An op-ed by Kristine Snow Millard
We’d gather every night around the dinner table in the rectory of the Episcopal church where my father was the priest — Mom, Dad, all five of us daughters. Inevitably, conversations turned to Dad’s work. He’d fret about the church furnace, boast about Sunday service attendance, comment on something the bishop did. But what I remember most is how Dad sometimes spoke of a troubled parishioner, calling her a “fat slob.”
Weight stigma, even 50 years ago, was well established.
A body is not an indicator of personal character or worth. It’s what we live in, the medium through which we experience the world. Yet with effective new weight-loss drugs now readily available, weight stigma is only going to get worse. These medications are here to stay, but we can push back against these enduring judgments, perpetuated by Big Pharma’s billion-dollar investments in the weight-loss industry. We can choose to celebrate all bodies for their true value as vessels for human beings who matter, regardless of their size.
Medications like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound make it more challenging to honor our bodies as they are. They raise new questions, create new assumptions, and encourage more cruel barbs like my father’s, heightening our culture’s assault on those who live in larger bodies. The reasoning goes like this: large-bodied people now have no excuse for their size; they are choosing to be overweight. Fat translates to a lack of self-control or pride in one’s appearance, a willful unhealthiness, and so on. Now that there are, arguably, reliable ways to get thin, why not go the pharma route?
My body is slightly above-average-sized. I have struggled for decades with disordered eating and abominable body image. Diet culture has spun me in its vortex, even landing me in treatment programs. At age 42, I starved myself to the point of cognitive impairment. I was very, very thin and also very, very ill.
I understand the urge to be skinny. I look in my mirror at the pouch of flesh hanging over an old hysterectomy scar, at dimpled thighs, at that extra upper-arm flesh. But my body can swim across my favorite pond, and round and round in a giant circle in an evergreen-lined cove. My body can hike the hills of my Western Maine town with their stunning views of the White Mountains. I can do 20 pushups in a row and I can pedal a bike, which I often do while watching episodes of my guilty pleasure, NCIS, streaming on the Roku TV I bought at a church rummage sale.
I battle clinical depression and have high cholesterol, well controlled by medicine, so my body is healthy. On the larger side, yes, but truly healthy. And so are many, many bodies that aren’t athlete-thin or Instagram-perfect.
Still, our size-focused culture continues to judge bodies by the pound. I’ve done it myself. And here’s the real shame: the more that large-bodied people are blamed by others, the more they blame themselves. Society looks down on them, so they look down on themselves. With the advent of endlessly marketed weight-loss medications, this will only happen more often.
To be fair, the shaming can be universal. More than a year ago, when these new weight-loss drugs were gaining popularity, the New York Times reported that their consumers were subject to stigma as well, often judged harshly for relying on medication to lose weight, rather than willpower. Of course, it is well established that willpower, diet and exercise may promote weight loss in the near term, but nearly all who diet gain weight back. And once a person stops taking weight-loss drugs, they gain the pounds back, too.
The decision to diet, take weight-loss drugs, or simply accept one’s body in its current form is solely that of the inhabitant of that body. One’s health may depend upon those weight-loss medications. Others may take them just for vanity or social acceptance. Regardless, weight-loss drugs are here to stay, and so are bodies of all sizes. Whether it’s around a dinner table or in response to Big Pharma’s campaign to make people feel small, let’s stop all the shaming and appreciate all bodies just as they are.
Kristine Snow Millard is a writer in Western Maine working on a collection of essays about diet culture.
