And the abuse from loved ones continues well into adulthood. A 2017 survey found that 89 percent of obese adults had been bullied by their romantic partners. Emily, the counselor, says she spent her teens and 20s “sleeping with guys I wasn’t interested in because they wanted to sleep with me.” In her head, a guy being into her was a rare and depletable resource she couldn’t afford to waste: “I was desperate for men to give me attention. Sex was a good way to do that.”

Eventually, she ended up with someone abusive. He told her during sex that her body was beautiful and then, in the daylight, that it was revolting. “Whenever I tried to leave him, he would say, ‘Where are you gonna find someone who will put up with your disgusting body?’” she remembers.

Emily finally managed to get away from him, but she is aware that her love life will always be fraught. The guy she’s dating now is thin—“think Tony Hawk,” she says—and she notices the looks they get when they hold hands in public. “That never used to happen when I dated fat dudes,” she says. “Thin men are not allowed to be attracted to fat women.”

The effects of weight bias get worse when they’re layered on top of other types of discrimination. A 2012 study found that African-American women are more likely to become depressed after internalizing weight stigma than white women. Hispanic and black teenagers also have significantly higher rates of bulimia. And, in a remarkable finding, rich people of color have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than poor people of color—the opposite of what happens with white people. One explanation is that navigating increasingly white spaces, and increasingly higher stakes, exerts stress on racial minorities that, over time, makes them more susceptible to heart problems.

But perhaps the most unique aspect of weight stigma is how it isolates its victims from one another. For most minority groups, discrimination contributes to a sense of belongingness, a community in opposition to a majority. Gay people like other gay people; Mormons root for other Mormons. Surveys of higher-weight people, however, reveal that they hold many of the same biases as the people discriminating against them. In a 2005 study, the words obese participants used to classify other obese people included gluttonous, unclean and sluggish.

Andrea, a retired nurse in Boston, has been on commercial diets since she was 10 years old. She knows how hard it is to slim down, knows what women larger than her are going through, but she still struggles not to pass judgment when she sees them in public. “I think, ‘How did they let it happen?’” she says. “It’s more like fear. Because if I let myself go, I’ll be that big too.”

Her position is all-too understandable. As young as 9 or 10, I knew that coming out of the closet is what gay people do, even if it took me another decade to actually do it. Fat people, though, never get a moment of declaring their identity, of marking themselves as part of a distinct group. They still live in a society that believes weight is temporary, that losing it is urgent and achievable, that being comfortable in their bodies is merely “glorifying obesity.” This limbo, this lie, is why it’s so hard for fat people to discover one another or even themselves. “No one believes our It Gets Better story,” says Tigress Osborn, the director of community outreach for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. “You can’t claim an identity if everyone around you is saying it doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.”