I realise this sounds completely weird as many of my posts have explained in detail how difficult life can be for fat people. How can there suddenly be fat privilege when I always talk about fatphobia? Hear me out though. I recently read a fantastic post on thin privilege by The Fatphobia Slayer. Her blog is wonderful so if you haven’t already please check it out. In it she says: 

‘it is an immense privilege to be able to spend hours in the gym sculpting a perfectly chiselled body (oh, yeah, and a chiselled body does NOT mean a healthier body).
Not everyone can afford a gym membership, an hour alone without being responsible for someone else, a personal trainer, transportation to a gym, organic bone broth, etc. etc. It is fucking expensive to be “healthy” the way the media portrays it, and it is a fucking privilege.”

The Fatphobia Slayer

This is absolutely true and I sent her an email telling her so. It did get me thinking though….is there such a thing as fat privilege? There’s white privilege, straight privilege, thin privilege and cis normative privilege but surely no fat privilege? I mean, if thin privilege is a thing (which it is) how can fat privilege exist in tandem with it?

Extreme Poverty

Simple. To be fat you have to have money for food. I don’t mean you have to be well off. It’s an accepted fact that obesity is more often a problem in lower-income households because in the western world it is significantly cheaper to buy overly processed freezer food than fresh meat, fruits and vegetables. You can live on pizza, chips, fish fingers, pies and baked beans for about £30 a week for two. Having a diet rich in whole foods can easily cost double that.

What a lot of the government advisors and media forget though is there is a section of society below this level. These are the people who live in a constant worry about where their next meal will come from. Who may need to choose between food and their rent, or heat or shoes for their kids. It is one of the most shameful characteristics in our extremely wealthy society that horrifying numbers of families are relying on food banks to be able to eat. We are one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Everyone should have enough to eat and the government’s weaselling to escape this fact demonstrates why they shouldn’t be in power. This is not the point though.

 My point is that it’s highly unlikely that families relying on food banks or just scraping by on their salaries have enough money to eat enough to be fat. Families who couldn’t afford to give their children lunch when schools closed due to COVID are not going to be able to provide sufficient surplus food to the point where they will be overweight.

Safety

Similarly, we see pictures of refugees, the poor souls trying desperately to reach a place of safety for themselves and their loved ones. I don’t see many fat people among them. Bizarrely fleeing a war zone and living in terror for your life can limit the time you have to eat. Who knew? 

I don’t know if either of these things constitutes fat privilege or if it’s western privilege or just not being flat broke privilege but I feel that with so many people struggling it IS a privilege to have had enough money, food and safety to get fat.

I realise this may be pretty contentious so while I’d love to hear all your comments below please keep it kind and respectful.