Tag body weight:

Leftist Politics and the “Significant Burden” of Fatness

Posted on by Elisabeth Lechner

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…

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Trademarks and Activists: The Complex History of Health at Every Size

Posted on by Gemma Gibson

The definition of Health at Every Size (HAES) may initially appear to be easy to understand. Many HAES advocates argue that all bodies, regardless of size, can achieve and maintain ‘good’ health. Yet, meanings and understandings of HAES have a complex and contentious history. HAES can loosely be separated into two branches. The most popularised branch has now been trademarked and was adapted and popularised by healthcare professionals such as Lindo Bacon, Deb Burgard and Lucy Aphramor. The other is perhaps lesser known to people outside of the fat activist movement but has its roots in early fat liberation where fat people were first able to discuss their dismal experiences of healthcare as part of community organisation.  Both branches argue…

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Weighed and found lacking? A Brief History of Bathroom Scales

Posted on by Debora Frommeld

Humans love to measure things, for example temperature, time, distance and calorie intake. Increasingly, we have discovered new ways to apply these measurements to our own bodies. New technologies have allowed us to collect this data more precisely than before and also, perhaps more importantly, to have these measurements available at all times. “Worrying” about our body has become second nature to us so much that we may not even realize how much of our time revolves around tracking ourselves. Every January, magazines, websites, and social media outdo each other in giving weight-loss advice and fueling a guilty conscience. So we are forced to consider working on our “beach body” for the summer. Starting a diet, working out, getting in…

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A Sporting Embodiment: Black Women Run Too

Posted on by Tori Thompson

“Why do they always look at me like that?” That’s what I think when I consistently see the same white men and women on the running trail in my neighborhood. My boyfriend and I recently moved to this neighborhood, motivated in part by the vast amount of running trails in the area. Granted, I see more people using the trails to walk their dogs in the morning, but I don’t mind the dogs. What I do mind are the constantly surveilling eyes that watch me as I jog over the bridge.  I cannot help but think that their gaze is a response to both my being black and running on the trail. My blackness may be disrupting their racially homogenous…

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Rethinking Fat as a Class Issue: Current Insights from Studies in Social-Epidemiology

Posted on by Tae Jun Kim

Prevailing voices in the public and health sciences state that lower class people are much more likely to become “overweight” compared to their “middle” and “high class” counterparts. In this sense, the so-called “obesity epidemic” becomes inseparable from the discussion of class, and the equation remains clear: “the poor are fat and the fat are poor.” In order to explain the link between class and body weight, people generally refer to two assumptions about poor people: they have less access to healthy food and they don’t know which food is healthy. Over the last decades, studies that explore the social determinants of health and illness in populations (“social-epidemiology”) have particularly discussed this relation between food and fatness as a class…

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