Episode 203 Transcript

You're listening to the Fierce Fatty Podcast episode 203: NYT “Confessions of a Former Body Positivity Influencer”: What It Gets Wrong. I'm your host, Vinny Welsby. Pronouns they/them. Let's do it.

Hello. Welcome to the show. So pleased to have you here. Thank you for your patience as I have a delay between getting episodes to you. As you may know, I'm at university doing a masters in counseling and I have figured out that I have two months on and then one month off and so in that one month I will be recording three or four episodes so that you can get your, uh, you can get your first fatty fix if you want it over the next few months. So um yeah so that's the delay that's what's going on with me um but I thought I would make a podcast about this video that came out a couple of weeks ago from the New York Times. It's an opinion piece, a video essay from someone that I wasn't familiar with. I guess it's the reason is is that she wasn't a part of the fat liberation community. I've watched the video, I've done an, uh, you know, an analysis of it. It's just really boring. The things that, you know, as in as in I mean it's good storytelling. I mean it's nice it's nicely produced and stuff and I think you can tell that people are, you know, they spent a long time with the script and all that type of stuff. Like, I mean it's, I mean as in it's entertaining for someone who's you know new to the topic but it's boring in regards to it's just the same old boring message of I'm fat and a piece of shit. But it's framed as I escaped and I'm brave because I'm trying to lose weight. Shhh. It's to me, snoozefest. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. But, but, but, but the reason why I chose to talk about it is that I know this video is going to trip up a lot of people as it's already got 560,000 views. Uh, especially those who are just discovering fat liberation or intuitive eating or quote body positivity. And I'm worried that it's going to cause real harm and derail people's mental health, their physical health. So I want to break down the misconceptions in the video because you could watch the video, you know, it's it was it was presented to me on YouTube and I was like 'Huh, what is this?' You could watch the video and think 'Oh God, uh, oh no, yeah, I agree with, I agree with this person. I don't want to do, I don't want to be involved in body positivity because they sound really unreasonable' and just out there, I don't care when people lose weight. You know, I care that, you know, that they feel happy and they're safe and they're good but, you know, it's not really, it doesn't really interest me, it doesn't activate me, it doesn't make me mad or, or anything. I feel maybe a bit sad for them but I don't really pay attention, it's not, it's not something that I make content about and the reason is, is that that's not what fat liberation is about and that's not what I'm interested in. Fat liberation looks at the structures at play and criticises them, the structures at play saying 'fat people need to do abc to be seen as human' and where those messages come from aka anti-black racism, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, healthism, etc etc etc and dismantling those systems. Whatever someone does to survive an anti-fat world is their business, especially if they're also marginalized in other ways, for example being racialised and disabled or super fat or an immigrant etc etc etc right, so if someone decides that engaging with diet culture or taking a GLP-1 is the way that they're going to survive then great, I'm glad they're able to survive and I'm not interested in critiquing them as an individual because it doesn't interest me and I don't think it's going to move the needle forward. Also I try, I try not to, I'm not into shaming people, it's not really my bag, it's not my bag, because you know we all fuck up and make mistakes and do things that we thought were great and later realise they maybe weren't so great, if I criticise other people then you know, criticise myself as well because I like leading with compassion is what I'm trying to say, but the big thing that happens in this video is that body positivity is completely misunderstood and misrepresented, like it's bananas, it really is. I'm walking the dog and being like, what, what time, how can I explain how badly misrepresented something is, like with an analogy or something, you know and I was thinking oh it's like someone said to you, oh man I tried strawberries, I just really don't like how big they are, you know, they're the size of a of a football and and they taste really meaty and you're like huh, you mean strawberry, meaty, the size of a football, I don't think that that was strawberry that you were eating, it doesn't sound like it. And then everyone you know in the comments of the video like yeah fuck those strawberries, they're so fucking meaty and stringy and stuff like spaghetti and you're like what, this is not the same thing we're talking about.

