Unlearning Fatphobia is Your Responsibility, Full Stop

Around two years ago, I was still in graduate school, still in semi-early recovery (again), and still trying to navigate support groups and fat acceptance all at once.

As a recovery practice, I began getting comfortable with using the word ‘fat’ as a self-descriptor around in my shares at group and in conversations–until I was called out and told not to come back until I could figure out my language and how to stop saying ‘fat’ because it was triggering to others.

I understood that. I understand that for so many people, fatness is a fear, and that fear can coexist with a mental illness (like anorexia, bulimia, or body dysmorphic disorder).

But I was also grappling with the fact that societally, fat is set up to be an insult, and I was tired of that dynamic, especially in ‘recovery’ spaces. I wanted to reclaim the word and remove its pejorative use from my consciousness. So I did, in my speech, shares, and writing.

Fatphobia is insidious in virtually every corner of our culture, because it prioritizes the politics of desirability over health. This happens even in spaces that are meant for people in recovery.

Fear of fat or becoming fat is not a diagnostically supported symptom of body dysmorphia; it is a socially constructed symptom of diet culture that has trained people to value aesthetic desirability over health. Fatphobia still comes in so many forms, even in spaces that claim recovery. It sends the message that recovery from an eating disorder is possible, but only if it’s done while in a specific body.

There are still so many recovery spaces that support the sentiment that it is okay and valid to not want to look like me. These same spaces are the kinds that have historically validated the notion that “fat” is an emotion, as if it can be removed from one’s consciousness embodiment the same way that sadness or contentment pass. My body type isn’t an emotion, and I can’t just get rid of it; in fact, I spent over half my life trying to do just that…and it was called an eating disorder. 

yourfatfriend is the best ok

Nobody wanted to call it that, though, because for most of my active illness I was in a body deemed aesthetically acceptable. How I got that desirable body wasn’t investigated, it was just assumed that I must be doing something right because my body was “right.”

The endless calorie deficit spreadsheets and the six to ten times a day I would weigh myself suggest otherwise. 

I have learned and come to the conclusion that I am under no obligation to assuage thin peoples’ insecurity about the possibility of looking like me. I certainly have compassion for where they are and the ways that diet culture has manipulated them, but at the end of the day, my fat body will not be used as an example, will not shrink itself to make space for bias, and I do not and will not ever be responsible for the ways that someone’s triggers are justified at my expense.

It’s not anyone’s fault that they learned that fatness was evil, bad, immoral, lazy, or undesirable. At the exact same time, it’s not my job to soothe the deep-seated hate for my body and others like it. It’s that person’s job to unlearn, question, shift and not project what they were told about fat bodies, and theirs alone.

Fatphobia comes in the form of silencing, health concern trolling, food policing, making spaces inaccessible (and much much more), and ignoring that Health at Every Size is more than a movement; it is and has always been a well-documented and valuable scientific approach. Do not mistake Health at Every Size for HealTHY at Every Size (Thanks M for that one), because not every single body is healthy.

Thin bodies can be diabetic, have heart problems, or high blood pressure. Fat bodies can be anorexic, have osteoporosis, or be poorly nourished. No disease is exclusive to a body type. My weight alone does not guarantee that I will get sick, just like thinness alone does not guarantee health. My body has a GI disorder that is entirely genetic, and correlated to my mental illness (anxiety), also genetic.

What’s more, I don’t owe anyone in the world receipts for my health in order to claim recovery. I had to unlearn fatphobia completely on my own, just like I learned it from the beginning both blatantly and subliminally. The ways that it is STILL pushed upon me are an unnecessary burden, and inevitably do harm, but it is solely my responsibility to make sure that I don’t project that harm or that burden onto other bodies.

Same goes for fatphobic conditioning, comments and advice you may think is rooted in health. Unless that person is paying you for advice, save it. And even then (because some doctors literally get paid to fat shame people)–THINK–is this thoughtful? Helpful? Important? Necessary? Kind? The ways that fatphobia is expressed onto bodies, often (almost always) without their consent. What people fail to understand is that fatphobia and weight stigma itself is health-compromising, “good intentions” be damned. 

If my body or the words I use to describe it are triggering to you, that has little to do with me or with disordered eating, and a whole lot to do with the potential work needed to dismantle anti-fat bias. Look within and examine unconscious stigma. What’s so terrible, scary and disgusting about being in my body? All I see when I watch this play out among fatphobic people, unconsciously or not, is that what they’re truly afraid of is losing is 1) their perception of thin as superior, 2) the indignant self-righteousness of “health and wellness”, and 3) their ability to feel power when they make anyone over a size 16 feel shame. 

It can be really hard and terrifying for someone to come along and burst what’s familiar to you, but get used to it. It’s not my body or the fact that I say FAT that makes them uncomfortable, it’s the fact that the same science that privileged thin existence for all of the 20th century is just now concluding that I am capable of health and deserving of recovery.

Regardless of your fear, my body is still here and I still love it for what it is; in fact, I have done more health-promoting behavior holistically (mental, spiritual, physical, etc.) in this body than I have in my entire life. If that’s a threat to your joy or your pursuit of desirability; that baggage ain’t mine. Stay mad. 

xoxo

 

How and Why I Quit Therapy

Therapy is magical.

Seeing a therapist has been part of my life and my story since I was eight years old. I started in a small office in an old, two-story Victorian style house a few towns away when my parents got divorced. We’d get Wendy’s on the way there right after school. Mostly, my therapist Barbara and I played board games and drew about my feelings. I wrote poems. I talked about not feeling like I belonged at the Catholic school I went to, and the confusion of all of it happening to me at once.

In fourth and fifth grade, we had a group at school called “Banana Splits” where we met weekly or monthly during my lunch time and ate together and talked. It was a group of kids whose parents were going through a divorce or who were already divorced, and I actually found a lot of peace there. I don’t know the logistics of how I was enrolled, but I just remember it being safe and helpful to me at a time when I was so, so lost in a new elementary school and still maladapting to my parents’ being apart. 

I found a therapist in middle school who I saw up until my high school graduation. She got me through episodes of depression, anxiety, bullying, self-harm, (then) undiagnosed, eating disordered behavior, coming out to myself, ending my relationship with my biological father, and recovering from what I knew at the time to be an addiction to self-harm and self-imposed destruction.

I saw her through my diagnoses of depression and anxiety at age 17, and there were so many instances in which I can say she saved my life. She’s passed on now and someone else lives in her house (which also used to be her office); but I am so grateful to her for how much she helped me in the seven years I sat in her office baring my broken soul all that time.

Throughout college I had a few episodes of suicidality, in which I was recommended on mandate to the University Health Center Psych Services. Their intake crisis counselor became my therapist outside of school, and she would get me through four years of college and phone sessions until a year after that. She was like the mom I needed, the one who didn’t nitpick my outfits or police my food–she nurtured me.

Doc M saw me through unhealthy coping mechanisms and even unhealthier codependent relationships, coming out to my family, navigating college with anxiety. After a major breakup and a year of graduate school, I was managing okay. It was mutually understood that I was ready to move on.

In December 2018, I sought therapy again for the first time in a few years, immediately following a relapse. The first thing I did was look up “eating disorder specialists” on my insurance website, as well as on Psychology Today.

