By Amanda Schwarz and Sophie Schwarz
Walking into a class potluck and offhandedly stating I want a piece of banana bread, my thin ‘friend’ jumps on the comment and declares, “Of course you do fatty.” I dump the piece of banana bread I had gotten onto my plate, wondering when it became cool to insult your friends for eating food.
According to the FortuneWell article, “How ‘Big Back,’ ‘Fatty,’ and other ‘Fatphobic’ Slang is Damaging Your Teen’s Mental Health” by Beth Greenfield, the trend became popular from a TikTok video (as most trends do) last spring, and its popularity has grown since.
Body dysmorphia, eating disorders, diet culture, and other types of food-based anxiety are no small topic today. Eating disorders have doubled in the past two decades– likely thanks to social media– and it is safe to say that the surrounding body and food-based issues have multiplied with it (OHSU). So, if people (especially teenagers) are so much more sensitive to what they eat and how they look today, why are they so much less sensitive to commenting on it?
Greenfield explains Gen Zers don’t use it to intentionally insult someone or criticize their body size but rather to poke harmless fun at friends while they eat. A 17-year-old from Rhode Island describes that “it can be harmful to some but for me, I just think it’s funny. I definitely wouldn’t say it around an actual fat person,” (FortuneWell). But would you say it around someone who always feels fat even if they’re increasingly underweight? Would you say it around someone who used to live off granola bars and coffee and is just now learning to indulge? Would you say it around someone you’ve only been friends with for a few weeks?
Fat “jokes” affect a lot more than just visibly overweight people. It’s often impossible to tell how your words actually affect someone. You can’t always know if what is just a joke to you is something much more serious to someone else.
Furthermore, the trend as a whole is not only directly deleterious, but also indirectly as it strengthens unnecessary negative stereotypes regarding diets and body types. A second teen, a 16-year-old Connecticut high schooler states, “‘We say, ‘Hey, fatty,’ as if you’d say, ‘You’re so silly.’ It’s an insult but it’s playful, you know what I mean? … It feels like a joke. But,’ she adds, ‘in some ways I guess it does strengthen mental bias,’” (FortuneWell). Just like rereading information or studying flashcards, constantly hearing phrases thrown around you or at you increases the likelihood that we will perceive it as true.
Moreover, appetite and body size do not have a perfect correlation. Educator and parent coach Oona Hanson, while talking about linking appetite and body size, states “I think it really reinforces harmful ideas both about body size and about food, and makes it socially acceptable to comment on people’s bodies,” (FortuneWell). Hanson, who specializes in helping families battle diet culture, sees firsthand the growing rate of problematic relationships with food. Although someone you see may eat 3 times more than you and still appear leaner, you have no idea what they are going through– obsesses exercise, purging, or just simply genetics – to maintain their appearance. If you wouldn’t call someone who is physically overweight “fatty,” why would you call someone invisibly struggling “big backed” or “fat”?