Mothers of daughters:
Based on available evidence, I'm pretty sure one of the most important things you can do for your daughter is simply to never shame her body & never make little comments judging her eating habits. Even better if you can avoid shaming your OWN body too.
When I hear what some mothers put their daughters through, my blood boils.
My relationship to my body is a little fucked up due to cultural stigmas & pressures. I don't think it would have been possible for me not to absorb at least some of the rampant body shaming, but compared to the women whose mother's shamed their bodies (or only praised them for being thin) & taught them a bad relationship to food & eating, I'm doing pretty damn well.
Fat-shaming your daughter is setting her up for a lifelong battle to love herself. It's fucked up to do that to someone you love.
As a woman who was NOT fat-shamed by her mother, let me tell you, that was the right choice.
I did not learn to view my body as a commodity. I did not learn to tie my love of myself to the size & shape of my body.
Fat-shaming is a tool of the patriarchy. Women are taught to harm their daughters & teach their daughters how to harm *themselves*, & for what? To have a body that is acceptable, to be the only kind of woman who is supposed to be allowed to exist.
It stuns me how much women's bodies are controlled, & what especially gets to me is that that level of control on that large a scale is not possible without mothers doing this psychological damage to their daughters from a young age.
Yes, it's fucking magazine covers, movies & TV, the girls at school, & all that shit. But without mothers teaching their daughters that to be a girl or woman is to have to constantly monitor your body & keep it small, this scale of dysfunction could not happen.
Women keep passing on their trauma, the shame their mothers trained into them, the feeling that their worth is tied to their physical form, & it fucking pisses me the fuck off.
I believe that body control is a *key* component of patriarchy. This is where women learn that they don't have the right to freely move through the world, that they don't even have the right to exist without modifying themselves to be smaller.
I think a lot of women think they are really helping their daughters. They know the ways they have been shamed.
They know the difference in how much respect a woman receives depending how much she weighs (this is true of all people in fatphobic cultures, but the level of *control* for women is higher & the threshold of "fat" is much, much lower).
It's understandable to want to protect your daughter from that, but really training her to submit to it is making her a victim, not setting her free.
It fucking stuns me how much energy women & girls are STILL expending in the year 2026 to monitor & control their bodies & appearance, but it just shows how embedded this aspect of patriarchy is.
We deserve to exist. Our worth isn't connected to the size & shape of our bodies.
This misogynistic bullshit needs to be put to bed. It is not ok to train girls to obsess over meeting meaningless & arbitrarily difficult (essentially impossible) standards.
This shit is also inextricably tied to white supremacy (patriarchy & white supremacy are thoroughly intertwined into a single system).
The body that women are pressured to have is specifically & intentionally a white body ideal.
It is not an ideal that most white women naturally meet, but it is defined by difference to body shapes more common among folks of African descent.
Training a young girl to meet this standard is training her to access the benefits of white supremacy & uphold its cultural power.
*Skinny* white women are the ideal. The ideal woman is a white woman who has dedicated her very life to the god of white supremacist patriarchy.
In part, it's a declaration of loyalty. All the meals she eats (or doesn't) are like ritual sacrifices to be allowed participation in the hierarchy of white supremacy.
Is that what we want other women to aspire to? To be made into acceptable tools of the kyriarchy?
Fatphobia & fat shaming are always harmful.
I'm pretty damn disturbed by seeing the pressures men & boys are under for meeting a body ideal too. I could be wrong, but it seems like those pressures have intensified over the last couple decades.
It's sick & twisted. It does nothing to promote health. Just suffering—both physical & mental.
Your body is not shameful. Your body is not the cause of the things you suffer. It's a fucking distraction from the real sources of suffering.
Access to rights & dignity are supposedly locked behind body-control, & you are supposed to think that if only you had the "right" body, all would be well with you, & the fact that all is not well with you is supposed to be the proof that there is something wrong with your body.
Bullshit.
Your rights are trampled & you live a life of constant indignities because of oppression, not because there is something fucking wrong with you that you need to fix before you can have good things.
Oppression requires control. The fact that we are taught to abuse our bodies & police the bodies of others is not some accident. Not really.
You are supposed to learn to conform & especially to fear the suffering that people inflict on you for non-conformity. Ideally (for the purposes of oppression), you would also learn to punish others for their non-conformity.
Fatphobia is a tool of the enemy, my friends. It is a way we are trained to hurt ourselves & each other.
It's not surprising when the capitalists need to increase their authoritarian control to be able to keep destroying the world that they would ratchet up the pressure on *everyone*—not just women—to obsess over controlling their bodies & expend all their energy on molding themselves into the "right" shape.
And those who can't or won't do that? They are to be socially punished for failing to submit to control. It is acceptable to punish them because they are existing incorrectly.
Fatphobia is still widely accepted, & this is a fucking problem for every marginalized group, because it is a tool to train us that *some people* do not deserve dignity.
It may not *seem* like the most pressing of bigotries, but I think a big part of its function is to train us all from childhood that human dignity is not inherent, & that it is ok to select targets for abuse as long as they are the "right" target.
