This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. This week features a guest interview by Sojourners editorial assistant Greta Lapp Klassen. Subscribe here.
Travel back in time with me to the early 2000s: Celebrities were openly fat-shamed in tabloids, and supermarkets were overrun by all things “low” — low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, low-sodium, or low-sugar. Diets like Atkins, paleo, keto, raw foods, and juice cleanses abounded. TV shows like The Biggest Loser and My 600-lb Life were used to paint fat people as lazy, undisciplined, and disgusting. In the 2010s, a 10-day feeding tube diet gained some traction, promising to help brides lose 20 pounds in 10 days by consuming only 800 liquid calories a day.
A child of this era, I internalized the idea that nothing I accomplished would be worth much unless I was thin. By late high school, I worked out daily and followed a diet prescribed by the YouTuber whose workouts I followed. If I missed a day of workouts or ate a brownie, I felt like I needed to make up for it with extra workouts. Despite being undeniably thin, I still felt fat, and that feeling controlled me. Maybe it’s controlled you, too.
Over the past few years, I’ve learned a lot about diet culture, nutrition, and what really qualifies as healthy, and I have concluded that our country does indeed have a fatness problem, but not the one most people think we have: We have a problem with how we view and treat fat people. And Christianity is partially responsible.
I’d heard of Christian weight loss programs, but I wanted to know more about the influence Christianity has had on the ideology of anti-fatness. That’s how I discovered the work of Rev. Anastasia E. B. Kidd, director of contextual education at the Boston University School of Theology, pastor in the United Church of Christ, and author of Fat Church: Claiming a Gospel of Fat Liberation.
Fat Church recognizes that everyone comes to the work of fat-acceptance from a different place and serves as both a primer on the work of combating anti-fatness, and as a place for Kidd to spell out her vision for a different type of Christianity that accepts and celebrates all people, without trying to change them — including fat people. It is a balm of a book, both educational and cathartic.
I talked with Kidd last month about fat liberation, Fat Church, diet culture, and more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Greta Lapp Klassen, Sojourners: You and other fat activists use the word “fat” as a neutral description of human bodies, just like short or tall. Why is reclaiming the word important to fat activists?
Anastasia E. B. Kidd: A very core starting place for fat activism is claiming the word fat. Not everybody who is fat is ready to claim the word fat because of all the cultural associations, [but] like the queer community has reclaimed the word queer, the fat community has invited people to reclaim the word fat as a neutral or even positive word to describe the adipose tissue that lives on every single person’s body, and/or the shape of their bodies. And saying that in a neutral or even positive way is a very disruptive act in this world.
There is no healthy and sustained way for a truly fat person to become thin without over medicalization, orthorexia, or eating disorders. So, for a fat person to claim the identity of fatness is a radical act of presence and living in their true form. Fat people are not failed thin people — they’re fat people. Claiming fatness as a permanent, immutable, and positive identity — just as one would claim any other sort of human identity marker — means that I can no more change the size of my body than I can the color of my skin.
Fat activists also reject the use of the word obesity, and in your book, you stylize it as “ob*sity.” Can you talk about that decision?
Obesity is the medicalized word for fatness, and the underlying Latin word, obesus, means “to eat oneself fat.” That [definition] automatically assumes something about how I became fat: lack of willpower and overeating. It also belies a misunderstanding of biological fatness, which is a very complex issue full of genetics, health behaviors, social determinants of health, and metabolic differences. You don’t call a tall person some medicalized word and then try to shorten them.
[Obese] was actually used as a slur [starting in] the 1600s. It would be as if the word stupidity was used to talk about someone with developmental delays. As if “stupidity studies” were what we were using to study developmentally delayed folks.
Obesity studies always start from the place of fatness being problematic, so the assumption is that it would be good to end obesity. The assumption [is that] that my body has a problem, and that it needs medical intervention to become “normal.” But that’s just plainly not true. Fat studies, [by contrast], are interested in studying fatness as a sociological or even health behavior. We’re interested in keeping fat bodies, not blaming fat bodies for the cultural discrimination against them, and seeing how fat bodies can thrive, even in a society that is not necessarily made for them.
In the beginning of your book, you talk about how witnessing your mom die from breast cancer helped you finally break through your fat shame. What is the story there?
My mom was a big woman. She was smaller than me but considered herself fat. The thing about fatness is it doesn’t matter what size you actually are; if you consider yourself fat and you buy into diet culture, you’re going to have dieting behaviors. My mom metabolized [diet culture] and since I was a fat child, she put those same diet restrictions and behaviors on me. I went along with those willingly for years and years because I thought that was the way to be well. [Then] I saw her lose so much weight, wasting away from cancer, and denying herself the foods and the strength that would have come with calories and protein because these foods weren’t in her dieting repertoire — it shocked me. I didn’t know how deep the diet culture went until I saw her refuse peanut butter and whole milk, even when she was only eating a couple hundred calories a day. We kept on having to buy her smaller clothes.
She would go to church and people would praise her, and then it came to the point where she couldn’t go to church anymore. I saw her waste away. When she finally died, I was so angry because I wanted my plump and happy and healthy mom back. I thought she would have lasted longer with the ability to deny herself the diet culture.
