new book, You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Gordon explores some pervasive myths about fat people and debunks them. Myths like the idea that being fat's a choice and that if fat people don't like the way they're being treated, they should just lose weight. And she also digs into all the places where anti-fat bias shows up in the world. Places like of doctor's offices that set limits on the weights of patients that they will see. Consider this, if anti-fat bias is deeply embedded and largely unquestioned in our society, where does it come from and what are some of the ways to push back against its harmful messaging? My conversation with author Aubrey Gordon is just ahead.

From NPR, I'm Juana Sumcom. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Our society praises and elevates thinness. And especially at the start of a new year, there's so much pressure to change the way our bodies look and how much we weigh. According to author Aubrey Gordon, a lot of that pressure stems from a bias against fat people. She writes about it in her new book, You Just Need to Lose Weight, and 19 other myths about fat people. Gordon calls that bias anti-fatness. Anti-fatness is a sort of web of beliefs, interpersonal practices, institutional policies that are designed to keep fat people sort of on the margins. And along with that come myths, a whole lot of them about fat people.

Myths like being fat is a choice. Researchers have been clear for years that our body size isn't solely or even primarily the result of our own choices. Or that BMI, body mass index, is a reliable way to measure health. The BMI was not developed by a healthcare provider. It was developed by a mathematician, statistician, and astronomer working exclusively with data from French and Scottish military conscripts in the 1800s. So we're talking about the bodies of white Western European men. And we have sort of continued to use that. Largely, it came back into our healthcare system through life insurance providers who were looking for ways to charge some customers more for health insurance. And they found that with fatness. And over time, that sort

of crept into doctor's offices. It's worth knowing that the high watermark of the effectiveness of the BMI is about 50% of the time it can quote unquote predict obesity accurately. That's because it's just body weight divided by height. So it doesn't distinguish between fat and muscle or any of that stuff. And that's in white men. And its reliability goes down from there. So what researchers have found is that it may actually actively be harming the health of people of color and Black folks and Indigenous folks for whom it was never designed and was never tested or meaningfully adjusted for, right? It was also never designed, tested, or adjusted for women. You know, and it strikes me that like this standard of how a quote-unquote

average body is sized, it just plays into everything in our environment from like the size of airplane seats to how tables are spaced at a restaurant comparatively to each other to the size of a blood pressure cuff used at the doctor's office. And I think that realizing how pervasively anti-fat the world is can be frankly kind of mind blowing to people who have never had to think about it before. I appreciate you bringing up the idea of quote-unquote average. It's worth reminding ourselves in these conversations that in the United States, the average is plus size, right? The average person is a fat person. So we are building environments that are hostile

not only to sort of some vanishingly small minority of people, but to most of us. I'd like to ask you about just one more myth in this book, and it's the idea that fat people should not call themselves fat. And can you just, for people who have never experienced this before, talk about the types of responses that that can sometimes elicit and what's wrong with that. Yeah, absolutely. I will say this is one that happens to me very regularly. The most recent example was I was at a women's soccer game. I'm like a huge women's soccer fan with a friend of mine and was looking at their sort of merchandise and was flipping through the racks and they didn't have an offering in plus sizes that would fit me. And a friend was like, you should get a t-shirt. And I was like, no, they don't have fat lady sizes. And a stranger turned around and went, don't call yourself that.

That's terrible. You're not. And I thought, well, I'm a size 26, I weigh over 300 pounds. I don't know where your standard is for fat people, but I'm pretty sure I'm in it by most people's standards, right? But it is this very strange moment where my understanding of my own body as a fat body, which I think of pretty neutrally, when I say that other people usually thinner people, rush to object to that. And what they're responding to there isn't the accuracy of my statement, right? They're not disputing that my body is like actually small. They're sort of shadowboxing with their own kind of assumptions about what it means to be a fat person, right?

They're assuming that what I am saying is that I am unlovable, that I'm undesirable, that I'm ugly, that I'm rejected, that I'm unlikable, all of these sorts of things. And while they think they are defending me, what ends up happening is that they don't end up listening to me, right? And this becomes a place where thin people start to name fat people's experiences and bodies for us without really realizing how kind of wild that is to tell someone else how to feel about their own body and how to describe it. You know, I really like that this book includes all of these really practical, often quite simple calls to action. And in the section that you wrote about this myth, you challenge people to say and hear the word fat in a neutral manner. Why is that so important? The more comfortable that people, particularly people who are not fat, can get with hearing the word fat, the more they'll be able to actually hear out actual fat people's experiences, right? I think the other thing that it does is it requires folks

to face their own biases and what they've attached to the word fat so that they're not going around and projecting those assumptions or that sort of emotional baggage onto fat people who are mostly just trying to live our lives. You know, another thing you suggest that people do when they're thinking about the language they use is to say what they really mean. So instead of saying when they're thinking about themselves, I feel fat, maybe say to yourself instead, I feel tired or I'm struggling with my body image today. Why is a shift like that so impactful? I will say it's impactful for a couple of reasons. One is that fat is not actually an emotion, right? Fat is a body type. And fat people's bodies are not metaphors for low self-esteem or bad body image days, right? It is really disheartening that when people want to talk about feeling at their worst in their bodies, the descriptor that they reach for is a descriptor of my body. They're saying, I feel terrible today, which means I feel like I look like you, which feels terrible to me as a fat person, right? The more that folks can talk about the real thing,

it actually gets you more precise help and support from your friend. So the next question I have for you, I have to say is a little bit personal. I'm somebody who probably falls into the category of which you describe in your book as a smaller fat person. So I'm on the lower range of plus sizes. Sometimes it's really hard in a mainstream store to find clothes that fit me well. And like many people, my relationship with my potty over the years has been kind of a roller coaster. And one thing that I have found, especially recently, is that while I'm an imperfect person like all of us, I try to be very vocal and upfront about challenging anti-fatness in the relationships in my life and in the communities I show up in, whether it's at work or in fitness spaces or in my family. But I find when I think

about it, it's a lot more difficult when it comes to my relationship with myself and my own body. And I'm just curious how you think about that. Yeah, it's so tricky, right? It's such a hard thing. I mean, I think different things work for different people when it comes to sort of addressing our body image stuff. I think one of the things that has been really helpful and impactful to a lot of folks is filling their social media feeds with people who look like them or who are fatter than them or hold more marginalized identities that they do. Build a social media feed that feels more reflective of the world that we live in is a really important step for a lot of folks. I will say for me, the stuff that gets my

relationship with my body back on track is actually sort of peeling back the curtain on where a bunch of our most reductive beliefs about body size come from. And overwhelmingly, they come from really unreliable sources like scientific racism in the 1800s, right? Like corporations looking to profit off of our bad body image, right? Like all of this sort of stuff comes from people who don't want what's best for most of us, right? They want to make a buck or they want to prove a political point or what have you. And it's really freeing to realize, you know, we've been sort of led down a garden path. And once you sort of see where that garden path leads and where it came from, things have gotten a lot easier for me on that front.

Aubrey Gordon is the author of You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Juana Summers. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University drives discovery, innovation, and creative endeavors to solve some of society's greatest challenges. Research and cybersecurity mean IU sets new standards to move the world forward, unlocking cures and solutions that lead to a better future for all. More at iu.edu forward.