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thebestofallpossible:

skyure:

thelittlestastronaut:

clatterbane:

agreekdoctor:

lady-yomi:

thisisthinprivilege:

mainstreamqueen:

loverofbrownsugar:

bigfatscience:

tribvtaries:

fattyatomicmutant:

viergacht:

sinthiasweet:

thecrazygeek-rant:

thisisthinprivilege:

I work at a daycare with infants.

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

Thin privilege is a small, pretty baby getting better childcare because the caretaker doesn’t think she’s too fat to be allowed to eat.

This reminds me of a cousin of mine who ended up with her kids being taken away from her by social services for a number of reasons but mostly for nearly killing her baby daughter. How?

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

(Note. She still, to this day, maintains the view that she was right and the doctors were wrong. “They just want fat kids so they can keep employed treating them for all those diseases that being fat causes.” = her actual words.)

My mom had me dieting with her when I was eleven. She had me eating less than 600 calories a day because she was worried I was going to “get huge.” She even grounded me once because she found out my friends were bringing me lunches! I ended up passing out, going to the ER, and getting two IVs at once BC I was so goddamn dehydrated. Soooooo surprised they didn’t call child services… And looking back, this was the root of my anorexia. I’m nearly 22 and still fighting it. Please don’t starve your fucking children.

For fucks sake babies are SUPPOSED to be fat, what is wrong with people? It’s just stored energy, and growing children need stored energy – an 11 year old is just about to hit some major growing years. Damn.

Fatphobia

Is

Real

and it kills

This is no joke. people will literally starve their own babies cause they don’t want them getting fat. A parent brought in their six month old baby who was having breathing issues and kept getting sick. the parent was asked if the baby was eating regularly and the parent straight up told the doctor that they only feed the baby once a day. ONCE A DAY. A FUCKING BABY. they even had the nerve to say because they didn’t want the baby to get fat. people like this are real. they would rather have a dead baby than a fat one.

My youngest son is a very big boy and has been since he was born. When he was 10 months old I took him for his well-baby check and vaccinations. The nurse noted his weight and said, quite casually, “He is in the 99th percentile for weight so he is at risk for obesity. You may want to keep an eye on that.” I said, “He is exclusively breastfed. He refuses to eat any solids yet.” What did she expect me to do? What would it mean to “keep an eye on” an exclusively breastfed baby’s weight?

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.”

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

We need to completely eliminate weight talk from medicine, especially when it comes to children. Even the smallest exposure can have terrible consequences.

Wtf…

A friend from college had been going to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. She was told to lose weight.

Over the course of several years, she went back to the doctors time and time again, telling them that she’d been sticking to the diet but because of her breathing problems she had been unable to even walk for more than 20 minutes at a time.

The doctor got her into an exercise programme and told her that she just needed to really try to lose weight because that was clearly the reason for her breathing problems.

By the time they found the tumour on her lungs, it was inoperable. She only lived three months after diagnosis. She was 25.

She’d had the tumour for over five years.

The doctor was so focused on the fact that my friend was “fat”, that they refused to look for any underlying cause.

They killed her.

Weight-first treatment KILLS. Fatphobia KILLS.

I have 2 scary stories to share about fatphobic doctors & parents harming their childs/patients’ health:

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

It’s a real shame that we all have so much stories to share about this issue. A REAL SHAME.

Future doctors, interns, and residents following me:

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

Don’t let bias against your fat patients kill them!

(#and this is just when we actually go to the doctor and tell them we have problems #how many of us just give up #or won’t mention anything that seems like too much of a ‘fat’ problem)

i’d really like my thin followers to reblog this if you can. fat people are already here for each other, we need you guys to help us out too. this is something i never see anyone actually talking about in-depth, and it’s disappointing. be there for your fat siblings, too.

Things my doctors told me I should lose weight for:

=> Depression. If I was just thinner, I’d not be as depressive. (Yes. This is the actual quote of an actual licensed psychiatrist. I am not with this doctor anymore)
=> Lymph-Edema. If I was losing weight, my chronically ill lymph system would be fine. No actual acknowledgement that I already had those when I was skinny, from the same doctor that diagnosed them first when I was 21. (this was not the doctor that later on became my main physician for this problem)
=> rheumatic Arthritis. Losing weight would be the magical cure-it-all. My hands would not hurt anymore if I lost weight.

=> Migraine. Losing weight was described as the only way my migraines would ever stop. No explanation to why my bodyweight causes migraine.
=> Needing glasses. One optometrist flat out told me that being fat would make me squint, and that’d be the cause my eyesight was getting worse. Again, no actual acknowledgement that I needed glasses since I was still skinny, and that with age, my family has a knack for seeing less and less.

Other things my weight has been seen as the cause off:
(I will actually do some quotes that I got from doctors)

=> Hairloss

=> Acne
=> Teeth being “too yellow to be pretty”
=> pregnancy based kidney problems
=> pregnancy (…I…. what? I got pregnant back then because I was too fat? HMkay)
=> ADHD

(And now to the surreal ones)
=> Flu

=> broken Limbs
=> Fatigue (Starts with fat, so it makes sense /endsarcasm)
=> Sunburn

I was only ONCE in a doctor’s office, where I wasn’t getting my ears chewed off for being fat.
That was the later cardio-phlebologist/lymphologist, that I found by pure sheer luck.
Who looked at me, at my history, and tut-ed.
“Can see why you are not losing weight as the other doctors demand you to. You’re having lymph/lip-edema. Stage 2, bordering on stage 3. Losing weight is nearly impossible by then.”
To my, rather shocked, expression that the other doctors said I should just lose weight and it’d be better:
“Yeah, most doctors LOVE to beat that little ‘lose weight and you’ll be healthy’ knowlege to death. No, where you are now, you’d only lose a significant amount of weight if you’d get surgery, and that would mess up your lymph-system, doing more harm than good. Now we work on maintaining, or keeping the future weight gain, to a minimum.”
And that we did.
GENTLE exercise (to keep the body from going stiff), lymph drainages, and NOT depriving me of calories I need for my body to function.

All other doctors looked at my increasing weight, shook their head, and told me the magical-cure-it-all.
“Lose weight”

I went to the doctor for back pain from being an idiot and falling/jumping shoulder first into a wall. Her first words were “well, you know you are overweight”.