Does Being Fat Affect Your Voice?
Lots of people claim they can guess a person’s weight by the sound of their voice alone.
By Jessie Schiewe
Have you ever guessed someone’s weight just by talking to them over the phone?
Heard a DJ whose voice made him sound “fat?”
Listened to a song that sounded like it was sung by someone overweight?
If you have, you’re not alone. Guessing someone’s weight by their voice isn’t uncommon, with a lot of people claiming to be good at identifying so-called “fat people voices.”
Fitness journalist Charlotte Hilton Andersen recounted the time she once listened to a radio DJ guess the weights of callers who called in to this show.
“He claimed he had ‘a gift’ for it,” Andersen wrote in The Huffington Post.
And he apparently did. Over the next half-hour, interspersed between Top 40 hits, the DJ correctly guessed caller after caller’s weights. One woman said that she played softball four times a week and that her favorite show was C.S.I. The DJ called fat on her, placing her weight at around 250 pounds. Her response? She weighed 235.
Another man, who talked about his love for his local sports team, his hunting dogs, and politics, conceded to being overweight, too, after the DJ estimated his weight was around 300 pounds.
Whether a voice can sound fat is something the internet has been talking about for years. You’ll find the question (or variations of it) posted on websites about choral singing (“Will Weight Gain or Weight Loss Affect My Singing?”); in African-American chat rooms (“Is it possible for your voice to sound "fat" or "obese?"); on question and answer websites like Quora (“Can a voice sound fat?”); and in multiple posts on Reddit.
The consensus is almost always in the affirmative; that yes, you can tell if a person is packing on extra pounds through their voice alone.
To buttress their point, people bring up famous overweight musicians, like Rick Ross or Aretha Franklin, who, according to one person, has a voice that “sounds like something is stuck in her throat, pudgy sounding.”
“Honestly, I can,” a user named “MarsBars” posted on the chat room, Lipstick Alley. “In fact, there was this video where a YouTuber was fasting for weight loss. She had a distinctive voice before the fast. After she lost 80 pounds, her voice was way different. People were commenting on the video mentioning that.”
Those who can identify “fat people voices” describe them as having a certain breathy, labored quality to it or as if the person has “a meaty throat.”
“Fat does, indeed, affect the shape of one's throat and therefore the sound of one's voice to some extent. But it's more likely what you're hearing is the extra breaths or short sounds that people with low breath capacity make,” a Redditor named “Chel_of_the_Sea” posted in the subreddit Explain Like I’m Five.
When you’re out of shape, catching your breath can be difficult, and your lack of physical fitness can be revealed in the sound — and strain — of your voice.
Having excess fat on the body can also place weight on your diaphragm and chest cavity, which can affect how you sound and how often you need to pause to inhale when you speak. If you have a fleshy face, the fat surrounding your nose and your neck can also create differences in the way you sound.
But though the internet has shown a fascination with this phenomenon, science has been relatively mum on the topic. This might be because it’s sort of a moot point to study in the first place.
Since sound is subjective, what one person hears as being a “fat-sounding voice” might sound completely different to another.
The English language also doesn’t have a ton of words that describe phonetics — or, how things sound — which can make identifying and studying “fat voices” even more difficult.
As a vocal coach from the Danish Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus/Aalborg wrote in a Quora post on the topic:
“I'm sure you can come up with many words to describe the individual sound of a voice, but it is harder to make everybody else agree [on what you’ve heard] and even harder to make sure than a written description will be understood as you meant it by every reader.”
The aural cues one might use to guess a person’s weight are also unreliable. Breathiness and shortness of speech might be indicators of fatness, but they can also be indicators of asthma, respiratory illnesses, or other issues.
The radio DJ who invited listeners to call in so he could guess their weights learned this when he made his one and only wrong guess of the day. He incorrectly predicted that one woman was fat, when in fact she was just a heavy smoker.
Not every overweight person has these tell-tale “fatness” vocal characteristics, either.
“I know some fat people [that] sound like Minnie Mouse though, like helium voice,” a user named “aabbsseenntt” commented in the Lipstick Alley thread. “I don’t know where the fuck that comes from. Maybe the pressure is like a whistle and [that’s why] their voice comes out like Mariah’s?”
And some voices don’t give any clues at all as to what the person’s body shape is like. I once knew a phone sex operator who weighed more than 250 pounds and I always wondered whether the men she spoke with could tell that she was overweight.
Others have been equally duped.
“There used to be a radio DJ at my local radio station that had such a sexy voice,” “Amble” wrote in a chat room. “I was surprised to find out they were overweight when I saw their pics online.”
To date, there’s really only one well-publicized study that has been done to determine whether being fat affects your voice. Conducted in 2014 in Beirut, Lebanon, it was a small study (15 people to start, although six dropped out mid-way) that examined patients’ voices before and after bariatric surgery. In addition to having their laryngeal functioning and overall acoustics measured and tested, the patients evaluated their voices themselves, focusing on any changes in pitch, loudness, physical effort, or vocal fatigue.
Thanks to the surgery, the patients lost a substantial amount of weight; an average of 66 pounds per person. But despite this big drop, researchers noted that none of the aural measurements they’d taken before surgery had actually changed post-op, indicating that maybe fatness really doesn’t have an effect on one’s voice.
But some of the patients felt differently. One-third of them reported hearing changes in their voices after the surgery. Of the three who noticed a difference, all of them felt that their voices had gone up in pitch, sounding higher and less deep than before their operation. Two of them thought their voices sounded less loud, and only one thought that their voice sounded less tired and forced.
So what does this mean? When science disagrees with intuition, which side should you believe?
We don’t know. But maybe that’s also the key. This could be one of life’s many unanswerable questions — one that’s better left unposed altogether.
It goes without saying that guessing someone’s weight by the sound of their voice is a pretty awful, uncool thing to do. It verges into sensitive territory and can easily come across as hurtful, derogatory, or shaming.
In fact, even discussing the phenomenon of being able to guess peoples’ weights by their voices makes some people uncomfortable (and rightly so).
“This thread ain’t right. It just ain’t,” a user named “Suzy Poon Tang” commented on Lipstick Alley.
Clearly, there are some topics that are better left unsaid, or even mentioned in the first place. Even if you guess right, you’re potentially making things awkward and uncomfortable. And if you guess wrong? You could really hurt someone’s feelings and mess with their sense of self.
That’s what happened to “Bomby57,” a Redditor who penned a distraught post (“Do I sound fat?!”) about a guess gone wrong in December of 2019.
“I met with a coworker whom I interact with only over the phone,” she wrote. “Her first sentence was, ‘Wow, you’re so much smaller than I thought when we talked.’
And all I could think of was that I sound fat. My job is to call people, and now everyone will think I’m fat.”
But, if you’ve got to make a prediction and simply can’t stop yourself from sharing it, at least be aware of your surroundings.
“In my college dorms, I could hear my suite mate talking through the shared bathroom and I swore up and down that heifer was fat,” wrote one person in a chat room, who learned this the hard way. “One day, my friend asked if I had met her and I said, ‘No but she sounds fat.’
It never occurred to me that if I could hear her, she could hear me as well. A few minutes later, she came and knocked on the door and said, ‘I just wanted to show you that I wasn't fat.’ I could hear my friend in the back laughing into a pillow.”
JESSIE SCHIEWE IS THE EDITOR OF OK WHATEVER. SHE BELIEVES IN MERMAIDS AND THRIFT SHOPS FOR EXERCISE.
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