 

I found a therapist with Friday appointments, who took my insurance, close to my house. I had also at this point started drinking again (which most of you know, I don’t do) so I knew this was yet another bottom I’d need picking up from, with more than just an app and a text to the crisis line acting as a de facto “treatment team.” 

This person’s profile also contained the usual client-focused questions that tell a person seeking their help virtually nothing about their experience with specific issues. The video I linked above is a really good comprehensive primer about how to find a therapist who will do a better job for you by asking the right questions and demanding the right level of care for yourself through a series of “what to look for.” (Note that it’s pretty new-agey/weird Portland OR specific; maybe I should make one for the Long Island area).

This therapist, according to my insurance website, listed eating disorders as a specialty.

This was not the case. 

I will say, this therapist often gave a lot of really good feedback and didn’t let me stew in my own sh*t longer than I needed to. I got a lot of what I needed, not wanted, to hear, and was always tasked a lot of reflecting to do. But I’d never experienced a therapy session in which 90 percent of the talking was done by someone who wasn’t me for an entire hour, where specific issues that I had been clear about addressing were forgotten about in favor of talking about this person’s politics, and where conversations that just mentioned my LGBTQ (particularly transgender) friends were taken as a challenge and a debate in which I was asked to educate this person about those issues. They also frequently made jokes about scheduling appointments not too far apart so they could get paid, and then inserted “for continuity of care” as an afterthought. It was…weird. In hindsight, it was probably a huge red ethics flag. 

Most significantly, I never really got the help that I needed, and asked for, for my eating disordered behaviors. Those continued. And in their office were books about the keto diet, gluten free fad literature, and other triggering and unhelpful things that signaled to me that this person was indeed not the therapist who could or would help treat my eating disorder, despite their best intention and the fact that my own insurance company said they were qualified to help.

I saw them continuously for about nine months before ghosting them entirely. Since then, I rely mostly on my brilliant and amazing psychiatrist for therapy. I’ve been seeing him for three years this spring, and there has literally never been a session I haven’t left with a smile on my face. He even told me to give that therapist a shot and not “break up” with them…but I’m actually faring really well with just my psychiatrist’s help for the time being.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s really difficult to maintain executive functioning sometimes without a weekly and frequent therapist. But that’s why I’m so grateful for all the skills and ideas I have learned in therapy up to this point, in the past 17 years since I started in and out of a therapist’s office. I also am so grateful for different apps like Sanvello, Recovery Record (which, admittedly, I need to use more often!) and the cultivation of a spiritual practice that involves regular ritual, community, and openness to learning.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Breaking up with a therapist is never easy–heck, I ghosted mine. I guess I did this for a few reasons a) saying outright “you’re really transphobic and I want to recover and this isn’t helping me do that” is a mouthful of awkward, and b) I didn’t really feel like I owed this person that explanation or any at all. I felt like “do no harm” was not happening for me, no matter how well-meaning this professional was; which solidified my need to survive first and cut ties with this person without much communication.

I haven’t been back since September, and I’m okay with that. Has my journey with ED been bumpy at times? Absolutely, especially now at a time when health stressors are high for our entire culture and I’m navigating a potential chronic digestive illness.

But I’m managing, and actually, this time away from my work has allowed me more time to self-care and make time for the things that I don’t get to do ritually for my mental health. So I’m feeling grateful, despite not having a formal “treatment team” or never really having been to treatment despite likely needing it.

Self Advocacy is EVERYTHING.

Especially when it comes to eating disorder recovery and other specific diagnoses within the mental health field, you have to know what to ask for. I am no longer afraid to ask potential therapists what their experience is in eating disordered behavior and treatment, and whether or not their approach involves HAES.

A list of questions (that you are absolutely entitled) to ask a potential therapist for your ED:

• What is your training in eating disorders?
• How do you understand eating disorder recovery?
• Would you give the same mental health advice to a thin/fat person?
• What do you know about HAES, and do you align with the philosophy and science that supports it?
• What is the efficacy or effectiveness of Overeaters Anonymous? Do you recommend this program to everyone who you believe has an ED?
• How do you treat the twofold illness of disordered eating and body dysmorphia?
• Can I count on you to avoid weight talk or weight bias?
• What is your approach to treating anorexia?
• What is your approach to treating bulimia (conventional or exercise bulimia?)
• What is your approach to treating binge eating disorder? (if their answer is weight loss as a primary treatment, get a second opinion)
• What is your approach to treating orthorexia?
• Do you believe that a person can fully recover from an eating disorder?
• What resources are you connected to in case I may need a higher level of care? Will you support me in accessing that higher level of care if necessary?

(A note to therapists: involving diet culture, weight loss or other fatphobic approaches when treating folks with ED will NOT help them recover–promise).

I think it’s important to look FAR beyond what the insurance company website says a person specializes in, and straight up email/ask them yourself. If they spent a weekend doing a seminar or crash course at a Renfrew, that’s not eating disorder specialized. If they diet regularly and subscribe to the culture that renders some bodies more deserving of help than others, that’s not eating disorder specialized–that’s food/disorder fixated.

Find a therapist who spent time doing LONG rotations at ED clinics, reading up on and taking continuing education courses in the specific manifestations of disorder you are looking for treatment in, someone who knows the harm that diet culture does and is at least able to recognize the HAES framework. And don’t stop asking questions about what they have done to prepare to treat and empathically understand the FULL scope of your illness in the here and now. The only boundary I would say is off limits is outright asking them about their personal experience with eating disorders–that’s not your story to hear; it is only their story to tell, just like yours is your own.

Wondering out loud here for you, my LI/NY followers–would we like a video similar to the one I shared above, for New York based treatment options for those of us with ED? Let me know. 

Stay safe and healthy out there, everyone!

A Shout-Out to My Gastroenterologist

I recently went to my gastroenterologist for a consulting visit before my scheduled procedure in April and I was so honestly happy with the outcomes.

When I began the process of seeking out treatment for my stomach issues (which are related directly to my anxiety, have been persisting for years, and likely were made more difficult due to my ED behaviors), I was really nervous and didn’t know what to expect. A family history of GI-related illnesses (Crohn’s, celiac disease) runs in my family, and I had been experiencing symptoms for the past few months that were indicative of something needing to be done.

At my first appointment, the standard thing went on–conversation about symptoms, family history with the help of my mom who came with me to the appointment, but a minimal discussion of my mental health conditions and my history of an eating disorder. I got a few tests spread out over those next few months–an MRI that came back normal, despite not feeling normal and often having nausea and other issues.

So I scheduled an appointment to meet with my doctor during a week off and I went alone to discuss the unaddressed issues of my eating disordered behavior in a more complete way.

She didn’t take my weight at all, validated my mental health symptoms as a likely cause of my gastrointestinal issues, and gave me a recommendation for medical food that would help.

We discussed Overeaters Anonymous and the fact that it’s unnecessary and unhelpful for me (something that doctors, in my experience, never feel, especially when fat patients are sitting in front of them), discussed my family’s relationship with my disordered behavior and my lack of ED treatment (due to weight stigma and denial that what I had was an eating disorder at all in the first place), and she reviewed my previous tests and came to the conclusion that my ED has had no long-term adverse affects on my body.

It is likely that I do have IBS, and she noted that I may benefit from biofeedback so that I can get better at aligning my hunger and fullness signals with my executive functioning.

Because after a few years of binge-purge cycles, I learned how to recover, but my anxiety is a persistent issue. I still struggle with executive functioning, and sometimes will get so busy or bad at time management or just be too anxious to eat, and my hunger signals will go ignored and eventually shut off until they are no longer in my awareness.

