Pushing Back Against a Lifetime of Weight Stigma

End Weight Bias founder Zabe shares how a lifetime of weight stigma shaped their experience of an eating disorder, and how they created International Fat Liberation Day to centre dignity and human rights.

I was four years old when my mum began restricting my food. I remember being told that instead of butter on sandwiches, we could use “healthier” options. Butter, I was told, would make me fat. The word “fat” floated around our house like a warning. I didn’t fully understand what it meant yet, but I understood this much: it was something to avoid.

I was a child not yet old enough for primary school. I didn’t consent to my body becoming a project.

Growing up, the message only intensified. By the time I was nine, mum and I were dieting together. It became our thing, a bonding activity. A shared goal. A shared promise that the next one would be the one that “worked”.

It wasn’t just my mum reinforcing the idea that my body needed to be smaller. It was my teachers, family members, coaches, and doctors who framed weight loss as the solution to problems that didn’t even exist.

For more than two decades, I moved from diet to diet. Each one came with rules. Each one came with hope. And each time the weight returned the message was the same: you’ve done something wrong, you need to try harder.

Those fad-diets and weight cycling defined so much of my adolescence and early adulthood, it was all-consuming. As the years went on and my weight cycled up and down, the recommendations became more extreme, and if my body wasn’t responding, everyone, including me, assumed I wasn’t doing enough.

I remember when I was about sixteen and in the clutches of yet another fad-diet, I stopped at a bakery on the walk home from school. Even though I knew I was ‘breaking the rules’, I bought some things that had been off limits for a long time, and hid around the side of the shop to eat them so there’d be no evidence when I got home. I still remember the flooding guilt. I felt like I had failed.

What I didn’t understand then was that I wasn’t failing at diets, diets were failing me, and all the systems we exist in that equate health with body size were fuelling something much more sinister: an eating disorder that I lived with for decades before I could name it.

Part of the reason it took me so long to realise I needed help was that my behaviours were encouraged. Restriction was framed as discipline. Weight loss was praised. Even when I was struggling, the cultural script told me to keep going.

When I finally sought help, the response was devastating. The doctor I spoke to dismissed my concerns. “Stop making excuses, you need more willpower.” The same old message: you’re doing something wrong, you need to try harder. I left that appointment believing I was the problem, and that doctor’s weight bias meant I didn’t ask for help again for another eighteen months.

Weight stigma in healthcare is not abstract. It shaped how seriously my concerns were taken. It shaped the kind of treatment that was offered. And it continues to shape how people in larger bodies are treated.

Over time, with the steady and gentle support of a close friend, I began to untangle what I was living, and to understand that eating disorders are serious mental illnesses with complex impacts. I began to see how deeply weight stigma had threaded itself through my story.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

The beliefs I absorbed throughout my life weren’t isolated. They are part of a broader system that treats certain bodies as problems to be solved, showing up in public health campaigns, media narratives, pop-culture, and everyday interactions, harming people across all body sizes and makes treatment and recovery more complicated.

After years of navigating recovery and reflecting on how profoundly weight stigma shaped my life, I struggle with how normalised it is.

In early 2025, after experiencing a significant injury and some stigma fuelled challenges that ensued, I half-jokingly half-frustratingly said to some friends, “Why isn’t there an organisation for fat people, by fat people, to advocate for our rights?!”

It didn’t take long for the joke to become a reality.

We had experience across health, medical, and the not-for-profit sector and knew the incredible work being done within size-inclusive healthcare and eating disorder spaces, but saw a gap for a lived-experience-led organisation that could advocate beyond healthcare.

That was the beginning of End Weight Bias.

As we built the organisation, another observation surfaced; every year on 4 March, World Ob*sity Day dominated the global conversation. For many people, including me, this day is triggering. The language, the framing, the underlying assumption that larger bodies are “a health crisis”.

We didn’t want to ignore that day, we wanted to reclaim it.

So, we launched International Fat Liberation Day in protest of World Ob*sity Day, offering an alternative narrative that centres dignity and human rights. It turns a day of erasure into a platform for justice and visibility.

International Fat Liberation Day is a response to weight-centric systems that pathologise fatness by default, and a call for weight-neutral care for everybody. Larger bodies deserve compassionate, evidence-based care, eating disorders deserve to be recognised and treated without bias, and children should not grow up believing their bodies are problems before they can even spell the word “diet.”

For me, International Fat Liberation Day is deeply personal. The words that are commonly used in public discourse to describe larger bodies cause harm. Reclaiming space on that date is about refusing to let stigma have the final word.

Weight stigma is subtle and persistent. Even now, after years of recovery and advocacy, I sometimes notice old thought patterns trying to resurface. That’s not a personal failure. It’s a reflection of the world we live in. But we can challenge those narratives, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our healthcare systems, and in ourselves.

Ultimately, International Fat Liberation Day is a reminder that dignity is not a radical demand, it’s a prerequisite for equality.

To learn more about End Weight Bias, head to their website here or to share your lived experience this International Fat Liberation Day, head here.

Note: We use the term obesity only when necessary for clarity, such as in research, medical contexts or recognised dates of significance. We acknowledge the potential harm and stigma associated with the term and aim to minimise its use wherever possible. The asterisk (*) signals this intention. 

About the Author

Zabe Sharpcat (ze/zir) is the Founder and President of End Weight Bias; an advocacy organisation grounded in lived experience. After navigating decades of an eating disorder and recovery shaped by weight stigma, ze now advocates for dignity, human rights, and size-inclusive systems within and beyond healthcare. Zabe speaks from both lived experience and advocacy perspectives, challenging dominant narratives about body size and pushing for cultural change that centres respect rather than shame. And yes, ze now has butter on zir sandwiches.

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