'I was fat and healthy, so why was I contemplating weight loss surgery?'

For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. Here she shares why she was not.

Kate Manne is learning to accept her body size, after years of shame and dieting.

There was a moment early on in the pandemic when I was contemplating weight loss surgery. My BMI put me in the “severely obese” category, and I had tried every diet under the sun—low carb, low GI, low fat, low calorie, and so on. I exercised intensely. Although I’d once been able to lose weight by sticking to a rigorous diet, the weight always came back before long. And diets were no longer working for me at all—my body remained defiantly fat in spite of them.

And so I wondered: should I do something drastic? Should I have bariatric surgery? Should I go under the knife, for the sake of finally losing weight permanently? In a fit of desperation, I left a voicemail with a local weight loss surgery clinic, and started researching different procedures.