It sometimes would result in me skipping meals for hours, and bingeing once I can no longer ignore the ghrelin entering my stomach and telling me to eat, causing me to double or triple up on food, as a way of answering for my missed meals.

I left this appointment having articulated all of this to my doctor, and feeling heard and validated in that understanding of my behavior as it relates to my GI function. And none of it was attributed to my fatness, I was not asked to answer for my weight or reduce it, and I am so grateful for that.

This comprehensive understanding and being able to talk to a doctor about my eating disorder history and be understood and not stigmatized for my weight all at once was probably the best experience I’ve ever had with a medical professional since realizing that I needed to recover from BED/OSFED.

It is difficult enough to be a fat patient in any medical office, but when that doctor visit has to do directly with your eating behavior and the potential for weight stigma is higher than normal, bracing yourself for both subtle and not-so-subtle fatphobia is stressful and traumatic.

I didn’t think finding a doctor who was understanding of my history of eating disorders across the spectrum WHILE also actively not being fatphobic would happen for me. These small things add up for us folks who deal with weight bias from virtually all other corners of life in this world. Thank you so much, Dr. S!

A Discussion About Rule 62

An open letter to men in recovery: stop using “Rule 62” to dismiss women, comorbidity and intersectionality.

To ring in 2020, I spent New Year’s Eve with my friends who are sober–most if not all of whom are qualifying members of Alcoholics Anonymous (I am not; however, I understand the fellowship and framework quite well).

I was discussing sobriety with a man I had just met upon walking in the door to my good friends’ house on the water on the south shore of Long Island–the designated gathering place for 50+ sober people at any given time on a holiday such as July 4th, MDW, and this year, NYE.

I mentioned the unfortunate lack of consideration for folks with eating disorders like myself in the program of AA–especially considering that so many women (approximately 50%) experience comorbid symptoms of eating disorders and substance abuse including alcoholism.

The man in question simply said, “Rule 62,” and looked at me blankly.

Rule 62. 

Don’t take yourself so damn seriously. 

Rule 62, for those unfamiliar, is a rule that has found its way into recovery circles as unspoken tradition.

The backstory, from what I understand, has to do with tradition four (“Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or A.A./E.D.A/whateverA as a whole.”) in anonymous programs, which discusses the  idea that individual meeting groups can operate on their own volition without involving or compromising the integrity of the fellowship as a whole.

When AA was expanding, a group attempted to be “all things to all people”–they resolved to take care of meetings, residential treatment, and other facets of recovery life all under one roof–and realized that their goal was way bigger than they could manage in the context of the AA program.

This group came up with 61 rules and sent them to AA as a manifesto or proclamation for beginning their ambitious program. Then, they realized just how daunting a task it would be to take care of every single person’s needs in the realm of addiction treatment–and before scrapping the idea, they came up with rule 62. 

So, what about it? 

Last week, I read a really powerful and thought-provoking opinion piece in the New York Times about the patriarchal foundations and history of AA as an organization. We all know the names Bill W. and Dr. Bob, two men who were alive during the first world war and became alcoholics due to a perceived spiritual malady that they believed had to do with an inflated ego and sense of self, as well as a lack of presence of a higher power in their lives. They were their own higher power for the duration of their relationship with alcohol and drinking–which, as the NYT article suggests, is the essence of white male privilege. 

They sought to recover from this sense of ego, but did it also heal their harmfully separatist sense of rigid gender roles and toxic masculinity?

Alcoholics Anonymous itself has, seemingly ironically tried to be all things to all people; opening itself to women, people of color, people with doctorates, average folks, and everyone in-between, but how can it do that if it still holds itself in the principles, practices and ideas of a world that was designed by and for white men? How can a fellowship with such a marginal number of women attending compared to men even say that “anyone can do it” if they have the capacity to be honest? 

The problem is, this claim is dishonest in and of itself.

Rule 62 was meant to be an ego-check on a group of alcoholics who thought (mistakenly) that their individual group’s program could be a one-stop shop for recovery. When they failed, they wrote this rule as a way of softening the ways that their ambitious and admirable mission had not gone to plan. Well intentioned? Maybe.

In this conversation in my friend’s kitchen, Rule 62 was used to dismiss my very real concern about the harm still being done to people like me in the rooms who are not having their eating disorders addressed–a problem backed by statistics, as I shared before.

I know, I know. If AA were to take on eating disorders too, they wouldn’t really be AA anymore. But this is 2020; and we really need to start accounting for the more than half of the fellowship that needs access to a safe place to express the comorbidity of their alcoholism with other issues like disordered eating and, in the case of my region, opioid abuse. By not being sensitive to issues that clearly and empirically intersect with the problem of alcoholism, there is an imminent danger of making full recovery inaccessible to so many members and potential members.

“At least you’re not drinking” (I hear this one a lot, too!) isn’t good enough anymore. Eating disorders have an unbelievably high mortality rate, especially anorexia nervosa. And I’d venture to say that MOST eating disordered alcoholics can relate to the feeling that alcohol sets off their ED, and vice versa. This is serious.

Food is available at tons of AA meetings without supporting the people for whom food might be a trigger. With over 50 percent of addicts and alcoholics also having an ED–it seems a little insensitive not to address this, and to tell those who are authentically worried about it “not to take themselves so damn seriously.” 

It’s not really a coincidence or an accident that this “rule” is probably most often bestowed upon women, as it was done unto me.

Having an ego and unwarrantedly flaunting your ability to quote a book that is, dare I say, just as fallible and subjective as we all are is…confusing, and honestly, a form of gaslighting imo.

Women don’t need to be powerless, and we don’t need to be told not to take ourselves so seriously. The world outside of those church basements and sober gatherings already does that to and for us. 

Now, I know that this individual’s use and interpretation of Rule 62–like the fallible interpretations of a lot of things in AA and other anonymous groups–speak to the person, not to the fellowship as a whole, hence, the fourth tradition. Hell, Rule 62 was created so that a bunch of people who created a plan and failed, like any human might do, could laugh at themselves and not be bummed that they hadn’t succeeded. We all need a little of that in our lives, certainly.

But I wonder how many times this rule has also been used to drive women into silence about the things that bother them about the world that they live in; things happening inside and outside the rooms. Because the fact is, we absolutely need more power in the world at large and in the daily context of our lives, not less.

And that’s not going to come to us when we are told that the realities of the things we face–pay gaps, the motherhood tax, harassment, assault, violence, dismissal, diet culture, body shame, objectification, legislation made against and about our bodies, repeated interpersonal abuse and marginalization–aren’t serious, problematic or important enough for the men who claim to be united in recovery with us (while, might I add, segregating themselves OFTEN) to take seriously.

I’m a member of a recovery fellowship that isn’t AA, but since AA laid that foundation, I’m addressing it directly, I guess. Any if not all of my closest friends are members of AA. Some of them may cheer me on for saying this, and some might not. That’s okay. However, if anonymous recovery groups, and recovery as a whole, isn’t the same boys club that it says it “used” to be, I’m going to need some of the recovering men I see, know, and love, to start proving that. In fact, I demand it, because (gasp!) I take myself seriously. Out of nothing more than self-respect.

 

So, I joined a gym: Week 1

During and after college, I used to be an avid attendee at my local Planet Fitness. Then exercise bulimia got in the way.

