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!

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!

‘Callout culture’ isn’t necessarily ‘toxic,’ it just asks us to be uncomfortable

Have you ever messed up?

Let’s begin with a story. A few months ago, I was part of a HAES group on Facebook that centered fat bodies. I was SUPER excited about my new yoga wheel, which would make doing a bunch of different poses more accessible to me and my size 18-20 self.

I posted a picture of me in shoulder stand on my wheel with the caption of “my fat a** doing yoga” and honestly, I realize it was–not my finest moment as an ally.

There was a mixture of messages; people equally glad for me to be able to do yoga accessibly, something that is not often seen because yoga has been co-opted by thin white bodies that make an effort to push out and not represent fat folks.

But more quickly and more frequently, I got messages and comments from people larger than me, giving me critical feedback about why yoga wheels aren’t always accessible for people who live with butts even bigger than mine; or why seeing the word “fat a**” (which I now fully recognize as a slur that sometimes reminds people of being bullied) triggered them. It wasn’t necessarily mine to reclaim from the beginning. And in my post, and in all my excitement, I managed to center myself while marginalizing other folks.

 

Your missteps and mistakes aren’t about you

No one was saying my body was not or is not important–but I failed to note that my body, despite its not-thinness, queerness, and not fully-ableness, is the most represented one in the “body positive” and even in the fat positive community. I failed to see that even if and when you are a fat person, you can still benefit from thin privilege without being thin. You can still be affirmed as a “good fat” by the society we live in; the very same one that preaches that thin is healthy, thin is virtuous and good, thin is best. Because smaller fat people are closer to being thin than people who are, say, “infinifat”; and they are given more social currency because they “fit.” And I don’t mean to say “they,” like I’m not one of them. I am.

Neglecting to put a TW or a CW (trigger or content warning) stirred up a lot of feelings for a lot of people–put me in contact with the moderators–and left me feeling defensive. I did not want to have to mark and label my own body as “triggering”, especially after fighting with it for almost two decades through binge eating, restricting, dieting and exercise abuse. 

I fought and fought and fought with people for my own worth and validity–had over 400 comments directed at me, my message, and some even at my body. These were hurtful and painful and did a really, REALLY huge number on my mental health for a few weeks. I had to grapple with the fact that I had hurt people, no matter how unintentionally, and not try to level the playing field with hurting them again even if they were hurting me back.

Comments like “someone the size of one of my legs pretending they have the same experiences as me is laughable” — objectifying me and sticking into my head over and over again, awakening my eating disorder for the first time in what would have been months.

Then came the supporters, who I didn’t ask for–less nuanced in the social justice aspect of fat politics–who would post and then dip out of the group in ‘solidarity’ with me; and I began to feel like these people were giving me a representation that wasn’t true to who I am. They were supportive, and well-meaning; but misguided in some areas of this language and this work. This is where it got even more stressful.

The “all lives matter” rhetoric coming from those who share equal marginalization with me as a 2X/3X sized person was really disappointing–I didn’t and do not stand by it and it was uncomfortable that it even went to that space.

I had to shut it off for a while after so many conversations with the moderators about reparations, my errors, and my own feelings of being disrespected. I was SO uncomfortable and scared and wounded — and sitting in my own place of reference waiting for someone to patch me up and dust me off and tell me I was 100% right and demanding emotional labor from others — something I have learned better than to do, honestly.

It would have been so easy to frame this in the narrative that ‘callout culture is toxic,’ but that waives my accountability and my need to center and repair my relationships with those who experience a lot more difficulty in their life from a psychosocial space than I do.

I am a tremendous believer in the idea that impact ALWAYS outweighs the intention of our actions. We can mean well, but if we harm people, we are ultimately responsible for that. I drafted an accountability post a few weeks after this happened, in an effort to repair the emotional viscerality of the situation, but my mental health and consulting with the admins kept me from posting it to the group.

 

This doesn’t necessarily accurately represent ALL bodies, but it is helpful in understanding where to put yourself–especially when understanding that there are bodies that experience varying degrees of size discrimination in accessibility, fashion, social situations, etc.

