‘Just say fat’: Why the host of this hit podcast isn’t afraid of the F-word
Partway through the documentary, Your Fat Friend, we catch its subject, Aubrey Gordon, in an emotional moment. She’s recounting the newscasts she grew up watching, where fearmongering headlines about rising obesity rates were accompanied by footage of fat people shot from the neck down.
“I spent a good 10 to 15 years watching that B-roll and would often tear up watching it ... because I was looking for myself,” she says, getting emotional again.
There’s a cruel, dehumanising legacy of fat people on screen. It’s in the disembodied news footage that Gordon recalls and in characters like “fat Monica” from Friends and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Rosemary in Shallow Hal, both of whom are played for laughs.
In Your Fat Friend, Gordon, now 40, finally finds herself on screen, but not in the way her younger self might have feared. In its opening scenes, we see Gordon swimming – something she loves but avoids doing because of the staring – shot from below and glowing blue in the pool’s water (by chance, the pool happens to be the same one Gordon swam in as a child). We see her relaxing in a hot spring as close-up shots of her body – frank and unflinching – are interspersed with shots of nature.
“I wanted to make her body look magnificent,” says documentarian Jeanie Finlay of her depiction of Aubrey Gordon.Credit: Jeanie Finlay
Created by British documentarian Jeanie Finlay, Your Fat Friend follows Gordon and her life in Portland, Oregon, over the course of six years, as she goes from anonymous blogger to celebrated author and host of the hit podcast, Maintenance Phase.
“It felt like a radical act to shoot a fat lady with main character energy instead of sad sidekick energy,” says Finlay. “Aubrey, quite early on, had said: ‘You can put the camera anywhere. It’s fine. You don’t have to think about flattering angles.’
“And I wanted to make her body look magnificent.”
‘It felt like a radical act to shoot a fat lady with main character energy instead of sad sidekick energy.’
Jeanie Finlay, filmmaker
Upon seeing the film for the first time, this was one of the things that struck Gordon most, too.
“Part of it is not seeing fat people as the main character,” she says, “and part of it is not seeing fat people as a product of thin people’s imaginations about what it means to be a fat person, right? And I think that part of it just sort of intellectually felt and continues to feel really powerful.”
Most people will be familiar with Gordon’s voice – spirited and warm – delivered each week through the Maintenance Phase podcast that she hosts with journalist Michael Hobbes. The award-winning show, which has a sizeable Australian following, “debunks the junk science behind health and wellness fads”.
Seeing Gordon on screen is a new way of encountering her – an “act of visibility”, as Finlay put it to a London audience at a post-screening Q&A. And as Gordon talks about in the film, so much of her life has been spent trying to disappear – to shrink herself during plane journeys or to stay safe after being doxxed by online trolls. Here, she gets to take up space.
As with the rest of Gordon’s work, the documentary’s message is bolstered with a bevvy of scientific research that charts the complex science of weight, like why the BMI is not an accurate marker of health and the fact that no country or American state has ever reduced its obesity rate. She discusses the way diet culture has been repackaged into a trillion-dollar wellness industry, flicking through her collection of vintage diet books with titles like Help Lord! The Devil Wants Me Fat and I Prayed Myself Slim.
In 2020, Gordon, then a LGBTQ community organiser, penned an essay under the alias, Your Fat Friend. Written in the form of a letter to a close friend, the essay appears as a voiceover in the opening scenes of the film. “Just say fat,” we hear Gordon say.
“Not ‘curvy’ or ‘chubby’ or ‘chunky’ or ‘fluffy’ or ‘more to love’ or ‘big guy’ or ‘full-figured’ or ‘big-boned’ or ‘queen size’ or ‘husky’ or ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’. Just say fat.”
Language, then, is a central part of the film and a key way in which fat people are so often dehumanised.
“The issue with talking about fatness and fat people isn’t necessarily the specific words that people use. It’s the disregard for how fat people describe ourselves, right?”