I would often go to the gym twice a day, especially after bingeing on dining hall food to the point where I would make myself sick. Exercise became a punishment, a compensation, a labor.

I took this behavior home with me after graduating from college, too, even when I started to recognize my eating disorder for what it really was–a disorder. I was obsessed with my body and food and unwilling to compromise with myself. I slowly began to resent the gym and movement pretty much altogether, and was restricting enough so that the gym wasn’t necessary for compensation anymore. This led me down a dangerous path.

I was also a track and XC kid from 7th to 10th grade, when my knees wouldn’t let me run distance anymore and I had to give up the sport. I used this, as you can probably guess, to my full advantage when creating my elaborate eating schemes and compensation behaviors. I ran and ran and calculated each mile ran or walked down to the 1/10th of a mile. I did crazy sprint drills on the bleachers at my high school (when I was home for the summer) and strength exercises like the football players do in movies.

 

Until one day just before my college graduation, after a really memorable experience of feeling so disgusted with myself on an elliptical that I couldn’t keep going after fifteen minutes, I swore off exercise machines for life.

What I didn’t realize then was that it wasn’t the gym’s fault that I had this attitude; it was my intention and (over)use of the gym itself that created an association with disorder, misery and self-consciousness in my own head.

Now, I was born with a displacement in my hips; one is a few degrees higher than the other, and it makes my right knee joint work harder to reach the ground (knee pain), AND, to top that off, I have flat feet.

So basically, from the waist down, I’m pretty prone to a lot of clicking and pain in my hip joints. I feel like one of the Golden Girls and I’m only 25 (if I were a GG I’d absolutely be Dorothy btw).

Recently, I re-joined a gym for the first time in about three years. I’m back at the same Planet Fitness I used to belong to in college and would visit frequently on my breaks from school and weekends home. Except I signed up with a new goal in mind–health and strength first.

My hip pain motivated me to go get stronger, and I’ve since been doing that. Often times, fat folks get diagnosed as fat when they’re in pain–and it’s not always incorrect, because there are certain joints in our bodies that bear weight (load-bearing joints); and to stress them out creates mobility compromises for some folks. But for me, my knees have always been jacked up, fat or not–hips too.

But just as often as fat people get told to lose weight to improve their health, thin people don’t. Thin people with the same joint problems I likely have will be told to stretch more, strengthen and work out more–but I guess when it comes to fat folks, it is assumed that we can’t, won’t, or aren’t already doing those things for our health or to maintain strength in the areas that cause us pain.

So I went to the gym telling myself “I’m going to make my left hip pain less frequent and severe,” and that’s just what I did.

So far, I’ve been there twice since signing up, and I did two weight circuits, a stretching sesh, and some specific leg training stuff like lunges. I even made time for the stair climbing machine of death that I used to be terrified of because I fell off once. I went on for only five minutes because it was like reaaaaaaaallllly hard, but I took what I could and didn’t do it past my threshold of enjoyment. That’s what exercise is all about, I’m slowly learning–our intention and the ways we plan to connect with and interact with our bodies while we move them.

To extend this bada** gympowerment thing even further, I told my mom not to comment on my appearance or physical activity and especially not to connect it to weight loss since that’s not what I’m there for–and so far, those boundaries have been maintained which is so tremendously huge for me. There is nothing better than to be seen and heard and respected all while getting to improve my health in a way that has nothing to do with weight loss, and to receive the recognition that there is worth–and health–beyond my weight.

Stay tuned for more updates from the gym!

Are you Addicted Enough?

Most people would look at this post and go, what? But as always, just wait to see what I mean.

Most people (maybe not most, but a lot) of people I’ve ever heard talk about addiction talk about having the disease of “more.”

On a walk this afternoon, 65 hours after my last binge, I realized that I have the disease of enough. 

I used to ask myself,

Am I good/worth enough?

Do I belong enough?

Is there enough food for me? 

How can I become small enough? 

Did I burn off enough? 

My family used to comment that I would “eat like I was going to the electric chair” and tell me to “take human bites.” These comments didn’t help me, in fact, they probably made me internalize a lot of the mentality that I was “broken.”

Realistically, now I know that there is a glitch in my brain that falsely tells me that there is not enough food and that I better eat as much as I possibly can so that I get enough. This comes from dieting and starving beginning at age twelve; I built myself a deprivation mechanism that fossilized itself into my brain so hard, that when large quantities of food are present, my brain thinks its the last time I’ll ever eat again.

The reasons why I binged on thanksgiving this year are many. For one thing, I disassociated pretty bad when I got to the table, as if it were just me and the plate. I took a three hour nap after my meal and still felt sick. I wasn’t proud at all.

To my surprise, I woke up the next morning and felt SUPER charged with the energy to recover and do better. I don’t know where it came from; I think maybe I just knew that I didn’t want to feel the way I felt the night before…disgusted, alone, defeated and depressed. 

I went to a meeting with my cousin, and another one later that evening, and another one last night where I shared in front of a room full of 50+ people that I needed support. I asked myself two questions on paper last night, “How do I get better at asking for help?” and “How do I make g-d everything?” and I think that meetings and support systems will reveal the answers to those questions as I go forward.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that staying sober is pretty easy on me but, if I’m in active eating disordered behavior, that becomes a thousand percent false.

I never drank problematically until about a year ago, when I spent a month drinking at the same bar. During that time, I learned how connected my eating disorder and my problem of drinking were. My body image issues were the primary problem, but I learned quickly that if I drank, I no longer was conscious of what I looked like and I couldn’t really coherently think about what other people thought of me–or what I thought of myself. 

Even after I stopped drinking alcohol, I was so judgmental (one of my go-to defects). Today, I realized that this was how I behaved because I saw people the same way that I assumed they saw me, which was how I also saw myself–worthless, inferior, undeserving. And I kept blaming the internalized voices of my abusers for these projections, when realistically, it was a way of keeping up self will. Those voices that emotionally manipulated me down to nothing started as the voices of other people, and then started to sound a lot like me.

I blamed my higher power for that for so long, even though it wasn’t her fault. I couldn’t trust a higher power because what had g-d ever done for me, anyway? I had to control my life. I had to protect myself. I had to find ways to survive abusive people. I had to successfully hide my identity from my family. I had to save the world and still make it home in time for dinner. All the stability in my life has always depended on ME. How was staying sober or free of self harm or away from disordered eating any different?

Those messages I received as a kid that I was small or unimportant came from people who chose their own form of self-will over unconditional love. And it gave me a model for allowing my own forms of self-will to run my life into the ground, on and off for the past (almost) 12 years.

And to think I kept this up until it attacked me head on this past week. 

I binged because my higher power wasn’t invited to the table with me where I sat and ate for almost 10 minutes in virtual silence. I didn’t give a power greater than myself a chance to protect me, and that’s on me. I was busy making sure I had enough, belonged enough, felt like enough–when in reality, I was born enough.

 

---

 

48 hours

Stare at your plate

eat, take more

eat, take more

until you can’t 

take anymore

you remember 

this time last year

you were well 

because you invited god

to your table

where is your god now

and why did you make her small?

because it’s all you know 

how to do

shrink yourself,

to feel like your life 

is your own 

except god didn’t have to

get smaller with you 

it’s not god’s fault 

the same way it wasn’t 

your fault

when they chose self will

over unconditional love

so you sit here 

and stare at the plate 

taking more,

promising you’ll make up for it tomorrow,

hollow yourself out 

until your body is screaming,

you’ll keep choosing self-will 

over unconditional love

and you can’t hear your body

screaming

“We are both so much more

than enough.”