“Small fat” privilege definitely makes up a lot of the voiced experience in many of the movements that body positive or body neutral people have access to, and this itself is not ideal. I want to do my best to be a better ally and simultaneously voice my experiences as an “in-between fat” person (because the current “measure” doesn’t really describe me well), and hopefully somewhere along the way, others can identify with holding space for their in-betweenness–at the same time, I want to stand out of the way so that bodies that don’t look like mine can speak, move and do the work that they need to do to free themselves without sizeism, healthism, or fatphobia. Centering less normative voices is an action–one of many–that can counter the “white and slim thick is normal, nothing else” that goes on on the internet. Nobody is free until we all are. Education on how to do this is not owed to me, but I am absolutely willing and ready and eager to be told where to position myself in this process.

The amount of gratitude there is to express for dialogue; past, present, and future, is boundless. My deepest apologies for harm done and for all that I have neglected to do in this learning process.

That being said…

One thing that I refuse to do is to drown out the voices that hold me accountable with toxic positivity. In the past, I’ve justified and made excuses, but toxic positivity is something that seems to be replacing ‘callout culture’ and it isn’t for the better. I see this mostly among able-bodied, small fat, white, cis/heteronormative writers and influencers–and it’s far more toxic than ‘callout culture’ itself.

Toxic positivity is a term that comes from the mental health realm, in addressing stigma associated with mental illness. It looks like those well-meaning messages and words of good intention that come from people who don’t share your experience or have no idea what they’re talking about. They offer suggestions like “have you tried going outside”, tell you about how kale or pilates saved them from depression or start a lot of sentences with “should.” Know the type? The friends and family who are just trying to make you feel better about being anxious or depressed, but are really just adding to the stigma, incompetence, self-doubt, frustration or stress you feel if you experience symptoms of a mental illness.

Toxic Positivity in Accountability Culture is Similar

What I mean by “toxic positivity” when it comes to responding to your audience is responding to accurate, valid or critical thought and criticism/feedback with “you’re being negative,” or “positive vibes only!” and other such language. What this does is ultimately silence and dismiss the person who might be trying to help us learn and grow as an influencer and an ally. Toxic positivity demands only affirming or validating responses from those in its circle, and sometimes literally blocks out the rest and dismisses them as “haters.”

But our ‘haters’ can often teach us about what we need to do to be better, and they don’t owe it to us to be kind or gentle about it–especially if our actions are harmful to them. You might come out of a mistake a little (ego) bruised. But. you grow through what you go through. 

 

 

Being called out, confronted, or asked to pass the mic is uncomfortable and immediately launches people into the defensive–I know that from my own experiences of screwing up, and not just in the time I mentioned; it has often been uncomfortable for me. At the same time, it has also shaped me. This goes for my interactions about race (because I have a blind spot as a white person), gender identity (because I have a blind spot as a cis person), and disability (because I have a blind spot as an able-bodied person. It’s no one’s job to hold my hand and educate me, but it is my job once I have been told how a certain view, voice or amount of space I am taking up on other peoples’ behalf or at their expense is harmful to them–to educate myself and not demand anything from anybody until I know how to act right.

I have no reason to apologize for my body, but I do have to apologize and make right on it if I force people to hear what I think, see what triggers them, or listen to words that are harmful to them without their consent. I don’t just get to tell people to “stop following me” if something I do or say triggers them–because it’s my responsibility as a justice-oriented person, activist and feminist not to perpetuate the same messages that do harm to marginalized people whether they follow me or not. 

It is, first and foremost, a privilege to be able to say any of the above toxic positivity responses–because it means likely not having had to think about the person who’s experience one is responding to. That is the essence of privilege–not having to think about it. And calling folks out isn’t necessarily toxic–individuals who call out can become toxic when they start attacking others’ humanity and forgetting that there’s a person on the other end of the listening session, but the act of calling someone out for being less than mindful is, imo, perfectly acceptable in a world or in a learning community that prioritizes justice and representation. The only thing that will make that justice restorative is time, and a whole lot of listening. And that’s what these ‘conversations’ (which can sometimes look and sound and feel confrontational or tense) should look like–listening sessions, where the privileged listen and the marginalized speak about harm done and reparations to be made.

 

 

 

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. 

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.

How Dichotomies are Ruining Your Life, Relationships and your Health (Part 1)

From a really early age, we are taught opposites as a way of categorizing things in our brain. Humans are conditioned to put things into filing systems based on what they are not, more often than what they are.

