Good Fatty/Bad Fatty

The Good Fatty/Bad Fatty dichotomy was originally named by feminist and fat acceptance writer Kate Harding (Chastain, 2016). This dichotomy privileges certain fat people while marginalizing others by virtue of health status and/or engagement with health-promoting behaviours. Fat people who “take care of themselves” by engaging in certain health-promoting behaviours (e.g., dieting, regular exercise) are deemed socially acceptable “good fatties,” while anyone who does not or cannot engage in these behaviours (e.g., disabled and chronically ill fat people) is left behind and labeled a “Bad Fatty.” This often perpetuates healthism, or the moral obligation to maintain “good health” (e.g., Gibson, 2022).

Health is seen as entirely a personal responsibility, and this often leads to blame and shame being placed on those who are not “healthy.” Through the lens of healthism, “health” and health behaviours are very narrowly defined, focusing on the maintenance of physical health (and thinness) through exercise, eating a “clean” diet, etc., while neglecting other aspects of wellbeing, like mental or emotional health. Social factors (e.g., poverty, education, housing, discrimination, etc.) that greatly impact health are also often ignored or downplayed. 

Stacy Bias (2014) expands on this Good Fatty/Bad Fatty dichotomy in her 12 Good Fatty Archetypes comic. Each of these “Good Fatty” archetypes serves as a justification for social inclusion—the closer a fat person can align themselves to privilege, the more power and inclusion they can experience. However, this throws those who do not align with the archetypes under the bus, so to speak, with these so-called “Bad Fatties” being entirely excluded, while some fat people (the “Good Fatties”) are able to come closer to social “inclusion.” “Good Fatties” include “The Fat Unicorn”, who eats healthy foods, engages in regular exercise, and has perfect bloodwork; “The Work-In-Progress”, the fatty who is actively trying not to be fat anymore; and “The No-Fault Fatty”, who attributes their fatness to external factors, such as a medical condition.

These archetypes give us a way to think about how some people seek legitimacy and inclusion through alignment with dominant social norms, while reinforcing the exclusion of others. For example, white supremacist notions of health exclude fat Black women from being perceived as “healthy” (e.g., Harrison, 2021). It is also important to note that there is nothing inherently wrong with aligning with one or more of these archetypes; the issue lies in using this alignment as justification for why one should be included, at the expense of someone else. As Bias (2014) argues, everyone is valuable, deserving of respectful treatment, and worthy of inclusion regardless of health status or alignment with “Good Fatty” behaviours or characteristics.

Fat Spectrum

As mentioned in the introduction to this module, fatness and who we consider to be fat is socially constructed. The boundaries or borders of who is considered fat and who is not are malleable and often influenced by other identity markers such as race, class, disability, and sexuality. In the final section of this module, The Real Epidemic: Anti-Fatness in Health Care, you’ll learn about how fatness is constructed within medical discourses, often using racist and pathologizing measures such as the BMI (body mass index). Fat studies scholars and fat activists often work to resist such categorizations of fatness in an effort to draw attention to the fluid social construction of fat identity (Lupton, 2018). However, as fatness has a physical or embodied aspect to how a fat person moves through the world, many fat activists have created their own terms of categorization that acknowledge how fat people of different sizes may face increasing instances of oppression, marginalization, and exclusion. 

Blogger and fat activist Linda, who blogs as Fluffy Kitten Party, provides an in-depth overview of activist authored “fategories.” In this entry, Linda (2021) refers to a fat spectrum. The concept of a fat spectrum has been constructed, referenced, and built upon by numerous fat activists. Most often external societal measures, such as clothing size or physical measurements, are used to define categories on the fat spectrum. For example, Ash (2016) from The Fat Lip podcast reflects on the fat spectrum, adding the term “infinifat” to describe those at the largest end of the fat spectrum. Much of Ash’s (2016) conceptualization of this term references contemporary Western plus-size fashion sizing. Her body is an “unknowable size” because it is larger than the largest size of clothing available at mainstream plus-size fashion retailers, so Ash coined the term “infinifat.” She explains her reasoning as such:

But what should we fats on the very very very fat end of the fat spectrum be called? I humbly propose “infinifat.” Because what size am I? I really have no fucking idea. A size greater than any assignable size number. Infinity? (Ash, 2016)

As Fluffy Kitten Party (Linda, 2021) acknowledges, not all fat activists embrace the fat spectrum as a useful tool for understanding fat identity and resisting anti-fatness. Some fear that the need to categorize fatness is akin to harmful pathologizing measures such as the BMI or will lead to increasing exclusion or siloing in the fat activist movement, where activist groups or gathings may be restricted to those who are “fat enough” at the detriment of the fat liberation movement as a whole. In particular there are some fat activists who resist the term infinifat and its connotation of being “infinitely fat” or fat beyond measure as this framing can feel particularly exclusionary or otherwise harmful. That being said, the continued evolution and use of the fat spectrum points to a growing understanding of how fatness is not a universal experience and how those who are at the larger or largest end of the spectrum may experience more physical and social limitations and exclusions than those at the smaller end. This framework is especially useful when we consider the material conditions of fatness and fat embodiment.

Weight-Inclusive Health Frameworks

When discussing fat activism or fat acceptance, many people’s initial response is to ask, “but what about health?” It is also not uncommon for people to support body positivity or fat acceptance but only “as long as you’re healthy,” drawing a boundary around who is allowed to feel positively (or even neutrally) towards their body. The idea that fatness is unhealthy is deeply embedded in our society, as we will explore more in the Healthcare section of this module [internal link to health care sub-module?]. Higher weight bodies are inherently storied as being risky, despite significant uncertainties in the “obesity” literature about the health risks of having a higher body weight (e.g., Friedman et al., 2020). It is vital to consider how anti-fatness directly influences the health and wellbeing of people categorized as “obese” (e.g., Rinaldi et al., 2020), instead of placing blame for fatness and ill health on individual people and behaviours. [link to “Critiquing Normative Weight Science” page in the health care sub-module?]

As an alternative to normative, fat-maligning health frameworks, weight-inclusive frameworks like Health at Every Size (HAES) have been introduced. HAES emerged out of the fat acceptance movement, and has been further developed and popularized by critical obesity scholars and non-diet health professionals. The Association of Size Diversity and Health has created a series of blog posts on the history of the HAES movement (Bruno, 2013). However, these frameworks are not without their critiques, including how such frameworks may reinscribe healthism (Your Fat Friend, 2020), as well as how some supposed leaders of the HAES movement have weaponized their privilege against the very people they claim to be advocating for (Mercedes, 2022).

Thus, the argument pertaining to fatness and health has two layers: yes, fat people can be “healthy” and the evidence about fat being unhealthy is not as clear cut as we have been led to believe, but fat people also do not owe anyone “good health” and deserve to live free from discrimination regardless of their health status. There is a need for weight-inclusive approaches to healthcare, but existing models like HAES may miss the mark. Fat activist interventions, including art, may help to disrupt some of the harmful beliefs and behaviours towards fat people within healthcare, as we will explore throughout this module with the use of digital stories and images.

Authors

Allison Taylor, Meredith Bessey, and Calla Evans

Contributors

• Elisabeth Harrison
• Lilith Lee