The Problem With Overweight And Obese – Yahoo News

This is an excerpt from Quibbles & Bits, the BuzzFeed News copy desks newsletter. Sign up below to nerd out about language and style with us once a month!

For BuzzFeed News Body Week, the copy desk is looking at the language we use when we write about bodies, particularly fat bodies. Its always been at the core of our style guide to avoid any sort of body-shaming, and were always learning when it comes to what words people want to use to talk about their bodies when its relevant to talk about them at all.

As always, we avoid euphemistic language. Unless someone describes themself as chubby or full-figured, were never going to refer to them as such. Theres nothing wrong with fat. The word itself is just a descriptor, but a society that praises and elevates thinness has tried to make fat so negative that people opt for terms they believe are based in medicine, like overweight or obese. But they fail to take a step further and question whats really behind those words and what stigmas they perpetuate.

People say obese and overweight under the guise that they are discussing someones health rather than their appearance, but this vocabulary insidiously upholds anti-fat bias. Overweight implies that there is some objective standard weight by which we can assess the health of every body. And obese comes from the Latin obesus, which means having eaten oneself fat, a definition that activist and writer Aubrey Gordon describes as inherently blaming fat people for their bodies in her book What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About Fat.

Obesity is a category people fall into based on their body mass index (BMI), a metric that has come up frequently in the last two years of the pandemic; the CDC claimed that it indicates a higher risk for severe COVID-19, and ones BMI measurement qualified some to get the vaccine earlier than others. As a copy desk, we had a discussion about person-first language when it comes to obesity (e.g., person with obesity), but the truth is the term itself is best avoided. BMI doesnt measure anything about an individuals health it simply looks at height and weight and is based on a Belgian scientists idea of the average man 200 years ago. Its racist and served as a stepping stone to the creation of eugenics. And both obesity and overweight have contributed to weight stigma that leads to employment discrimination and physical and mental health issues.

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Gordon, also known as Your Fat Friend, has written endlessly on this subject, and her book dives into the pervasiveness of anti-fat bias in society and its incredibly detrimental effects. In an essay for Self, she explains why she uses the words anti-fatness and anti-fat bias to discuss the attitudes, behaviors, and social systems that specifically marginalize, exclude, underserve, and oppress fat bodies. These terms, she writes, are clear about who is being hurt under this societal dynamic, and they denote an active discrimination as opposed to a legitimate fear, as suggested by the word fatphobia. (We follow a similar guidance on the suffix -phobia and try to use anti- constructions since were usually talking about a prejudice rather than a psychological disorder.)

Even in our own copyediting, there have been times when weve opted for body-shaming when we really meant anti-fat. This is perhaps reflective of how ingrained it is in us to avoid language that makes us uncomfortable or to cower to the vernacular of a body positivity movement that still centers thin bodies and isnt honest about the ways fat people are really under attack. Of course, we also want to use the language that people use to describe themselves, and sometimes doing so leads us to avoid words like fat, which society has trained everyone to read as pejorative. But theres a stark difference between sensitivity and euphemism.

Fat justice is how Gordon describes the goal of her work. I yearn for more than neutrality, acceptance, and tolerance, she writes in What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About Fat, all of which strike me as meek pleas to simply stop harming us. As with any movement for justice, language is only a small part of it, but it matters.

Thats why when we reference clothing sizes, we use the terms straight-size and plus-size. We dont use words like normal to describe people or their bodies.

So, as always, think about the words youre using to talk about peoples bodies, and also why youre talking about bodies in the first place. Do the physical descriptions in your story add color, or are they reminiscent of a tabloid headline? Does your choice to describe one body and not another affect how your reader perceives your subjects and sources in ways you didnt intend? Did you avoid a word that made you uncomfortable and replace it with one that fails as an accurate description?

Well keep striving to use neutral language when writing about peoples bodies, and, perhaps more importantly, asking ourselves if its even relevant.

glabella gluh BEH luh (noun) The area between your eyebrows. According to Merriam-Webster, its first known use was in 1823, and it descends from the Latin glabellus, meaning hairless (although eyebrowless might be more accurate).

This is where you see frown lines (or elevens) from furrowing your brow and squinting. Wrinkles that form in the glabella are known as dynamic wrinkles because they are caused by muscle contractions which injections of Botox, or botulinum toxin, can temporarily paralyze or relax.Used in a sentence: My glabella is so smooth that you cant tell how furious I am that I spent so much on Botox last week.

And finally, a tweet:

This story is part of our Body Week series. To read more, click here.

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The Problem With Overweight And Obese - Yahoo News