While this is a helpful skill for visual and spatial discrimination in our early development, it can turn into social discrimination and hardline rigidity in our adult lives.

The systems of binaries we create for the purpose of more convenient categorization don’t actually match up with the realities of our diverse world. There is more to us than just fat or thin, straight or gay, black or white.

An example that we struggle with as a society right now is the acceptance of non binary gender identities.

Even in the area of orientation (an identity entirely separate from gender), we are doing okay but could be better.  I struggled with my identity from the beginning of my adolescence until maybe the second year of college. I identified as bi to my friends and for all intents and purposes, to myself, but never really became fully comfortable or felt “in place” around guys.

When I came out at 19 to my mom, I told her I was a lesbian–but I knew it was more expansive than that. I have since opted for the term queer; an umbrella term that sits comfortably in the middle of non-hetero identity.

A lot of bi people experience bi-erasure; this notion that a person can’t be truly bi, but that either they are just needy and greedy or “not a real” gay/lesbian person.

And there are certain merits we give to people who cosmetically conform to the binary identities we have, even while they exist outside the margins with as little visibility as possible. Lesbian women can be lesbians on their own time, but must perform and exist as women (mostly by paying their dues to the male gaze) in the outside world. But often, fat people, trans people, and many others don’t have the same set of performance privileges (Vade & Solovay). The further into the margins you get, the less flexibility you have to be yourself; even behind closed doors.

This kind of dichotomizing happens both outside and within the queer community, and its a way of labeling that asserts a moral superiority that is just as socially constructed as the identities themselves.

It also does nothing to resolve the issue of breaking down the gender binary, and plays right into the harmful gendered stereotypes that non binary people find themselves having to apologetically aspire to in order to be perceived as “real” men/women. But guess what? Their very existence makes them “real”.

Binary thinking not only limits our relationships with each other, but also limits our realities, language surrounding those realities, others’ realities, and everyone’s understanding and empathy towards those realities. 

And even with the added factor of gender, food gets moralized even more deeply along with body image. (Cis) women are taught to aspire to thin bodies, and made to apologize for non-thin ones. At the same time, nobody seems to care what size trans women are because the binary tells us that they are and should remain invisible.

We can do our best to combat this by uplifting the voices of those who are non binary, fat, of color, differently abled, and who have different realities and experiences than those who are in set norm populations altogether.

For my recovery, one of the most dangerous dichotomies of all is the one that moralizes food. 

All food serves a purpose, and it doesn’t exist to be labeled “good” or “bad”. It exists to be enjoyed, to provide energy, to serve as a backdrop for social gatherings, and so much more.

 

It took me years to unlearn the patterns of thinking that told me that eating Oreos or skipping a day (or two or three) of working out made me a bad person. I did a lot of work to start seeing my body as my friend, and using food for whatever purpose it had in context. Sometimes, I eat cake because I want to. Sometimes I eat broccoli because I want to. Now that I don’t exist in binge cycles and eat with my brain in deprivation mode, I eat any and all foods that I enjoy because I want to. 

Lately I have also been battling with the idea that I am not allowed to feel full, that it’s bad to feel full, and that if I do start to feel full I must exercise to “get rid of it”. These are tried and true eating disordered thoughts that our culture has turned into normal patterns of behavior. 

It’s considered normal to avoid foods you like because they’re “too fattening”.

It’s considered normal to exercise so that you can “earn” dessert or even a meal.

It’s considered normal to be inundated by calories printed on the menu when you order out at restaurants (at least in New York).

It’s considered normal to want to aspire to not look like that fat girl you know.

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I am putting this type horseshit on blast. I am so triggered. This is one of the major problems I have with the fitness industry. This type of bullshit rhetoric is dangerous and unmotivating! This leads to self loathing. Imagine if we could celebrate loving the skin we are in as much as we criticize our bodies. Exercise because it feels good and stop this kind of bullshit talk! YOU CAN’T HEAL A BODY YOU HATE! Self love and self care is the only path to healing This shit is not about us! You are perfect as you are. Love is the way. Stop hating others #abolishhate #spreadlove

A post shared by Dianne Bondy (@diannebondyyogaofficial) on Jul 25, 2018 at 4:06am PDT

 

Thin has been considered normal for a long time, and statistically speaking we are getting new standards here in the good old United States. In this country, a size 14 woman is considered the average. But our attitudes haven’t caught up with us yet, because we still give an incredible amount of privilege, status, and deference to thin people. 

