In My Size

There’s a basic misunderstanding that a person can be in a fat body and also be athletic. The two concepts are not, and never have been, mutually exclusive.

Take yoga instructor Jessamyn Stanley, for example. She is a proudly fat, queer yoga instructor who teaches classes all over the world for all body types and experience levels. Yet, when she walks into a room, people still don’t think that she is the instructor.

Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/womens-sport/2019/08/19/life-bigger-pant-size-yoga-teacher-jessamyn-stanley-body-obsession/

In the article, Stanley says, “Fat people can do all kinds of things, we just clearly have a visibility issue.” And that is so true.

I remember when this “Body Issue” for ESPN came out in 2014 showing a naked Prince Fielder, first baseman for the Texas Rangers.

Source: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/prince-fielders-naked-espn-cover-is-sexy-as-hell-1603146649

People LOST. THEIR. SHIT. Not because Fielder is naked—no, that’s common for the cover of this particular issue of ESPN magazine. No, it’s because Fielder is fat and naked and an athlete in a sport that doesn’t seem like it fits his body type. If Fielder were an American football player, someone on defense maybe, then perhaps the collective gasp wouldn’t have been so loud. We expect football players to be around 300 pounds, to create a wall to stop the run or keep the offensive line from getting into position to make a catch. And while baseball players have come in all shapes and sizes—remember Babe Ruth?—there’s still an image of what we expect one to look like that Fielder is messing with. From an article about the cover in 2014:

In 2016, EPSN followed up with pictures of Vince Wilfork, five-time NFL Pro Bowler on the cover. He’s also naked, also fat, also powerful, and there were also jokes.

Source: http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/27400369/the-body-issue#!vince_wilfork

So yes, Stanley is right… despite these examples of athletes so powerful and in their prime, fat and naked on the cover of ESPN Magazine, fat people still have a visibility issue. We are not seen to be athletic. Fat people everywhere, every day, have to battle against the assumption that our large size has come from laziness, a lack of self-esteem, poor food choices, and a lack of exercise. We are missing something fundamental about ourselves or we wouldn’t be fat.

But Vince Wilfork and Prince Fielder and Jessamyn Stanley are just three small examples of how wrong that is.

Let’s not get it twisted, though. Just because they are athletes and fat doesn’t make them any more worthy as people than people who are not athletic and fat. Or not healthy and fat. Athleticism and health and fitness are not the price of admission for being treated with the same courtesy and dignity of everyone else.

It is beyond time to start checking your assumptions about people based on their size. If you’re surprised that a fat person is doing something you didn’t think they could do, ask yourself where that assumption came from. If you assume that a fat person at the gym or out enjoying some kind of physical activity is trying to lose weight, ask yourself where that assumption came from. And if you feel compelled to congratulate that person or give them encouragement, stop and ask yourself why (and then don’t).

I’m not sure how many different ways I have to say it, but it clearly needs to be said over and over. Fat people are people and we can do anything, from being a five-time NFL Pro Bowler to being a singer and pop/hip hop/funk music star to being a person walking down the street with a cup of coffee. We’re here and we exist in all facets of life. And we are amazing.

Most of the interactions that fat people have with healthcare professionals can be boiled down to “Lose weight or you’re going to DIE!”

Guess what? We’re all going to die one day, fat or thin or in between. What the doctors and nurses and other providers mean, of course, is that you are going to die prematurely based on your given life expectancy for your socioeconomic class and region (which we can debate the merits of at another time).

Except now there’s evidence that some fat might actually provide protection against disease and not cause premature death at all… say WHAAAAAAAAT?

Researchers are calling it the “obesity paradox,” which is a bullshit name for the antithesis of a bullshit epidemic that doesn’t exist, but I’ll allow it. At its core, the so-called paradox is that some extra weight—individuals in the overweight or mildly obese BMI categories—offers a protective benefit against a list of diseases including (but not limited to) pneumonia, cancer, burns, heart disease, stroke, and hypertension.

All of this is from an article in Quartz about the “obesity paradox.” It should come as no surprise that researcher after researcher has tried to deny these findings after data from over 100 studies and over 3 million people had been incorporated. First they attacked the data. When nothing wrong could be found there, they attacked the patient populations.

The upshot is, no one can make the “paradox” go away. No matter how they crunch the data or reconfigure the patient groups, the evidence is still there.

So how come healthcare professionals still stigmatize and shame fat people? Shouldn’t this mean that fat people are treated the same or even better than thin people who statistically will have worse outcomes in these areas?

No, of course not. That’d be ridiculous. It’d run counter to decades of fat bias and diet industry conditioning that thin is always healthy and fat is always unhealthy.

Source: https://qz.com/550527/obesity-paradox-scientists-now-think-that-being-overweight-is-sometimes-good-for-your-health/

According to the article, even the researchers whose work helped to identify the paradox don’t know what it means and do not back away from recommendations that fat people should lose weight to be healthy. The article concludes that HAES seems to be the best way forward and that research has shown that a HAES approach (opposed to a weight-loss approach) “…leads to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and other metabolic markers.”

But the idea that a fat body can be healthy and actually be protected from poor outcomes from disease is such an anathema that it seems like people can’t wrap their heads around it. The article stops short of examining why that is. My guess is money related to the diet industry (ie, being paid for their research by the diet industry or sponsored as key opinion leaders by the diet industry), internalized fat phobia, and learned fat bias.

The article also does not give critical information on the debunking of BMI and the fact that it never was an indicator of health. So even the basis of the research on this paradox is pretty much bullshit. But the good news for us is that weight cannot and should not be used as a measure of our worth or our health. Even the scientists don’t know what it all means.

A Fat Athlete is Not an Oxymoron

When Fat People Don't Die Like You Said They Would