Why Do We Fear Fat? A Brief Overview of the History of Fatphobia and Colonialism

By Athena Nair

Laidlaw Scholar

In today’s world, we are used to fat-shaming. We have become accustomed to the idea that weight is a measure of health. We associate fatness not only with a lack of health, but also a lack of beauty, intelligence, and personality. We often overlook these widespread instances of oppression and discrimination at individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels. We take our current paradigms of health for granted, and use faulty science to uphold these bigoted convictions. As with many systems of oppression in our world, fatphobia is based upon a colonial construct. This essay investigates the creation of fatness as a construct related to health, beauty, lifestyle, class, and race, and as a justification for oppression. Specifically, I detail the history of fatphobia during colonialism, the creation of the BMI, and the medical industry’s adoption of racist, fatphobic principles based on faulty data.

The BMI is considered a key signifier of health today, but it wasn’t created as a measure of health in the first place. In 1832, Belgian astronomer, sociologist, and statistician Adolphe Quetelet created the BMI, originally dubbed “Quetelet’s Index,” out of his interest in observing average measurements of a population (Eknoyan, 2007). Though Quetelet was a scientist with many passions and interests, including statistics, astronomy, and sociology, medicine and health were not part of these interests. Quetelet was interested in the l’homme moyen, a term which many translate to English as ‘average man.’ The added connotation of this, though, is the “ideal man” (Karasu, 2016) This distinction is crucial, because this language of an ‘ideal body’ links the BMI to social determinism and eugenics. Many who recount the history of the BMI fail to note this nuance, instead claiming that Quetelet was only interested in the ‘mean of a population.’ In reality, Quetelet “believed the mathematical mean of a population was its ideal” (Your Fat Friend, 2019). Of course, the population he was gathering data from was a group of upper class, thin, French and Scottish people from the 1800s. Therefore, Quetelet was already assuming the ‘ideal body’ would be found in wealthy, thin, Western Europeans, and this would become the basis for ‘ideal health’ for a vastly diverse population in the future. 

The BMI’s path from a statistic to the doctor’s common tool is a convoluted one. Despite most people not knowing his name today, Quetelet was a widely influential figure in the 19th century. He is considered a founder of modern Western statistics; he organized journals and meetings across the scientific community in Europe. He became a private tutor to Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert. He consulted with President Andrew Garfield about improving the U.S. Census. He also influenced sociological thinkers including the likes of Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim (Psychology Today). Quetelet’s work in positivist criminology (a theory to predict and explain criminal behavior) paved the way for criminologist and phrenologist Cesare Lombroso to assert that people of color are ‘savages’ and evolutionarily stunted. Therefore, people of color, to Lombroso and other positivist criminologists, were and are genetically prone to commit crimes. Additionally, Quetelet is considered to have founded the field of anthropometry, which includes phrenology, a subsection of racist pseudoscience and eugenics. Here lies a clear reason why the lens of intersectionality that Kimberlé Crenshaw offers is crucial to understanding oppression at large – colonialism has led to a subjugation of bodies of color in a variety of ways, on a variety of axes(Crenshaw, 1994). Not only did European colonizers differentiate by skin color to draw conclusions about morality, health, and intelligence, they also differentiated by body size, body measurements/proportions, gendered body parts, and more. Race was, in many ways, a proxy for many other attributes, making it a highly effective tool for creating and perpetuating oppressive hierarchies. 

So, how did the BMI intertwine with eugenics? How did it eventually become adopted as the measure of health we are familiar with today, despite the measure originally having nothing to do with health? In the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century, Quetelet's Index largely faded from scientific and cultural conversation. However, the association between people of color and fatness, and therefore the association of fatness as inferior, continued to thrive. These were the foundations for a European society (that eventually created and bred an American society) that functioned (and functions) on colonization and justifications of colonization – racism and fatphobia. This knowledge-making and spreading occurred (and occurs) through a variety of media: newspapers, postcards, live entertainment, government propaganda, etc. 

One of the prime early examples of the fetishization of fatness and the creation of a spectacle around Black fat bodies is the story of Sarah Baartman. Sarah Baartman was born in South Africa in the late 1700s. She made a deal with the heads of the house in which she worked at to travel to England to be a part of shows and circuses. Onlookers were excited and shocked by the exhibit of Sarah Baartman; they ogled and exclaimed at her large buttocks. It became solidified through imagery, not just words, that Black people and especially Black women were a spectacle, particularly because of their fatness. In fact, Baartman experienced a condition called steatopygia, which results in the accumulation of fat on the buttocks – a common condition in South Africa. She was also fetishized and gawked at because of her elongated labia (Ashley, 2021). Colonizers fetishized, hypersexualized, demonized, and exploited Baartman’s fat Black feminine body and the bodies of people of color around the world. The exploitation of Baartman’s body continued long after her death at the age of 26. Someone who had once danced with Baartman at a private party created a cast of her body. He then dissected her body and “preserved her skeleton and pickled her brain and genitals,” all of which were on public display until 1974 (Parkinson, 2016). Even after her death, Baartman’s body was taken advantage of without her consent. 