There are unspoken policies that pit fat people against the thin and create fatphobia and weight stigma, which cast fatness into a moral problem (Huff).

The same good/bad attitudes about foods are extended to bodies, depending on what bodies are consuming the “bad” food.

In order to be seen as trying, credible, valid, fat girls have to be eating salads at their desks alone at work–aspiring to be smaller.

If a fat girl eats a donut, it’s seen as an eternal “gotcha”–“that donut and all the other ones you probably eat are why you look like that!”

 

If a skinny girl eats a salad, she’s doing the right thing; participating in the maintenance of her thinness (which is like, more than 70% genetic, most likely, unless she has an eating disorder or a hyper-metabolic health issue).

If a skinny girl eats a donut, no one has a damn thing to say about the space she takes up, how that space is related to that donut and how it justifies hurling prejudice at her until she changes her habits.

Our need to categorize things in such rigid ways can turn into real time, unfiltered, and really-hard-to-unlearn-as-adults prejudice. Fat people bare the brunt of this in their everyday lives all the time. I learned this the hard way when I tried explaining HAES to my mom and she just completely told me that I was flat out wrong…

Even though there is empirically tested, scientific research that weight stigma is actually more of a pre-cursor to health issues than weight itself; and that causality and correlation are not the same thing when it comes to health conditions that have been considered to be caused by a person’s weight or fatness.

Our first step is to change our attitudes about split thinking before we can ever hope to change policies that affect the lives of LGBTQ+, fat, differently abled, or any other marginalized group. The “us” and “them” is what creates stigma, oppression, marginalization, and even policy that furthers the disparities among us.

When Accessibility Doesn’t Come in Your Size

I’m so excited to be co-authoring this week’s post with the awesome body positive mental health advocate, fellow content creator and recovery warrior Lexie Manion!

One of her Instagram posts about being in a larger body and not fitting into a lot of the spaces that thin people can fit into inspired me to ask her to co-write this post with me. We’ll share our experiences about spatially exclusive items that thin people, for the most part, use every day without a problem.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfXZAsLhzbr/?hl=en&taken-by=lexiemanion

 

The idea that there are certain everyday items, places, arrangements, and accommodations (publicly accessible things) that are not even a second thought for thin people is one of the many examples of thin privilege.

In its most basic form, thin privilege is used to describe how thin people in society are commonly accepted — even celebrated. Thin people have the upper hand in many everyday parts of life, including physically and metaphorically fitting in with ease, having no issues shopping for clothes, eating food without being questioned, “are you sure you want to eat that much?” 

There’s this fallacy that gluttony and laziness are the true problems that make fat people fat, which is so far from the truth.  Unintentional weight gain or weight distribution throughout the body can be caused by aging, medications, physical illness, mental illness, and what Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch call our individual “genetic blueprint. (Intuitive Eating Principle #8).

It’s a shame the general public denies that many fat people are actually fat because of circumstances beyond their control, and that diet programs are one of the only products in our consumer market that blame the user for a receiving a defective item.

It’s worth saying that in our diet culture, not every fat person wants to lose weight. Each person’s health and wellness is their own. I (Lexie) personally can not recall anytime I’ve heard a fat person shame a (thin) person who smokes or drinks excessively.

Correcting other people’s behaviors or assumptions about their behaviors, especially strangers, can never be justified because it’s rude, unnecessary and counterproductive. Meeting a perceived problem with judgmental eyes will never help.

It’s also worth saying that the fat acceptance movement isn’t going around demanding that every single person be fat or live in a larger body–but that society at large is demanding that everyone be thin, fit, eat “clean” (ugh), and have a certain ideal body type that requires taking up less space. The fat acceptance movement is the thinspo, fitspo and thin privilege clapback, not a demand to standardize fatness.

And when we discuss thin privilege in the Body Positive community, it echoes the similarities of other unearned privileges of identity such as white privilege, able-bodied privilege and heterosexism. Admitting that we have this privilege isn’t a bad thing either (another fallacy). Lexie–a white and able-bodied person; Cait–a white and able-bodied cis person; Stating our privileges is acknowledgement that while we are all created equally, not all bodies are created–or socially treated–equally. Racism, sexism, ableism and fat discrimination are all very alive and well in our world.

