No one asked for my opinion on fat-shaming, but here it is: it’s bad.

We each have a finite number of hours remaining in our lives and one way I definitely don’t want to spend whatever time I have left is punching down, looking for already struggling groups of people to shit on, or generally being an asshole.

“Whoa!” you might be thinking. “What even IS fat-shaming?” Or you might take the stance often seen on the internet or TV and respond: “Hey, I’m actually just concerned for their health” or “These are just facts, man.”

Let’s look at it.

What Is Fat-Shaming?

Fat-shaming, also referred to as “weight-shaming”, is a term that covers a range of actions including bullying, singling out, discriminating against, or making fun of people who are overweight, either individually or as a group. Sometimes it’s disguised as concern for the person’s health, advice for weight loss, or other good intentions.

It takes different forms. Sometimes it’s characterization of people as “lazy” or “stupid”; in some contexts being overweight is seen as a sin (gluttony, sloth) and thus equivalent to moral depravity. Other fat-shaming tactics refer to selfishness, lack of personal responsibility, or the strain on health care systems. Still other forms are more crude, including name-calling. (I won’t duplicate the names here; you know which ones I mean.) There are calls for “cracking down on” obesity and televised rants that “fat-shaming... needs to make a comeback.”

More broadly, the social stigma of obesity has far-reaching effects, including social exclusion, discrimination, and lack of access to goods and services. It sometimes leads to depression and even suicide.

In other words, it’s a form of bigotry. (Some have said it’s “the last acceptable prejudice”, though I question the degree to which other prejudices are truly “unacceptable” in our society.)

Fat-shaming also is known to be harmful to health and can cause increased weight gain. (It’s been known for years that fat-shaming doesn’t lead to weight loss.) Increased suicide risk is evident in teens who believe they are overweight. And so on. There is literally no benefit in it, despite outraged protests from fat-shamers.

(A note on body-shaming, because it was mentioned in the comments: Body-shaming is a broader term — more inclusive of all types of criticism and/or bullying based on body type or shape. Feel free to think of this broader term in relation to anything I’ve said above or below.)

The Difference Between Discussion And Bigotry

I assume most of my readers are grownups who long ago learned to differentiate between (1) discussing an issue and (2) bigotry, so bear with me as I look at those differences for a moment.

Just as we can determine whether a remark is racist, sexist, or homophobic based on intent, phrasing, context, tone, and effect, it often isn’t difficult to detect fat-shaming — as opposed to simply discussing weight-loss or health. (There might be gray areas, situations that I have yet to fully consider, which may require more insight.) For example, in a discussion about crime rates or police brutality, when someone cries out “what about black on black crime?”, we easily recognize it as a racist attempt to derail sentient argument. At the same time, we can discuss crime rates in minority neighborhoods or communities without engaging in racism — especially if we’re talking about causes and solutions rather than attempting to denigrate a group of people based on shared characteristics.

Typically, someone accused of fat-shaming (or believes he will soon be accused of it) resorts to one or more of the following responses: (1) “These are just facts, man”, (2) “I’m only concerned about their health”, and (3) “It’s really about the healthcare costs”.

All of them remind me of excuses for other forms of bigotry, and all can function as a kind of moving the goalposts — a fallacious form of argument in which a person changes his position after being challenged. If a person’s true motive is about healthcare costs (which we all share, to some degree), he would have opened with the immense cost of healthcare in our country and explored the plethora of causes and solutions to that problem, instead of nasty invective and caustic anecdotes about overweight people he knows or has seen. If a person is truly concerned about the health of overweight people, he would use language that indicates concern instead of engaging in or encouraging fat-shaming, using timeworn slurs about obesity, or expressing personal disgust.

I remember from my years in evangelical Christianity that people often explained away their anti-LGBTQ+ views by saying, “No, I don’t hate gays; I’m only concerned about the state of their souls.” In a few cases it may have been true to some extent, but very often the phrase was simply a way to mask their very opposite of concern as they advocated for harsh penalties for homosexuality, promoted dangerous unscientific “treatments”, fought tooth-and-nail against LGBTQ+ civil rights, and regularly employed hateful language and exclusionary tactics. When “concern” is the motivator, it will be evident in resulting acts.

When it comes to the “facts” excuse, the problem always turns out to be that the fat-shamer wasn’t, in reality, merely presenting facts; he was being intentionally mean, using “facts” as a bludgeon.