So that's the main thing is you know you'll see in the, I'll go through the video, you'll see the kind of conflation there but also the conflation with body positivity to something else and also missing what body positivity is, what fat liberation is. The reason why I don't use the term body positive is because body positivity is spawned from fat liberation. Fat liberation came around in 1967 was when the first fat in, FAT fat in as in sit-in, in Central Park happened and I think NAFA was created in 1969. Anyway so fat liberation says hey um can fat people get equal rights and access and you know just you know be treated equitably in the world, you know treated like we're humans, I know so weird. And then in the, which is, which is you know right like to us like yeah obviously to a lot of people, no we don't want to do that because fat people are pieces of shit or whatever. Then in the 1990s language was introduced body positivity, the body positive, that type of language. I think sometimes fat liberation can seem to radical. Body positivity is softer uh more trendy. The creation of the website the body positive happened in 1996 and the goal of body positivity there was to help people develop healthy relationships of their bodies um and challenge beauty standards um support people overcoming eating disorders. So it's a lot about body image and mental health.

More framing individual versus systemic stuff but still systemic stuff because it wanted to dismantle that. In the early 2000s we had health at every size and that is saying hey let's let's make sure that people, no matter their size, can access health care. Let's look at different ways that we can monitor someone's health outside of their body size because it's not something that we can change. And then we had in the late in the 2010s we had the commercialization of body positivity and the movement expanded. When brands adopted this messaging um why did they adopt it? To sell more shit so you know Dove had that whole uh campaign you know real beauty campaign. It kind of shifted the the narrative from an activism or political or civil rights movement, which is what fat liberation is, into this fluffy version of focusing on an individual and their looks and saying you're beautiful, everyone's beautiful. This aesthetic focus and personal empowerment um so which is like a watered-down version of fat liberation but um you know there were still those foundations when people some people were talking about body positivity but not a lot. Jess Baker, I thought it was only a couple of years ago but it was in 2017 wrote a blog. Lisa Frank Bopo is what I now call the branch of body positivity that one isn't intersectional, two focuses on white and often thin bodies, and three refuses to dig into the deep and critical political issues around comprehensive body liberation and instead relies on topical positive messages to keep us feeling cheerful and most important, comfortable. So saying that body positivity is a very white straight size movement. So for those who don't know Lisa Frank, Lisa Frank is a designer? Question mark but like really bright and kind of like bright child colors and stuff. I think it might be a child brand. I'm not doing a good job of explaining Lisa Frank but anyway fluffy right versus the grassroots of of activism and when we're losing that activism we then center bodies who are the least marginalized hence why body positivity is a lot about white straight size people saying "if I can love myself at this huge size" and they're a straight size "you can too" which is you know not inherently bad but it's not it's not the thing that's going to fix the world right. Talking about all that to give that kind of framework of still you know body positivity is not the movement that I claim and that many fat liberationists claim but it's also a movement that kind of gets people's foot in the door because the phrase fat liberation is too scary for a lot of people because you know if they're still struggling with anti-fat bias and hell no if someone said "hey do you want to get into fat liberation Vinnie?" you know 20 years ago I would have been like "fuck no" or if someone said "do you want to learn more about body positivity?" I would have been like "hmm tell me more" so you know it's helpful in some ways that body positivity is a thing but also just recognize that sometimes hard to define and not as political as fat liberation. We'll go through this video and then I'll point out the things that that you know are misconceptions or things that get wrong or things that you know messages that are that kind of are confusing to me and please don't go to this creators page and you know say anything, I just want you to be aware so that if someone comes to you or if your brain comes to you and says you should not be doing, you should not be working on unlearning anti-fat bias because if you do it means that you are going to die within five seconds or any other misconceptions in this video then you can be like "oh wow actually that's a misconception" so you're armed with that that information to help your brain and help others brains if that's something that you're interested in so let's have a look. Love yourself at any size. So first off we have a common misconception love yourself at any size this is a play on health at every size and health at every size is often the misconception about it is that it's HAAS - health at any size but it's health at every size meaning that fat people should be able to access health care no matter their size and not that fat people are healthy at every size or at any size so that phrasing there leads me to think that she's pulling from health at any size and misconstruing that and also she preached this quote "simple message" and she goes on to say she's wrong so should you hate yourself at a certain size?

