Fucking Stop connecting "health" and Fat.

I spend some time at the doctor’s office today where the scumbag made his patients wait for an average of 45 minutes in a woman-hating and fat-shaming waiting room. I was also not feeling well, due to a flue, so it was particularly lovely to wait for such a long time in a room where with a “lovely” poster warning about skin cancer. What was on the poster, you ask? Why, a woman’s body, of course. The naked half-torso of a woman, where the image started just at the lower part of her left breast and ended at her hips. Naturally the body was thin, white and her skin almost “flawless”, but for two mark that could cause skin-cancer.

I had to read the fine print at the bottom of the poster to even figure out why there was a headless woman’s body cut in half, down the center on this particular poster. ”Women are expected to have flawless skin, you doofus!” So of course we put the naked half body of a model on a skin-cancer poster, to warn women that having “imperfections” can not only make you “ugly” it can also kill you. Women take note!

The second woman hating and fat shaming piece of media was a television screen mounted on the wall. It kept displaying images in a loop of a woman’s bowels, “infections” bouncing of a woman’s breast, a woman eating a mattress size chocolate bar, a whole pizza (they could have done worse and tried to scare people with just one slice), two thin white women jumping in the air out joy because they are healthy thin, and in between the words kept flashing “Too Much”, “Too Fast”. Because of course fat is always a symptom of being a lazy slob who never moves a muscle and spends all day stuffing herself. It’s pointless to say “himself” here, because men are allowed a little fat and we will never see thin white men jumping up and down like children, because they are thin. That would just be silly, so we’ll have women do that. After all, we women are biologically hardwired to hate ourselves, right?

So after having seen the horrible list of diseases that are caused by fat, over and over again, I wanted to take my phone out and prepare this rant. Flue be damned. Unfortunately I didn’t have it with me so all I could do was let my frustration simmer. Then, when I was finally home again, I chatted with some people and complaint about the fact that the doctor’s office participates in fat-shaming, despite the fact that he is fat too, though none of the women working there are. (coincidence?)

After uttering the first two sentences, I got something like: “I have been getting fatter in the past few years and it is just so inconvenient?” The discussion continued a bit about fitness and about being less flexible, because of fat. All of a sudden I got incredibly angry. I was fighting so hard to accept my body when I was still a “normal” size and now that I am getting fat and the messages are mounting up against me, I really don’t need this crap. My mom is often implying, when she doesn’t tell me directly, that I should lose weight or at least buy smaller clothes so that I might be enticed to lose weight. Really? Will me not having anything to wear make me starve myself? It just might, it won’t mean I’ll be any thinner though. I’ll just be annoyed about not being able to fit into half my wardrobe and I will hate myself for ever bite I eat and I will mentally flog myself for every kilo I fail to lose or inevitably gain again.

I will also get my anemia back, after I finally managed to get rid of this year by not denying myself essential fuel anymore. I fucking need enough food. I have better things to do with myself than trying to fit myself into impossible molts, such as actually living my life. I also haven’t got any time for self hatred or self-doubt, because I am fat. So if it is not too much to ask, do not move conversations about fat acceptance into a “fat is inconvenient” area. You are only making things harder for people who are fat and perfectly healthy, and indirectly yourself too.

I am fat and any health problems I have are not caused by fat and fat does not make it harder for me to move and fat does not make me sick. So stop mentioning “physical fitness” and the “inconvenience that fat is” when the discussion was not even about “health”, because whether you mean too or not, you are indirectly blaming me and every other fat person for a lot of health problems they may or may not have. We already have plenty malestream media for the barrage of hate-messages. So when you are a radical feminist do not add to to those messages and think about what connections you are making when you move so quickly from topics of oppression to topics of “health”.