Changing Perspectives... on Body Inclusivity

At a recent industry event, the MC cracked a familiar joke: “Help yourselves to the catering, or we’ll all get fat.” The room laughed. I didn’t.

As the only visibly fat person in the room, I felt the usual mix of heat and invisibility. I wondered if anyone was looking at me. I wondered if they even realised I was the punchline.

Fat is not an insult to me. It’s a descriptor of my body, one I’ve reclaimed on my own terms. But in an industry and country where thinness is still associated with discipline, professionalism, and value, being fat can quietly shape how you’re perceived, included, or overlooked.

We talk a lot about diversity in this industry. As a queer, neurodivergent, fat, femme from a culturally and linguistically diverse background, choosing what to write about was not easy. I could have spoken to so many intersections of my identity. But this is a topic I have never seen openly addressed in our industry, and it needed to be.

I see the slow and growing awareness around gender equity, cultural diversity, First Nations inclusion, disability, and neurodivergence. But size discrimination is where the conversation usually stops.

That silence comes at a cost.

Office chairs, branded merch, and team activities rarely consider different body types. I’ve spent entire workdays slowly sinking in a chair not built to hold my weight, having to stand up every 20 minutes to reset the height. I’ve sat through meetings with the armrests digging into my sides, pretending not to notice.

Fat people are often excluded from campaigns unless the concept is explicitly about body size. 

Internally, offhand comments about food and health are normalised and inclusion strategies tend to ignore size altogether.

The number of times I’ve been praised for turning down a chocolate. “Good girl,” someone will say, as if I’ve passed a moral test. No one else gets that comment. And for the record, I love chocolate. I’m just lactose intolerant.

These moments add up. They send a message about which bodies are welcome, and which ones are only acceptable if they’re trying to become something else.

Fatphobia doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with other systems of oppression. It disproportionately affects women, queer people, people of colour, and people who experience disability.

That’s not a coincidence. Even in some LGBTQ+ spaces that speak the language of inclusion, fat bodies are routinely erased, mocked, or treated as incompatible with queerness itself.

In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, sociologist Sabrina Strings traces modern anti-fatness not to health science, but to racism. During colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade, thinness became a visual marker of whiteness and “civilisation”. It was used to distinguish European women from Black African women, whose bodies were portrayed as excessive, deviant and inferior. 

As medicine gained cultural authority, these racialised beauty standards were repackaged as science. The “obesity epidemic” narrative emerged from this foundation, cloaked in concern but rooted in control.

Today, when we talk about fatness as a public health crisis, we are still echoing those ideas. And like all systems of exclusion, fatphobia hits hardest at the intersections.

We don’t have to be intentionally unkind to contribute to the problem. Sometimes the absence is what causes the most harm. The unspoken assumptions. The lack of representation. The campaign that says ‘diverse’ but still only shows one kind of body. Who gets promoted to the client-facing role, and who doesn’t.

This is not about blame. It’s about awareness.

Fat people are not a diversity add-on. We are your target audience, colleagues, creatives, leaders and clients. We deserve to belong without having to shrink ourselves to fit.