What is the weight limit for self-love or loving yourself at any size? who is thin enough to be worthy of loving themselves? so simple message but now she's going against it let's continue I risked it all I don't care how trendy or cute or fun it seems to be fat you got to really think about your healthlove yourself at any size she says I don't care how trendy or cute or fun it seems to be fat when were we told that it was trendy cute or fun to be fat because I never got that message have you? and also she says it's not trendy if you have come but you have to be fun to be fat you have to think about your health why does being fat mean that you're not thinking about your health don't forget that your heart has to beat babes I'm going to tell you how I got here so she said love yourself at any size but don't forget your heart has to beat babes why does loving yourself equal that your heart is going to stop beating like I don't understand it she said she preached a simple message love yourself at any siz why does loving yourself at any size equal heart stop beating it doesn't make sense to me and the reason is because she's equating body acceptance with fatness with ill health so one equals the other fatness equals a heart that stops beating from championing body positivity to renouncing it but I'm from the Bronx.

We're having a curvy body and a fat ass is what you want

when you're latina you get called gordita and it's a term of endearment

fluffy like every class I used to say I called myself fat around my mom

so seeing as she goes on to renounce body positivity she seems to be

denigrating the latin a community kind of framing it that this is

backwards thinking like I came from a place where

it was okay to be in a curvy body and that makes me feel really sad that

that's kind of where she's coming from and then

we have this miho you're not fat you're fluffy

and the framing of that is because fatness is seen as bad

oh and she was like miho you're not fat you're fluffy

it wasn't until college that I learned in the rest of the country

thinness is the beauty standard even worse fat people are seen as lazy and

dumb I eventually learned that this discrimination has

a name fat phobia I never planned on being a body positivity

and so she says uh she went to college and she

learned that fat people are treated badly I'm

surprised that she never came across that before she

went to to college so she recognizes how anti-fatness

is bad but then she calls it fat phobia which which is a more outdated

term uh in the fat liberation community we

don't generally use the word fat phobia because the

disability community has asked us to stop using the word phobia to

describe bigotry which leads me to believe

that she was never in the fat lib community

just a little clue there doesn't mean that she wasn't but

they're kind of like hearing that word made me go huh cancer

I wanted to be an actress I wanted to be a star that's when I started to get more

attention from other plus-size women about how empowered

they felt watching my content and that just made me feel like

she mentions here that she got uh more attention from others

because they felt empowered watching she doesn't mention anything about the

the trolls that I bet she uh she got she made people feel good she made it

look like she was successful

with no hardships right it kind of is framing

this period in her life as it's one big party

but as we know being fat on the internet is really fucking hard

feels like omitting the fact that there were people who were

saying probably awful things about her is painting accepting your fat body as

only kind of running through the fields and you know

daisies and rainbows and stuff and um I think if she had also explained that

it was really difficult then it would give more nuance but that's admitted

I have a collaboration with a partner with GS Lovington for 21 for sponsoring this video I

was on magazine covers and making headlines it was the late 2010s

seeing a community that welcomes you with open arms and tells you there's no

pressure to look this way to be this certain weight

I mean does that not sound like paradise? does that not sound like paradise?

mm yeah maybe because paradise isn't real so she talks about the rise in

uh body positivity in the 2010s onwards and frames it as

we've reached the goal and fixed the issue because Tess Holiday was on the

cover of Cosmopolitan and a size 12 model

walked the runway if you are around and looking interested in

you know this uh this world at that time you

you know that the backlash was huge there you know there might have been this

forward momentum fueled by capitalism but um the 2010s was horribly

anti-fat it was not a paradise it was very surface level and you can

easily frame it as a paradise if it's only positive but it was

100% it was not. It was not and I have seen that shift like from

me doing this work for 10 plus years that even five years ago

the way that the response to my work was way different than it is today

still not gray but 2010s was not this paradise right?

