This week, I went to about 10 minutes of a twelve step study workshop before I shut down.
Literally, full trigger tears and an overwhelming sense of being immediately alienated from the room.
This person opened a workshop about the 12 steps by addressing and creating alarmism (a “hook” for her audience, if you will), around the “obesity epidemic” and the faulty statistics that go with it.
In my recent work on steps 6&7 in my eating disorder recovery, I have been learning to still give feedback that is important for the cohesiveness of my existence with the world, without stomping on that person’s truth altogether and making them feel small simply because I am hurt by their actions.
A close friend encouraged me to give the feedback, because as she said, so many people are unaware and feedback (but not attacks on their personality or their lack of knowledge), ultimately makes us better people. So I wrote an email when I got home.
Hi (name redacted),
My name is Cait, and I am a volunteer and regular participant at (organization redacted) I was at your workshop briefly this evening and I want to address some feedback that I have regarding some of the opening statements you made.
As a person in solid recovery from three different manifestations of eating disorders, and someone who lives in a body that is probably classified as either “overweight” or “obese”, I found myself immediately shutting down when you brought up these statistics and let them stand on their own to be falsely conflated to the disease(s) of alcohol & drug addiction.
(Organization) is the place where I was able to explore the information I am about to share with you, and personally, it was really triggering for me to hear the opening of your workshop in this context, as this very process of disembodying the social construct of weight being a function of “disease” used in this way is inherently somewhat problematic.
This kind of thinking is the very same thought pattern that perpetuates the diet industry, which makes more than 65 billion dollars a year letting people know that they are always one bite away from being a walking health risk (despite the fact that our consumption often has little to do with it, as 77 percent of our bodies’ health predispositions are determined by genetics), that they are broken people who can be fixed by following a magic set of rules that will change not just their body size, but how the world perceives, welcomes and includes them.
Obesity as a standalone issue in our society is socially constructed, and in a lot of cases misused to create outright prejudice around the people who meet the ‘criteria’. It is a fact that any qualified statistician can tell you that the very act of weight causing disease and weight being correlated with any given disease are not empirically the same set of information.
When you said 70 percent of Americans are obese, there was no acknowledgement of the fact that there is buy-in from a diet consumer culture that creates those statistics. I know that “breaking down weight stigma” isn’t the workshop you’re running—but letting this statistic hang in the air as a way to analyze the steps seemed to serve only the purpose of creating a “wow” factor that confirmed sizeism and healthism among members of your audience.
Several years ago, the set of standards for what “obese” is was shifted, such that millions of Americans became suddenly obese overnight, based not on consumption of food but on a deliberate, fatphobic shift in the data. This shift in numbers was purposeful and meant to create a panic—we live in a world where politicians have literally said that fat is more of a risk to American society than terrorism. In one fell swoop, our war on terror became a war against fat—and thus, against fat people.
Food as an “addiction” has also been long debatable. I am an ex-member of Overeaters Anonymous, and it is my truth that the way I was guided by almost everyone I interacted with to view food and my body in that particular fellowship made me more paranoid, obsessed with food, and disconnected from my body’s needs than I’ve ever been.
It actually kickstarted the most recent manifestation restrictive end of my eating disorders, which were a part of my life for nearly 15 years. It is no surprise that OA works for so many, because it still has a mental framework that props up weight loss as a back-burner goal. It is a function of diet culture.
Letting this rhetoric about “obesity” and the idea that “food addiction” and substance abuse are biologically the exact same process circulate is potentially harmful to people, and frames shame around people in larger bodies when this stuff is spoken about.
Eating disorders—because that’s what we’ll call the whole spectrum, from restriction to exercise bulimia and orthorexia to compulsive eating—are similar, but not the same, as drug and alcohol addiction. I have experience with alcohol abuse and if I treated my ED the same way I recovered from alcohol, I assure you I probably wouldn’t be alive to write this feedback to you today.
Compulsive eating is just as much an eating disorder as anorexia, but neither are an “addiction”. What people with ED’s are addicted to, most of the time in one way or another, is perfectionism and a sense of self that involves intense anxiety, control issues, and body dysmorphia.
Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence yielded from studies done on humans that food addiction actually exists. The brain lights up in response to food being eaten, but that’s literally what it’s supposed to do. It’s our body’s way of reinforcing that it needs to be fueled in order to survive, and to work together with other complex body systems to help us do just that using the nutrients we put in. When we eat, we create neurological connections that form patterns that make this behavior a regular occurrence for the sake of our species’ existence.
Food is meant to be a pleasurable experience that drives us to do, be, achieve and think clearly. Anything that suggests food as an addiction positions the so called “food addict” into a shame spiral and this thinking is rooted in diet culture and weight bias/stigma. Addictions are not eating disorders, and eating disorders are not addictions, and both come with their own degrees of shame on their own. This gets further reinforced when we try to carry this mode of thinking over to something that our bodies need in order to survive, that we have no choice but to have a working relationship with from birth until death. (See Christy Harrison’s episode of Food Psych Podcast for this exact information, articulated so wonderfully by Marci Evans).
Food is a substance, just as water or hydrogen peroxide are substances, but not a “drug”, and is something we need to regulate our bodies for the purpose of sustaining life. I gained more weight in my recovery than I ever did while actively in my eating disorder, and am in perfect health—but that’s not the fat person’s job to justify to the world.
Creating discourse around this that lets obesity stand alone and conflate a lot of its causalities with drug addiction doesn’t leave room to explore the socially unjust implications of disembodiment in this process. It is statistically, sociologically and psychologically known that weight stigma is actually far more of a health risk than being fat itself is. There is empirical information to support this, which I would really recommend looking into.
Some of the best resources I have read to this point are Intuitive Eating by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch, Body Respect by Dr. Linda Bacon & Lucy Aphramor, Health at Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon, and The Fat Studies Reader by Ester Rothblum & Sondra Solovay.
Their work is integral to breaking down what we have been conventionally sold about our bodies and how they work, how they should be treated in society over a certain size, and how to deconstruct this information using research that supports all bodies.
Thank you for taking the time to read this email.
Cait O.
Royally Incomplete 