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Notes -
Those rules were either honored in the breach or didn't bear much weight. People got the message that being fat was bad, even if it was communicated by what pointedly wasn't said rather than by what was. And these rules (at least among peers) didn't have the asymmetry that current fat acceptance does. Complaining about the discomfort one's fatness resulted in would be as unacceptable as pointing out the reason for it.
I think most frequently, breaches are used to contest and/or enforce a social hierarchy; it is acceptable to breach etiquette to an inferior's disadvantage, and unacceptable for the inferior to call the superior on the breach. Which has some bearing on the fat issue, as someone gaining weight would lose status in the hierarchy and thus open themselves up to unpunished rude behavior.
But in addition to that, the etiquette rules always left a way (at least for someone with enough social status) to get one's point across, whether that be plausibly-deniable catty remarks or perhaps even exaggerated efforts to "help", e.g. "Oh, honey, that chair just isn't very sturdy, and I wouldn't want you to hurt yourself, why don't you sit in that one" (when the chair in question is fine). The fat acceptance people don't want that. They don't want weight gain to lose them social status, they don't want to be told (even implicitly) that being fat is bad, and they want to be able to demand accommodation for their fatness.
The oppressor/oppressed framework offers them everything, if they can get the right position in it. Nobody gets to say anything about their weight, or treat them in any way badly due to it, and they have to be accommodated in every way.
I want to believe this, but I feel that time has shown that the oppressor/oppressed framework is more than capable of overruling the science. There's a lot of research on IQ, heritability, innate gender differences etc - and people just continue to spout verifiable, known lies that accord with the framework in question.
I suspect the fat acceptance movement won’t have the same success, partly because it isn’t innate and partly because medical advances will make being thin easier for most fat people to attain. Didn’t @self_made_human talk a few months ago about some new diet pill that seems to work wonders? Once almost anyone can become effortlessly thin, fat acceptance advocates will probably be seen the same way we now view anorexia advocates.
As I noted in a reply upthread, at least one "fat acceptance" activist professor has attacked Ozempic as an example of "fatphobia" — "the elimination of fat bodies" even:
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