Back when I had a podcast, one of my early guests was a self-styled âfat activist.â I donât want to call her out by name here, because I consider her a dear friend, though I do think she is, and was, wrong about many things.
We had a long conversation about how she was fat 1 from a very young age, how she was always attempting diets and failing, how nothing seemed to help her lose weightâuntil finally she had an epiphany: the âpurposeâ of her body wasnât to be âskinny,â or âattractive,â or âfitâ; it was for living in, enjoying, and serving the people around her.
I could affirm all this, of course, but then she started hammering me with factual claims that I instinctively knew were wrong: that diets âdonât work,â that BMI is racist and meaningless, that âhealth at every sizeâ is possible, there are no âbad foods,â that some bodies are just ânaturally fat.â A lot of it just didnât make basic intuitive sense (youâre telling me that thereâs no downside at all to putting twice as much stress on your knees every single time you take a step?), but I wasnât really equipped to argue with her at that momentâand, being that I myself was obese at the time, I was temperamentally inclined to at least nod along.
But Iâve been thinking about the conversation in the years since, and I think Iâve finally landed on an analogy that makes the point I wish Iâd made at the time 2 : consider how conservatives and libertarians talk about climate change.