My 600-Lb Life Needs To Be Canceled

But as I’ve watched and laughed and cried, it’s become clear to me: feelings of superiority can breed the most monstrous behavior. Fatness is intertwined in my very being; I don’t know who I am if I’m not fat. But I’ve also prided myself on not being that fat. Many fat people have that moment when we walk into a room—sometimes with strangers, sometimes with friends— and we look around, sizing up everyone around us and attempting to figure out if we’re the largest person there. For me, that moment dictates a lot about what happens next. If I’m the largest person in the room, I feel an innate urge to shrink, to make myself as unobtrusive as possible. I position myself in a corner where nobody can see me, lean against the wall, and pretend as if this is natural posturing.

But on the rare occasion when I’m not the largest person in the room, when I size everyone up and gleefully notice someone bigger than me, it imbues me with a wicked, false confidence: “Now there’s someone else to focus their attention on.” I no longer have to be a wallflower because someone else can fill that role now. In these moments, I siphon that other fat person’s energy. Suddenly, I have an effervescent buoyancy, and I feel confident enough to socialize, to speak to strangers, to put my shoulders back, hold my head high, and own a room.

That same dynamic functions in my obsessive, repetitive watching of My 600 lb. Life. As I absorb the subjects’ stories, no matter how tragic they are, I get to reinforce to myself that I’m superior because my weight is “under control.” I’m still mobile. I can still walk into a plus-size store and purchase clothes. Doctors discriminate against me, but I’m not at the mercy of any particular provider to receive the care I need. In other words, I’m able to create distance between the fat body I inhabit and their fat bodies. I know I gain nothing from investing in fatphobia and perpetuating it toward those larger than me, and yet, it’s much easier to laugh at fat people on television than to think about those laughing at me.

Dr. Now routinely tells his show’s subjects that they smell, that their bodies have an odor, that they could be living a better life if they just slimmed down. He often couches these insults in humor and feigned concern, pretending as if his cruelty is really about preserving his patient’s life. The reality, however, is that he’s able to play up their shortcomings for the camera—bringing in equal amounts of ratings and disgust from viewers who have bought into the idea that it’s only their eating habits and never their genes or their trauma that have brought them to the point of immobility. It’s painful to admit that I feel morally superior to fellow fat people on reality television. I am sure—nearly positive— that this will disqualify me as a fat-positive activist. People might screenshot parts of this essay and spread it on social media to prove that I’m a fraud or that I purport to care about fat people in public, but in private, I am just as complicit in fatphobia as the very people and institutions I criticize.

Unlearning is a difficult process. It first requires you to look in the mirror, admit that you’ve benefited from a system at the expense of other, more marginalized groups, and then actively work to create new commitments and behaviors that dismantle that system. But when you’ve been indoctrinated into a fatphobic theology where thinness is the god to be idolized, and every element of your life underscores this worldview, it becomes easy to pick apart people whose bodies are more unacceptable than yours, even if only slightly. Peering out the window and asking, “Do I walk like her? I hope not. She’s waddling,” covers my own fear about being the person being judged in the way I’m judging. I deploy these skills, forged in fire and struck against iron, while watching My 600 lb. Life. I’m especially guilty of doing this when said person refuses to follow Dr. Now’s program and continues to either gain weight or lose it more slowly than Dr. Now would prefer. “That’s an absolute shame” is one of my favorite retorts, followed by “Well, that episode was a waste of time. They didn’t lose any weight!” I couch these barbed comments in the additional skin I’ve formed over time. I’ve learned that it’s better to strike first, to preemptively project before the echo can return, even if it comes at the expense of your self image. You see, if I am obsessed with this show, then no one can be obsessed with me. ●

From Weightless by Evette Dionne. Copyright © 2022 by Evette Dionne Excerpted by permission of Ecco, a division of HarperCollins. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.