then over time I got heavier and heavier I've always been an

adventurous person so after I over time I got heavier and

heavier it kind of feels like she's framing body positivity as causing

weight gain which you know I don't know but there was a lot I couldn't do

anymore fitting into the seats on roller coasters

planes I couldn't wear heels my dresses wouldn't zip up

and that wasn't all when you're bigger you might not be able to wipe as well as

a thinner person can't reach because there's

no space so with her saying that she's been an

adventurous person but now she can't fit on the seats in

roller coasters or planes uh couldn't wear heels couldn't zip up the dress

she's blaming structural issues on her body she's displaying ableism um

it sounds like she has shame about needing accommodations

like for example to use the toilet that makes sense right

it's hard to become disabled especially if you perceive

that you've caused it yourself and I feel like she's been really unkind to

herself here and I can feel that that shame of when

she's you know introducing the clip of you

might not be able to wipe as well a lot of self blame there that you know

it makes me feel sad okay so I'm gonna uh skip over her

saying how much she's uh she weighed but they do a side

side-by-side photos of her in 2018 and now I can't even tell a massive

difference you know I'm sure others you know I'm

viewing it from a fat positive frame I'm sure others probably can

because there's a reason why they're showing them but um

just having those side-by-side images it's just um

it's fucked up right when Gabriella looks back

on this in the future it's probably gonna make her feel like

shit if it doesn't already because um you know at the end of the video it's

not like she says oh you know I left and now I'm really thin or anything

they're comparing her 2018 body to her body today as if to say like oh

you know there's the the before now look at her

and it's given self-flagellation for other people's entertainment um

so at the end that they show her the at the end of the video they show her doing

workouts you know framing her as a good fatty

but she's I think she still has the same body size

again it sounds like she's just being really unkind to herself

yeah and it makes me think about what I said about myself when I would have lost

weight doing weightwatchers the way that I

would talk about my former body being like

oh I used to like eat food oh how gross was I

and that was really came from a place of shame and blame

and was anti-fatness it was my anti-fatness right

I started to wonder if loving myself at any size

had become an excuse to ignore how big I was getting

she said I started to wonder if loving myself at any size

had become an excuse for how big I was getting

if you were really loving yourself um then

in this moment if you were gaining weight you would be offering yourself

compassion you wouldn't be saying that you're

you're you need an excuse for your body and again yeah it's just

it's a lot of a lot of shame I felt like I saw myself being

brainwashed essentially I find this really interesting that she uses the

phrase brainwashed notice how it's similar to say for

example a queer kid comes out to their conservative parents and those

parents will claim oh they've been brainwashed by the internet or

that trans people are brainwashing the youth it's a conservative speaking point

that blames marginalized people for sharing

information that refutes bigotry or celebrates the joy of their identity

I'm being brainwashed by this marginalized community

so yeah conservative speaking point meanwhile the language around body

positivity began sounding more extreme online there are a few words that I

don't know it's really funny but the you know

the language around is about body positive is extreme

online and they're kind of statements that are

are lacking nuance um Tess Holliday is saying that she doesn't use the word

healthy which when you think about it with nuance um

healthy because healthy the word healthy has been used as a barometer of

worth and healthy has been conflated with

body size um with other systems of oppression and so

you can't be healthy unless you're not disabled that you're

you're white you're thin you're rich etc right

so healthy is coded language also we frame

foods as healthy and unhealthy when that can be triggering for many people

with a history of disordered eating or eating disorders

because all foods fit and some foods might be more nutrients

dense or less nutrient nutrient dense and

that's okay um but saying that all of this category of

food is healthy and all of this is unhealthy

moralizes food and means that we're stigmatizing people who

who eat food that we have deemed unhealthy

and we're moralizing people who are unhealthy for whatever reason if they're

disabled or whatever and health is not a moral barometer right

of your worthiness so that's a long there's a nuance for that

but you just hear there are a few words i don't allow

healthy is one of them and so without that context someone

with who doesn't know about this stuff will be like wow well that sounds a bit

strange oh you know this is the the design of

this because if they use that nuance then

um these arguments would begin to break down and

it would you know make it sound less extreme and this

this is language that the uh you know the community sharing language

preferences and essentially asking for space where

uh space for their identities and when that happens

uh people will react you know when they say hey by the way don't use the o words

or hey by the way you know healthy has these connotations

people are going to react and say uh tell fat people to

you know sit down shut up that's that's silly you should be ashamed you need to

be compliant and that is why supremacy culture

and patriarchy right so when a marginalized community says hey this is

a language that that we find useful in this context it's been framed as

extreme and think of any other marginalized community who've said hey

maybe this word is not so helpful and then being labeled

extreme is it is it well healthy is one this comes up a lot when i talk about

how the word obese is a slur i don't want to step on the scale of the doctors

i say oh i don't want to be waved saying oh i don't want to be waited at the

doctors extreme oh my gosh really it was just

just uh you know protecting your mental health i've even seen celebrities being

attacked for losing weight so uh i've seen celebrities being attacked

for losing weight um and in this section we've we've been shown tabloid new shows