If one genuinely believes his audience unaware, he can refer to the wealth of news stories, scientific studies, government health pages, charts, and facts and figures on the subject. Most of them have been well-publicized for decades and are uncontested in the public sphere, commonly accepted by all. For example, this page from the West Virgina Department of Health and Human Resources, plainly states that “an estimated 300,000 deaths per year are due to the obesity epidemic”, and “obesity and overweight (sic) together are the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States.” The existence of these facts doesn’t constitute bullying; they don’t, by nature of being true, hurt, assign guilt, blame, or marinalize anyone. Facts inform; that’s it.

The obvious rebuttal to the above is that almost all of us are aware of those facts. As noted, they have been publicly blared for decades. (Think of the absurdity of a doctor “informing” an adult patient that “smoking is bad for you”. No shit, Sherlock.)

One fact that I think sometimes gets lost in the haze of fad diets and costly exercise regimens, is this one: simply eating less is the most effective (and cost effective) method of losing weight. Yes, we know this, but I often see exercise framed as the chief tool in the weightloss toolbox, and conversations on diet often tend toward the type of food that one eats. (I was prompted to add this fact after reading multiple recent news stories on health and weightloss, none of which referred to it and all of which implied that only exercise and changing the type of food one eats are effective weight loss tools.) I believe it’s easy to forget — while we read nutritional labels and focus on avoiding specific ingredients — that simply reducing portion sizes will lead to weight loss. (Obviously, this fact relates only to weight-loss and says nothing of relative health or fitness.)

Like other facts, the above is a neutral one, backed by science and repeatedly confirmed for generations. But the presentation matters. If I’m using this fact to scream “eat less, you [slur]”, then it’s something different from “here’s some information I found”.

When it comes to the cost of healthcare in the U.S. — whether overall costs, taxpayer funded healthcare, or private insurance premiums — it’s true that some of those costs are due to obesity. However, it is not the primary drain. Cigarette smoking continues to be the biggest cause of preventable disease and death in the U.S., responsible for nearly 10% of all healthcare costs in the country. But more than three times that amount is spent on healthcare for persons 65 and over (yes, there is overlap between the these statistics: people who are elderly sometimes also smoke and/or are overweight). Alcohol-consumption is also responsible for a ton of healthcare spending, not to mention the approximately $200 billion drain on the economy through loss of workplace productivity. And if we’re pretending it’s the cost that truly concerns us, why not focus on one of the most significant drains on U.S. healthcare spending: capitalism. Profit-seeking is why we in the U.S. spend (per person) twice the amount on healthcare as other wealthy countries. “Administrative costs” account for eight percent of all healthcare spending in the U.S. but only 1-3% elsewhere. Our drugs cost twice as much. Our physicians are paid twice as much. Each procedure and service here is priced at least twice what it is in other countries (example: “the mean payment for an MRI in the United States was $1,145 compared with $350 in Australia and $461 in the Netherlands”).

Despite all this, it’s a rare fat-shamer who also disparages and slurs capitalists, hospital administrators (does a derogatory term even exist for this class of person?), insurance profiteers, the elderly, drinkers, or smokers. Certainly not with the same level of disgust and attempt at hilarity. (Of course, people in those categories sometimes do experience animosity or marginalization; I only bring them up to show that the “costs” excuse for fat-shaming isn’t genuine.)

After I wrote the above, a helpful commenter directed me to this piece, by Lindy West in 2011. She addresses the same three points but with much better brevity and scorn. For example, her paragraph on health insurance costs:

“ ‘But but but my insurance premiums!!!’ Bullshit. You live in a society with other people. I don’t have kids, but I pay taxes that fund schools. The idea that we can somehow escape affecting each other is deeply conservative. Barbarous, even. Is that really what you’re going for? Good old-fashioned American individualism? Please.”

What Is The Real Motivation?

If I’m convinced that fat-shamers aren’t primarily motivated by genuine concern for health, presenting facts, or the costs to the healthcare system, then what does motivate them? For many fat-shamers, I assume it’s the same confluence of factors that leads to bullying, shaming, and harassment of any group — a question for psychiatrists and/or sociologists. Short version: they get some kind of rush from it.

But in the high-profile cases I’m aware of — ones that have either received national media attention or achieved trending status on social media — I think most of these people are professional agitators who literally profit from the attention, whether negative or positive.

