TESTIMONY
"Everything that revolves around fat people is unthinkable, because these fat people are not in the public space. I was the first to be surprised at the number of fat people in France". In 2017, Gabrielle Deydier, 1m53, 140 kilos, told her story in a book: We are not born fat . Three years later, with Valentine Oberti and Laurent Follea, she wrote the documentary On achève bien les gros , broadcast on Arte.TV. We discover many people there who denounce grossophobia.
Guest from Europe 1 this Thursday, Gabrielle Deydier testifies to her experience at the microphone of Pascale Clark, while recalling that there are more and more fat in France. If you have to have a BMI over 25 to be overweight and over 30 to be obese, "you don't have to be medically fat to be socially fat," explains the documentary's author, who claims that ten million people are affected by obesity in France and that 40% of French people are overweight ".
>> READ ALSO - Obesity: why we are not all equal
"My mother cut 36/38, I always heard my father tell her that she was fat"
There is no hereditary link to obesity, explains Gabrielle Deydier, who says her parents had two very lean bodies. "My mother has done 32/34 all her life and has climbed to 38" once. Nothing alarming, but at home, that is not what you feel. "I always heard my father tell her that she was fat. If my mother is too fat doing 36/38, then me, doing 40, it's a disaster."
When she is 16, Gabrielle goes to buy jeans with her father, but that's the tragedy: size 40 does not fit, you need a 42. "When I come home, my mother panics because I have it. 'impression that size 40 is a psychological threshold. Going to 42 at 16, for my mother it was not possible ", continues Gabrielle Deydier, who recalls that for many clothing catalogs, size 42 is the beginning of "large sizes". She then begins a first diet ... which will make her gain thirty kilos in a few months.
"We know that 95% of diets are failures and we continue to prescribe them"
"There is a guilt of fat. We know that 95% of diets are failures and we continue to prescribe, while we do not know how to cure obesity", denounces Gabrielle Deydier. At work, in transport or in public spaces: few things are suitable for fat people, recalls the author of the book On ne ne née pas fat. "It makes me angry, because when I go into a waiting room and I can't sit at the doctor, I wonder how I'm going to be greeted," she pleaded.
>> Find Culture-Médias in replay and podcast here
"Get an operation and you can take your blood pressure"
Paradoxically, "when I go to the beautician, I don't have this problem. None of them told me one day that I couldn't get on the table," says Gabrielle Deydier. Because the examples of daily medical violence are numerous. "To take the blood pressure, it is not complicated to have a cuff with an extension, but some doctors refuse and say: 'Have an operation and you can take your blood pressure'", says Gabrielle Deydier.
Some also refuse to prescribe contraception "either because it is felt that you do not need to take the pill because you are fat, or because it is felt that you have no sex life", Gabrielle Deydier concludes.