 

The same message is spread when fat people can’t access certain things in public spaces, or even in private spaces, that affirm their bodies and make them feel like they belong there. Let’s take a look at some examples:

Straight Size Clothing

Lexie: I am a huge Demi Lovato fan and was checking out her merch for her past tour a couple months ago. Sadly, her store doesn’t even accommodate to my XXXL/XXXXL size. What irked me though is that a fan could buy an XXL shirt, but there is a catch. We all know that singers and celebrities over-charge for their merch already (because they can because the fans are so loyal!). So, get this: for $34.95, plus an additional $2.95 (shipping not included), you can be the proud owner of a Demi Lovato shirt (if you can fit into an XXL, of course)!

Cait: This interests me to hear about Demi’s clothes and merch, considering she is a person in recovery. That brings me to another issue: the idea that bigger bodies aren’t the ones with “real, medical eating disorders” and that we all just lack willpower and self control and that that somehow makes us less of a person.

At almost every store I go to, there is a plus size ‘section’ full of maybe an area of clothes that fit me that’s no more than double the size of my bedroom. And everything that fits plus size women like me is always in an irrationally unfashionable assortment of animal print. As someone whose style leans more toward the fat version of Janis Joplin, I don’t want to look like a bloated cheetah or a zebra or Sylvia Fine from The Nanny. And I most certainly don’t want to be charged more for it.

 

Transportation

Cait: I haven’t been on an airplane in a couple of years, but I’ve heard so many stories from women who are larger than me about being charged for needing to buy two seats on a plane just to be able to travel. For a lot of people, this extra money is a hardship; and it’s unfair that a person has to have more money to take up more space. This has become a phenomenon by passenger rights advocates known as the “fat tax.” (read more from this BBC article).

Trains are different, though. I see a lot of weirdness on the LIRR as a native Long Islander. For instance, there are fold-down seats for folks who have disabilities and their caregivers so that they can access the train and get on and off without a hassle–fitting their wheelchairs if need be. Plenty of able-bodied people occupy these spaces when there are no room in the standard seats provided. I’ve seen people get really perturbed about having to sit next to a fat person on the train, because the amount of space they take up is met with judgment--but the same level of annoyance doesn’t get expressed for thin people who put their bag next to them on a seat or who do things that are just not generally so courteous. Fatphobia runs rampant in public spaces; and it boils down to simply prejudice.

 Academia

In a recent Food Psych podcast episode that Christy Harrison did with activist (almost) Dr. Joy Cox, she discusses the idea that desks and seating arrangements in higher education–and for that matter, secondary and public education–aren’t accessible for large bodied people. 

Fat studies and health at every size has also barely entered the realm of academic discourse as a branch of social justice/sociology/studying discrimination. Joy talks a lot about how weight is not yet a federally protected class and how this ideology spills over from the idea that weight and body size fully function as a choice. 

I (Cait) having sat through six years of higher education and having a semester to go on my Masters, have never truly, totally embodied this problem, as I was often small enough or “just fat enough” to be able to fit. But what happens when we add arms and non-movable desks to seating in academia, where fat bodies can’t fit in the space between? We close out academic access to fat people and perpetuate their lack of access to education. And denying someone access to education is one of the many systemic realities of discrimination. 

Fat people aren’t any less able to learn or get degrees because they are somehow less competent, smart or capable–they are locked out because they literally don’t fit in.

As a teacher, access to information, good professors, life-changing classes and academic discourse means THE WORLD to me. I don’t know what I would have done without one of the last classes of my undergraduate program, entitled Feminist Pedagogies. In this class, though it wasn’t pertinent to me yet, we did touch SO MUCH on embodiment and the idea of education as a visceral process; one that fat people aren’t entitled to until they conform to yet another standard of cisnormative, heteronormative white classist privileged education systems in America. And luckily, we sat at tables with armless chairs; so the space itself was fat friendly, but I can’t say the same for all the learning spaces in either my undergraduate or graduate work institutions.

In order to combat this, we HAVE to include weight and body size in collegiate and academic rhetoric about diversity. Because discrimination against people of size is too real and too widely unnoticed. And in colleges across America where students are learning the value of multiculturalism and diversity, fat people are locked out or expected to change yet again.

