Tag: body positive

Being Fat Means… What, Exactly?

This post is inspired by Virgie Tovar’s No I Won’t Cut You A Smaller Slice of Cake.

People look for rational ways to justify their prejudice toward being fat and certain forms of consumption, noting how being too fat and eating too many processed foods can negatively affect your physical health and your cognition (which suggests a rationale for the belief that fat people have poor moral character). But there’s ample evidence that fat affects everyone differently depending on where they store it and how much they have. Many of the “negative” psychological traits associated with eating a Western diet are due to the emotional and psychosocial consequences of fat discrimination, which takes the form of ridicule, food policing, social exclusion, lack of physical accommodation, and poor media representation. To a great extent, fat prejudice is arbitrary. Signals of body fat and signals of eating habits are symbols; they are a form of social compliance. Keeping to a specific window of body fat and eating certain foods are ways to indicate you’re part of the group. The opposite may as well be the norm – and in fact, in some cultures it is. Not being fat or not eating large quantities of food… these things can make you look untrustworthy, unreliable, and ungrateful. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that fat prejudice is often code for racism and sexism. From what I’ve read, bodies that are non-White or non-male may be more comfortable with fatter bodies and larger portion sizes, and so stigmatizing those bodies and behaviors is a subversive way to discriminate against these groups.

The Consequences of Negative Fat Representation

When I was doing research on the presence of fat cartoon characters on television, I came upon a few news articles that discussed a 2015 study out of the University of Colorado. The articles warn about the study’s findings that kids who see cartoon characters with a “rounder” shape are more likely to make unhealthy food choices afterward, unless they are first reminded about healthy behaviors. I immediately became worried about an implication that fat characters had ought to NOT be visible on TV, so as to not prime kids into eating poorly. I think it is very important to have better fat representation in the media, especially for kids. The researchers wrote that there is already evidence that children form negative stereotypes about fat people by the age of 3, and by 8 years old they think fat people are “lazy” and “less healthy”. 

I think it’s not completely clear that seeing fat stereotypes “cause” kids to eat more or eat unhealthily, or if it’s really that seeing fat characters LETS them NOT police their own eating. From what I’ve read in the study itself there is no mention of this possibility, but I think it’s important. Because in a way I think that’s not a bad thing, and if anything, what might contribute to a “letting loose” mentality is the constant admonishment for eating “bad” foods that kids are exposed to. Researchers have found that part of the reason diets don’t work for most people is that denying yourself foods you think are bad for you makes you crave them even more. So I think we should hold off on blaming depictions of fat characters indulging themselves.

I hope that people don’t refrain from portraying positive and diverse fat characters in the media because A) the only reason kids and adults hold negative stereotypes about fat people is because the media historically shows fat people as overindulgent, lazy, fearful, etc. and B) you’re NOT going to get kids to make more healthy food choices by erasing fat people from the media; they’ll just think only thin people eat healthy and that there’s no place for fat people who eat healthy, that both these things can’t be true simultaneously.