There's no escaping from "fat."
On both social media and in the day-to-day speech of less thoughtful people: when describing someone who is obese, the first word that comes to mind is "fat." Distinctions like "obese" and "overweight" are lost in that one large generalization. Barring some long-term societal change, that's the world we live in and the word we live with today.
That's why we need to take "fat" back.
It, like the pejoratives “retard” and “f-g,” has been systematically taken out of polite conversation. Unlike those other words, which have been taken out because they are inherently hateful, the word “fat" has been replaced by “large” and “thin” by “small,” a ridiculous change that only serves to confuse people, even people who have the very best intentions.
I remember meeting an old high school friend who greeted me with an unironic “You look smaller!” (Who does he think I am, Mike Teavee? Post "drink-me" Alice?)
This new language allows us to comment on someone’s weight without feeling like a bully.
But the function of language isn’t to make people feel better about themselves. The point of language is to accurately convey the workings or the word as well as we possibly can.
In a noble attempt to avoid using the word "fat," we make the word taboo and, therefore, much more potent when it is used to hurt others.
By absenting the word from polite conversation, we give it a terrible presence.
The point in bringing "fat" back is to cement in our minds that obesity is a reality, and not something to be talked around. In order to discuss it, we must call it by its most commonly used name without feeling ashamed about it.
In order to bring the discussion to everyone, we must use the terminology that we see on Yik Yak, Twitter and when we're around the kind of people who don't carefully choose their words.