So this week we learned that saying pregnant women is baddy-bad-bad-bad. Instead, to be “inclusive,” we must call them birthing people. And, now we can’t call fat people “fat people.” Instead, they are larger-bodied people.
Yeah. Really.
Boy. Those “Your Mother’s So Fat” jokes just got more complicated, didn’t they?
“Your birthing person’s so larger-bodied, she wore a yellow raincoat and people yelled ‘Taxi!’”
“Your birthing person’s so larger-bodied, she’s got more Chins than an AAPI phone book!”
The article headline from the LA Times: “Fat shaming, BMI and alienation: COVID-19 brought new stigma to large-sized people.”
Larger-bodied, large-sized.
For the life of me, I don’t know how saying Larger-bodied or Large-sized is any less “stigmatizing” than saying Fat or Obese. But that’s me.
The upshot of the story is this: Doctors tell fat patients to lose weight.
The horror!!!
The Wuhan Pandemic did its most damage among those who are obese. That’s just a fact.
But heaven forbid doctors tell obese patients to drop the weight.
Instead, doctors must ignore their obligations and instead practice “fat acceptance.” And heaven forbid they treat obesity like the health crisis it is.
“Weight stigma by healthcare providers has been documented for decades,” says the LA Times article.
Yes, doctors telling fat people, sorry, larger-bodied people, to lose weight in order to decrease the likelihood that they develop the myriad of medical problems that come with obesity is now considered “weight stigma.”
Would we call it “cig stigma” to tell a smoker to quit smoking?
Is it “alcohol stigma” to tell a boozehound with an enlarged liver to cut back on the booze?
When Lupus made my previous physically active lifestyle impossible, I put on weight. Too much weight if you want to know the truth.
Both my GP and my rheumatologist were brutally honest with me: change my eating habits, find a source of exercise my Lupus could tolerate and lose the freaking weight. The added pounds were only going to make matters worse for me. And if I wanted to minimize the arthritis symptoms caused by Lupus, the best way is to take the added pressure off my joints by dropping the fat.
Harsh words. But it needed to be said. And I’m grateful they said it.
My doctors aren’t there to salve my tender feelings. They’re there to treat my disease. Their job is to help me find ways to minimize the damage Lupus does to my body.
It would be malpractice for a doctor to pretend obesity is perfectly fine.
And calling them larger-bodied people doesn’t make them any healthier.
So why on earth is there a push to normalize obesity?
Well, stigmatizing larger-bodied people is, hang on to your hats folks, racist.
Yup. Of course it is.
“I started to think almost immediately about what it would look like for me as a fat Black person,” said panelist Da’Shaun L. Harrison, whose exploration of race and weight, “The Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness,” will be published in August.
“I know how the medical industry engages people who look like me,” Harrison said, “who show up with bodies like mine, with skin like mine, right?”
Good grief. Always the victim.
Harrison knew because of a lifetime of interactions with doctors who looked at the body before them and wanted to treat weight instead of asthma or gastro-intestinal distress, who celebrated Harrison’s weight loss as a child instead of addressing the illness that caused it.
For crying out loud. If I’m bleeding to death, first and foremost, I want the doctors to get the bleeding stopped. We can worry about what caused the bleeding after they stop me from bleeding to death.
“Especially as a kid, it was very damaging for me,” Harrison said. “It set a precedent for me that it didn’t matter how good I did or did not feel in my body. What mattered was if I was thin.”
From a medical standpoint? Yes, a healthy bodyweight is more important to a doctor than how you feel in your body. Sweet merciful Zeus.
The 24-year-old showed up in an ambulance at an Atlanta emergency room in the heart of the pandemic: a fat, black nonbinary person who uses the pronouns “they” and “them,” with a cough and chest pains, who hadn’t slept and had trouble breathing.
“A fat, black nonbinary person who uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them.”
Maybe it’s me, but I laughed out loud reading that.
Sounds like “they” has a promising future at the CIA.
Harrison had just been lifted out of the ambulance. They were lying on a stretcher in the early morning darkness, terrified they had COVID-19 and could die, fearful of what would happen to them once inside the hospital walls. A male nurse walked up.
“Wow, you’re so big,” he said to Harrison by way of introduction. “The first thing we need to do is get this weight off you.”
So?
What was he supposed to do? Ask “them” what “their” pronouns are?
Obesity is a killer. Obese people … sorry … larger-bodied people are more likely to die of COVID than people who are physically healthy. They’re also more likely to suffer from diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
Reading through the replies from that tweet from the LA Times, I couldn’t believe how many were disgusted and angry at the “rude” nurse for stating the blazingly obvious – obesity is unhealthy.
I don’t want doctors to practice “fat acceptance.” I want doctors who are honest with me. They’re doctors, for crap’s sake. They are supposed to tell you the truth about your health.
Doctors and nurses shouldn’t lie just to protect the tender feelings of fat … sorry, larger-bodied people any more than they should lie and tell a smoker that his two-pack a day habit is no big deal.