"I'm just concerned about people's health."
You know some things that would make people healthier?
- Access to healthcare (without financial strain)
- Not being overworked & overstressed
- Experiencing fulfillment in one's labor
- Access to better food
- Feeling worthy of care & loving oneself
- Experiencing love & acceptance
You want people to be healthy? That's what people fucking need, not shame, derision, "helpful advice", or being denied life-saving healthcare until they lose weight.
The size of people's bodies is not the problem: abuse, oppression, & deprivation are.
Let's end poverty & see what people's health looks like THEN.
I am convinced that the primary reason being fat is associated with risk of early death is that doctors won't treat fat people until they lose weight.
I don't know how many stories I have heard about fat people who—after YEARS of going to the doctor complaining of health issues & being sent away without any further investigation—found out they were in advanced stages of cancer (or another illness) that should have been caught & treated long ago.
Even if we set aside extreme cases, how is someone dealing with serious health issues causing them pain, weakness, fatigue, etc. supposed to work on "losing weight"?
If fat people can't get treated for their illnesses & injuries until they are skinny, um...how are they supposed to "get healthy"?
They aren't, are they? They are supposed to suffer, because they have bodies that are not considered worthy of care.
Some people don't deserve life & comfort? What kind of fascist bullshit is that?
We already live in a eugenicist society. We have been living in a eugenicist society.
Fatphobia is one of the guises under which eugenics operates.
@artemis Sexual selection has always been a part of life. Be it human or animal. The measurements used to select a partner differs culturally and personally, and is shifting constantly.
Eugenics is a concept to control breeding on a societal level. In the furthest sense, can maybe the medial presentation of attractive attributes be seen as eugenics.
@vekkq
If you scrolled up 2 posts on this thread, you would have heard of it before replying.
Your definition of eugenics is far too narrow & does not account for systemic/societal factors.
It's not an individual problem. It is a systemic problem perpetuated by stigma, misinformation, & prejudice.
@artemis i read it before.
i think your definition of eugenics is too broad.
I also don't see how eugenics correlate to fatness. Gaining weight has little to do with genes. Deciding to having someone die, because of fatness, is rather an issue of severe discrimination, independent of race or genes.
@vekkq @artemis My sister had a 23 lbs ovarian cyst. It was painful, the doctor told her "You're just fat, do some situps!"
With the chance of rupturing the cyst, that advice could literally have killed her. Any investigation at all by the doctor would have revealed "just fat" wasn't the cause.
"Just fat" isn't inherently painful either. The symptoms didn't even line up with the DX.
Maybe it's stochastic eugenics but that doesn't make it *not* eugenics.
@vekkq @artemis Your definition of eugenics would lead one to believe that eugenics is a vibe that vanishes on the scale of individual choice, which is really convenient because it means no one ever has to think about whether their actions affect anyone else or participate in destructive systems.
It's really convenient to have a definition for a harm that completely absolves everyone from having committed it.
👱♂️”Doctor, I think I have post-exertional malease, I can’t exercise, I have to lay down after climbing the stairs”
👨⚕️”you should lose weight”
👱♂️”I’d like to, but how? I can’t exercise”
👨⚕️”if you lose weight it’ll be easier to exercise”
Losing weight is not a treatment, it’s a goal, which is meaningless without some way to work toward it.
Getting this as a white guy with good insurance just makes me more ashamed of how our society treats everyone else
@artemis There was an article I saw that was basically about this... And that many health risks associated with weight are also similar to responses to the stress of experiencing prejudice.
I'll see if I can find it when I'm at a desktop computer.
@artemis Well, I couldn't find the article I was remembering but the terms "weight bias" and "weight stigma" brought up a lot of research papers. My entirely unscientific search and light skimming suggest:
1) bias is fairly widespread in med pros,
2) bias impacts docs' behavior in lots of ways including diagnosis patterns & more unsolicited advice
3) patient *perception* of that bias, true or not, leads avoidance of getting treatment,
4) stigma impacts patient mental health, too.
1/2
@artemis However, the closest article to the "spirit" of the one I'm remembering was this one, which has links to other papers as a start of further exploration. The key connection seems to be a constant additional stress response to stigma.
@artemis DING DING DING
Hit the nail squarely on the head with this one.
“American horses are getting sick in ways that look remarkably familiar,” writes Joshua Moen. https://www.statnews.com/2026/06/08/obese-horses-humans-metabolic-syndrome-food-system/
@artemis There's this story from mid-2020 in Slovakia that sticks with me because of how much time and space in the fucking news they wasted on fat-shaming a 16-year old girl who died from complications related to her chronic illness that were triggered by catching COVID.
They were litigating whether it was her weight or not. In the fucking news. Over and over and over again. And it's like... How was she managing the chronic illnesses she had PRIOR to catching COVID? Do you want to address that in your whole tirade about how, actually, "being fat" is a pre-existing condition and that it was her being fat that was the problem?