Gordon prefers the word fat over the words obese or overweight because of the connotations they hold.
“People have this idea that those are neutral terms because they’re medical, and I would say precisely because they’re medical, they’re not neutral terms for fat people,” explains Gordon.
“In the US, doctors and most healthcare providers have significantly higher levels of anti-fat bias than the general population. [Australian studies reflect a similar trend.] So you are actually likelier to encounter anti-fat bias with the people who are there to keep you healthy and keep you alive.”
In following Gordon, Your Fat Friend maps the myriad ways society is not built to accommodate people of a certain size, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the health system.
‘You are actually likelier to encounter anti-fat bias with the people who are there to keep you healthy and keep you alive.’
Aubrey Gordon
We see this in the way blood pressure bands aren’t made to fit arms like Gordon’s, or in the way the morning-after pill is only effective in people up to a certain weight. Standard vaccine needles are not long enough to penetrate the muscle, rendering the vaccine largely ineffective, while many fat people are told to simply “lose weight” by their doctors, whether their ailment is a headache or an eye condition. At one point in her life, Gordon went eight years without seeing a doctor.
In Australia, there have been calls for school nurses to be able to weigh and identify kids at risk of obesity. Gordon points out this has been standard practice in the United States for nearly 60 years, and has been “categorically” unsuccessful.
“Hello from the future,” she half-jokes. “We have generations of adults who can tell you how traumatic that experience was and how long it stayed with them.”
For the next generation, Gordon says she’d “love to see as much – or more – consideration for the emotional health of those kids and the health of [adults’] relationship to kids compared to what they look like and how much they weigh.”
Gordon’s relationship with her long-divorced parents and how their own attitudes to food and their bodies have shaped hers are the beating heart of the film. Her mum, Pam, was a “Weight Watchers mum”, a product of ’80s diet fads like cottage cheese and cantaloupe. By the age of 12, Gordon had joined Weight Watchers with her, the first of many diets they did together.
In one reflective scene, Finlay asks Pam if, through all the dieting and weight-loss programs, she ever thought her daughter would get smaller. “No,” Pam quietly replies.
Documentarian Jeanie Finlay during the filming of Your Fat Friend.
The relationship between mothers and their daughters is often complicated by diet culture, as feelings of shame are passed down generationally. As Pam reflects in the documentary, “her size was my responsibility … that was very clearly the message from my husband”.
Her father, Rusty, a former pilot, is barely able to say the word fat at the beginning of the film. For one of his daughter’s birthdays, he proudly presents a surprise cake that he’s had custom-made to celebrate the launch of her podcast. He’s made it gluten and sugar-free, even though Gordon’s diet requires neither of these things, but the icing has sugar in it, something he repeatedly reminds Gordon not to eat. It’s a tense scene where Gordon’s clear discomfort is at odds with her father’s excitement.
“When I met her family, it absolutely sealed the deal because Aubrey wanted to change the world, but her family being almost unable to say the word fat out loud – I just thought the distance between them, that distance is where you can find a film,” says Finlay.
Since its release earlier this year, Gordon and Finlay have toured the film internationally to rapt response. At every screening, Gordon says she’s had at least one person approach her and tell her, “I think I owe my kids an apology” or “I’ve been really mean to my mum because she’s fat, and I thought I was doing that as a service to her”.
“That piece has also felt incredibly powerful and meaningful and moving,” Gordon says.
Reflecting on the way in which Gordon’s relationship with her parents radically shifts throughout the film, Finlay says: “I think everyone wants our parents to see us, like really see us.”
At Gordon’s book launch in Portland, her parents are seated in the front row. As she reads an excerpt to a sold-out crowd, we see Rusty lean over to an audience member and whisper proudly: “That’s my daughter.”
He finally sees her.
Special screenings of Your Fat Friend are showing now. It will be available to stream on DocPlay from November 11.
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