I’m aware of the inherent cliché in saying that someone’s “so brave” for talking publicly about their own struggles. But it’s a challenge not to associate that term with Aubrey Gordon, who spent the past six years working with filmmaker Jeanie Finlay on the documentary “Your Fat Friend,” which played this summer at the Tribeca Film Festival and is set for mainstream release soon. What Gordon points out in this documentary is: In a culture obsessed and financially enmeshed (to the tune of trillions of dollars) with the “wellness industry,” complete with endless flowery language around self-care and body positivity, how is it still the case that fat people are so routinely treated as subhuman?…

She also chronicles years of being written off by doctors she’s seen, health professionals who often refuse to treat the thing she’s come to them for and go straight to telling her to lose weight before she comes back. Gordon, who has struggled with an eating disorder, says she went through an eight-year span where she simply stopped seeking medical help at all.

Author Roxane Gay has spoken and written about this hypocrisy — the notion that fat people aren’t paying enough attention to their health, when they are reviled by the professionals from whom they seek help or treatment. In a 2017 interview with Lindy West, Gay said, “Half the issues that fat people face happen because of accumulation of lack of health care. It’s not that you just are fat and all of a sudden you have diabetes or high blood pressure, it’s that you go to the doctor for a physical or strep throat or heart palpitations and they just say, ‘You’re fat, lose weight,’ and they don’t treat you, and then you stop going to the doctor. And then 10 years later, of course you’re an explosion of medical issues. Because you’re a human body and you haven’t seen competent medical professionals. It’s a disgrace.”

[I think the headline is basically true. No one should be offering stranger unsolicited weight loss advice in the grocery store. But doctors are another matter. They are literally paid to give health advice and probably know better than most people how being overweight plays into a host of other maladies. So, if a fat person wants to tell the nosy lady at the store to go to hell that’s fine with me but tuning out your doctor doesn’t prove the doctor was out of line. I’m sure a generation of smokers felt the same when their doctors hounded them about quitting smoking but the doctors were still right to say it. – John]