newspaper called MetroExpress when I was fifteen. It was about How to Be the Best Westlife Fan. I love musical theatre and I love going to the cinema alone. I prefer dogs to cats. I also prefer dogs to most humans. I am many, many things other than my weight. I am sure you are too. I don’t wish for my fatness to define me any more than I want Kindergarten Sleeper, Westlife Fan or Dog Lover to define me.
But when people see me, they see the fat. They judge and notice the fat. Despite this, they rarely say the word fat. That is why it’s part of the title of this book. FAT. I say it as often as I can. FAT. In the hopes that the more I say it, the less scary it will seem. We all have fat on our bodies, it’s only the volume of it that differs from person to person. Fat is essentially energy. Fat is protecting our organs. And fat is just a descriptive word. The negative connotations came later; hissed at us by a parent, shouted from a moving vehicle, or written in yellow all-caps letters on the front cover of a magazine as a warning.
A lot of effort is put into denying fat. Phrases like ‘You have fat, you are not fat’ and ‘I am not fat, I’m just easy to see.’ The intention is sweet, but it does nothing but reaffirm that fat is bad. This is all called fatphobia. The fear of fatness. This is a message we see constantly – from adverts on television, through fat characters in movies who either don’t exist or are portrayed negatively, through your mother asking if you’ve gained weight with a sneer, your friends talking about their new diets, the high-street clothes shops not catering to a size bigger than 12, through the lack of fat people on the covers of magazines and the constant news stories telling us that the obesity epidemic is coming to get us all. Everything has the basic underlying message that it is positive to be thin and negative to be fat.
Of course, if a woman is thin, she will be wrong in other ways. She will be too thin, not the right shape of thin, not the right height, not have a large enough gap between her thighs – and she needs to smile more but not too much, because that would be slutty. She needs to laugh but not at her own jokes, preferably men’s jokes. She needs to wear a dress that’s not too long because then she is a prude but also not short because then she is a whore. Her breasts have to be big – but not vulgar-big and not big in length. And she most importantly has to never complain about these extreme and impossible beauty standards and society’s wish to make her into an accessory.
There is a growing amount of pressure on men to look a certain way as well – but usually, they are given a slightly bigger pass than women are. Yet, even if they do get a big pass, fat men are still not allowed to be fat.fn1 Fat is frowned upon, regardless of who embodies it and regardless of how much they embody. Trashy magazines will find even the slightest bulge on the stomach of a celebrity swimming in the ocean and plaster her all over the front cover of their magazine as an example of someone breaking the rules: by not staying thin.
Fat is perceived to be an exclusively negative thing. And it isn’t. And it doesn’t have to be.
That’s the essence of this book. Fat is not an inherently negative word. Fat is, if anything, neutral. But it can be beautiful, it can be loved, it can be absolutely magnificent. You can be fat and sexy, fat and healthy, fat and happy.
I love my body. I love my stomach with all of its red stretch marks hanging like an impractical bum bag over my thick, fleshy thighs which spread out and drape slightly over the sides when I sit in a chair. My double and, sometimes, triple chin. The jiggly flesh on my arms where there are, in theory, somewhere deep down, triceps. There is so much fat there that I can grab a fistful of it. My body is many, many fistfuls of fat. When I wear a bra, bulges of fat pop out right above the strap under my armpits, creating side boobs. My cheeks are thick, so thick that when I smile, they almost cover my eyes completely. I smile a lot. I would tell you how much I weigh, but I don’t know. I stopped weighing myself years ago.
I have never been thin and I will never be thin.
I am a fat person and I love my body. I feel lucky to be able to say that. It has never come easy. It has taken a lot of work and a lot of time to get here. I often meet people who are incredibly puzzled that I can love this body. Taking the world into account – how we are taught to see bodies and judge bodies – I understand the puzzlement. But I am quite sure I can explain it. I want to tell you what I have learned and how I got here.
Essentially, this book is a beginner’s guide. A look into the world of being a fat person.
More specifically, what it is like to be me – a white, pansexual,fn2 West European person. On top of which, I come across as straight – meaning that people can’t see all the internal feelings of oh actually I want to kiss girls and oh actually I’d like to kiss everyone. I am, at this moment in time, nondisabled. In the moment of writing this book, I call myself fat. There are loads of different terms you can use to describe your body, but the most commonly used ones within fat activism are big-thin, small-fat, fat, super-fat and infinity-fat.fn3 It’s hard to define. All bodies are so vastly different that you can’t really make an official definition. Two people weighing the same could look completely different – and therefore be treated very differently by society. One person who is a size 28 could fit into an airplane seat whereas another person who is a size 24 could not. I am somewhere in between ‘fat’ and ‘super-fat’. I can buy clothes in most online plus-size clothes shops, but I cannot fit into most seats that have armrests. Infinity-fats can definitely not do any of those things. Big-thins never have to worry about either.
This book is very much from a West European perspective and primarily deals with West European culture. It’s important for me to say this and, I guess, for you to read this, because it is worth noting that there are other viewpoints out there. It is always important to be aware of privilege – be it your own privilege or the privilege of the author whose book you’re reading.fn4 But it is not for me to speak on behalf of others – instead, I talk about me and my experiences. Over the course of the last decade, I have read books and articles, studies and opinion pieces, I have watched documentaries and attended conferences, interviewed experts, scholars and highly experienced activists, all about fatphobia and its causes and its consequences. So even though my perspective is my own and as everything (hu)man-made, fundamentally subjective, the only reason I felt comfortable writing this book is that I feel like I have enough empirical knowledge to back up what I will be telling you.
Throughout the book, I have incorporated chats that I have had with people with different life experiences from my own. It’s also a way of showing intersectionality at play. I have talked to Stephanie Yeboah, who is a dark-skinned black and fat woman from London, and who – just by existing – has to deal with fatphobia, racism and colourism. There is Kivan Bay, a fat, trans, queer man from Portland, US, who has to live with fatphobia, transphobia, queer- and homophobia. And Matilda Ibini, a black woman in a wheelchair from London, who has to deal with racism, colourism, body shaming and ableism. You can’t separate just one ‘marginalisation’ on its own – which is why I urge you to not skip these chats. They are all incredible people whom I very much enjoyed talking to. If their life experiences are not similar to your own, it is still important to include them in your journey. I’m so grateful for their input.
I also have a chat with Dina Amlund, a Danish cultural historian who focuses on fatness, who is here to fix one of our most common misconceptions within our ideas of fatness. I am very excited and proud to share her viewpoint with you.
This book is for everyone. Absolutely everyone. But I have lived as a fat woman, I relate to fat women, I relate to queer people; people who sometimes feel like they are on the outskirts of society. I have written this book for everyone, but if you are not fat, if you are a cis man, you may at times feel left out or unattended to. This is not because I am purposely leaving you out. But I have lived for thirty years now consuming art and media made by thin, white, straight cis men who have subconsciously or consciously primarily addressed
