Fat or Thin, We Are Not Meant to Feel Good About Ourselves All the Time

In the Times, a profile of “fat activist” Virginia Sole-Smith. The piece seems perfectly pitched to ignite angry discourse, in part because the woman profiled appears intent on doing exactly that. Beneath the surface, though, there’s pain.

I should start by saying that I’m someone who has a great deal of sympathy for people who fight against reductive attitudes towards weight and shape and fitness. I am, after all, pretty fat myself these days, although I’m on semaglutide and slowly losing weight. I have direct and unambiguous experience that demonstrates the folly of seeing weight loss or gain as a simple function of behavior and choice. When I’m manic, I quickly lose weight without trying, sometimes when I’m actively trying to bulk; when I’m on meds, I try very hard to keep weight off, and put it on quickly anyway; when I’m neither manic nor medicated, I usually just stay the same weight, regardless of what I’m trying to achieve. Now, I’m going to spend ~$10,000 this year on a drug that’s hopefully going to take all of this out of my hands. Either way, any way, all ways - my personal effort has almost no influence on my weight. My various diets and workout regimes and tricks and schemes are powerless in the face of forces I can’t control. And yet gaining or losing weight is widely thought to be a matter of simple virtue or lack thereof. I find this senseless and deeply cruel.

But, of course, that is not enough for people like Sole-Smith. The understanding that losing weight is hard and highly variable depending on genetics and environment, and a subsequent dedication to not blaming individuals for how fat they are (and to minding your own business), are not enough. The fat activists instead insist, as Sole-Smith does, that fat people should not attempt to control their appetites at all, and that doing so constitutes “diet culture,” which is presumed to be psychically unhealthy and a vestige of bigotry no matter what the circumstance. They also tend to minimize or dismiss decades of research findings that show that carrying around a lot of excess fat is dangerous in and of itself. (This is, indeed, why I’m on Rybelsus, on top of the fact that it simply became too physically uncomfortable to walk around with 270 pounds on a 6’2 frame.) “Fat activism” vs. “cruel and unscientific insistence that fat people can just choose not to be fat” is a perfect synecdoche of our rotten political culture, a diorama of our whole system, which amounts to a series of dueling incurious orthodoxies prompted by the desire to inflict cruelty on one’s enemies. Someone else’s obesity is none of your business; insisting that there are no health consequences for being obesity is both personally and socially destructive.

Many have focused on the physical health consequences of fat activism, and much of the reaction to this profile has fixated on the health consequences for her children in particular. That stuff will be fought out for longer than I can bear to hear. Personally, I’m more interested in the whole doctrine of personal acceptance and self-love that animates Sole-Smith and fat activism in general, the notion that the alternative to stigma and mockery must be unfettered acceptance of who we are inside. As you know, I think self-love is a false god, one which causes a great deal of emotional harm. I’ve written about this several times in regards to the bizarre boss-bitch mysticism that still has so much presence on Instagram, the melding of woowoo spiritualism with a “you can have it all” Katy-Perry-lyrics approach to feminist empowerment. As I said in earlier pieces, it seems obvious to me that the level of deranged self-confidence and ruthless pursuit of self-interest demanded by that world is just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet. And I feel the same way about Sole-Smith and her intent pursuit of totalizing self-acceptance. She speaks of the unhealthy expectations she nurtured in herself, during an earlier period in her life:

“They were the ‘can you have it all’ years,” she said. “You’re going for the big job. You’re going for the perfect body. You’re going for the great marriage. You’re going for motherhood. You’re going for the perfect home.”

It’s always healthy for people to recognize that the outsized goals they’ve set are actually injurious, that they simply make life harder and less happy. So strange, then, that she does not understand that “You’re going to love and accept yourself and your body all the time” is no more realistic, enlightened, or healthy a goal than those. But then, that’s the new American catechism - that the ultimate goal of adult life is to walk around feeling good about yourself and your life, all the time, treating it all as a political project.