The fundamental mistake that most thin people make regarding fat people is that they make the assumption that all bodies work the same way that their own does. The naturally thin among us look at a fat person and think, “I’d have to eat nothing but cheeseburgers and milkshakes all day long to weigh that much. Therefore, that person must eat cheeseburgers and milkshakes all day long.”
It doesn’t work that way. Most fat people eat the same basic three meals a day that thin people eat. Despite what you have seen on tv and in movies, fat people do not shove food in their faces all day every day. In most cases, they eat the same things that thin people eat, but their bodies simply process it differently. But fat people are labelled as “disgusting” and “pigs” because they are only ever shown from a thin person’s point of view, based on these false assumptions.
Fat people can be guilty of this mistake too. Sometimes we see someone very thin and, knowing that we would have to stop eating entirely and exercise obsessively in order to be that thin, we assume that the thin person must be anorexic, when they may just be naturally thin.
The difference is, in our culture, thin people are assumed to be morally superior. These wrong assumptions about how body size happens paint the thin as disciplined and the fat as lazy, when the reality is that there are as many lazy and undisciplined thin people as there disciplined ones, and there are as many disciplined and active fat people as there are lazy ones.
“But every time I’m out I see fat people shoving food in their faces.” Really? And you never see thin people eating in public? Are you sure you aren’t just noticing the fat people because you started with the assumption that fat people eat all the time, and every time you see a fat person eating, you take special notice of that as proof that you are correct?
Some people will always be naturally thin, no matter how much junk food they cram in their faces, and some people will always be naturally fat, no matter how little they eat or how much they exercise. The naturally thin may gain weight now and then, but their bodies will always eventually settle into being their own natural thin size. The naturally fat can lose weight, but eventually will gain it all back as their body regains its natural shape.
Attaching moral weight to a person’s body size will always be wrong. When you think that thin people are better than fat people, you may as well be saying that tall people are better than short people, or blue-eyed people are better than brown-eyed people.
The truth is that people are people, and all of them should be treated equally.
As a former naturally thin person, all I have to say is: YES. I was always skinny because I had an out-of-control metabolism, not because I ate well or exercised. In fact, I did the opposite. Then I had a baby, and that metabolism went to shit. Now I have to work hard to be a much larger size than I was before. Thin or not, the only thing that seems to change when I step up my eating habits and workout regimen is how I feel. How I look doesn’t.
Trying to figure out who is healthy based on appearance is extremely inaccurate, and shaming people, even if they are actually unhealthy, doesn’t help.