For example, Bill Maher’s 2019 rant was neither “just the facts” nor was it “I’m only concerned about their health”. It was an attempt to generate buzz and nothing else. (It worked.) Maher blared: “Fat shaming doesn’t need to end; it needs to make a comeback.” He began the segment with a lie: “Weight Watchers had to literally take the words Weight and Watchers — I'm not kidding — out of their name. It’s now WW. Because merely the idea of watching your weight is now bullying.” Weight Watchers is still, of course, called Weight Watchers; it’s right there in the URL, not to mention in bold blue text at the top of the page. He then said many people die every month from obesity-related causes, as if this is new or startling information. In order to drive home his point about shame, which he said “is the first step in reform”, Maher said shame caused people to quit smoking, start wearing seatbelts, cease littering, and stop being racists — four astounding claims offered without evidence. While U.S. smoking rates have declined, and more people these days do wear seatbelts, I found no evidence that shame played a part in either. (Much more likely in my opinion is that public information campaigns, combined with legal action and changing pop culture portrayals, caused the gradual changes.) As for littering and racism, I can’t find evidence that either has actually decreased, much less what the cause might have been.

Mea Culpa

Me? I was wrong on this one. For a long time. I’m sorry about it. And I’m sorry it took me so long to come around. I hurt people by the things I said — more than once (and likely many times of which I was never aware). If you were one of those people, please consider forgiving me; I accept that you might not.

I don’t mean I ever went out of my way to name-call or bully anyone (my tendency is to side with obvious underdogs), but I know that for years I used terms and phrases that were insensitive and upsetting to people around me. (At least once I was called out for it, immediately apologized, and promised to do better.) And for many years I held the opinion that a person’s weight was purely a matter of choice and personal responsibility. I was wrong about that too.

As with many other things I was once told were personal flaws or moral failings — like poverty, addiction, and poor health — obesity turns out to be a complex issue with a multitude of causes and solutions.

Is There Good News?

I think there is some good news on this front. At least in my lifetime I’ve noticed a steady trend toward anti-bullying awareness in schools and workplaces. A schoolchild might still be teased about his weight, but now new rules allow administrators to take action against the bully. I’ve seen the vocabulary change around the subject, whether to be more accurate or to avoid giving offense — both of which are good things.

Today, more so than in the past, there is pushback. One example is when James Corden used his own show to blast Bill Maher a few days after Maher’s outburst. “If only there was someone with a platform who knew what it was actually like to be overweight”, Corden said, referring to himself. Corden pointed out some of the misinformation in Maher’s speech but also noted that “bullying only makes the problem worse” (as I noted above) and in fact can lead to over-eating. “A lack of shame is not the issue here”, Corden added.

“If making fun of fat people made them lose weight, there’d be no fat people in schools and I’d have a six pack by now, right? Until we make healthy food and health care more accessible and we properly educate people on nutrition and exercise, maybe we can hold back on the whole call-fat-people-virgins-until-they-lose-weight strategy...

“Bill, while you’re encouraging people to think about what goes into their mouths, just think a little harder about what comes out of yours.”

James Corden

And though health-food crazes are often misguided, there is progress here too. Dietary guidelines continue to be refined and re-studied. We now know more than we did in the past about what shaped the country’s obesity in the first place and what to do about it. For example, it came out a few years ago that the sugar industry funded research in the past to deflect blame from sugar and onto fat, attempting to influence the scientific debate over the relative risks. We now know more about the sugar industry’s strategies to infuse sugar into our diets, beginning in the 1970s by adding more sugar to baby formula and other infant foods, switching to high fructose corn syrup in sodas and other drinks, and billions of dollars in ad campaigns over the next few decades. Today, intake of sugar in the U.S. is slowly declining, and obesity rates are leveling off in some areas. More of us are looking for healthy snacks (as opposed to “indulgent” snacks).

Other studies have informed us about food deserts, shedding light on why obesity and poverty are often linked. We now know more about genetics, metabolism, and general health than humans have ever known before. There are “body positivity” movements that aim to bolster self-confidence and assurance — as opposed to shaming and bullying those who can least put up with it. Some clothing brands have been pressured into hiring “normal” or even plus-sized models for their ad campaigns.

Yes, there are still miles to go. It doesn’t take a sharp eye to notice that almost all people on TV shows and in movies are of a certain shape, with rare exceptions. Appearances by persons beyond a certain weight are still largely for punchlines as lazy, incompetent buffoons whose only character arc is “I have a weight problem”. Fat-shaming is still widely reported in schools, with women and girls facing harsher judgements. Overweight people are less likely to be hired — everything else being equal.

Given our society’s babysteps in the right direction, and the steep incline still ahead of us, I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Conclusion

I wrote more on this than I originally meant to, and spent a lot more time on it than I had hoped. I kept finding things I’d said awkwardly (or incorrectly) and trying to fix them, and places where I went on tangents that had to be excised.

Basically what I started out to say was “fat-shaming is bad” and “I know I crossed the line a few times in the past and I’m sorry”. I know I can be kinder, and I think others can be kinder too. All of us will benefit from it.