doing the criticizing i'm sure there are people online too

doing criticizing when people are losing weight absolutely and i think a lot of

that is disappointment from fans of celebrities who

have been a part of a fat community um champion size diversity um who have

then seemingly turned their backs on this

value that they apparently held or people perceived them to hold

so um i find it interesting that they they're showing kind of new stories of

this criticism and i wonder if it's because there wasn't

good evidence of people within the fat liberation community

doing that not saying that there wasn't but i can't really think

of like fat liberation influencers who are doing kind of take down posts on

abc for losing weight because losing weight like you do what you do what you

want with your body you know it's your body you can do what you

want i think maybe the the um rhetoric around it is how

people are disappointed that um someone they thought was was

liberatory is not as liberatory as they once

believed i always say that i don't know that a fat person is fat

positive unless they say out of their mouths i believe in fat

liberation i think that fat people should have

the same rights access and opportunities as anyone else in any other

body size but they if they don't say that if they say i'm body positive or if

they just say love your body babes i'm not going to take it that they are

a part of the fat liberation community because they're not saying that they are

but a lot of people haven't um don't know that and take

you know those words of body positivity as

i've got your back i don't think that i would be better if i lost weight i think

that i'm worthy and i can at this size and i think i can

work towards health if i want to at various sizes and you know i think

people get disappointed like they've been hoodwinked but have

these people said that they're fat liberation people

criticism after revealing she's taking a prescription medication

for weight loss slim down star is facing criticism after her noticeable

weight loss it wasn't always like this years before i had often talked about

weight loss without getting hate so she says i've often talked about all

that weight loss without getting hate so she wasn't a body positive influencer

then she was a lifestyle influencer who

championed weight loss who happened to be fat so this is a

prime example right so gabriela is a fat person and so we

could look at her and say oh she's a fat liberationist but she's not

she happens to be a content creator lifestyle content

and champions weight loss um and this video that she's showing how in

she says in the video i oh i'm depressed and doing what i eat in a day videos to

lose weight and etc that was from 2017 right from 2017 to

now almost 10 years people have become a lot more educated

around what what content might be more or less

helpful for their mental health and maybe in 2017 she had done that weight

loss content and then she hadn't done it for 10 years and so then her followers

were like oh well gabriela is a fat liberationist not

realizing so anyway she at 2017 she didn't get any pushback

apparently is what she's saying but as the body positivity community

became more radical i was scared to say the wrong thing

so i was scared to say the wrong thing so i stayed silent after the body

positivity movement community became more radical

this comes off as creepy men who are like we can't say anything

nowadays without people getting offended and you

know what they want to say is offensive stuff you know they they just they

want to be a bigger and not have anyone you know say anything or have people go

yes so you know 2017 gabriela can say i want to

lose weight and blah blah blah um and people are getting more clued in

in regards to the harms of anti-fatness and so now people are saying hey maybe

this is not so great but we'll see what people were saying so

she says that she stayed silent did she stay silent

my friend died i really believed that she

was going to make it out of it but in late 2022

she died at 37 reportedly from heart complications she's conflating

dying from heart complication complications as dying from fatness

um we don't have information about what caused jamey's death but if you're in

the mindset of fat people die then they if fat people die they die

because they're fat then this would be really alarming right

i kind of want her to feel like i was trying to tell her what to do and i kind

of wish i would have spoke up maybe more um and just let her know that i i cared

and she wasn't the only one oh so uh gabriela's saying she wished that she

spoke up more i don't think fat people need any more

people to pile on and tell them that they're fat right

you know her friend had this whole tv program about

being fat and guaranteed that she's heard

many times that um she should not be fat so

how would have it have helped if gabriela said hey did you know that

you're fat and that you should be thin so how would that have fixed um the

issues with her heart a week later another body positivity influencer

posted this video i ruined my life with food binge eating

and lack of self-care i'm hoping that it's

she died she was 28 i don't know for sure if jamey and brittany died because

of their size but hearing their own regrets so she

talks about another person online not a friend just some uh someone online

who had type 2 diabetes and uh and died and says i don't know for sure

if jamey and britney died because of their size we don't know brittany the

second person we have no cause of death so i looked it up

and i was like we haven't do we have something somewhere

so no cause of death is released but we're saying but she's saying i don't

know for sure if britney died because of her size we don't know at all and we

don't know um if jamey did either and it's the same

shit for every fat person that dies they died from fatness

you know it was one thing to sacrifice my adventurous lifestyle

it was another to put my life at risk and so

i just pressed so she says uh it was one thing to sacrifice my adventurous lifestyle

it was another thing to put my life at risk so you you're saying you don't know

why they died but apparently accepting your fat body

means that you're putting your life at risk

it's it's just not adding up record and everything i said just came out i'm gonna

