'When people say baby fat...they’re suggesting that someone is allowed to be fat at a certain age with the unspoken addition that they will be expected not to be fat after that.'
Adults foist their own fatphobia onto children in numerous ways, not the least of which is by watching what they eat. The link between food consumption, fat, and lack of good health, which many studies have found“When we start policing children around food and telling them they’ll get big if they eat too much, we start the concept of ‘too much food equals a fat person’ and that’s a false equivalency,” says Virgie Tovar, a fat activist and author ofThe term baby fat is, at its core, an oxymoron.
“Baby fat is safe because babyhood is always already in our past, something we always understand we’re going to grow out of, versus adult fat, which is a dangerous kind of fat, it’s a kind of fat we have to monitor,” Tovar said. “I remember baby fat as a way to euphemistically still talk about my body but my fatness as something that was transient.”
What’s most harmful, according to Dr. Gaudiani, about selling adolescents the myth of baby fat, is that puberty is a time when kidsgain considerable weight. Telling them to expect anything different misrepresents nature’s design. To propel a metamorphosing body through the “miraculous work” of puberty, as Dr. Gaudiani calls it, takes an incredible amount of energy. That energy reserve usually stored in our stomachs.
During gym class when I was 16, I weighed in at 260 pounds. My weight became fodder for discussion. Among those close to me, potential solutions for my weight were solved by groupthink. It was eventually proposed that I work out at a gym I could attend for free. Of the many options I was given — dieting, exercise, etc. — none included keeping my body as it was or explaining to me the benefits of fat.
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