Ultracheese:
The downsides I was aware of before. It's just a mix of being faced with the reality of those downsides and a bit of nerves in general. They're things I need to think about some more.
I like to think I could live with the standard fat shaming, since there's fat people everywhere. It's just that if I put on weight too fast, people may get concerned. Family, coworkers. I'm worried they'd try to intervene, and I don't know how to resist that without coming off like a weirdo (I am, but don't tell anyone that!). Ideally I like to be free of others' expectations, but when work involves a lot of networking (which I suck at to begin with) and peer evaluation, I wouldn't want that to reflect too poorly on me. Hopefully they'd see actual work and other factors as more important though.
Oh man, the consequences of fat shame can be unfortunately real... if medical fatphobia can exist, employment fatphobia seems like a very reasonable concern.
Based on a lot of factors (my size and build, i.e. clearly overweight/mid size, but I don't think I'm perceived as "fat"; my gender; the people around me, e.g. family, friends, and coworkers I have; etc.) I don't experience many negative comments about weight. And based on those factors--and the privilege some of them afford me--when I do get them, two options tend to work well:
1. White lies or brush off ("I have put on a few recently, huh?" or "Oh, yeah--new medication", or "I ate GOOD over the holidays", etc.)
2. The long game of helping them unlearn fatphobia
IME, the key with both is to maintain a positive attitude and to not give ground to the idea that being fat is bad/shameful/whatever, *even if they've succeeded in making me feel bad about it momentarily*. Internalized fatphobia sucks and makes me feel bad sometimes, but strategically, I perform positivity for a couple reasons:
1. If opted for a white lie or brush off, it's probably because I don't think I have the relational position/leverage to help someone change their thinking (e.g., insufficient rapport, fatphobia is too entrenched, or they hold some hierarchical position over me and it's gone to their head a bit, etc.). In other words, I lie when I think helping someone change is too risky, and I just want to end the interaction without incurring negative consequences.
2. If I opt for the long game of helping them unlearn fatphobia, I want that person to feel good when talking to me about weight, fat, etc., because ultimately I want to have several conversations with them where we iteratively progress through several levels of concepts/questioning/etc. It takes some patience to wait for and identify opportunities, and (for me at least), it can sometimes be tricky to know when to stop for the day--people can only tolerate so much challenging at once, ya know?
Expanding on this would be a whole other essay, but generally, I just ask questions and gently share information that help people to critically evaluate what they actually know about fat and health, about the moralization of fat and health, about their own thoughts/feelings about fat, and most importantly, about boundaries. Complaining about some other person's fatphobia has been a good angle: like "Ugh you won't believe the bullshit [insert influencer/celebrity/whomever] said..." IME, using phrasing that implies that they're a) informed/knowledgeable and b ) on my side creates pressure to not disagree directly (e.g., to avoid conflict or to avoid looking uninformed or bigoted) and ask questions instead. (I *think* it works because it creates incentive to understand a perspective rather than putting them a conflictual position of defending their current perspective, but I'm not sure)
These approaches aren't going to be right for everybody, but they work for me.