say something controversial and i don't care

i actually feel kind of guilty for being a part of this movement health is real

organs failing is real diabetes heart disease all that

is real okay it's not fat phobic to care about your health

so i have no idea where where she's getting this information from right so

she said i'm just gonna say something i'm gonna come out with something

controversial diabetes heart disease heart disease all

that shit is real okay yeah yeah yeah who's saying that they're

not what so that's like that conflating of

body positive so what i'm hearing is that body positive

people deny that humans have diseases

so or deny that health is a concept so she says health is real organ failing

is real um yeah i've never seen anyone

remotely you know associated with body positivity or fat liberation saying

organ failure that's made up that's tooth fairy stuff

don't know what you're talking about it's just so strange that

what i'm gonna say something real controversial

sometimes it rains and sometimes there's clouds in the sky and sometimes it's

sunshiny yeah i know right it was like well yeah

we know how's that controversial i don't understand

it's controversial because in her mind she's framing

or she's misunderstood or something i don't know what has gone on

or misconstrued or or something something i don't know where she got

this from that this is what health at every size or

intuitive eating or body positivity or fat liberation is about

love to see like the sources of that information or if there's something

that's gone on in her mind where there's just like a

little bit of crossed wires or something

anyway i was learning those lessons now myself

and the backlash was massive literally been seething with a blowing my mind how

fat-phobic you've become you should know better and do better the body

positivity community branded me a pariah and so i left

did they brand you a pariah so they uh show on the screen all of the

horrible comments that she got all of the pariah branding comments

the comments are so mild like oh sounds like she's got internalized fat

phobia that you know and then one comment said

she hates herself and wants others to hate themselves too

that was the spiciest that's the spiciest one i saw but most of them are

saying this looks like internalized anti-fat bias

and i find that really interesting because you could

a fat person's social media you can find nasty comments right

but they're using these comments of like you sounds like you've got

internalized anti-fat bias as they branded me a pariah it doesn't

line up and so she says branded me pariah the

response was huge so i looked at what happened to her social medias at that

time the amount of followers right so she has 450 000 followers

no not 450 405 let's just say 400 somewhere between 400 and 450 on the

top of my head anyway so i looked at her 410 410 um so

i looked at her social media following um you can look on something like social

blade or whatever to see over time the social media

following so she lost 0.6 percent of her followers

in august 2025 and so i'm assuming in august 2025 is when she put this video

out so that's 2,700 people of at the time she had 410,000

so the equivalent so 2,700 people might sound like a lot

but say if you had a thousand followers that would mean losing six followers

that is not a lot that is not a quote counseling or or some big reaction

losing so i have 42 to 43 or something thousand followers the reason why

i don't really know is because it changes so

much on a day like you could lose 100 followers one day and then gain 100 and

then you know so it just fluctuates just

naturally and so a 0.6 reduction in her

followers and um long term in um she's

basically been at the same number of followers um

she got a big gain in 2022 i think she did a collaboration with a clothing

company and since then it's been really steady

you know just a line across no big dips nothing

exciting happening going up or down in either way

so i'm not sure where this i think maybe she perceived it as a

big reaction but the the reality is that she didn't

really lose she lost 0.6 percent of her followers on instagram so

so she said and so i left because um i was branded pariah

and but i don't know what that means like what does that mean she

left because she wasn't a body positive influencer in the first place and also

her bio currently says the first thing on her bio says self-love advocate so

i don't understand she left but she didn't

maybe because she's using the word self-love advocate that feels

that's leaving i don't i don't understand and now we have

footage of good fatty gabriella working out

not everyone can control their weight and no one should be mistreated for it

but what's not fat phobic is this being fat does increase your risk

of health problems okay so not everyone can lose weight and no one should be

mistreated for it but she's involved in a piece that is mistreating

