“Fat Acceptance” movement hypocritical, demeaning

160 million Americans are overweight or obese, 13% of the global total. Despite the health problems that can come with being overweight, such as type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease, there has recently been a movement of “fat acceptance,” encouraging those who are overweight to not feel pressured by society to change their bodies.  

In general, this kind of movement is a good thing. No person of any size should feel forced to change their body unless they want to. While opposers of the fat acceptance movement often defend themselves by saying that being overweight isn’t healthy and that to be healthy, one should lose weight (which isn’t necessarily false), the fat acceptance movement is mainly about societal beauty standards. 

However, as with many “movements”, sometimes this support for one group turns into hatred for another. There’s been a recent trend of activists for fat acceptance attacking thin people online. The Internet is full of posts from these activists shaming skinny women for feeling uncomfortable in their bodies. They say things like “don’t ask your fat friends to assure you you’re not fat.”  

While one can understand the frustration, the shame is blatantly unfair. If you’re allowed to feel uncomfortable in your body, so is everyone else. If you’re allowed to accept and love your body, so is everyone else. 

There’s a large amount of hypocrisy that comes from this movement. They say diets for weight loss are unhealthy, meanwhile, they often maintain a diet that lacks proper nutrients and that contributes to their weight, which can lead to deadly symptoms. They don’t want other people telling them to lose weight, yet they’re often the ones encouraging skinny people to eat a sandwich and put on a few pounds. They preach about how society’s view of fat bodies causes them mental health problems, ignoring the fact that many people afflicted with eating disorders developed them at a healthy weight. There are improvements to be made on both sides.  

Kelli Jean Drinkwater, a self-described “radical fat activist”, gave a Ted Talk in 2016 titled “Enough with the Fear of Fat” that went viral. Internet trolls reprimanded her for promoting being fat, with one commenter saying the ideology was “misguided and dangerous.” Her face can be seen in fat acceptance “cringe” compilations all over the Internet. 

She is nowhere near alone in her thinking. Dozens of fat activists, mostly women, get put on talk shows – many from Australia, where 2 out of every 3 adults are overweight, leading to an “obesity epidemic.” They question if thin people can be truly happy or if they’re just lying to themselves to preserve what society sees as attractive.  

This is, clearly, incredibly rude. Questioning someone’s happiness when you know nothing about them is stepping out of line, not to mention they do this as they complain that everyone assumes fat people are miserable. Like many other radical activists, they play victim and are hypocritical when confronted. Drinkwater herself does this exact thing on an episode of Insight, an Australian talk show that discusses hot button topics with experts. She blatantly attacks Breanna Cox, a woman who chose to lose weight because of her health, saying that she must have some health problems now that she chose to diet.  

These women are doing nothing but hurting their cause. They try to get the public to take fat people seriously and to see them as successful and in control, things which Drinkwater claims society views as only for slim people. But their argument is negated as soon as they call a skinny woman unhappy and wonder why they’re being attacked immediately after attacking someone.  

This movement is unreasonable and unfair. Yes, there are people who are overweight and feel perfectly comfortable in their bodies, and that’s fine. But there are those few “radical fat activists” that choose to take their opinion on the injustice that obese people clearly face and turn it into hatred for all skinny people. It’s the same kind of generalization that leads to white people believing all people of color are criminals. There should be no place for that sort of hatred anywhere, in any argument.