Ok, don’t shoot me before we delve into this discussion point! Black women are fat, not citing exact sources (because all of them point to the same fact) somewhere around 4 out of 5 black women in America are overweight or 82% with 56% considered obese, not just a little chunky around the thighs, obese!

And, then you may be thinking, so what!

The main reason black women are so fat is because, well culturally black women as a whole want to be and black men push for this, there is nothing wrong with a chunky lady. You all know it, culturally being fat and black is far different from being fat and white.

As Alice Randall wrote in The NYTimes:

How many white girls in the ’60s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears.

How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.

But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one.

Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose “the sugar down below” when she embarked on a weight-loss program.

And it’s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It’s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw’s provocative book “The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies.” Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman’s body “functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.” By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.

Read more from Alice here.

Now, the issue comes into play when it comes to health. Lets face it, we know that being extremely overweight comes with a million health problems.

image src: https://bossip.com/940672/aint-worried-bout-nothin-big-boned-black-woman-parades-around-hollyweird-in-a-bikini-as-an-expression-of-self-love-photos-video-43081/

White health doctors, authorities and whoever else can keep telling the black community that it is unhealthy, but that can’t change a damn thing.

The black community as a whole needs to want the change. Slim black women don’t have certain aspects that culture demands of them but for the love of their health this needs to be accepted as much as any other shape.

Fat shaming and concentrating on visuals certainly is not the answer, women can look amazing at all sizes, however there are things that can be encouraged that will enable women to stay within a visual context that they feel they want and gain a healthy inner body.

Weight loss is not the goal here, we have to think about health.

Diet is the biggest killer in the USA with heart disease being the one that holds the knife. Food does this, the American diet is NOT good. We are gluttonous as a nation, this isn’t a black thing, it’s an American thing.

But we have to promote this, put down the fatty foods and start eating veggies, we should all be joining and putting our time into community gardens, getting social, getting moving and eating right.

In many communities access to healthy food and healthy activities isn’t easy. With no fresh food store in site but a million Popeyes on the way, no safe place to go out running, no flat enjoyable parkland, no backyards!

Access to all this is a problem, so we have to facilitate and create this. Talk to each other about health (lets keep weight out of this). Set an example for the kids. Move more, don’t jump in the car if it can be helped or start a home workout program like Insanity (maybe start a little easier). There are options, it just takes a little work and a little community building.

Change will not come overnight because we all have to keep our attitudes in check, we got to get off this body image thing and embrace health as the goal.

…. And it’s not like black men (or any American at that!!) are exactly in top shape either, so everyone needs to get on this wagon!

What do you think?