fat people that will lead to more mistreatment of fat people

and she says not everyone can control their weight but then she says

basically fat people are unhealthy so what are we going to do about it you

know what so what's the point you know what's the solution that that is being

proposed here be fat but be ashamed

because as she says not everyone can lose weight and what we know is that it's

um the vast majority of people are unable to manipulate their body size

and only a few percent of people can it sounds like she's saying

be fat but be ashamed about it spend your life trying not to be fat

in the hopes that you are one of the ones that can become thin

you know i don't know what the i don't know what the solution is

the solution is shame right is what i'm hearing am i hearing it wrong

people are about six times more likely to develop type two diabetes

we have a 28% greater risk of heart disease we have higher risk

for 13 types of cancer up to seven times the risk for endometrial up to five

times the risk for esophageal colon rectal pancreatic kidney higher risk of

strokes we can still be body positive while

acknowledging these risks we can still love ourselves even if we

want to lose weight that's what real body positivity should

stay okay so we have all of these um you know studies show xyz where are

your sources let's see the links to the studies

because what we know is that correlation does not equal causation

i i read somewhere on the internet that someone was like i hear people say

correlation doesn't equal causation all the time and i have no clue what that

means so just just in case um that's that's you know you're like

vinnie you say it all the time but i don't know what if i can talk about for

example on hot days we know that people will go to the

beach and we also know that people might eat more

ice cream because the ice cream van comes around

um and we also know that maybe there are more shark attacks because um

people are on in the sea more they're at the beach

right so if we take the data there are more ice cream sales

on sunny days and they're and the other data

more people are attacked by sharks there's a correlation

so more ice cream more shark attacks that's a correlation can we say that

ice cream sales causes shark attacks right the causation

so correlation so we've got a correlation but we don't have a

causation we can't say that ice cream sales causes

shark attacks so we have to get a little bit curious

and say huh let's look at everything else that could be going on

and let's see oh could it be that another connection is sunshine

is it sunshine that's causing shark attacks

oh what happens if there's sunshine maybe people are on the beach oh could it

be that people are in the sea more right and so a lot of problem with um

statistics like this is that uh most research linking weight and disease

is uh is not doing that work to say but why so the fat people are at higher

risk for abc but we do not know that it is adipose

tissue fat tissue that causes causes that that increased risk we

also know that fat people have better outcomes in

lots of different areas uh stay tuned for podcast number

205 where i'm doing the benefits of being fat

where i list a lot of those positive outcomes of being fat and so

there are many other reasons why fat people could have worse health outcomes

in certain respects and better in other respects

and a lot of the worse out how health outcomes

we know uh come from uh lack of uh good health care

experiencing anti-fat bias that stigma and yo-yo dieting

so they all independently increase disease risk so it's kind of you're not

looking at the nuance this this video is very flat right there's not a lot a lot

of nuance someone on the internet on the internet who

is fat died therefore fat people die because they are so unhealthy

therefore if i don't hate my body i will die right so just very

flattened and doesn't do a lot of exploring or um

expanding on on ideas because that's you know it's nice to have like a

binary kind of ab equal c this equals your bad this equals your

good it feels good to be able to categorize the world like

that we can still be body positive while acknowledging these risks

they're not independent of each other right

being body positive whatever that means to to you or to

whoever does not mean saying fat people are always the most healthy

people on the planet and never die we never experience any ill health ever

right that's kind of the impression that i'm getting is that

body positivity to gabriela means that you deny science or that you're

really unintelligent or you're living in some fairy land or something like that

see they're just they're not independent

of each other so we can be positive while still

acknowledging these risks yeah yeah yeah and say let's get curious

about these risks where's it coming from what's happening

what factors are at play let's investigate this let's not

flatten the the topic we can still love ourselves even if we