Yoga

Lexie: As someone in recovery from an eating disorder, I was introduced to the yoga world early on; the treatment centers I went to offered a class here or there during the day. While there is no obvious size or weight limit to practice yoga or stand on a yoga mat, it’s very apparent that much of the yoga world seems to accept only thin women into their practice.

I know as a plus size woman that I can’t do every single pose perfectly (or at all), and thankfully there are modifications for fat people or people with injuries, people with mobility issues so they can more comfortably get into the position. However, fat shaming can easily carry into a yoga class consisting of one instructor and several other members.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhnOmt_BUNu/

Fat people can feel out of place in yoga classes, especially if the instructor calls attention to it by showing the fat person additional support with or without their consent.

Cait: The criticism of yoga as an increasingly problematic space for body diversity is nothing new. In fact, it goes beyond the scope of fat and differently abled bodies.

Like Lexie, I gained weight and changed body shape in my recovery, which has kept me from accessing the poses I could once do when I was stronger, leaner, but also sicker. I was never able to do crow, but could do a pretty kick ass shoulder stand. And while I’m working on it and my rolls often get in the way, I sometimes have to stop my dysmorphia from beating me up about taking modifications. Yoga, or unity in Sanskrit, is about the process.

Yogis like Dianne Bondy and Jessamyn Stanley have talked extensively about the thin ideal that permeates a lot of yoga practices. Yoga for fitness (ugh) has become increasingly popular among thin, suburban white women, and it dilutes the spiritual practice that is the entire point of yoga in the first place. Yoga’s original intention was to help Buddhists, Hindus and the dozens of other meditating Eastern religions to be able to sit and meditate for longer periods of time. I am a regular yogi, a practicing Buddhist, and lover of yoga–but I am also an exercise bulimic and a recovering perfectionist.

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Down dog, 🐶half pigeon 🐦 and shoulder stand 💪🏻 shoulder stands are a "skinny girl pose" in the world of co-opted yoga. They make your shirt fly up and your pudge stick out (in my case, full belly hangin out), and feel like your own weight will topple you over. They've become more challenging as my body has put weight on, distributed it and made me more torso-dense. But it's one of my absolute favorites and I still do it. Yoga's eight limbs are a way of life; thus, a practice. Today I listened to @krystalslusciouslife verbalize the meaning of "ahimsa" – nonviolence – as nonviolence against the self. I was sweaty and started getting frustrated by my third vinyasa, but it's no excuse to give up. I found joy when I found yoga, and I have to get back to the core values that allow me to practice self-compassion and spiritual health. This body can do most anything and I'm so so grateful. #bodybyyoga #fatgirlyoga #eatingdisorderrecovery #nutritionalreorientation #healthateverysize #redefininghealthy #shoulderstand #recovery #recoverywarrior #asana #septemberselfcarechallenge #meditation

A post shared by theinbetweenqueen (@theinbetweenqueen) on Sep 14, 2017 at 2:53pm PDT

I often have to remind myself that yoga is not about weight loss or weight redistribution or calorie burning, and that when I stray from my spiritual intention in the practice itself, I am effectively engaging in cultural appropriation.

If you’re struggling to take up space in this world, or the world is struggling to make space for you, demand it. So many movements have been successful in our culture to bring marginalized people into the forefront by them simply demanding space, and resisting the idea of being left out because of something that made them different.

If you struggle to give fat people space, try saying the word ‘fat’ as a non-pejorative term a few times in conversation. The word may trigger some people, but that’s a great place to begin. Find out why people find it so offensive, and remove its moral meaning from the understanding that diet culture has given you about fatness. Bust down the stigma that is associated with it; and learn to just let people live their lives.

So much of what I see on the internet surrounding peoples’ discomfort with the fat acceptance movement and their willingness to only allow “acceptably fat” bodies into the body positivity sphere is exclusionary, and turns out to not be very positive for a lot of people at all.

The rest is straight up hateful. But that’s to be expected when you don’t understand something. Just look at Google:

Read books like Body Respect (which Cait recommends all the time across this blog!) and take the body respect pledge; not just for other people around you, to help you combat fat shaming and weight stigma…but turn that ish inward, too. Too often when we try really hard to learn about and accept others, we forget ourselves. 

