Hi friend,
AAAAAAAAA! I’ve done my first published book blurb, and it’s for Amanda Martinez Beck’s excellent new book More of You!
Here’s what I wrote (plus extra text that was cut for length):
“More of You grapples with some of the central conflicts of today’s body liberation movements.
Beck’s religion informs her writing as she reconciles being a person of size with one of faith, taking up space in a society that wants fat women to shrink and mingling the body’s inherent goodness with pain and discrimination.
This book is an updated fat liberation manifesto that recognizes the gains of the past — and the fights of tomorrow.”
Now on to this week's letter:
"They don't know any better."
When I talk about weight stigma and fatphobia in healthcare, that's often the excuse that people make to me on behalf of healthcare providers. "That's how they were taught."
In 2022, that excuse just isn't good enough any more. Not only do we have a half-century of evidence that intentional weight loss doesn't fix health issues -- and in fact, it doesn't even make people smaller in the long term -- but we're not talking about a minor whoopsie, a one-time error made in good faith.
Doctors (and other healthcare providers) spend less time with fat people.
Doctors don't want to touch fat people.
Doctors don't listen to us.
Doctors refuse to consider using evidence-based treatments for us.
Doctors hurt and kill fat people every single day by denying us the healthcare they provide to thin and average-sized people.
"That's just what they know" doesn't wash. No one is disgusted by half the population (in the United States -- as always, I speak from a U.S.-centric view) to the point of not wanting to touch them or provide them care without realizing it.
Imagine this:
A healthcare provider prescribes weight loss to treat a fat person's illness. But not only does the illness not get better, the person can't seem to lose any weight.
Well, that provider thinks, maybe the patient didn't really take it seriously. And maybe they're fibbing about what they've been eating.
So the provider prescribes weight loss to the next fat person, and the next, and the next, following what they've been taught.
And none of it works.
So the provider decides not to re-examine what they've been taught about medicine, but to believe that half the U.S. population is made up of lazy, dishonest, gluttonous, inherently unhealthy liars -- just as the provider's always been taught by the culture in which they live.
That, my friend? Is a failure of medical ethics. It's a failure of an entire profession. And it's a failure of the heart.
