Save More than 20 years later, I can still remember my grandmother handing me the silver diet book with the cartoon cover and the sense that I needed to do something. I was probably around 13; the specifics have mercifully faded with time, but the cover and the feeling are burned into my brain. And so it was with a special kind of remembered dread and baggage that I read a recent NPR headline: “How Parents Can Address Kids’ Pandemic Weight Gain.” Children have had their lives upended over the last year, isolated from their friends and shut out from so many spaces and activities; so many of them have lost grandparents, parents, and other people they cared about. Why is the weight the thing that matters? Of course, it’s always the weight that matters, looming large in American culture as an obsession, a scapegoat, a gravitational force that warps discussions about fitness, about food, about bodies. Not just in American culture, but for those of us who are in fact fat.