And I thought, well, I'm a size 26, you know? I weigh over 300 pounds. And a stranger turned around and went, don't call yourself that. And I was like, no, they don't have fat lady sizes. And a friend was like, you should get a T-shirt. And they didn't have an offering in plus sizes that would fit me.

The most recent example was I was at a women's soccer game - I'm, like, a huge women's soccer fan - with a friend of mine and was looking at their sort of merchandise and was flipping through the racks. I will say this is one that happens to me very regularly.

And can you just, for people who have never experienced this before, talk about the types of responses that that can sometimes elicit and what's wrong with that? And it's the idea that fat people should not call themselves fat. SUMMERS: I'd like to ask you about just one more myth in this book. So we are building environments that are hostile not only to sort of some vanishingly small minority of people but to most of us. GORDON: I appreciate you bringing up the idea of, quote-unquote, 'average.' It's worth reminding ourselves in these conversations that in the United States, the average is plus size, right? The average person is a fat person. SUMMERS: Gordon debunks all this and more in her new book ''You Just Need To Lose Weight': And 19 Other Myths About Fat People.' When we talked, we started with the idea of an average body size and how it plays into everything in our environment, from the size of airplane seats to the distance between tables at a restaurant to the size of a blood pressure cuff at the doctor's office. It was developed by a mathematician, statistician and astronomer working exclusively with data from French and Scottish military conscripts in the 1800s. GORDON: The BMI was not developed by a health care provider. SUMMERS: Or that BMI, body mass index, is a reliable way to measure health. GORDON: Researchers have been clear for years that our body size isn't solely or even primarily the result of our own choices. SUMMERS: And along with that come myths, a whole lot of them about fat people - myths like being fat is a choice. And a lot of that pressure is rooted in what author and podcast host Aubrey Gordon describes as anti-fatness.ĪUBREY GORDON: Anti-fatness is a sort of web of beliefs, interpersonal practices, institutional policies that are designed to keep fat people sort of on the margins. This time of year, there's a lot of pressure to change the way you look.

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