A reflection question for today: is it diet culture or is it anti-fatness?

(Comments are off on this one, because it really is for personal reflection, and folks tend to respond to these from a place of defensiveness. I'll do more threads/questions later with comments on.)

I'm noticing a lot more thin people engaging with the concept of diet culture as something that has hurt them. Which is great! Diet culture is bad news!

But many of those same thin people don't name anti-fatness & continue to perpetuate it, even as they critique "diet culture."

Perpetuating anti-fatness isn't new. Nearly all of us do it on the regular. But when we classify something as "diet culture" that is *specifically designed to harm fat people,* we miss the opportunity to confront that bias, and to show up for the people who are the most targeted.

In that way, naming things as being diet culture (rather than anti-fatness) allows thin people to re-center themselves in conversations that are fundamentally about scapegoating fat people.

Again, diet culture is a thing, and we should name it! But we should also name anti-fatness, which is a primary driving factor in the popularity and spread of diet culture. If we want to get to the root of diet culture, we HAVE to be specific & explicit about anti-fatness.

So, some reflection questions for you:

How do you define diet culture? How do you define anti-fatness? Where do the two overlap? Where do they diverge?

When you call something a facet of diet culture, how does that allow you to center or decenter yourself?

When you call something an expression of anti-fatness, how does that require you to center or decenter yourself?

Do you feel more comfortable calling something "diet culture" rather than anti-fatness? Why might that be?

What is that comfort protecting you from confronting in yourself? How is that comfort keeping you from showing up for people who are fatter than you?

I don't have hard and fast answers here, and don't want to pretend that I do. And people start at different places & grow into allyship. I get that.

But this is a trend that I've been noticing that feels at once understandable, fraught and worth exploring.

The trend of calling some things "diet culture" instead of "anti-fatness" also feels like an echo of replacing fat activism with body positivity: using a more palatable framework to displace fat people, even in our own struggle.

Again, conversations about anti-fatness and diet culture are inherently linked. Both are important. Both should be discussed.

And we also shouldn't let our discomfort (&/or our need to feel centered) dictate when and whether we show up for fat people. That's all.