The supposed distinction in size between white/European and bodies of color was further bolstered by the stories and experiences that colonizers brought back with them to Europe and perpetuated in the media. Colonizers stole a variety of rich foods from around the globe to bring back to their countries. Due to this rapid introduction of new food, and lots of it, to the upper class, upper class Europeans began to see an overall increase in weight. They worried about their weight and pride themselves upon their thinness. They also linked this “epidemic” of fatness to the people they colonized. In South Asia, the British generalized heaviness to all Brahmin elites, and associated fatness with “weakness, laziness, and cowardice” (Forth, 2012). The British made assumptions based on very few facts to fit the agenda they were trying to create. For example, Ganesha is one of the many Hindu deities, known for having an elephant head, a large belly, and a love of laddoos, a South Asian sweet. The British saw Ganesha as a clear example of the reverence of fatness in South Asia – they took one piece of information and ran with it, claiming lower intelligence of South Asians because of their worship of fatness. In Africa, European colonizers ascribed some pastoral people’s “disinterest in hard work as ‘obesity of mind’” (Forth, 2012). Thus, people of color were being put into narratives of laziness, fatness, unintelligence, and savagery, and these narratives were the justification for the subjugation of their bodies and land.

The stories spun by European colonizers about South Asians and Africans, among other people of color, were spread across the European continent through the media. Academic and scholarly journals would cite these observations as scientific evidence for racism and phrenology. Cartoonists would depict fat people of color in caricatured, garish, dehumanizing manners. Personal essays, poems such as “The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling, short stories and general fiction perpetuated images of lazy, unintelligent people of color and the idea of white people (especially white men) having the burden and responsibility of ‘reforming’ them. Clearly, race was a primary way of distinguishing colonizers from the colonized – so, too, was body size. 

With fatphobia and racism deeply embedded in white Western cultural consciousness, these systems of oppression became fundamental to American capitalism in the early 1900s. This was the turning point for the link between weight and health, and therefore fatphobia itself, becoming “objective” rather than subjective. While before the 1920’s there were widespread associations and schemas related to weight, body size, race, and morality, the medical field hadn’t quite come into the picture yet. The 1920’s brought a time of rapid change with industrialization, science and technology advancement, new forms of media, global war, and more. By the 20th century, life expectancy was longer and people were less concerned about infectious diseases than chronic illnesses. Health started to become a matter of public and individual control, rather than something mostly out of one’s control. The thriving fields of eugenics and phrenology also perpetuated a desire for white Americans to be ‘ideal,’ or ‘the best’ – particularly to separate themselves from people of color. So body size, health, and morality all became conflated, and Americans became desperate to measure and control their health. As Kelsey Miller puts it, “Americans had both brand-new concepts of health and longevity, and very old biases about weight and mortality.” Combine these with the availability of the weighing scale, and one’s weight became a simple measure to determine and control one’s health and worth. 

World War I was an event that deeply transformed American politics, culture, and economy. Food was prioritized to be available for American soldiers, and the Food Administration began a campaign of food conservation: “Food Will Win the War.” Given that women were the ones staying home and in charge of the ‘Cult of Domesticity,’ campaigns and propaganda from the U.S. government and the health insurance industry targeted women, specifically. They put the responsibility of maintaining thinness and conserving food on women. This was continued and bolstered in World War II, and during this time, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company publicly published one of their weight tables (Miller, 2021). 

Insurance companies realized they could make a profit by seizing on the widespread fear of fat, so they pushed the association of higher weight with decreased life expectancy. They introduced weight into conversations about health in ways that had not been done before (Karasu, 2016). The data these claims were based on, were, as usual, faulty and biased. Their sample was life insurance customers over a few years, and many participants inaccurately self-reported their height and weight. In the 1940s, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company created and publicly published tables of “desirable weight,” with arbitrary and subjective measures of body frame – these were inspired by Quetelet’s Index. The table did not include age as a factor, and they were not created by health practitioners. They were based on 700,000 policyholders – all of them men, and most, if not all of them, white. Even still, the table was edited over the next several decades, and physicians began to use these tables to measure their patients’ weight in comparison to the ideal (Your Fat Friend, 2019). For the next 20 to 30 years, these weight tables were a primary basis of health, accessible to households around the country and used by medical professionals across the country, too. Once again, a diverse and vast population is subjected to a narrow measure of health that is both not inclusive of them and completely inaccurate. 