It [became] important to start dismantling that self-hatred in my own body. And so as she died, I broke my fat shame and said, “I can’t live this way. Or at least, I have to figure out if there is another way to live.”
One of the things that makes your book so unique is that it outlines the history of anti-fatness in the church. What are some of the most interesting and important intersections between the church and anti-fatness?
My first experience with the conflation of “righteous Christian [living]” with weight loss culture was Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down workshops in the 1990s. I was in high school. Shamblin had an empire based on the idea that to be fat was to be unfaithful, to be fat was to ruin your body’s temple. She made millions on this. And that was just assumed to be true in the culture of Christianity in which I grew up in.
To lots of people throughout church history, [being] a pious and controlled person [meant denying] ourselves pleasure in whatever form it took. So, if the assumption of fatness is that overeating is what makes us fat, then being thin has a moral righteousness, even if that’s just the body structure your genetics gave you.
Early American diet culture was very concerned with pure and holy living, defined through diet and exercise, because disease was thought of as a response to sin; anything that was unhealthy in your body was your fault or the fault of your ancestors, and God was punishing you for that. That led to terrible things being done to anybody who had a non-normative body and continues to inform the rampant individualism that is behind the idea that we can bootstrap ourselves into a whole other body size or shape.
So much of our current wellness and diet culture is rooted in dissatisfaction and shame about our current state. We are told that we have to do certain things for an unspecified, never-ending result that we must fight to maintain without ever knowing if we’ll get there.
Repentance is the backbone of diet culture. Food moralism, the idea that there are good or bad foods, and that we’re righteous if we eat an apple and we have to repent for eating a hamburger, either through shame or actually doing something to “work off” the “sin” of whatever we’ve done.
How are you and other fat activists tracking the introduction of Ozempic, the insulin-inducing drug that, while not approved for weight loss, is being prescribed to treat it?
It’s fat eradication! One thing I try to be careful of is not to set health as a requirement for dignity, but it’s hard to talk about Ozempic or any other medicalized intervention for fatness without bringing health up, because that’s the underlying concern when people either go, or are forced to go, on Ozempic. What happens when a person is in a perfectly healthy fat body [but] insurance companies, because they believe the [American Medical Association’s] decision to make “obesity” a disease, say that I am not participating in my own health care if I don’t take Ozempic? What happens if I decide that my fat body, that functions the way I want it to function in the world, does not need to be intervened against?
The real question is of bodily autonomy and fat eradication. If this was against tall people or short people, we would balk at this. Because culturally, [for] tall people or short people, there are some accommodations needed, but they aren’t maligned and called a disease. But the AMA, against the recommendation of its own [Council on Science and Public Health], decided to [define] obesity as a disease in 2013. Again, against the people who had been working for years, who told them, “Don’t do this,” the doctors still decided, because it allowed doctors to bill insurance for weight loss interventions that they knew were coming down the pipeline. Even just talking to somebody about their weight loss allowed doctors to add that to the insurance claim. For the sake of money, they created the disease.
What the fat community is worried about is for those of us who claim permanent fat identity, will we be forced into weight loss interventions to get dignified and complete health care? We might move toward that.
All of this is exacerbated far more for people of color and for people in economically disadvantaged communities. Because if you interrogate anti-fatness in the same way as you interrogate other oppressions, you begin to see that the capitalist, white supremacist system is at work against fat bodies as a placeholder for the white supremacist, capitalist machinations against Black and brown bodies. It’s a great way to eradicate entire populations of people. And that’s very, very scary.
You offer up a different version of Christianity: fat church. What does that mean to you and to the people who are part of your community?
To me, [fat church] is not a place, but a set of principles on which we function, a movement toward a space in which structural anti-fatness is interrogated, so bodies have the ability to be free in a fat church.
True body liberation would be the end of discrimination against anybody, for any reason. So body liberation in full would necessitate the end of white supremacy, the end of policing, the end of patriarchy, of usury, capitalism, structural class hierarchies, and all these other systems of violence that we have in society.
Fat church would be a space where we try our best to go against the grain of society by practicing body liberation. Which means accommodation [of different body sizes and abilities], which means collective care, which means believing in the diversity of God’s creation as a good thing.
For Christians who want to work towards this vision, what do you think are some tangible first steps within a church community?
Just like any other sort of organized system of violence in society, I would say the first thing is to learn more about it. Anyone who’s brand new to it needs to read copiously. I’d be grateful if they read Fat Church — I wanted to distill the 10 years of research that I did into a space that is pretty digestible. There are so many other wonderful books and podcasts and places where they can learn about systemic anti-fatness, they can get involved with NAAFA, National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, which is championing fat liberation, fat acceptance, laws, and anti-discrimination laws in Massachusetts and other states. Currently, it is still completely legal to discriminate against fat people — for employment, for housing, for any number of services — in 48 of 50 states.
The other piece is to claim that identity. If [the about 74 percent of Americans who are considered “overweight” or “obese,”] understood the way the medical, beauty, health, and wellness industries, are all aimed at our pocketbooks, not only our waist lines, and began to slowly dismantle our body shame, that would go a long way toward creating the space for fat people, alongside other human identities that need care and protection in this world.
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