Body Dysmorphia is Bigger than Your Brain

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is considered a subsymptom of most eating disorders. It involves “a disabling preoccupation with perceived defects in appearance which makes sufferers excessively self- conscious.”

In both active ED and in recovery, I’ve experienced body dysmorphia (also often called dysmorphophobia, to emphasize its positioning in the realm of cognitive distortion rather than reality); and the feelings that come with it–anxiety, shame, dissociation, guilt, worthlessness. These emotional parts of the disorder itself are visceral and real experiences.

But in a few arenas of this recovery community, I’ve also heard expressions of dysmorphia linked to “feeling fat” and “being fat”, even (and especially) from the most thin-passing of people.

I shouldn’t even have to say why this is inherently problematic in that it alienates actually fat bodies, dismisses fat peoples’ corporeal reality to a fleeting emotion (which it most definitely is not) and reinforces fatphobia by centering thinness as the ideal to achieve even in the face of deadly illnesses like eating disorders very much are.

It recycles in the already disordered brain the idea that fat is a bad word. 

As an activist, I’ve often been thrust into the conversation regarding the use of “fat” when a person just really is trying to express that they are deep in dysmorphic thinking as the person who had the responsibility of educating thinner people about the ways that their language instigates healthism, size discrimination and weight stigma.

While I didn’t mind at the time, I had to step back and really ask people to do their own work and their own research to understand why this kind of speech is dehumanizing to bodies like mine. Further, it is even harmful to people who are thinner than me because it positions them in a cognitive distortion that suggests that they “better be careful” or they’ll “end up like (fat person)”. This is the recipe for body dysmorphia perpetuated by our own culture. 

What it mostly comes down to is a gross misunderstanding of thin privilege. 

Thin privilege CAN and actually does often exist in the eating disorder recovery community. The most represented “recovering/recovered” body is the thin, white, cisgender female, and despite being two of the three, I’ve experienced a lot of frustration with this paradigm of privilege in what is supposed to be the “body positive” movement.

How can we claim to be positive and inclusive of ALL bodies if only certain bodies are being represented? It sure does make it look a lot like the white thin-passing people are the only ones working hard at recovery, while people of color and trans people who may be experiencing dual dysmorphia/dysphoria are working really hard not only to recover but to be seen.

Centering thin bodies in this movement also purports a hugely missed opportunity for fat people with eating disorders to speak on their stories. Fat people can experience restriction, and thanks to our diet culture, they do–often.

Fat people in the recovery community don’t only struggle with binge eating disorder and other disorders that are characterized by weight gain, though for some, that is our story. I’ve said it so many times on this blog…when I was in the throes of binge eating disorder, I was in a “healthy” or “normal” weight range…whatever that means.

Only after eating intuitively and settling into my body’s needs did I begin to gain weight in recovery…and not because I was necessarily eating more, but because my body was trying to readjust to all the years of dieting, restricting, excessive exercise and bingeing cycles that I used to abuse and numb myself through trauma and my severe anxiety.

“So thin people should just stay silent about their experiences, even if they ARE uncomfortable in their bodies?”

When mindfulness of one’s language is called for, sentences like this are often a response. People, especially those with privilege, really hate to feel like they are being silenced. Silence isn’t what’s demanded of those with eating disorders, no matter where they fall on the spectrum.

And even still, sometimes silence isn’t so bad. Because the less we talk, the more we can listen to what those experiences look like, sound like, act like and are like for other people.

Those of us with ED experience know that silence is what makes that eating disordered voice grow larger and louder. However, when being asked to consider how you use “fat” or express your dysmorphia, you’re simply being asked to consider the reality of others in the context of your own.

When I ask people who are in anti-diet circuits or even in recovery forums and settings to question why they “feel fat” and when I am quick to label their jargon as disguised or internalized fatphobia, I am met often with a lot of resistance.

Speaking in terms of social justice, this is a lot of the same thing that happens when white people are asked to question their implicitly racist behaviors and how those behaviors may signal that there are pieces of their identity that they benefit from that others don’t have the same privilege of doing on a daily basis.

I can’t take my fat off my body at will. It’s not a costume. It’s not an emotion. I can’t package it up into a feeling. I’ve tried that before, and it put me in a place where my body was at war with itself constantly from the time I was 12 years old until I was 23. 

“But what about when I DO feel larger than I might actually be?” 

Words you can use instead of “I feel fat” to describe your brain’s distorted relationship with your body:

“I’m feeling really bloated right now…it’s only temporary.”

“Wow! What I just ate maybe doesn’t feel so good all at once. Next time I try this meal, I’ll eat a little slower so I don’t feel so overcrowded, overwhelmed or sick.”

                             “My body feels different than it usually does.”

“I’m feeling a little out of sorts; how can I distract myself?”

                              “I can only compare myself to myself, and even then, comparison doesn’t help me live in the now.”

These are all statements that ask us to get curious about what’s really going on in our brain and to connect that to our actual, tangible reality.

And it does that while also not contributing anymore to the deepening our culturally constructed bias against fat bodies.

These thought patterns encourage me to step away from comparison traps, to view bodies in a more socially conscious way, and remove normative ideas about bodies from the center of my own individual consciousness, and maybe eventually, from the ideas we all have about what it means to be “in recovery.”

Feeling weird in your body is, and I hate this word–normal. But the harder we work at smoothing out that weirdness and becoming comfortable and curious about how different it can feel and look within us day to day, the softer and more gentle that strangeness gets.

Our bodies are not static, and feeling different in them every day is how we are supposed to live this life. I know that as long as I feel at home in this body, I’m free to feel as experimentally weird and different as my range of sensory and emotional experience allows. Dysmorphia is a big part of my story, but it doesn’t have to be escaped through fatphobic rhetoric that ultimately widens the gap between my empirically fat self and the worth and value I have as a person. 

Sober and In love in Buffalo

Love shows up in the most unlikely places.

Seriously, who would have thought a city that is so famous for its crazy, double-digit inches winter snowstorms could be so full of magic?

One thing I never knew about the beautiful city of Buffalo was that it is an absolutely incredible place in the summer. 

My girlfriend and I went for her sorority sister’s wedding last week, and we made a little vacation out of it. I fell in love with the city, I learned so many new things about my relationship and myself, and I fell in love–with her. 

We spent the first night wandering around the canal side of town, and came across some really cool stuff–a shark girl art piece, boardwalk trivia night, and a few characters from around the city. 

Also–THE FOOD! Beef on weck, pretty good pizza (coming from a native metro-New Yorker), Buffalo wings, stuffed banana peppers, HUGE burgers, and every ten feet, a bar with their own brewery or a brewery close by that makes all their own beer. Of course, I did not partake in the drinking for obvious reasons (sobriety).

The day after we arrived, we hiked the Buffalo River through all the old grain silos and down past the canal side where we were on our first night in the city. It was easily one of the most calming, beautiful, and spiritually energizing things I’ve ever done. If you’re ever in Buffalo, go see Silo City–it’s unreal, and perfectly legal to tour–unlike almost all other abandoned sites you’ll find anywhere.

