is one from a list of some basic pieces of advice that I wish I could give to every Maldivian, every brown family member, everyone in general:

Don’t comment on weight, period. Don’t compliment people for losing weight when you first see them: it could be an eating disorder, they might be ill or stressed, you don’t know their life. The same for the other way around: it could be many things & none your business regardless.

Don’t jump in with unsolicited health advice. You’ve seen the feedback by strangers on photos a fat person posts talking about how they’re unhealthy and giving them advice on how to lose weight or chastising them. This applies particularly if you don’t say the same things to any skinny person having a cigarette with their burger and coke, or don’t judge a thinner person by immediately writing them off as lacking willpower or being lazy, without knowing anything about them, if you see them having an unhealthy snack. Not only do you not know context, and not only is it none of your business, but people aren’t dumb. They know their own bodies and well-being better than someone else.

You can guarantee that anything insulting or condescending or dismissive you say, or any “health advice” or diet suggestion or attempt at shaming? They’ve heard it a hundred times before, because again, society treats fat people like shit. The inner voice probably says it constantly. So if you find this impulse coming to you, stfu is my advice.

If you feel compelled, if you’re one of those people who get hit with a sudden burst of Social Responsibility whenever you see anything online or off that is remotely respectful or complimentary toward any fat person, and insist that you need to state the importance of health, that it’s some kind of duty to remind or nudge or shame them into losing weight before that sense of duty immediately goes into hibernation until the next body positivity post enters your feed: first of all, that’s so weird, dude. But also, health criticism doesn’t have to be an ever-present 24/7 aspect of any discussion about any fat person’s life or experiences; we don’t pair everything else we ever talk about, every time we talk about it, with common knowledge the listener already knows. It’s dehumanizing to not be able to separate someone from their body. its insulting to think of any fat person as some kind of mindless agency-lacking child who needs to be constantly informed on things they hear and see everyday and aren’t aware of their own body and health.

Society treats fat people like shit. In a superficial society obsessed with monitoring and controlling people for maximum desirability for consumption, pretty much everything except unattainable perfection gets you treated poorly, yeah. But there’s levels. You don’t need to put fat folks down because society is shitty to you too.

While you’re at it, don’t do the #WhatAboutMen or #WhatAboutWhitePeople and derail people talking about the specific ways in which society treats fat people awfully by talking about the ways other bodies (probably every kind of body, in aforementioned superficial society obsessed with control) are also treated poorly. You don’t need to crowd out someone’s discussion. There’s lots of real estate to be carved out for more conversations about body image that don’t need to crowd into the same space and derail another one. And while carving out that new real estate, you need to have some consideration.

Fat shouldn’t be an insult. Don’t tell people “no, you’re not fat”, like being fat is some horrible curse. It’s just a body type, and so many body types look so good, and if you open your mind the world is full of so many more people whose hotness you can appreciate to be honest. There’s studies that suggest many people, especially men, find many overweight people attractive but don’t admit it and limit themselves to only dating thinner people because they’re afraid of their friends looking down on them for going out with a fat person, because people do that, because society treats people like shit.

But that gets to an interesting point, which is that that says is we’ve got kind of a herd mentality about controlling body image that we all keep up even though we’d all be happier if we dismissed all of it. Beauty standards for bodies have differed throughout history with current archetypes arising (at least in the West) after the cultural revolutions of the late 60s. It’s not biological but social: without the openly disciplinary nature of the much more traditional previous eras and in a dysfunctional and alienating society, something needed to fill the role, and one of the earliest of them was diet culture. Having an ideal, being constantly focused on achieving it, restricting yourself from worldly pleasures in pursuit of that ideal goal, monitoring each other constantly to ensure we all conformed because if we all didn’t keep up that illusion we’d have spent so much time and energy denying ourselves pleasures and putting ourselves through hunger and exhaustion for nothing, punishing ourselves for not achieving that ideal. Diet culture and all the ways it makes us treat people like shit for being fat plays a social role that doesn’t do us any good. Of course, as with most theories about social phenomena, that’s a theory where different schools of theorists differ, but I think it’s pretty compelling.

So I understand the psychology behind those reactions: all of us are constantly subjected to the notion of fat as a horror to avoid, and people who do so often feel like its hard work or willpower they had which others didn’t have, and that not getting treated like shit for being fat is some kind of earned reward. And that’s so dysfunctional when you think about it. Sticking to how things are in established society is the lazy option (just like getting defensive before reading all of this and thinking it over is lazy as fuck, and I expect people to do that instead of just reacting reflexively, which a lot of people seem to do on this topic, viscerally, and with venom).

Finally, don’t just listen to me. There are dozens of great articles about all this out there. This is a good one.