Have a great week, y’all!

xo,

Cait & Lexie

Mixed Messages

The fact that it’s been THREE months since I’ve written a post on my beloved blog.

A lot has gone down since February 7th, when I wrote my last post for this blog; including two more posts (for the NEDA Blog and for a really awesome girl-run blog called Demystified!)

Wellllll y’all, for one, I had a lapse in recovery behavior; I found myself bingeing and unable to cope with my anxiety, which led to a lot of stress flooding through me for a little while. Over the past few months, work and school have taken over my LIFE, and I’ve managed to not only get back to the business of recovering, but do it well. 

 

 

Right now, I’m really focused and this lapse, strangely enough, has brought me close to my family. I finally got to explain to them what it feels like to live inside my head and inside my body after a lot of miscommunication, passive aggression and a lot of avoidance on both sides.

For the first time in my almost 24 years of life, I can say that my family and I are closer than ever and that I actually feel fully supported by the people around me. 

 

 

It wasn’t always this way, though. But I don’t and would not ever attribute that to a lack on the part of the people who raised me, in any regard. Like I told my mom recently, the reason why I stuffed a lot of my anxiety down (emotionally and literally) was because I love her so much and my way of being grateful for all that she does for me and for my family was to not make her life more difficult with my stress and symptoms.

This came across as a lack of appreciation and gratitude, but I got to finally communicate that it was merely my intense ability to internalize things so that they don’t adversely affect others. I wonder if anyone relates? 

This idea of stuffing things down brings me to the initial topic I had for this post; mixed messages.

 

My introduction to emotional eating began with my parents’ divorce when I was really young, as I’ve said in so many posts before–around age six. 

Food was my way of emotionally regulating, and when my home split into two, my families on either side also had really different ideas about food and body image. 

When they were still together, my mom had Slim Fast in the fridge and Weight Watchers books all over the place. She was a product of the roaring, dieting, Tae Bo crazed 90s. 

One family made a lot of healthy meals, and raw veggies were a staple for after-school snack foods. My grandmother would always joke about how good my eyesight would be because I ate so many baby carrots. Even still, the amount of baby carrots I would consume was always a lot. But I guess it was okay, since veggies were “free” foods.

 

At my other grandparents’ house, processed foods were of the same status as raw veggies at grandma A’s house (they’ll be A & B because I’m not trying to @ either parent in this one). The food they eat does not have anything to do with their morality, but that’s not to say it hasn’t built consequences around me vis a vis an eating disorder.)

Cold cuts, desserts in wrappers, popcorn with extra butter–and you had to eat all of what was put in front of you, whether you liked it or not–the implicit “clean plate club.” 

Grandma A, on the other hand, took everyone at the table’s likes and dislikes into account when we ate meals. My grandfather, to this day, HATES lima beans. He never had to eat them, and if we didn’t like them, we didn’t either; they modeled what they did and practiced what they preached. Lucky for me, I LOVED when grandma made lima beans with dinner–tilapia, not so much. 

I could write the rest of this post about why it’s really not okay to attempt to regulate children’s hunger and fullness signals by moralizing what or how much they eat. But diet culture studies already do that for us. I am living proof of how these mixed messages created so much chaos for me and for my body image.

I will also reiterate that it’s not really the fault of my parents on an individual basis as much as it is part of the culture(s) from which they came. Strict Irish Catholic backgrounds on both sides + diet culture = one confused six year old girl.

Confused six year old girl became confused twelve year old girl, confused eighteen year old girl, and going on 24 year old woman trying to make sense of all the information that was (and wasn’t) given to me about health, size, weight stigma, nutrition, and self love.  

 

These mixed messages eventually solidified into conditioned behavior, and then emotional eating became bingeing and restricting. I would exercise for hours when I went to visit this parent in order to sometimes counter the lower quality food and portion values that came to the table with us at meals.

Intuition about fullness, in this house, was not a value, because “if you don’t like it then starve” took the driver’s seat when we ate together. We also had milk with every meal while the adults drank soda “because [they were] the adults.”

I would run or work out in the basement just so I could feel less bloated and weighed myself up to six times a day in the bathroom, compulsively.

At home, bingeing would occur more frequently. Intuition was lost there, too. “You can’t possibly be hungry” or “you’re just bored” would be a lot of what I’d hear when reaching for snacks.