We came back to Silo City, this time for a vertical tour–yep, that’s right. My fat ass went up 11 floors of 110 year old spiral staircase, down more metal staircases, up a ladder, across an air bridge, and through three different grain silos that were built during or before 1930. I’ve urban explored since I was 15, but never with a group of strangers and most certainly never that high up.

And even though my fear of heights is like, OVERWHELMING, I still wasn’t as afraid of falling more than 14 stories as I was of maintaining my recovery while on this trip.

I realized that my fear wasn’t because I was angry at my girlfriend, or angry at anyone else–it was because I was in a physical and emotional space where it became really, really hard to keep my sobriety while being surrounded by so much celebration and so much actual alcohol and food all at once. And for me, staying sober is necessary to keep my ED recovery, too. I was in sensory overload, for sure.

So how did I do it?

Connection.

We had spent the day walking around, we toured the Martin House, originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and went to see the Hotel Henry, on the former site of the Buffalo State Psych Center.

I started getting really restless, irritable and discontent--which is what happens when you’re in your ego, far from prayer, and thinking only of yourself and your small problems.

My friend from home (shout out to Ryan) urged me with GIFs to go to this LGBTQ AA meeting ten minutes from our hotel room. I was able to ask my girlfriend to drop me off and get me there, and I’m so grateful I did.

 

An aside–Buffalo has an INCREDIBLEEEEEEE LGBTQ+ community.

The speaker spoke so much truth into my story. The perfectionism, the comparison, the feeling out of place. More and more people told my story and I realized that it was my higher power speaking through the people in this meeting, whom I would likely not see again.

I got their numbers anyway, and one of them was the reason I figured out why I was being such a brat–because I was so scared of losing everything I’ve been working for in recovery from my eating disorder and beyond.

They got me through the rehearsal dinner, where I wanted to cry because we sat three feet from the open bar. 

They got me through the rest of the night following the rehearsal dinner, when I finally opened up to my girlfriend about why I was being so mean and that I felt so scared. We compromised and and she thanked me for my realness. Relief.

Communication

…is something I’m notoriously terrible at. But Cait (yes, she and I have the same name…it’s….a thing) makes me so good at it. It’s easy to articulate things when someone wants to listen and grow with you and understand, even if they know they might not ever understand. 

The more we communicated, the more we were able to draw solutions out of the next twenty four hours.

She stayed for the wedding after party and I went back to our hotel room alone. I asked for what I needed, and it began with that meeting at the end of our trip. I set boundaries like I never have with another person before.

My fellows and my girlfriend weren’t the only ones I was in frequent communication with. My higher power was there this whole time, and I think that kayaking trip was when I felt it most. I was in my own head every second of that trip before the miracle of a meeting I went to, except when I was out on the water paddling through the wind like a champ.

Commitment

Maybe the feeling of “so in love” was a symptom of wedding fever; maybe not…who knows. Seeing all the dancing and the staring into each other’s eyes intently and the speeches and the love and the crying was enough to make me look at my own love and see nothing but perfectness.

Even in the face of imperfection. 

My girlfriend thought the ceremony was a half hour later than it actually was, so of course, we missed it. IMMEDIATELY she started to cry once she realized. I tried to preach acceptance as best as I could, and let her have a good time, dance a little, talk a little, reassure a little, get grounded a little.

Typically, I am a dancing MACHINE at weddings. But as I said, this wedding had me particularly anxious and vulnerable. So I didn’t leave my seat much, except for (obviously) the Cha Cha Slide. 

Then, our song came on. (“Perfect” by Ed Sheeran).

 

 

We were the only slow dancing queer couple on the floor, and the self-consciousness set in REAL hard. But I looked at her and sang the words and stopped caring. And I loved every second of it.

For three minutes, I was committed to being myself. I was committed to love and to not caring what other people thought. 

And that instance made me realize that I’m committed to loving this person as much as they love me.

And that means being honest with them, even if I have to lay out that honesty while being an angsty, frustrated and resentful mf. 

I loved Buffalo. I love being in love. I love my recovery. And I wouldn’t trade any of my life for anything (except maybe I’d move to Buffalo).

 

 

xo

 

What is Happening to Body Positivity?

I can promise y’all this post is going to be part rant, part analysis, part grieving process, all realness, and a lot of emotional work.

Today after a lot of sad reflection I’ve started to wonder what the absolute heck is happening to the body positivity movement.

Or maybe I’m just now realizing that it has never truly, wholeheartedly meant to include specific bodies over a certain size all along.

Once I have examined all the privilege I have being in a body with a voice in eating disorder recovery, body pos, and fat acceptance all at once, I realize it’s probably the latter. 

I’ve started to realize that body positivity as it stands, really hasn’t told us anything new for a long time. I say this because it’s rooted and it survives and thrives in a big hearty pot of western (white) feminism. It’s worth acknowledging that as a white cis person, there are more than a few ways I benefit from this. But as a fat person, I don’t, and neither does anyone bigger or more brown or differently abled than I am.

Being body positive and fat positive aren’t the same thing.

…In much of the same way that saying you’re not a racist and rejecting white supremacy aren’t the same thing. Just like tolerance and acceptance aren’t the same thing (though in a lot of settings they are problematically and incorrectly conflated). Taking one of these actions does not automatically signify doing the other.

Loving your body and giving people space to love their bodies too does not altogether erase attitudes and inherent policies that are fatphobic. It does not erase or remove thin privilege or the fact that people do indeed benefit from being smaller on an economic, social, and systemic basis.

And if you’re a body positive influencer who is in an “acceptably fat” body, standing next to a fat person for a picture and hoping that your privilege and success will somehow rub off on them and make them be seen isn’t fat positive.

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I love this. #Repost @pnwfattitude ・・・ 📣♥️ "Because without a full reckoning of what it means to honor all bodies unconditionally, “body positivity” becomes just another thing to fail at, just another impossible gendered expectation. " – @thelindywest – (From her @selfmagazine article "The Way We Talk About Bodies Has Changed. What We Do About It Comes Next."💋)

A post shared by Chubby Cartwheels (@chubbycartwheels) on Aug 10, 2018 at 1:04pm PDT

Thinness is a western ideal.

So it makes almost perfect sense that even in “body positivity”, that thin, cis white bodies are at the top of the pyramid.

And maybe they don’t mean to be, but it’s hard to unlearn old habits. Western attitudes colonized, stole and claimed the rest of the world as we know it, and I think that despite the best efforts of western ideals to shift and to (even if only cosmetically) pass themselves off as inclusive, western ideals are failing to hear and respond to the demands for accountability from all the other cultures that differ from us. 

Thinness is one of the west’s old habits that continues to die hard.

In some eastern and many African cultures, the larger a body you were in, the more status you received. In western cultures, the converse of the above statement is true. You are assigned more personal value, more social currency, for the less space you take up in the world. Thin is not merely a vain statement of fashion, but a distinction of class,  moral character and righteousness. And to pretend that this has not carried itself into body positivity is, for lack of a better word, dense.

Thin members of the body positive community need to start doing better than taking pictures next to or with other fat women and hoping that somehow their thinternet success will rub off on us fat girls and make us worthy of being heard, too. If you want to actually share our space, move away from your privilege, hand over the mic to people with further marginalization than you, and let them speak.

This sort of non-specific callout post includes me, for race/class/ability/gender performance reasons.

