What I wish I had known about fatness before starting a diet, but no one ever told me.
First thing: You can be fat and happy. Really happy. Truly happy. Professionally, interpersonally, stylistically, sexually, mentally happy. Moreover, you can feel secure, comfortable, and energized not just in your life, but especially in your fat. Some of us hold onto pearls and celebrate our fat selves. You can feel joy, skill, satisfaction, be content with your body, be satisfied with how you look, and be satisfied with yourself. (You can also be fat and sad, but symbolic disappearance teaches that lesson repeatedly and eliminates everything else, so I’m not very interested in that. It’s a counter-lesson, the truth of fat happiness, and culturally struggling.)
Also, you can eat well (really well!), exercise (a lot!), and be fat. There’s this idea that if you eat “right” and move enough, you’ll thin out. This is simply not true. Body diversity is real. Even if everyone eats the same and moves the same, some people get bigger, and some people get smaller. Some are skinny, and some are fat. This is because body diversity is real. And that’s okay.
I grew up with siblings. My siblings ate whole boxes of cereal, king-sized candy bars, cans of Coke, and so on. I eat very well; I sometimes laugh about it - so many local vegetables! I was almost satirically on an Alice in Waterland diet, and I exercise a lot, and I am fat.
By the way, this is common. There are plenty of fat people who “eat right” and exercise, and still, yeah, are fat. For example, check out this amazing interview with Martinus Evans. Or read up on the IG world of fat athletes and fat fitness enthusiasts to find us.
At the end of the day, what you put in your mouth and how you move does not determine your body size and shape. They may influence it a little, especially in the short term, but that’s about it.
In other words, the only thing you can convey by looking at fat people is what biases you have about fat people. If you see a fat person and assume you know what they eat and how they move their body - and…