What we need to learn about fat acceptance
One Sunday evening in 2020, I was walking from my car to a friend’s house in the hyper-hipster corner of Hauz Khas in New Delhi, when a lady on a scooter screeched to an ungainly halt. She parked haphazardly and ran up to me, whipping off her helmet to say something. I paused, wondering if she needed help. After all, us ladies gotta stick together, right? I looked at her, enquiringly, and she sputtered out through her mask, “Ma’am, please take this ma’am,” she said, proffering a card. I took it almost automatically. “Actually I am doing a weight loss business ma’am, fully 100 per cent herbal, all the weight will go ma’am, please just try it once!”
I felt all the things I knew I was going to feel. Shock, though it was really not a surprise. Anger that this total stranger felt it was not just acceptable to make assumptions about me, but that I would be grateful. Laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation. And helplessness, because this was not the first time fatphobia had vomited on me, and it would definitely not be the last.
What is fat phobia?
Being fat is difficult. Our world does not like to see fat people; we are programmed to think of fat as being a stand in for: lazy, stupid, indisciplined, ugly, embarrassing… It’s a long list of negatives. Being fat doesn’t actually mean you are any of these things. And yet, everything around us, from what people say to the clothes we can wear, feels like it is designed to tell us we are wrong, and we don’t belong. Fat people, especially fat women, constantly feel like we are less than other people; we need to apologise for existing or become invisible, and display that we are not lazy, stupid and useless.
Many of us look very hard for role models, and we find none. Fat people in the media are always seen to behave in negative ways. They are the butt (pun unintended) of jokes, their interest in someone is humiliating to that person, and they never really get to dress nicely. If you do at all see a fat body on screen, it’s usually one that is mocked, or one that is desperate to not be fat; think: Monica Geller from . The real world isn’t very different. Dipti Barwani, a designer and Instagram influencer, says, “I saw that I was looked down on for being fat. I was not an ideal girl or a desirable person, people at weddings and different functions used to point and talk and laugh. I wasn’t considered fit for the industry even as a fashion designer, because I looked different.”
Fatness cannot be hidden, which is why strangers on the street will come and give you weight loss advice, and think that it is okay to do so, because being fat is so terribly wrong. Even if you can accept fat bodies, Tanvi Ravishankar, a plus-size advocate and influencer, points out that “only a certain shape of fat body is acceptable by our society: hourglass or pear-shaped.”
Many people live in fat bodies, and though they can do most of the things thin people can, they are constantly being judged for those bodies. It’s almost as if those bodies become the site of our collective need to exorcise our fear of fat. The fear that is so deeply embedded that women with normal bodies are afraid to wear sleeveless clothes or anything body-hugging because it might reveal a bulge. That fear makes them say and think cruel things about themselves, which, of course, is the only messaging we all hear about fatness, whatever the size of our bodies.
The fear of fatness, or fat phobia, is a deeply embedded part of our society today, and it is all over. Only take a minute to look at the comments that plus-size people (with or without large followings) get on their social media. And the trolling starts young. Cat Pause, a fat researcher in New Zealand, told me that children have learned that fat is bad as early as three years old. Teenagers, especially feminine ones, develop problematic eating habits, obsessed with weight and appearance, skipping meals, counting calories while their bodies are still growing. “By middle age,” she says, “most women would rather lose 10 years off their life than gain 10 kilos.”
Hello, fat acceptance!
I asked my colleagues at Quilt.AI to look up search and social media trends on body positivity, fat acceptance, diet and exercise in India. They found that less than one per cent of news on body positivity is produced in India, and the conversation centres mainly on body positivity rather than fat acceptance. (There’s seven times more interest in body positivity than there is in fat acceptance). The story is the same on social media, with most narratives seeming to come from people in the West relating and responding to India-specific events. The real extent of our obsession with avoiding fatness shows up in the fact that the search volume for diet is 23 times that of body positivity.
It’s not all bad news though. The internet has allowed us to find a space. Of course, there are the models: Ashley Graham, Paloma Elssesar, etc. But you also discover incredible people like Ragen Chastain (dancer), Substantia Jones (photographer) and Tess Holliday (model). We get to see fat bodies as sexy and stylish, because the fat acceptance movement exists internationally. And some of us, like myself and my podcast (Fat.So? Podcast) co-host Pallavi Nath, Tanvi and Dipti, among others, are trying to create a space for fat acceptance in our country.
What exactly is fat acceptance? It is the idea that all bodies are good bodies, that fat bodies can perform headstands and run races and dance swing, just like anyone else. It is the radical thought that we can all be just the way we are, and our bodies don’t determine our virtue. Ever so slowly, the world is beginning to change. Lizzo, our collective goddess, is mainstream like no fat body has been in decades, and she is joyful and proud of her body. Just look at her, dancing, singing and playing the flute on teetering high heels for hours in concert. And, of course, that watershed moment for all of us, when she was on the cover of US Vogue, talking about how even the body positivity movement does not include “[g]irls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated, that overlap. Girls with stretch marks. You know, girls who are in the 18-plus club.”
It feels a little like there might be a new world ahead for us. A world that Pallavi loves to describe as one “where fat is only used to refer to a naturally occurring oily substance and does not imply excess or a lack of health or deviant behaviour that needs to be controlled.”
Originally published at https://www.vogue.in on January 28, 2021.