 

I have learned and grown the most from the women of color who claim their bodies as their own and reject notions of body colonization. I have done so, often from the internet sidelines. I don’t deserve awards or accolades for not demanding emotional labor from people who don’t need to give it to me. But I think something can be learned from the very act of not making demands of people who are already deep in the struggle for representation, power, and a slice of this self-love that seemingly does in fact have a size limit. 

First and foremost, I listen.

I tell people about the wonderful work being done by people like Sonya Renee Taylor and Dianne Bondy (@diannebondyyoga) and  Jessamyn Stanley (@mynameisjessamyn) and Rachel McKibbens (@vulturekiss) and J. Aprileo (@comfyfattravels) and Jes Baker (@themilitantbaker) and Ericka Hart (@ihartericka) and Your Fat Queer Friend (@yrfatfriend and Jude (@merqueenjude) and actresses Joy Nash and Jen Ponton and more and more and more.

I am so grateful to them for my own voice and for love of my body and for taking my body out of a harmful context and putting it back into a context that recognizes its place in a world where there is so much struggle for people who are like me and in some cases even more struggle for people who don’t.

Freedom from restriction is still the dominating recovery narrative.

Though there are a full spectrum of eating disorders that we know about, somehow a lot of the bodies represented in the ED community and those who stake a claim in the body positive movement are ones who have struggled primarily with restriction.

While I am not aiming to detract from these particular stories, I think that again, thin privilege is at play here. Binge eating disorder wasn’t, after all, seen as even being a real eating disorder until only five years ago, despite being the most common one that Americans are faced with symptomatically. There is a lot that comes with unpacking the particulars of this. Let me try:

We as a society value being thin, but only thin enough to keep oneself alive. And for every body, this looks different. Let’s not forget that fat bodies can too be acting out restrictive behavior, despite preconceived notions about how their body became a fat one in the first place.

There is a threshold of “too sick” for our social context just like there’s a threshold for “too fat”.

 

And those of us with binge eating disorder are often seen as just having no willpower, and are often congratulated for the very same behaviors that doctors and loved ones worry about when they are displayed in anorexia/ARFID patients. This stigmatizing and incorrect assumption is made clear by the fact that it wasn’t even listed in the DSM until 2013. This stigma and the idea that as a fat person, if I restrict and overexercise that I’m just being “conscious” is the exact reason why I was never deemed “worthy” of treatment, despite my absolutely disordered behavior.

In similar scenarios, doctors get to blame binge eaters (whom society also doubly denotes as being virtually all fat people) for an eating disorder for all of medical history until this century.

 

 

And because of medical perceptions and the misinterpretation of correlation and causality between weight and health, weight restoration for anorexia patients is often seen as a function of this lack of willpower in people with BED. The same behaviors that anorexia patients are asked to perform to “get well” are those that are vilified and discouraged among fat people and people with binge eating disorder (which, I will repeat, are not mutually exclusive). This in itself is a direct result of fatphobia, on both a social and medical scale.

This brings into play the idea that fat bodies can’t be participants in body positivity without being trolled by the health police.

The comments I have seen online about fat bodies, direct and indirect, expressing false “concern” for a person’s health, which when called out by the victim often reveals itself in its true form; nothing more than fat hate and deeply internalized weight stigma.

For people like me, weight loss or restriction is encouraged; and only bodies that are in danger of dying due to their smallness to begin with are allowed to show signs of weight gain and be applauded for it. Fat bodies are often locked out of body positivity in the name of health, which is why fat acceptance takes a radical extra step to ensure that fat bodies are actively being seen, tolerated, and accepted.

And even still, entertainment and mainstream media often make attempts that fall significantly short of humanizing fat bodies. Take this new show Insatiable for example–one that aims to address binge eating disorder and weight-based bullying by caricaturing it, only to actually play into and further normalize narratives rooted in fat hate.

I wrote a position statement on just the trailer alone, but I’ve heard enough about the first few episodes from a few blogs to know that it does far more harm than good. This show, as I’ve said before, does nothing but allow the dehumanization of fat people to sink further into the western psyche by neutralizing the oppression of larger bodies (not to mention not even having any actual large bodies on the set in the first place).

Before anyone asks, I won’t be giving the show “a chance” because I think it does a lot of damage to girls like me by making us re-live the trauma of growing up with the assumption that we were just fat, lazy, and, well, insatiable. 

I’m all about growing through distress tolerance as a way of recovering, but I don’t need yet another media reminder that “just stop eating” is the recovery cure-all I’ve been waiting for for almost 13 years. If I wanted this kind of advice, I would still be interested in diet culture. Not to mention the classism, bad modeling of emotional regulation, and further stereotyping of addiction all in just the first episode. Big yikes. 

 

And somehow none of it manages to create a fat girl who stays that way and claims victory because of, not in spite of, what size she is. There is no body acceptance narrative to even be found. And without the presence of body acceptance, you can forget fat positivity altogether too. Patty is only allowed to claim body positivity once she is thin. And even then, she has so much internalized fatphobia to work through that I’m just like girl, get a sponsor and some steps going to deal with all this fatphobic rage puuuuuuhlease. 

Body positivity cannot exist without fat positivity.

I mean, so far, a lot of the time, it has existed without fat positivity across the board. But body positivity without fat positivity, fat acceptance, rejection of white supremacy, rejection of cissexism and heteronormativity and the intentional visibility of differently abled bodies is CRITICAL to creating a body positivity that is truly inclusive and intersectional. Body positivity doesn’t lock out anyone from the experience of personal, community body love through representation, peace, and when it calls for it, recovery.

So we need to do away with all the healthism, the pushing and shoving to get to the top of the pyramid, and dismantle the pyramid altogether.

We also need to agree to stop giving air time to shows, platforms, people, places and things that undercut people’s reality or their emotional health in pursuit of ratings or recognition. Evaluate the message, the message underneath the message, and lean into the impact that certain work has on you. Use that impact to hold creators and spaces and even law makers accountable for the ways that their actions may miss the mark on addressing and challenging weight stigma, or worse, ways that their work may contribute to it.

As a community we also need to note that none of this work exists without body diversity, and no voice deserves more air time than another. But without a doubt, there are certain voices that are getting most of the air time anyway.

Follow accounts, bodies and lives different from your own. Stand alongside people who have different experiences than you and ask them what they need. And when you ask, don’t just wait to respond–listen.

Ask. Listen. Act. Stand back.

My Big Fat Insatiable Rant

 

Today in our culture is a fatphobic mess: I’m sure you’ve seen the trash that is Insatiable all over the internet today.

For those of you who are new to the fatphobic, absolutely disrespectful and diet-culture laden series trailer premiere, welcome.

I’m not going to post the trailer itself here for people to view. You can look it up on your own if you want to see the word “fat” weaponized back into its pejorative form, stereotypes about binge eating perpetuated, and bullying toward a fat person (who isn’t actually a fat person) normalized and used as a feature plot for “revenge.” 

Yep, it’s everything terrible you thought it would and could be.

Basically the main character, Patty (chosen because it rhymes with “fatty”…how original)…who is actually just Debby Ryan in a fat suit (which I don’t even have to tell you is insulting), is being bullied for her weight constantly. At one point in the trailer, she is assaulted via being punched in the face, causing her to have to have her jaw wired shut for an entire summer. During this time, she loses a bunch of weight (apparently) and becomes thin and “hot”, (two words not synonymous by default) and uses her new appearance to get revenge on the people who hurt her emotionally and physically throughout her teenage years.

