Fat phobia is a tell – Sabina McAllister

Here’s something really critical to know about people who are mean to you about your weight. It’s not just that they suck. It’s that, deep down, they KNOW they suck.

The first time I really, really confronted this reality was back in 2022, when Ryan Ken tweeted this thread:

So much of the fatphobia of personal interactions is just an admission that you couldn’t like yourself if you were fat which just means you don’t like yourself. When I realized it was just people screaming “I DON’T LIKE MYSELF,” it lost a lot of its capacity to wound me.
— Ryan Ken (@Ryan_Ken_Acts) January 9, 2022

Someone secure in their relationship to their own body and worth would not be so moved by the mere existence of people in a space
— Ryan Ken (@Ryan_Ken_Acts) January 9, 2022

The you don’t care about yourself thing is a projection. Because you haven’t cared enough about yourself to find some self worth outside of the attachment to the arbitrary meat sack assignment we were given at birth.
— Ryan Ken (@Ryan_Ken_Acts) January 9, 2022

One of the biggest ways people tell on themselves is through the choice not to mind their business. When you do choose minding your business, you can actually decide to share your vulnerabilities intentionally instead of clumsily and by accident.
— Ryan Ken (@Ryan_Ken_Acts) January 9, 2022

I liked these quotes so much I made a TikTok out of them.

But the corollary is this: if you’ve constructed your self-esteem on either the opinions of others or on the size of your thighs, the degree to which you like yourself is always going to be shaky.

Any effort to seek validation through external means is always going to result in a self-esteem that is shaky as fuck.

The goal is for you to like you, no matter what size or shape your arbitrarily-assigned meat sack is.

One of the big lies of the weight loss industry is the idea that you can like your self more if you like your body more. That’s why weight loss is supposed to deliver happiness. Control your body = control your self-esteem.

But it really just doesn’t work that way. When you’re laying in bed at 3:00 am, thinking about how you fucked up at work that day, or how much your spouse despises you, or that your parents still control how much belief you have in yourself, the size of your body will not bring you any comfort, no matter how tiny you are.