Obese is NOT A More Polite Way To Say "Fat"

bigfatscience

“Obese” is not a more polite way to say fat.

ok2befat

“Obese” is the word doctors use to deny fat people medical care.
Medical discrimination is deadly.
Most fat people do not want to be called “obese”.

skyliting

The Wii Fit called me obese in its cute little voice. I shut it off immediately, had a good long self loathe and haven’t played it since. It defeat its own purpose.

ragnell

There are polite ways to say fat. There’s adjectives that imply attractiveness, like full-figured and plump and chubby and such. There’s also hedging around the term that’s awkward but at least says that someone doesn’t want to have the same connotations fat does, so they’ll say “sizeable” or “large” “hefty” and basically a million ways to say someone is “Big But Not Because of Height.” Actually considerate people have come up with a lot of ways to describe people.
Obese is not one of those ways. Obese is a cold clinical term that says being fat is unhealthy, undesireable, objectively bad. It tells us that the person saying it thinks that they are being nice, but they are looking down on you and think that your body shape is a failure of some sort. And it has the weight of having a specified medical definition, meaning they are trying to present this as an OBJECTIVE FACT rather than merely their relative opinion of what constitutes a normal weight. Fat, on the other hand, is a matter of opinion. Fat and thin are used relatively, like “Lisa is fatter than she was years ago” or “One sister was thinner than the other.”
“Obese” is a WAY more hurtful term than “fat.”

wincestshippingtrash

THISSSSSSS!!!!!!!

I even wrote my doctor a letter about the use of the word “obese.” It isn’t that she tries to shame me into losing weight. She understands that my dumpster fire of an endocrine system is a major determining factor in my body type and DNA is responsible for the rest of it. However, she makes the mistake of thinking that “obese” is a neutral, clinical term. It is not.

Obese is not a neutral clinical term like “hypothyroid,” which means that my thyroid gland doesn’t produce enough thyroid hormone. It is not a neutral term like “diabetic,” which means that I have a dead pancreas floating around in my body being a useless piece of shit. It is not a neutral term like “menopausal,” which denotes a woman who no longer gets periods.

The difference between these terms and “obese” is that people in the medical profession don’t judge me as some sort of disgusting failure for being hypothyroid, diabetic, and menopausal. “Obese” is a word that is sneered and spat out like the person saying it just tasted something bad. “Obese” is an extremely loaded word.

I said that I would straight up rather be called disgusting and ugly than referred to as “obese.” The fact that the first description of me in a medical setting is going to be “obese, elderly woman” makes me not want to talk to any medical professional ever.

I further went on to say that “obese” is not even a human being. “Obese” is a pariah. “Obese” is a thing, not a person.

You can refer to my body type as large, heavy, big, stocky, chunky, or straight-up fat. Fat isn’t an insult, it’s simply an adjective.

Never refer to anyone as “obese.” It’s a gross, nasty, ugly word. It is dehumanizing. I would love to see it stricken from the lexicon.

I would also love to see people treated as people, regardless of their size. We sure as hell ain’t there yet, but I will keep fighting for it.