8:30pm June 2, 2014

“In contexts in which food is scarce, being fat signals access to limited resources. Yet in the contemporary rich nations, in which there is an abundance of cheap sources of calories, the wealthiest— who still consume far more per capita than average citizens— are now often the thinnest. Despite this, fat bodies continue to be read as the embodiment of greed and overconsumption. In fact, fat people’s relative lack of power (both because they are less likely to be wealthy and because fatness is independently stigmatizing) makes them an easy target.”

—

Abigail C. Saguy, What’s Wrong with Fat? (via wretchedoftheearth)

I try so hard to remember that in my case, my fat is the product of generations and generations of poverty and near-poverty in my family (my generation was the one exception), which people survived by hanging onto every calorie they could. Everyone in my family has the same fat, stocky build. I try so hard to see that this is beautiful, that this is a survival strategy, that this is not something to see as undesirable. Hell, I’m on 1200 calories a day at most and I’m still fat. If I were thin, I’d probably be dead by now given I lost 70 pounds over the course of this illness. Fat means I’m still here. Hell yeah, fat! But seriously, overconsumption? In my family a fat body means that our ancestors, hell even our living relatives, survived hunger over and over again and we’ve genetically adapted, this is not a bad thing. Now that I’m going through hunger and malabsorption myself I can appreciate how little of a bad thing this is. I have a skinny friend who would probably have died if she had the diseases I have, and that scares me for her.

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