I work at a daycare with infants.
One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.
There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”
My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”
To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”
Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.
This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?
By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.
After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”
Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.
When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.
(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)
My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.
For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy - an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn.
Fatphobia
Is
Real
and it kills
This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.
My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight?
She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.
Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.”
I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.
We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.
A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight. Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time. The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems. By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25. She’d had the tumour for over five years. The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause. They killed her.
Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.
I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:
1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).
You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.
She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.
And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!
2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.
Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.
My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:
SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.
She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:
If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.
It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.
Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:
FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!
Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!
i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.
I had pain in my back for a really long time but I’d learned to live with it, because I’d been to the doctor once and two different chiropractors and they all told me losing weight would make it go away. Finally when I was working two jobs and it became too much I went to a new chiropractor in my town (this is when I was living up in Mass) telling him I knew it was because of my weight but I needed pain relief please. He did a full exam anyway and I HAD SOMETHING MISALIGNED WITH MY SPINE. Thankfully it didn’t wind up doing any lasting damage but it was YEARS of pain I didn’t have to go through. I have never seen someone so heated as when he was ranting about how I should have been treated when I first came in. He demanded the names of the other chiropractors, which I unfortunately didn’t have, but yeah. Being diagnosed fat is way too common and it hurts more than just emotions.
I’ve literally just had my confirmation laproscopy for endometriosis after 8 years because they said my pain was caused by being fat for the first 4 years.
My mum had endo. Her mum had endo. My sister (who is thin) was treated for endo, but I couldn’t possibly have it. I was just fat.
There are some doctors who, you could walk in with a gunshot wound to the chest, and they’d ask if you’d tried going to the gym.
My parents put me on an extremely restrictive diet (lean chicken breast and salad with no dressing for every single meal) at EIGHT. They were advised to do that by the endocrinologist I was seeing for early puberty, which was messing with my hormones and making me gain weight. I never became thin, I just spent so many years of my life having to sneak any food I could get because I was constantly starving, had anemia several times growing up, etc.
I was also forced to exercise until I literally passed out - which happened often because I was malnourished and also because I had a hard time breathing. Which was, of course, attributed to me being fat and out of shape.
Since I was a small child, I complained of breathing difficulty while exercising and was told if I lost weight, it would get better.
The year I turned 30, I moved to an extremely cold place. I arrived in the summer and was walking to work and back (40 min each way) every day. When the weather got very cold, suddenly I couldn’t even walk to the bus stop a block and a half away without needing a break to catch my breath. I knew it couldn’t possibly be me being out of shape because the change was so sudden. I went to a doctor and was diagnosed with extremely severe asthma. Biggest triggers: cold air and exercise.
It took at least twenty two years (if not more) of complaining about breathing difficulties to get diagnosed. The doctor said “with the amount of respiratory allergies you have, I’m shocked you have never been tested for asthma”. I wasn’t shocked, though. I was fat. Of course no one tested me for asthma. Fat kid gets out of breath when exercising? Must be the fat. Why look further, when you can blame the fat?
You can get so much from this, but if you get anything from this or need a TL;DR: FATPHOBIA HAS KILLED BEFORE! FATPHOBIA KILLS NOW EVERY DAY! FATPHOBIA WILL KILL AGAIN! AND IF WE DONT CHANGE HOW WE THINK, FATPHOBIA WILL KEEP KILLING!!!
I feel like this post and its notes should be like. Required reading for all medical students.
It’s so scary how these biases in society have influenced the minds of everyone, even doctors, to the point that unexplained rapid weight loss is likely to be considered a “good” thing even though it’s a sign of cancer and other life threatening illnesses.
My mother was told by a doctor when I was an infant that she was “overfeeding” me (as an explanation for gastro issues that would turn out, in my 30s, to be several food allergies). I spent the rest of my life having my food intake policed and being forced into crash diets. I remember eating packed lunches in grade school that consisted off a can of Slim-Fast and a baggie of carrot sticks. In high school, she put me on a low-carb diet and I remember one of my friends, aghast, asking “what kind of diet doesn’t allow FRUIT?” after I explained why I was eating cottage cheese and pickled artichoke hearts.
My mother loves me and would never intentionally harm me (or anyone). She believed, genuinely, that the torture she put me through was the only way to improve my health, because that is what society and my childhood doctors told her. I lived with disordered eating and a deeply distorted view of food and my body even after I was an adult living on my own.
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties and hospitalized for severe colitis that *anyone* looked beyond my weight for the source of my health problems. It wasn’t until my (wonderful, beloved, bold) partner coldly informed the endocrinology nurse lecturing me about portion control that “she barely eats one meal a day; she needs MORE calories, not less!” that I finally started to work on my relationship with food and stop thinking of it as the enemy.
Fatphobia does lifelong harm to children.
