"We will keep you safe by keeping you small"
A discussion of "Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture" by Virginia Sole-Smith
I’ve been obsessed with Virginia Sole-Smith’s newsletter Burnt Toast since becoming a parent. I think the post that hooked me was “Please Stop Romanticizing Your Child’s Lunchbox,” but there are too many good ones to list here. She is incisive and hilarious and her writing has significantly shaped the way I think about my relationship with my body and the bodies of others. She is able to call bullshit on so many lies our culture tells us about health and weight and what it means to be a “good mother.” When I learned that she was writing a new book all about how anti-fat bias affects our choices as parents, I pre-ordered it immediately and devoured it in less than a week. I was also fortunate enough to see Sole-Smith on her book tour in Boston earlier this week (in conversation with author Lynn Steger Strong) and fangirl all over her during her book signing.
I can't emphasize enough how much I loved this book. In addition to the detailed reporting it offers on scientific evidence related to health and weight, it includes heartbreaking, eye-opening testimonies from real families on how anti-fat bias has shaped their lives. It offers so much practical guidance (helpfully summarized at the end) on how to talk about anti-fat bias with doctors, friends, family members, and children, while also acknowledging that individualized solutions are not enough. As Sole-Smith said during her live discussion: The point of her work is not to help individual parents decide what to feed or not feed their children; rather, it’s to inspire us to acknowledge and call out the structural systems at play that perpetuate anti-fat bias as a step towards changing our culture. It has helped me continue my journey in acknowledging my own privilege of living in a thin body and taught me the importance of the intersection of anti-fat bias with all issues related to bodily autonomy that are under attack in our country.
I literally can't shut up about this book. Here, I'll try to limit my focus on how the book deconstructs three crucial lies that we tell ourselves as people and as parents about our bodies.
We care about weight because we care about health
The first third of the book is entirely devoted to discussing the political forces that shaped the narrative that weight and health are inextricably linked, and summarizing the science that shows that this relationship is much more tenuous than we are led to believe. Yes, there is a correlation between body size and health. But as any Psych 101 student knows: Correlation does not equal causation.
In reality, it is incredibly difficult to understand exactly whether body size causes health issues like diabetes and cardiovascular disease because: 1) the way our society treats people in bigger bodies affects the health of those bodies, 2) the commonly prescribed strategies to lose weight (like dieting) are unsustainable and also related to these worse health consequences, and 3) “health” broadly speaking is a resource that some have better access to than others.
Indeed, weight-based stigma is related to poorer health outcomes like diabetes risk, depression, and eating issues. The question remains: Does being fat by itself lead to health consequences, or is it the way that fat bodies are treated in our society that contributes more to this relationship? And, sure, there are studies that show that dieting can help someone lose weight in the short-term, but longitudinal research shows that the majority of people do not sustain that weight loss over time, regardless of the diet, and yo-yo-ing between losing and gaining and losing and gaining weight are associated with poorer health. Sole-Smith argues that there is indeed an “obesity epidemic” in that we weigh more as a society compared to decades ago, but that this problem has most likely been aggravated by our culture’s attempts to address it through encouraging unsustainable dieting practices and increasing weight-based stigma more than anything. Additionally, it’s incredibly difficult to understand the link between weight and health when we live with such drastic health access inequities, which is also influenced by anti-fat bias: Why would I go to the doctor when I know I’ll be treated worse because of the way I look?
The book then dives into how believing in the link between weight and health allows us to perpetuate anti-fat bias in our lives. We might tell ourselves that we care about exercising and eating better to be “healthy,” and while this may putatively be true, underneath this belief is also the (uncomfortable) reality that we also want to do these things to achieve or maintain the societal privilege that comes with having a thin body. An interviewee in the book even talks about how we might view doing things that conform to societal standards of beauty and fitness as being empowering because, well, these things actually confer real power. This is what makes anti-fat bias so pervasive; similar to our biases around being poor and other things that feel like they are “in our control,” we continue to aspire towards an ideal (being thin, being rich) and do whatever we can to get it/maintain it, which inevitably perpetuates the broken systems that created these desires in the first place.
This gets even more uncomfortable when we think about how this applies to our parenting. Yes, we might tell ourselves that we care about our child’s weight because we care about their health, but underneath this belief is also our desire to not have a fat child. Or, as Sole-Smith remarked during the live discussion, we want to keep our children safe by keeping them small. This is such a disservice we do to our children because it places the blame on them, as if they deserve to be treated worse based on the body that they have, rather than on the systems in place that cause health inequities and the stigma that people in larger bodies experience. Additionally, it’s just a lie: Keeping our children small will not keep them safe. Indeed, our attempts to do so may actively harm them.
We should prioritize a healthy body over a healthy mind
With all the hysteria around the “obesity epidemic” in children, Sole-Smith argues that we have ignored, and possibly accelerated, a far deadlier problem: Disordered eating. Through teaching or modeling common weight loss strategies, like counting calories, to children and young adults, we inadvertently give them the tools to develop eating issues. Despite our hand-wringing around the supposed health consequences of living in a larger body, eating disorders are more prevalent than type 2 diabetes in young adults.
These numbers are most likely conservative estimates due to the fact that eating disorder screening is often not part of regular pediatrician appointments, especially for children who do not fit the stereotype of being a skinny White girl. While it’s true that in order to meet criteria for typical anorexia nervosa, one must have “significantly low body weight,” eating disorders affect people who live in larger bodies. Atypical anorexia nervosa, or meeting criteria for all other symptoms other than low body weight, involves similar psychological and physical consequences as the typical version, may be more prevalent, and those with this disorder may be less likely to receive referrals for eating disorder treatment. We do a grave disservice to people in larger bodies when we assume that they cannot experience these types of issues.
This is a major problem because eating disorders are among the most lethal mental health conditions, with anorexia often cited as the “deadliest” due to its relationship with a heightened risk of suicide as well as early mortality caused by the physical consequences of severe malnutrition (including congestive heart failure). So while the evidence is unclear regarding how unhealthy it actually is to be “overweight,” we know beyond the shadow of a doubt that not eating will kill you.
As a mental health professional who does not believe in any type of distinction between physical and mental health, I think this was the most intellectually compelling argument Sole-Smith made. As a woman who can't name a single female friend who hasn't struggled with body image issues, it also felt the most personal.
Our bodies define our value
There were multiple times I cried while reading this book, but the phrase that kept affecting me was whenever Sole-Smith emphasized that your body is not your value. Whether it's talking to your thin kid who excels in athletics that prioritize their body type, to supporting your fat kid after they are made fun of for simply existing in their body, to telling your doctor that you'd rather not get weighed during a physical, it all boils down to this seemingly simple yet profoundly radical message.
Body positivity (“Every body is beautiful!”) does not go far enough because it still prioritizes the idea that the value of our bodies should be front and center. As Sole-Smith discussed in the live conversation, loving your body is not enough when your (fat, Black, queer, disabled, femme, etc.) body is not safe everywhere in the world. You can love your body as much as you want, but it won't protect you from a world steeped in anti-fat bias.
When our bodies do not define our value, it means we can focus on our bodies as instruments, not ornaments. It means that “fat” can be a neutral descriptor, rather than a weapon we wield to maintain our social power. It means we can raise a generation who believe that the way they look is the least interesting thing about them, who can stop focusing on making themselves smaller and instead feel entitled to take up as much space in the world as they want. Imagine everything we could achieve, how much safer the world would be, and how much actual power we would have, if we could truly believe this.