It was so disgusting. Like, I'm still mad about it, but I'm also constantly reminded of it because I see how doctors treat me... and if they treated her like they do me, then her chronic illnesses were probably not being managed well because they were too fucking focused on forcing her to lose weight without any assistance whatsoever.
One of my best friends has major chronic pain issues and a weight problem to the point he can barely walk. He went in for the procedure he'd been getting every 6 months or so, and found his pain management doctor had been replaced. Instead of performing the procedure, the guy took one look at him and said "this table can't hold you". Even though it was the SAME damned table where he'd already had this done half a dozen times. And suddenly instead of having relief, he got to go on a hunt for a new pain management doctor-- which also meant losing physical therapy for months.
New pain management doctor told him recently, "You're lucky I'm treating you at all. My techs don't want to deal with this. Nobody wants to deal with this."
I almost started shouting at the jerk right there. I mean, I know compassion fatigue is a major issue in these professions, but wtf. Dude sitting there in his fancy suit, ostrich leather shoes, talking about his $20k mahogany desk, and how "nobody wants to deal with" a person who's already at major risk of suicidality. Assholes.
@artemis another good contender: consistently elevated cortisol levels from being under constant stress about weight.
This paper, although sadly it does not include either your hypothesis or mine as possibilities, does an okay job of listing several others:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1155/2012/107989
It includes links to evidence about situations where obese people have better health outcomes (proposed explanations 4 and 7 in section 2). It's an infuriating paper to read because it's full of medical fatphobia, but the sources it cites are interesting. It's particularly ironic that while the CDC classifies BMI from 18.5 to 25 as "healthy weight," according you figure 1 in this paper in terms of life expectancy you're better off being in the CDC's "overweight" category. Worth noting of course with every mention of BMI that is eugenecist psedoscience :(
@artemis you might care to consider that the advanced stages of cancer don't take many years to happen.
It is a pity you are already convinced about the cause, or you could look at the incidence of various cancers, and the relationship between hormones driving some of them, and the metabolism of those hormones in fat storage tissue.
Through history though, people died of being too thin, starving. We've largely moved on from that, which is an improvement.
Your amazing thread put me in mind of my (until recently) two aunts, my father’s sisters:
1) One who has been ‘morbidly obese’ since her twenties and who now in her eighties has outlived by decades all the doctors who said being overweight would kill her (she avoids processed sugar and alcohol). She has dementia now but the doctors never warned her about the memory-wiping effects of being fat (/sarc)
2) The other who always reminded us of what our grandmother would say, having survived the Holocaust, that carrying ‘a few extra pounds’ was the difference between coming out of the concentration camps dead or alive.
@MercG @Photo55
>carrying ‘a few extra pounds’ was the difference between coming out of the concentration camps dead or alive.
Yes to this also! The same is true with illness. Severe illness can cause sudden, dramatic weight loss. It can become life-threatening extremely quickly if you have no fat for your body to use.
It's interesting that the "ideal" body is just like everything else in a profit-based world: operating with no margins, unable to withstand sudden/unexpected strain.
I remember my step-dad commenting on women's photos in the paper. 'If she just put in the effort she'd look better... How do you expect to find a man looking like that.. Etc."
It was a whole demonstration that a woman should look good for the benefit of the men around her. It was never a comment about health, or her doing what made her feel good.
It was an invisible way of thinking because you were surrounded by it everywhere. Like asking a fish what is water.
All of the "diseases of obesity" can be caused or exacerbated by stress. Like the kind you get from the constant stream of microaggressions (and macroaggressions!) fat people experience living in our society.
I am 100% NOT saying that none of these things would be a problem for obese people absent fatphobia. I don't know! We can't know, because no one's ever been able to do the experiment.
@artemis Don't know statistics on top of my head but I'm pretty sure poverty plays a big part as well. Kind of annoyed to hear "but Europeans are so much healthier than people in the US!" as a European. From what I heard buying healthy vegetables etc. and cooking a well balanced meal at home each day is significantly more expensive than takeout/more "unhealthy" food in some areas of the US. (And I heard this way before Trump got elected and every issue in the states got x10 worse.) In my country at least it's the other way around. (Not to mention the aspect of time and energy, if you have to drive everywhere due to long distances between everything and handle two jobs etc., when are you supposed to be up for cooking in the first place?)
How are you suppose to lose weight when every aspect of society keeps you from doing it?
@Sirablopp
Yes to these points.
The expense & the time/energy for prep are both *huge* problems for eating nutritious foods. But you *can* get cheap calorie-dense food that will get you through the day—food which just so happens to be engineered to be literally addictive.
Then the diet industry turns up, shames you for your body, & tries to sell "solutions" that are *always* temporary (they wouldn't want someone to ever stop being dependent on them).
@Sirablopp
Capitalism has done a number on the *entire* world at this point, but the US in the 20th century became the locus of hyper-capitalism where everything—literally every aspect of life—is intended to extract value & transfer wealth upwards.
Our bodies are just one more source of profit at the expense of our life, health, & general well-being.
Capitalism is the most successful economic engine in the world. What non capitalist country do you think is thriving?
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