In July 2024, after 14 years of conservative Tory rule, the British Labour party won a general election. Shortly after their landslide victory, in October, an interesting case study on fat politics played out in the UK. Keir Starmer, the party’s newly elected prime minister, announced he wanted to get fat, unemployed people back onto the job market with the help of free “weight loss injections,” a new turn of the screw in dystopian diet culture. In this piece, I want to reflect on the larger politics and consequences of this policy proposal and ask: What are progressive fat politics and what role do fat politicians play in shaping fat policy-making?
According to British Health Minister Wes Streeting, the “widening waistbands” of his fellow citizens are a “significant burden” on the national health system, a burden of eleven billion obesity-related pounds, he specifies. Keir Starmer concurred: To “ease pressure on the health system” his government needed to “think differently.” The US pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is now investing millions in a study in the Greater Manchester area, investigating the impact of its “weight loss injection” Mounjaro on worklessness and the use of NHS services. Arguably, the profit interests of pharmaceutical companies and a neoliberal understanding of health policy must have played a more decisive role in the investment in the ‘free’ jabs than the well-being of fat people, for whom “lifestyle changes” will nevertheless be necessary to lose weight and achieve good health. Because, according to Streeting: “the NHS can’t be expected to always pick up the tab for unhealthy lifestyles.”
“Thinking differently” therefore means fatphobia and classism on a dystopian scale, as new drugs are being tested on consenting, but marginalized adults in the name of budget cuts and improving the country’s workforce. Promoted by a social democratic party. Labour party health officials must know that despite breakthroughs in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, the effects of these drugs appear to be similar to those of diets: If you stop taking the drug, you gain the weight back. A lucrative business for manufacturers, while people struggle with side effects such as “Ozempic face,” i.e. “a hollowed look to the face,” nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and constipation, and more serious side effects like pancreatitis as well as unclear long-term effects not yet sufficiently researched.
A policy like the one introduced in the UK is not about health promotion based on the needs of patients or a genuine “relief” for the NHS, for example through more money, higher salaries or a reduction in working hours, but about economic exploitability. A group that is already socially shamed – unemployed, fat people – is constructed as an extra burden on a groaning healthcare system. Ideally, this is illustrated with “headless fatties” on chairs that they don’t fit in properly or jeans that don’t fit them to also visually drive home the message: These bodies are too much. It is disconcerting that the Labour Party, of all parties, cannot think of other measures in the face of systemic inequality – poverty, a burnt-out, post-pandemic health sector, broken infrastructures – than to optimize the “human capital” in the country by further cementing the shift of responsibility from governments to individuals. With this policy, they get in line with their conservative predecessors, the Tories, and health institutions like the WHO.
The more GLP-1 agonists – commonly known as „weight-loss injections“ – with brand names like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy start to dominate public health and weight loss discourses, the more they are praised as solutions to “the obesity crisis“. The WHO has referred to obesity as an “epidemic” or a “fast globalizing problem” roughly since 2000 and continues to do so, focussing not only on health outcomes for individuals with a BMI (a person’s ratio of height to weight) over 30, but also “economic impacts”: “If nothing is done, the global costs of overweight and obesity are predicted to reach US$ 3 trillion per year by 2030 and more than US$ 18 trillion by 2060.“ Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services in Trump’s second administration, is presented as a “controversial hope” to solving the pressing problem of fatness, conspiracy theories, misinformation and parasitic brain worm notwithstanding.
Interestingly enough, the neoliberal dogma of self-responsibility does not even seem to spare progressive politicians, who are fat themselves. Ricarda Lang, member of parliament for Germany’s Green Party Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, recently talked to Zeit Magazin about her weight loss and the onslaught of body shaming over the course of her career. Some of her comments about being a highly visible, young, fat, female politician are truly insightful: women in power are always their body first, and their policies second; if you don’t address hate speech, sizeism and sexism yourself, others will, and less favourably. Yet Lang is also caught in a pathologizing discourse of fatness as a problem to be solved. In the interview, she’s proud of the fruits of her “hard labour” of weight loss in the name of health. She’s “beaming” at home in her smaller body and happy about the impact of “weight-loss injections” on lowering obesity rates, which are “simply far too high” in many Western countries and often “very unequally distributed socially,” the only reference to social inequality in the extensive interview.
It is debatable what a leftist fat politics would look like and whether it would, for example, include the fight for legal protection from weight/fat discrimination. Legal experts often argue against such a “proliferation of equality grounds,” i.e. adding new protected criteria to anti-discrimination law. They fear, as Ricarda Lang does, weakening its effects. If anything is protected, nothing is, their logic goes. Fat activists, organised in groups like NAAFA (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance) in the US or GgG (Gesellschaft gegen Gewichtsdiskriminierung, e.V.) in Germany, on the other hand, have been fighting for legal protection. Their campaigns focus on the harsh social consequences of anti-fat bias and the immutability of fatness beyond individuals’ control.
From a leftist point of view, it is relatively uncontroversial to say that progressive fat politics should discard the BMI, in many respects an inadequate, white supremacist measure of health, and encourage a holistic approach to health beyond patients’ supposed lack of discipline and personal responsibility. Leftist fat politics should not only take into account socioeconomic factors like a person’s income, it should fight to end poverty, improve someone’s housing situation, environmental stress, experiences of discrimination, mental health, working conditions and hours, leisure time, sleep, availability of childcare and recreational opportunities, social contacts, resources for sport and access to affordable, nutritious food in the name of food justice.
Ultimately, a progressive fat politics needs to stress the fundamental right to remain fat, as author Virgie Tovar writes in her book. While the war on obesity rages on, we have to insist on fat futurity in the name of human rights. The struggle to end fatphobia continues, despite recent backlash and increased pressure, as there is no quick fix for complex, structural problems. It is worth calling to mind that governments of all political persuasions from Trump’s GOP to Britain’s Labour Party are not elected for quick fixes, but to create liveable conditions for all their citizens.
