Who Called the Ob*se Police?

Let's talk about how we feel about body language. Plus: The one big thing I'd change about my first book.

CW for repeated use of o words today. It’s Burnt Toast policy to use an asterisk whenever we write the words ob*se or ob*sity, in recognition of how those terms are used to weaponize and denigrate fat bodies. But it’s also Burnt Toast policy not to meaningfully change someone else’s quotes. So in today’s essay, you’ll see me using the asterisk when I reference these terms in my own voice, and not using it when I’m quoting someone who wouldn’t employ the asterisk themselves.

Friday Thread: What's Your Preferred Body Size Language?

On Monday, The Atlantic published an essay called The Obese Police criticizing the recent push among medical institutions and obesity researchers for “person first” language to describe body size. Organizations such as the Obesity Action Coalition and the American Medical Association have all begun saying “person with obesity” rather than “obese person,” and the AP Stylebook (which journalists, researchers and publishers of all kinds use as the gold standard on language) has now adopted the same policy:

“People with obesity, people of higher weights and people who prefer the term fat use diverse terms – including those and others – in reference to themselves. Use care and precision, considering the impact of specific words and the terms used by the people you are writing about. When possible, ask people how they want to be described.” The new stylebook guidance says the word obese shouldn’t be used as a modifier if possible.

This is a big deal; when I wrote about anti-fat bias for mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, I had to push very, very hard to get the word “obese” out of my stories (unless I was quoting a source who said it). But it’s also not a big enough deal because the AP Stylebook is not going so far as to reclaim fat as a neutral body descriptor.

In Fat Talk, I describe the obesity research community’s fixation on person-first language via a conversation I had with William Dietz, MD, PhD, a former director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

During my first interview with Dietz, I used the phrase “obese people” in reference to his own research, and he interrupted me: “Wait a minute, let me hold you right there,” Dietz said. “You used the term ‘obese.’ And I don’t know whether you’ve had this conversation, but we’re very sensitive to that. I would hope that you would do a word search and eliminate the term ‘obese,’ because that’s an identity when you talk about an obese person, or an obese child, rather than a person or child with obesity.” […] “We talk about people with cancer, we don’t talk about cancer people. This is a critical concern for people in the field.”

What was interesting about that conversation is how comfortable Dietz, a thin person, felt telling me — “a person with obesity,” to use his words—how to describe… bodies like mine.