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This is the Weight and Healthcare newsletter! If you appreciate the content here, please consider supporting the newsletter by subscribing and/or sharing!Every day I see something about how this diet, or that activity, or this federally funded program will help “solve the ob*sity* epidemic.”  In truth, this “epidemic” could be solved today.

Just stop talking about the “ob*sity epidemic”.  There, problem solved.  But perhaps in our current society this bears some explanation – here’s why we should banish the whole concept.

Before we get too far into this, the term “ob*sity” (and overw*ight, while we’re at it) was made up to pathologize fat bodies. This pathologization is rooted in, and inextricable from, racism and anti-Blackness and continues to disproportionately harm Black people and other folks of color. I urge you to read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness to learn more about this. So let’s break this down. First of all, fat people existing doesn’t meet the definition of an epidemic.  The CDC’s official definition of an epidemic is: “The occurrence of more cases of disease than expected in a given area or among a specific group of people over a particular period of time.”

While there is certainly no shame in having a disease, being fat simply does not qualify. (Even the American Medical Association’s expert council on Science and Public Health agrees.) “Ob*sity,” as defined by the CDC, is simply a ratio of weight and height.  So, even if you believe that there are more fat people who exist than would be expected, that still wouldn’t qualify as an epidemic, it’s just a bunch of people whose weight in pounds time 703 divided by their height in inches squared is over 30. 

Not only is the ob*sity epidemic not a real thing, it’s also dangerous in the following ways:

It is used to harm fat people in the interest of weight loss industry profits. The idea of conceptualizing simply existing in a higher-weight body as a disease has largely been architected and pushed by the weight loss industry. By pathologizing body size, they don’t have to demonstrate that their products actually improve health in any way. They can claim that simply by producing (very small amounts of short-term) weight loss, they are a “healthcare intervention.” This has been wildly successful for their revenue, and companies like Novo Nordisk are banking on this strategy to make fortunes from selling dangerous weight loss interventions. (Novo made a literal fortune price gouging insulin, so they are no strangers to harming people for money.)

It encourages appearance-based stigma, because fat people are perceived as being part of a dangerous epidemic. And here we have an intersection between healthism, ableism, and sizeism. There should be no shame attached to body size, health, or disability – the “ob*sity epidemic” propaganda encourages all three.

It causes people to be viewed, and encourages them to view themselves and the bodies that they inhabit 100% of the time, as a problem – and a problem that needs the attention of the public.  This leads to a worl