I’m not going to use the rest of this post to take my anger out on Debby Ryan (I already did that on twitter for most of today), especially after she defended her role in the show for the purpose of “spreading awareness about binge eating disorder” … which we all know is a bunch of absolute BS considering that the show’s literal premise is that now that Patty is thin after restricting for a full two months, she has infinite possibilities to be “a brain, an athlete, or a princess” (none of which her fat was stopping her from doing in the first place).

I found the entire show’s poor excuse for a plot line even less disturbing than the advertisements for it, laden with stereotypes about fat people, loaded fatphobic language, and outright justification for the show’s existence.

Ryan Seacrest even had the audacity to use the term “binge-watch” to encourage people to view a show that does nothing but validate the mistreatment of fat people until they are thinner. I guess binge watching is more okay than binge eating because you don’t get *gasp* fat from watching too many terribly written TV shows. Maybe the thin privilege reeking from this series will enter my life by osmosis!

It makes it seem a lot like the whole “inside every fat girl there’s a thin girl dying to come out” trope pushed on us to be not just a point worth making, but one that fat girls should be expected to hear and take seriously. Not just that–it propagates the myth that once we find ourselves under all that fat, we will somehow be more deserving of respect than we were before. 

Let’s address some realities of binge eating disorder, from someone who has more than 10 years experience with the behaviors that come with it–and then some.

Debby Ryan did get one thing right when she was trying to justify her role in this atrocious Netflix Original. Binge eating disorder is the most common eating disorder on the spectrum. This is according to both NEDA, BEDA, and even the DSM. But despite this, BED wasn’t even recognized as a disorder until 2013–so for a long time, people with BED have gone largely misrepresented or underrepresented altogether. And it’s not okay.

The creator of the show, Lauren Gussis, even revealed her own struggle with an eating disorder in adolescence. But anyone who has survived an ED, who lives in a fat body (which she doesn’t), should know that content like this is irresponsible and dangerous. 

It’s also worth noting that #insatiable is netflix’s second offense on the ED population. This is “To The Bone” for fat people. Fat voices, scream and make a mess about this. Thin people in recovery, stand by in solidarity as best as you’re able #NotYourBefore #EatingDisorders

— theinbetweenqueen (@inbetweenqueen_) July 20, 2018

People who have had my disorder haven’t been represented because BED is something that people think can be fixed by sheer willpower alone. I tried to mitigate this behavior through exercise bulimia from age 12 forward. I would binge and then exercise excessively to “get rid of it”, and lived in a “normal sized” body for most of my life.

Binge eating disorder stole my happiness, my ability to enjoy exercise for literally twelve years, some/a lot of my friendships, my self-worth, my ability to form romantic relationships that were healthy, my intimacy, my self-assuredness, my self-respect, and my perception of beautiful. I didn’t have trouble getting into relationships because of my body, I had trouble with healthy relationships because of how I saw my body. It was a personal hell that I would do anything to never have to live through again. I’m 24 today, and I’ve literally been in and out of binge/emotional eating/purge/restrict/severe dysmorphic cycles since before I was ten years old.

I was able to fly under the radar despite my behaviors, hours a day working out in my basement or in a gym or running, and avoid appearing “sick enough” to need treatment. My behavior was normalized. Binge-exercise cycles are normalized as “diet and exercise” or “wellness” in our entire social structure. Strangely enough, it wasn’t until my recovery, when I gained weight, that concerns were expressed about my “health”.

At 17, my assessment for an eating disorder went as follows: “Stand up, take off your jacket” ([male] doctor glanced at my body), said “Okay, if I prescribe you __________ it should make you lose weight or stop eating as much.”

I was given medicine. Not behavior intervention, not nutrition referrals, which are standard for ED treatment.

I continued to binge despite this, for all four years of college thereafter. My senior year when I came home, I tried OA, and let me tell you how much it didn’t work. I spent four months restricting, made myself 26 pounds smaller, and gained all the weight back plus about 50% more, just like diet results statistics predicted I would. I was less emotionally healthy than I had been when I started. OA is a narrative that has been present in representation of fat characters like Mike & Molly, a show that lasted six seasons starring Melissa McCarthy.

I like to think it’s not on anymore because people are really tired of seeing fat people only take up space in weight loss narratives. These roles literally shrink us down to nothing on so many levels, and hold up the myths about binge eating disorder as a widely diagnosed but incredibly misunderstood disease.

This show perpetuates everything about fat people (who don’t always have binge eating disorder, by the way) that isn’t always the truth. We are ALL not worthless, lazy, disgusting, self-hating eating machines. We are not all sitting at home “stuffing our holes” (a REAL classy line from the Insatiable trailer itself) while thin people are out having intimate lives that we somehow, as directly implied by Debby Ryan’s voiceover, don’t deserve because of our body size.

If we are here to tie BED and fatness, fat shaming, and fat hate and all that comes with that together, let me tell you: they need better excuses, because not all people with BED are fat. And not all fat people have BED. For like, 8 years of my disorder, I wasn’t.

And to address the title directly,  I was not insatiable; because it was never about the food.

Hey @DebbyRyan I had binge eating disorder for upwards of 14 years and let me tell you, being punched in the face and having my jaw wired shut wasn’t how I recovered. Don’t you DARE justify fatphobic content you’re complicit in to equate your work to my history. #insatiable

— theinbetweenqueen (@inbetweenqueen_) July 20, 2018

In fact, this word is loaded with really negative emotions for me specifically.

When I was seven years old, my parents were divorcing and I was just NOT coping well (understandably). My life was all over the place, and being in second grade and having both parents be first-responders in 9/11 who were gone a lot was already really hard. Emotional eating became a big part of my life, and I wasn’t really super conscious of that because at seven years old, self-awareness only runs so deep, you know?

Until an after school program teacher said, to my seven year old face as I asked for more Saltines for snack:

“It’s like your hobby is eating. You never stop!”

This is literally, the defining characteristic of insatiable.

I was not insatiable, however. I ate when I wasn’t hungry more times than I could ever account for for like, almost fifteen more years after those words were said to me. I ate past the point of fullness just so I could become less and less myself. Because I didn’t like myself, and the society in which we live helped make that concrete. Enough was something I never knew existed, because I never felt like enough.

I ate past my full signals more times than I can ever account for. I ate more calories to get away from myself and burned them hours later for the same reason. 

I exercised for more hours than I will ever be able to get back, purely out of self-hate.

I was not insatiable. I was destroying my body from within, and nobody thought to stop me because we live in a world where the very act of self-mutilation by restriction is ACCEPTABLE. 

I have never known what “enough” was, until I found recovery. And guess what? I’m bigger than I’ve ever been, but I’m also happier than I’ve ever been, no matter what anyone has to say about it.

This show is about teaching thin people how to hate fat people, including the fat girl/former fat girl herself. It’s more fuel for the fires of thinspiration, thin privilege, weight stigma, and size discrimination all at once. I will not be erased or silenced by sizeism, and I won’t let anyone else be, either. And trust me…the pushback that this show is receiving is giving me a lot of hope, despite being sooooooo tired of having to tell people why it’s okay for girls/guys/folk like me to exist as we are. 

Looks like I’ll be watching Dietland in a puddle of my own happy/sad mad cleanse tears this weekend.