Supports our actual bodies

Ragen Chastain, in her blog Dances With Fat, discusses the cavalier attitude of the health care industry has towards fat people.

The underlying belief of diet culture is that it’s better to be miserable, or even dead than to be fat.

She mentions an example. A fat person and a thin person go to a doctor with identical high levels of blood sugar. The fat person is referred to harmful bariatric surgery. The thin person is given medication.

I’m writing about this because I think it’s important to realize that when we are advocating for our health and healthcare, we are often advocating against a system that thinks that it’s worth killing us, or ruining our lives, to make us thin – no matter what we think.

Fat people have the right to exist, in fat bodies, and it doesn’t matter why we’re fat, what the “consequences” of being fat might be, or if we could (or want to) become thin. Fat people have the right to healthcare that supports our actual bodies, rather than insisting that we risk our lives to be thin before we are treated as human beings, worthy of appropriate, evidence-based healthcare

Nobody knows what fat people’s health outcomes would look like if we lived in a society that celebrated the diversity of body sizes, gave us the opportunity to love our bodies and see them as worthy of care, and the access to take good care of them. I’d like to find out.