Fat hatred is the thing pushing at many people’s lips when they decide to make a resolution to lose weight, when they say that 2012 is the year they will fit into their high school cheerleading outfit or wedding suit or other iconic item of clothing. It’s the thing that drives people to join gyms in droves and sign up for weight loss programs and ask their doctors about medical options for weight control, even if those things are dangerous or not particularly necessary. It’s the thing that feeds the multibillion dollar diet and weight loss industry, which relies on fat hatred to feed it. It certainly isn’t reducing its intake in the interests of health, that’s for sure, but apparently customers don’t identify the juxtaposition there.

January is the time when people around me talk about how much they hate their bodies and want to force them into something they’re not, or when people who are happy in their bodies get sidelong glances because they didn’t resolve to lose weight and have no intention to, because they have better things to do with their time. The new year is the crest on the wave of fat hatred, when it rises to a pinnacle fed by social pressures to ‘be a better person’ and ‘turn over a new leaf,’ because obviously fat people are bad, and hate being fat, and thus must want to turn over new leaves, to be new people.

I worry, as I do every January, about how many people will die this year because of fat hatred.