Sorry it’s been about 3 weeks since I’ve posted, y’all!
January has been a really busy month, and it’s about to make the next few months even busier. I’m in my second to last semester of graduate school, I’m working full time, and I’ve made my mental health and discipline in the practice of self-care a tremendous priority (as everyone should!)
This past month I have had a lot of interactions with diet culture, weight stigma, and fat phobic comments and questions and situations. Before I address that (next week), I have to address the root of all the feelings that stir up when people’s comments, attitudes, projections, and investments in diet culture come about: the trigger.
‘Trigger’ has taken up a lot of space in political dialogue, thanks to human dumpster fire Tomi Lahren. It has been taken to mean “weak”, “sensitive”, but has actually been a legitimate colloquial term in the mental health community for years.
To those with mental illnesses, namely ones associated with trauma, a trigger is something that sets off their symptoms or problematic behaviors. It is the stimuli that creates a reaction that is indicative of the symptoms of one’s mental illness or disorder, such as a PTSD flashback or a panic attack or an episode of self-harm. I didn’t need to live through any experiences to know this; all it takes is a little research and a dash of compassion.
I’ve spent the past few weeks feeling really triggered by my family’s weight biased comments, grappling with my own internalized weight-stigma-turned-body-dysmorphia, and trying to sort through all of it with a lot of self care and a lot of patience. It can get really exhausting being hyper vigilant of the fact that your body is rendered as an object of lesser value, and it gets even more exhausting to explain to people why I am valuable as a not-thin person.
There is also a lot of discourse around the word ‘trigger’ being associated with violence and the idea that it’s being moved away from in a lot of talk about trauma. While I see the point in this, and know that language is important to a lot of folks (myself included), to police the use of such a term among other people if it makes the most sense of them is the opposite of social justice.
For the sake of example, I am trying to avoid the generalization of the term ‘queer community’ in a lot of my social justice talk with others. Because while I identify with the term queer as a word that dislodges my personal identity from heteronormative ideals, I understand that so many people have been harmed by that word and that it is still in very many cases an antigay slur.
Similarly, there are people with a lot of investment in diet culture who have not personally reclaimed the word fat as a self-identifier, and I have, since inhabiting my fat body, been corrected for addressing my own body this way–‘fat‘ in our society is still viewed largely as pejorative, and while I get frustrated often with waiting for people in and out of the eating disordered community to play catch up, I must also remain patient and remember that fully actualized fatness is not everyone’s truth.
Like I mentioned earlier, this constant cycle of having to defend what makes sense in order to maintain a general mental and emotional homeostasis can get really daunting and really exhausting after a while.
I am happy to explain to people what my eating disorder means on an intellectual level, and as far as the science behind my body type and the reasons for my behavior, I’m pretty well armed with the facts about what’s immediately important to me.
But being prepared for battle and always having to step in front of people and assert my boundaries around their problematic, weight stigmatizing, inconsiderate or even sometimes outright fatphobic language and behavior is not my job. There are countless resources (some of which are linked directly to this blog for allies and ED survivors alike to learn more about the varying experiences of eating disordered folks like me).
This frustration has, in the past, graduated to becoming anger–but that’s not the tone I wish to convey in this post in particular. More than anything, I hope to urge people who don’t understand the eating disordered brain and the psychology of food fixation, perfectionism and dysmorphia to perhaps just listen to their peers, friends, family and even strangers they meet who are affected.
Understanding how to treat people with EDs, and most importantly, how to work really hard not to trigger them, is critical to our recovery and the active dismantling of the diet culture that affects all of us–fat or thin, eating disordered or not–so, so negatively.
For eating disordered people, triggers mean anything that can spiral us into shame about our bodies, no matter what size they actually are. This shame spiral can bring an eating disordered person deep into their behaviors, whether its bingeing, restricting, purging, exercise or other forms of food compensation.
Even if those behaviors make no logical sense, our brains are wired to do them to keep up with a mental image of perfection and to avoid discomfort. My go-to behavior has always been bingeing, and even though I know that bingeing is often what causes dysmorphia, it is the one thing that my brain has done for so long, that it is conditioned to tell me it NEEDS it to survive so that I can be happy and safe. It is my brain’s way of protecting me from discomfort, even if I know that that discomfort is temporary, insignificant, or imagined.
My triggers are: weight loss discourse of any kind, eating in front of certain people, eating alone, being offered food, buffet style settings, gyms, people who body check in front of me–to name most of them.
I list these not to highlight my fragility, but to highlight a specific understanding of my behavior and what goes on in my brain when I am interacting with scenarios where these behaviors play out. Too often, people don’t know what is and isn’t okay because it doesn’t get articulated, and we need to make space for that conversation to happen among ourselves with each other, whether those having the conversation are disordered in their food and body patterns or not.
Being mindful of the things we say about our own bodies and how that translates to how we feel about other peoples’ bodies is not only an act of kindness, but a step toward validating every body no matter what size, health status, or relationship to food that body has. We can all stand to lose a little negativity, be more kind to ourselves, and recognize that we as a society cannot stand for the predatory nature of diet culture anymore. I’ve said it before and I will say it again!
Somebody gets paid every time you feel shame.
It’s what convinces you to buy the newest makeup, cream, protein shake, Weight Watchers subscription. And just like in any business model, the demand only lasts so long. There’s a reason why 95% of people “fail” their diets. (People aren’t failing diets, diets are failing people).**** Not because anything’s wrong with them, but because there’s everything wrong with the industry and the idea that restriction and body hatred are sustainable practices. Resilience, self-love and radical, unapologetic acceptance is more than sustainable; its life-saving.
****TW for this site: diet program ads may pop up.
Royally Incomplete 