Recovery Has a Fatphobia Problem. (This one isn’t easy. But it’s true. And it’s time.)

Before we begin, I want to say that this one might land differently. It’s not cozy. It might stir something up. It might challenge what you’ve assumed or bring up feelings you didn’t expect. Writing it took something out of me. It required emotional labor, clarity, and care, and it came with the risk of being seen as too much. Which is, of course, part of what this piece is about. But I trust you with it. I trust your ability to sit with what’s uncomfortable. And I trust that some truths are worth the cost.

There’s a version of recovery that looks very impressive from the outside. Structured. Consistent. Clipped and polished. The kind that wakes early, logs morning wins in a habit tracker, lights palo santo before meditating, hits every milestone on the sobriety app, eats overnight oats with flax and chia, listens to a podcast on boundaries during their walk, and has a framed quote in the background that says “Progress, not perfection,” looking suspiciously like perfection. And this is not a diss on overnight oats. I love overnight oats. But you get the point. 

It’s the type of recovery that checks all the boxes. It looks like discipline, devotion, wellness. It is a recovery that can be photographed. Tidy. Celebrated. Marketable.

And underneath it, I often find a very old fear.
Control, posing as healing.

It’s easy to mistake one for the other. Our culture rewards control so thoroughly that it takes some time to even notice how much of our so-called wellness is really just surveillance. We swap wine for meal plans. We trade chaos for calorie counting. We quit drinking, but pick up intermittent fasting. We stop self-destructing and start self-managing. Hard.

And people praise it. They call it “taking care of yourself.” They call it “being committed.” But when care starts to feel like compliance, and when commitment feels like a performance you cannot opt out of, that’s not healing. That’s a new kind of prison.

I know this because I’ve been there. And I’ve worked with clients who’ve been there too. People who got sober and then became terrified of anything that felt “out of control.” Especially their bodies. Especially their appetites. Especially their softness.

We’re told that recovery is about listening to ourselves. But what happens when the voice we hear the loudest is the one that tells us our worth is conditional? That our sobriety will be taken more seriously if we’re thin. That our insight will carry more weight if we have less of it on our bodies. That we will be safer, more employable, more lovable, if we just work harder to stay small.

This is not personal insecurity. This is fatphobia. And it is not just a collection of rude comments or aesthetic preferences. It is a system that punishes certain bodies and privileges others. It is embedded in our health care, our hiring practices, our clothing stores, our recovery programs. It lives in our language. It lives in our nervous systems. It lives in the silence of rooms that claim to welcome everyone but only celebrate a particular kind of wellness. The kind that can be measured in pounds lost, sizes dropped, appetites suppressed.

Fat people in recovery often carry two burdens: the work of staying sober, and the constant pressure to prove they are also getting “healthier.” That word is slippery. It gets used as shorthand for everything from blood pressure to body size to moral character. We praise health as if it is a universal good and as if it means the same thing for everyone. As if it’s always possible. As if it’s always desirable. As if it’s neutral.

But the pursuit of health (and let’s be honest, we often mean thinness) is not neutral. It is shaped by race, class, ability, gender, trauma, and access. And when we elevate it as the gold standard of recovery, we leave a lot of people behind. Especially Black and Brown people. Especially fat people. Especially disabled people. Especially queer people. Especially trans people. Especially people whose recovery includes learning to stop performing and start living.

And while fat people bear the brunt of this system, the fear of being seen as “too much”  - including being too soft, too loud, too slow, too emotional, or too needy -  touches nearly every body. Fatphobia doesn’t just harm fat folks. It conditions all of us to be afraid of taking up space.

So maybe this is the moment to ask harder questions.

Not softly. Not hypothetically. But from the place that knows recovery has always been a mirror and sometimes what we see in it is our own participation in harm.

Where is fatphobia alive in recovery?

Where do you conflate someone's size with their insight, their credibility, their commitment?
Have you ever recommended weight loss to someone without being asked, or treated it as a prerequisite for health?
Where do you label a fat person’s joy as “brave,” but a thin person’s joy as beautiful?
Where do you catch yourself making assumptions about someone’s relapse, progress, honesty, or effort based on how they look?
Where have you nodded along with “health is a journey” while still believing, somewhere deep down, that weight loss is always a good sign?
Where have you confused control with care, or discipline with healing?
Where has the pursuit of thinness stolen time, energy, or joy from parts of your life that truly matter?
Where have you measured your worth by how much space you take up, rather than by the depth of your presence?
Where have you accepted pain, restriction, or inconvenience in the name of “flattering” your body?

These questions aren’t meant to accuse or condemn. They are hard, and they’re meant to be. Recovery isn’t always soft blankets and warm cups of tea. It is also the moments we turn toward the truths that make us shift in our seats. Sometimes healing asks us to unlearn the very things that once felt like safety. Sometimes it asks us to see where comfort was built on harm, and to notice the habits and beliefs we didn’t realize we were carrying. This is the work of making recovery wide enough for every body, including our own.

Recovery is not about earning back your worth.

And yet, so often, that’s exactly what it becomes.

And when recovery becomes conditional, the cost is always embodiment.

What if recovery means no longer auditioning for belonging?
What if it looks like taking up the exact amount of space we need, without apology?
What if it means building a life that doesn’t require us to disappear to be loved?

I want to say clearly: reclamation of the body is recovery.
It is not a detour from it. It is not the indulgent part you get to once you’ve proved yourself.
It is the very heart of it.

Because we don’t just drink at our pain.

We drink at our erasure.

We drink at our hunger.

We drink at the stories that told us our worth had a size.

We drink at the quiet violence of being unseen in plain sight.

We drink at the shame stitched into our joy.

And when we stop drinking, some of those voices don’t go quiet. They get louder. They tell us to behave. To be grateful. To be smaller, in every sense. They tell us to replace addiction with self‑denial and call it growth.

But we were never meant to recover into the same systems that made us sick.

So, what if our recovery lets us feel full? Full of desire. Full of laughter. Full of food that satisfies. Full of the sensation of being alive and unafraid to show it. What if our recovery includes joy that cannot be translated into a number on a scale? What if it includes clothing that moves with our bodies instead of locking them in? What if we are already whole, and recovery is not about controlling our lives into submission, but allowing ourselves to finally live them?

We need recovery that holds space for all bodies — soft, round, messy, glorious, queer, disabled, scarred, joyful bodies — without asking them to perform or explain or prove.
We need recovery that allows for breath, and slowness, and pleasure.
We need recovery that asks better questions than “How much have you changed?”
We need recovery that asks, “How much more of yourself are you allowed to be now?”

This is the recovery of the body.
It will not be neat.
It will not be admired by everyone.
It will not always be understood.
But it will be free.

I love you. Every bit of you. So much.

Anne Marie