Dr. Pattie Thomas and her husband Carl Wilkerson wrote a book called Taking Up Space: How Eating Well and Exercising Regularly Changed My Life that is just really awesome. If you haven’t read it, it’s well worth investing in.
The first chapter of the book has 10 fat myths. As I read them, I had so many ideas and thoughts and things I wanted to say about each one. I contacted Dr. Thomas and she said that it would be okay for me to use her list to talk about each of the myths here. So–welcome to a 10-week series.
Myth number ten on the list: Fat is ugly.
This is the last of the myths in Taking Up Space. And, in my opinion, perhaps the biggest. In fact, I’d like to make a case for the idea that all of the rest of the myths stem from this one.
When it comes to the current war on obesity and culture of fat hatred in the Western world, beauty and health have combined for a one-two punch that is particularly devastating to women. Perhaps if we were being told that we needed to be thin only to be beautiful, breaking away from that myth would be easier. But we are also bombarded by the message that our fat is going to kill us and makes us bad mothers.
The current culture of fat hatred hits us where it hurts the most, in our softest, most vulnerable places.










