Today in Things Fat People Have Been Telling You

[Content Note: Fat hatred.]

For literally decades, fat activists have been pushing back on the "calories in calories out!" mantra shouted at us by fat haters who believe we are all liars and must all be suffering from disordered eating and consuming mass calories and never exercising and this is why we're fat, because human diversity doesn't exist and human beings are Bunsen burners.

Here is just a small selection of the posts I've written over the years on that garbage:

I Am Not a Bunsen Burner.

B-b-but CALORIES IN CALORIES OUT!!!

The Best Thing You'll Read All Day.

On Fat Hatred and Eliminationism.

Fatsronauts 101: "Everyone who is fat is fat for the same reason."

B-b-but Calories In Calories Out! (Again.)

Today in Fat Hatred.

Now, another study (thanks, science!) has found that what is a "healthy food" for one person (where "healthy food" is defined as not promoting weight gain, which is a whole other issue) might not be a "healthy food" for another person BECAUSE PEOPLE AREN'T BUNSEN BURNERS.

A healthy food for one person may lead another to gain weight, according to a study out Thursday that suggests a one-size-fits-all approach to dieting is fundamentally wrong.

..."The first very big surprise and striking finding that we had was the very vast variability we saw in people's response to identical meals," said researcher Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

...Researchers were stunned to see the difference in people's metabolic responses to the exact same foods. For instance, some people's blood sugar rose higher after eating sushi than it did after eating ice cream.

And for one middle-aged woman, the act of eating tomatoes -- which she thought were part of a healthy diet -- actually caused her blood sugar to rise significantly.

"There are profound differences between individuals -- in some cases, individuals have opposite responses to one another -- and this is really a big hole in the literature," said Segal.

...Co-author Eran Elinav said the study "really enlightened us on how inaccurate we all were about one of the most basic concepts of our existence, which is what we eat and how we integrate nutrition into our daily life."

Instead of urging people to eat low-fat diets, a more personalized approach -- one that puts an individual at the center of the plan, rather than the diet -- could be useful to help people control high blood sugar and improve their health, he said.

I'm grateful that there's now Official Evidence of a thing that fat activists have been saying over and over and over, but I am really angry at the mystified shock being expressed by these researchers that all bodies don't work the same, because it's such clear evidence that researchers haven't been listening to fat people, or trusting us when we report our lived experiences, or treating us as authorities on our own lives.

There are people who make entire careers out of studying "obesity" who never listen to fat people. That is a problem.

It's a problem that fat people are called liars, when we are not being ignored, for saying the very thing that this study has concluded. It's a problem that we aren't taken seriously, or afforded the presumption of good faith, when we say that we know our bodies don't work the same way as many privileged bodies, because we can see it with our own fucking eyes. It's a problem that fat people are gaslighted and convinced that their fat is exclusively the result of personal failure, because other people refuse to fucking believe that maybe our bodies are just different.

So, you know, thanks for the research. But goddamn is it aggravating that we need a funded study to give permission to maybe treat as credible what fat people are saying about our own fucking selves.