“Only fat people ask for takeout on a first date,” “I ate really fat,” “Like a fat girl on a slide”... These and many other phrases involving the word 'fat' are commonplace. Today, the word 'fat' has reached such a degree of polysemy that it can be a term of endearment or an insult, or even simply refer to a copious intake. But what lies behind these meanings? In Anglo media, 'fat talk' is already a concept used to define those discourses about fatness in everyday life, generally with a discriminatory and pejorative sense.
What does it mean to be fat today? We must distinguish that medically, overweight and obesity are popularly encompassed in the ambiguity of 'fat.' And in some sectors, anyone who does not fit the idealized, thin, unhealthy, and unattainable figure conceived by certain parts of society is also considered fat.
Being 'fat' is no longer just a matter of body size or health. Today, obese or overweight people are attributed moral and personal characteristics that are far removed from a purely bodily issue.
A professor at the University of New Mexico once tweeted: “To all doctoral students who are obese: if you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbohydrates, you don’t have the willpower to write a thesis.” Needless to say, the tweet had to be deleted and the professor had to offer repeated apologies.
In this reasoning, the obese person lacks moral quality, lacks willpower, is lazy, angry at life... At what point did being fat become the essence of a person? Moreover, considering that the etiology of obesity is not an individual and unifactorial problem, we cannot attribute these characteristics to an obese person simply for being obese; on the contrary, a vicious circle is created in which the emotional health of the obese person is compromised.
It is documented that obese people suffer discrimination in their workplaces, in the clothing industry, and in many other areas of life. It is not uncommon for obese people to report feeling discriminated against and intimidated by external looks when, for example, attending a gym to incorporate physical activity into their daily routine to improve their health.
Furthermore, studies indicate that some health professionals dedicated to treating these patients are often cited as perpetrators of discrimination or as making aggressive-passive verbal remarks to these individuals, or even mocking patients among groups of colleagues.
Besides the ethical problem it poses, discrimination for being overweight or obese is frequently justified because it is believed to motivate people to lose weight, but it has the opposite effect: it is associated with the development and persistence of obesity according to social psychology studies.
Discrimination against the obese thus speaks to the moral quality of the person who points it out. When we hear a size 4 teenager say she is 'fat' because she doesn’t fit into size 0, it means we are doing something wrong as a society, just as when we label the 'sloppy fat woman' as being that way by choice.
When it comes to body shapes, genres are broken, but improving the quality of life, accepting differences, and having greater humanism toward others is what makes us advance as an inclusive society.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.