want to lose weight that's what real body positivity should

stand for okay so we can still love ourselves even if we want to lose weight

that's what body positivity should stand for so

she refrains the movement to fit her personal perspective this is a a common

move redefining a movement to make it

seem more quote reasonable while distancing it from

its political roots so we can still love ourselves even if we

want to lose weight that's what body positivity should stand for

well that's not what it is body positivity

aka fat liberation was never about requiring weight loss or centering

weight change it was about dignity and equality of fat people anyone

regardless of their size and it creates a straw man of body

positivity so a straw man uh it's a type of argument right

um where uh where someone will misrepresent or exaggerate uh an issue

or or someone's argument to make it easier to

attack so for example it's easier to say body positivity says denies that

fat people ever get get unhealthy so that's a straw man argument

body positivity denies that fat people can ever get unhealthy

that's really easy to say that's fucked up

but hell these body positivity people are absolutely unreasonable

but that's not what body positivity is so her statement body positivity should

stand for loving ourselves even if we want to lose weight implies

that body positivity says you must stay the same weight but body

positivity is looking at pressure to change weight and systemic

issues not individual choices so it just it's

just it's like saying the national hockey league they should stand for

volleyball rights uh what this is you know it's a hockey league why

should they be you know interested in volleyball they're

separate concepts so why should body positivity

say love yourself even if you want to lose weight sure like do that

right but that's not what body positivity is

or what it should stand for stands for the equal rights of people in all bodies

equal access so you don't you don't want equal rights and access and opportunities

for people all sizes you want to say actually we need to change body

positivity to make it say love yourself if you want to even if

you want to lose weight why it's a different thing

positivity should stand for loving yourself at any size

and having the freedom to change it so loving yourself at any size and having

the freedom to change it she does have the freedom what she

wants because she's got the freedom right it's not that she's looking for

freedom she's looking for freedom from conversations

where people might criticize what she's doing what she wants is praise

of her decision not nuanced conversations

or hearing that disappointment because people perceive her

as bait and switching now i don't know if she did bait and switch

you know i don't know if she was from what i can see

she there's no evidence that i can see that she ever was

a fat liberationist or body positive influencer or whatever that means right

so yeah like she wants freedom to not experience

consequences of her actions i guess she wants freedom

to be able to be supported no matter what um and then you know loving yourself at

any size and having the freedom to change it um

she's framing weight as health you know it sounds neutral but it

just reinforces this you know you know anti-fat bias dominant cultural

narrative so even if like you know that statement

sounds balanced it centers weight loss as a reasonable

direction right so because weight loss in that statement equals improvement

thinness equals health fatness is a problem to solve

the love yourself at any size but have the freedom to change it

because we believe that you should change your body

that body positive people or fat liberation people are

literally i don't know holding diets behind a glass

screen or something and she's like give me give me the chance to lose weight

please and body positive people are like no get back you need to stay fat forever

there's so much freedom that she has to change her body there's an abundance

of it and there's a tiny little you know group of people who are like

maybe framing yourself as fat positive and then

you know making a video saying you know all you fat people are

you know denying the fact that diabetes exists and you need to think about

your body and your health and you need to think about your your heart stopping

stopping beating babes and uh you know maybe them saying hey that's

maybe not so great and the big counseling that she got was people

saying it sounds like you've got internalized fatphobia

and 0.6 percent of her following going you know

okay so let's pause here uh because this is turning into a

really long video gonna be two parts now um thanks for hanging out with me today

links for i don't know if i've told you any links yet

um but links for things in the show notes

all right we'll see you next episode thank you for hanging out with me

um remember you are worthy you always were you always will be stay fierce fatty

goodbye.