It was in the 1970s that Ancel Keys decided to compare methods of measuring body fat to find the most effective method. He collected data on men from 5 countries, comparing the methods of Quetelet’s Index, skin caliper, and water displacement. The countries were the U.S., Finland, Italy, and South Africa (which the authors noted their findings don’t apply to Bantu men) – predominantly white populations – as well as Japan. They found Quetelet’s Index to be the most effective of three relatively imperfect and weak measures of body fat, and renamed it the Body Mass Index, or BMI (Keys, 2014). 

The adoption of the BMI into healthcare was directly connected with the changes of definition and prevalence of ‘obesity’ In 1985, the National Institutes of Health changed their definition of ‘obesity’ to be linked to people’s BMI. They referred to the weight tables created by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in this report, highlighting their uses and limitations (Health Implications, 1985). Notably, limitations such as the data’s lack of applicability to entire populations were not mentioned in regard to the BMI, despite the BMI having similar limitations. In 1998, the NIH edited their definitions of ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ once more, lowering the threshold of what was considered ‘obesity’ significantly. CNN aptly described this incident, writing that the “federal government adopted a controversial method for determining who is considered overweight” (CNN, 1998). Unfortunately, this indignation and insistence of these measures of health being ‘controversial’ has left cultural consciousness as society has gotten used to the BMI, and we have come to accept it as a valid and reliable basic measure of health. 

The BMI is not only inaccurate, it is harmful in the way it has been and is being wielded as a measure of health. Various studies have pointed out the ways in which the BMI fails to account for racial and gender minorities. For example, the BMI overestimates health risks for Black people, underestimates health risks for Asians, and does not account for sex-assigned-at-birth based differences (The Endocrine Society, 2009; Racette, 2003). With all of its harms, and with its lack of validity and reliability, it is time for doctors to leave this tool behind. Not only that – we as individuals, communities, and as a society must reckon with the history of fatphobia, and actively dismantle images and messages that undermine fat folks and people of color. We need a new, inclusive definition of health and beauty, and we need our systems of health, justice, education, and more to support these initiatives. 

This brings the question – where, and how, do we go from here? Our society is in need of a radical transformation, not just reform; considering that our society has been built on colonial constructs of race, fatness, gender, etc., we need a completely new framework. A framework that allows us to reckon with and heal from our histories of body oppression, that supports restorative justice, mutual aid, rest, joy, justice, liberation. Until that framework and that world arrives (/ we bring her into reality), we need to investigate, unlearn, and relearn our concepts of health, beauty, weight, fatness, and the body. 

I compiled and transformed my research into a syllabus for a course that I taught this past semester: “The History of Fatphobia Through Colonialism & The Origins of Body Positivity.” This course draws from the work and curriculum of The Body Positive, including curriculum I helped write and rewrite during my Leadership in Action summer. Week 1 sets up the space for the course, inviting participants to create “brave space norms” that cultivate a supportive environment for vulnerability and mistakes, then asks the participants to explore their conceptions of health and learn health myths from reality (The Body Positive, 2019). Week 2 frames fatphobia as a social justice issue, asking participants to consider how size discrimination impacts people’s daily lives, and Week 3 explores the construction of fatness as a “Third World” feature. Week 4 expands to the current day implications of the history of health and fatphobia, considering the so-called ‘obesity epidemic.’ 

Week 5 invites participants to investigate their role in furthering body liberation, discussing action steps and ways to respond to everyday fatphobic comments and messages. Week 6 continues to define and debunk facets of the system of fatphobia, specifically diet culture, and Week 7 and 8 explore resistance of these systems including the concept of intuitive living. Weeks 9 and 10 delve into the history of the fat liberation movement, which has codified origins in the 1960’s, and what fat activism looks like today. Weeks 11 and 12 give participants a chance to re-investigate their own body stories, inviting them to look inward after learning and diving into the external structures and systems. And students wrap up the course with a final project that is some sort of action/activism around body liberation, whether an intervention in a local, school, online, or other community (Nair, 2023). This course is one remedy to our deeply ingrained fatphobia, by spreading awareness, building community, inviting self-discovery, and encouraging action. 

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