Anonymous wrote:There is some truth to what OP is saying but I think you are looking at it VERY myopically because you are framing this entirely as being about weight and it's obviously not.
Like there's another version of your story where you instead focus on how people who are in poor health are treated versus people who are healthy since your weight gain was linked to health issues.
There is a version of your story that has to do with how mothers with young children are treated since your weight gain was closely linked to your pregnancies.
And yes there is also a version of this story that is about how you feel about yourself and the confidence you project and how that can influence how people see you and treat you. And that's particularly true around issues of weight which can be so personal and mental for women (myself included).
Fatphobia is real. But being a size 12 is not really that fat and you might consider that the way you are talking about it may actually be considered hurtful to people who have never been that small as adults. I have found that women who spend a lot of their adulthood as very small (and a size 2-4 is VERY small) and then spend any amount of time at even a slightly larger size seem to be very vocal about how much harder this is. But for people who spend their entire lives larger have a different perspective and don't think about it the same way you might.
yeah, no. It's about weight. I've had the exact same (flawless) labwork at "normal" weight, "overweight" and "obese", and the way I was treated by both doctors and casual encounters speaks directly to the rampant fatphobia in our culture. I've been anorexically thin, and sick, and praised for losing weight, even though that "weight loss" (i.e. starvation diet) tanked my health in ways that showed up at my clinic visits.
The winner is the thinner. It's stupid, there's no actual science behind it, and it's definitely a real thing.