In defense of being unapologetically fat

I weigh more than 250 pounds, and I'm more than okay with it

Being healthy and fat are not mutually exclusive.
(Image credit: Ikon Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

Just as I was about to power down my computer, the message zipped into my inbox: "You don't have to be obese, Laura. It's really not even hard. It just takes commitment." As a writer who has published very explicitly about my lifelong struggle to accept, and embrace, my 250+ pound body, I get these kinds of emails regularly. The unseen authors, possessed of a singular fervor, insist that I can't be healthy if I'm fat.

At one point, my instinct was to deliver a thunderous clapback explaining that, according to actual research, size isn't an indicator of health; to righteously school them with the doctrine of Health at Every Size, or rub their noses in the truth that I have walked 5ks as a fatty. However, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this line of defense. In fact, I'm tired of proving my dignity and self-worth by offering my blood pressure on a silver platter. Yes, as I've gotten older, recovered from a catastrophic injury, subsisted on the full-time freelancer's diet of frozen foods because of time and budget crunches, my physical health has declined. But I realize now that my body shouldn't need defending on any grounds.

Our cultural attitudes toward fitness have moved beyond the Jazzercized hard-body as the ultimate prize in-and-of-itself; that hard-body is now the conduit to a clean-eating purity of spirit. The ad copy for Shakeology, a protein shake, sums up this outlook succinctly: "You'll not only be healthier, you'll feel healthier — and happier — who doesn't want that?"

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

As it turns out, me.

Or at least, I don't want my BMI to be the calculus of my personal virtue. Of course, it's difficult, given that the medical establishment is notorious for making weight-loss the total cure-all (I once had a doctor lecture me about bariatric surgery during a consult for a sinus infection). As activist Virgie Tovar puts it, "There is incredible cultural impetus to be 'healthy' and 'health' is framed … as a personal/individual responsibility."

Movements like Health at Every Size and the myriad of "fit fatties" groups across social media offer a language of resistance against this kind of size-based stigma by arguing that big guys and gals can still have perfect blood pressure. Still, this rhetoric around "fit and fat" privileges health and wellness as a barometer of an individual's worth, and it celebrates what activists like Stacy Bias call "the good fatty": "They're fat but they engage in none of the typical behaviors assigned to fat people," Bias writes. "They mostly only eat healthy foods. They are fitness fanatics … Their bodies are strong and able … the poster fatties for Health at Every Size because they hold up under scrutiny."

Years ago, I would have been one of those "good fatties" who held up under scrutiny. I'd spent my teens and early 20s in a cyclone of binging and purging; when I finally emerged, storm-battered but grateful to be alive, I vowed that I would accept my fat body. Though I tossed out the scale, I found myself unconsciously, and very publicly, performing certain rituals of fitness — neurotically checking my Fitbit to make sure every walk was a 5k; stocking my fridge with organic vegetables (though I never did much like baby carrots); and using my blood pressure as a talisman against the haters stampeding into my inbox. I felt the need to justify my fatness, my existence, to the rest of the world.

Then, one terrible February morning, I slipped on a patch of ice, breaking one ankle, and spraining my other one (a category three, or granddaddy of sprains). For two months, I was completely bed-bound. The rest of that year was a thick slog of physical therapy and weaning off my cane; walking even the shortest distances brutally winded me. I was the good fatty no more — but during that time spent on the sofa, eating frozen and fast food, I became someone different, someone who was more in touch with herself: Once I lost the standard trappings of health, my focus shifted from my body to my work, and in joyful rush of productivity, I finished the first draft of a novel. My evening walks got shorter, and not just because of the physical pain — after working my 9-to-5, I'd come home eager to revise a scene or pitch out essays; my mind became the part of me that craved exercise. Dinner became whatever I could stick in the microwave — and, given that I was still paying doctor's bills, whatever I could stick in the microwave had to be cheap.

As my byline expanded, so did my waistline. Remarkably enough, I didn't care. Not even when, at a community picnic, one of my neighbors ruefully remarked, "Honey, I used to see you walking all the time." She didn't see me alone in my apartment, writing until dawn, before heading off to an office, so I could finish that chapter, fulfill that assignment. She didn't see me come to the quiet conclusion that I could make a go of full-time freelancing (at least for a while). For Ragen Chastain, a fat activist, athlete, and health coach, one of the more troublesome parts of the good fatty dynamic is the kind of moral prerogative it can represent: "Participating in fitness/athletics is no more or less virtuous than knitting a tea cozy. Running a marathon is no better or worse than watching a Netflix marathon." Being the good fatty, the woman who makes a conspicuous consumption of baby carrots when she really wants Nutella, is like putting on the same straightjacket I wore when I was breaking myself in fruitless pursuit of some immaculate thinness that was going to make me happier, healthier, more whole.

Our culture's fixation on a very particular type of health and wellness — the metrics of which can only be gauged by BMI or blood pressure or the number of steps and miles — isn't just reductive, it excludes broad swathes of people, particularly disabled and low-income people from the moral worthiness that health supposedly confers. A recent New York Times piece laments the volume of sugary drinks and sodas purchased by food stamp program participants, but this hand-wringing never touches on the hard grind of poverty, where those sugary drinks are a pick-me-up between long shifts, or Heaven forbid, simply a sip of something that tastes good. The all-abiding need to be healthy overrides personal choice.

Of course, there are people of all sizes who genuinely want to run marathons; who care about their blood glucose; and who can afford a fridge full of organic food, and like to cook. And that is perfectly okay — just as it is perfectly okay for my idea of a great night to be making my literary agent's novel edits while eating thick spoonfuls of Nutella for dinner. And not everyone who can't — or doesn't want to — embrace society's very specific definitions of health is necessarily a "bad fatty" like I am. That personal virtue doesn't reside in BMI or blood pressure. Indeed, that takes commitment.

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Laura Bogart

Laura Bogart is a featured writer for Salon and a regular contributor to DAME magazine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, CityLab, The Guardian, SPIN, Complex, IndieWire, GOOD, and Refinery29, among other publications. Her first novel, Don't You Know That I Love You?, is forthcoming from Dzanc.