Being fat, getting fat, staying fat: These are things that have no inherent moral value.
My body, which is larger than Barrymore’s, is not a punishment. The bodies of those who are larger than me are not a punishment. The punishment, in fact, is living while fat in a society in which fat is treated as retribution for bad behavior, while thin is seen as a reward for the saintly pursuit of self-deprivation.
We’re living a moment in which a lot of our cultural hang-ups about weight are awkwardly on display: the Instagram influencer who crafts a caption simultaneously apologizing for and pretending to embrace her quarantine weight gain, the people so desperate to get back to their gym routines they’re. As a society, we’re so uncomfortable with the idea of weight gain that we’re agonizing over a few extra pounds during a global pandemic.
It seems like a particularly fraught time to be reinforcing the idea, even jokingly, that fat is something that happens to bad people. “Taking care of yourself” is not defined as shrinking your body or maintaining a smaller body size. In fact, we cannot begin to truly take care of ourselves until we opt out of a system that tells us our worth is determined by a number on the scale and make peace with our bodies, sans judgment or shame.
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