 

 

Sometimes these voices were right, but they still encouraged me to tune out my own and privilege “discipline” over intuition. Eventually, I would learn how to regulate these emotionally charged eating cues and address the actual feelings rather than stuff them down. Then these comments don’t come as often anymore, and when they do, there are boundaries because I have learned due to intuitive eating how to stand up for that intuition. 

I oscillated between binge and restrict cycles well into college, and have since learned to emotionally regulate, nutritionally regulate, and get enough movement in to satisfy my body’s need to just stay active.

Exercise aversion, after many years of faithful exercise bulimia, is also a tremendous part of my story, one that I work on every day. 

 

I know its not from season 10 but GIRL I had to

 

This past weekend before I went to my first NEDA walk, I hung out and played frisbee with my partner. We actually had a really great time tossing it around, and kept up a really shocking volley of 25 throws before I stubbed my finger on the hard plastic. I sometimes forget how good it feels to get up and moving, and I am trying to make it more of a habit.

All I know now despite these mixed messages is that loving THIS body is possible. Being myself and learning new skills to emotionally regulate is possible. Learning how to be loved and to keep loving myself is not just possible, but necessary!

Thanks for sticking with me, y’all. I promise I won’t sashay away on you anymore. The Inbetweenqueen is back!!!!!

Follow me on social media, and check out my guest posts! (Linked at the top of the main page!)

Big Bodies are NOT a Big Problem

…But thin privilege is.

Why are we talking about this? 

I was recently at an eating disorder support group where I expressed ‘fat’ as a term that resonates as part of my identity. It has been paramount to my recovery in recent months, especially with all the noticeable changes/stretching my body has done since last summer.

I was told that my use of the word ‘fat’ (even though I was using it in a manner that is strictly self-referencing, not as a slur or to denigrate anyone) is “triggering, negative or may be harmful.” 

“Fat” has the connotation of being morally equivalent to bad, undisciplined, lazy, out of control, and so many other harmful narratives that I have experienced in my own lifetime. It is a catch-22 of “I’m not fat yet, but I could be, and that would be terrible” (for thin-bodied people) and “I’m already fat, so therefore I’m worthless, undeserving, lesser than”. It has always been as if fat was the worst thing that could or would ever happen to me. 

Fatness is viewed as nothing to aspire to, celebrate, or be okay with, much less reclaim. It is not thought possible that people in larger bodies could have eating disorders, and if we do, it’s because we have absolutely no willpower.

These notions remind me of one of my favorite poems, “When the Fat Girl Gets Skinny” by Blythe Baird. She says:

“When you have an eating disorder and you are thin to begin with, you go to the hospital. When you have an eating disorder and you are not thin to begin with, you are a success story.” 

 

How else would fat people suddenly “look great” and lose a whole bunch of weight? There is no magic to the behind-the-scenes obsessive weighing, restriction, working out to the point of injury or bodily stress and exhaustion. When people lose weight rapidly, it’s probably because they’re sick. Eating disorders are a valid, but often overlooked, form of ‘sick.’

 

Fat people are often associated/stereotyped with binge eating disorder, when the truth is that many fat people have used dietary restriction (myself included) as an eating disordered behavior. There is also evidence that dietary restriction is actually directly correlated to fatness, or higher set-point weight. In other words: the more you “diet”, the larger your body will be over time; because you are increasing your body’s threshold for fat preservation by frequently forcing it into deprivation/survival mode. 

The reality of the matter is that when someone in a thin body is discovered to be eating disordered, treatment is the first thought of those around them. When someone in a larger body is noticeably engaging in ED behaviors, the first thought is “Just lose some weight!”

Actual “suggestions” from people who noticed me bingeing, but didn’t acknowledge it was bingeing/that there might be an issue to further explore than just my “lack of discipline”:

• “Take human bites!”
• “Haven’t you had enough?”
• “Save some for everyone else.”
• Do you want to go to _(insert exercise plan the speaker claims to swear by)_ with me?”
• “If you want to lose weight, you need to portion control.” (I did not want to lose weight, nor did I indicate that I did)

Fat people get unsolicited advice in the interest of their “health” all the time; but no one ever stops to think about the effect that this has on their mental health. It takes away from the things that fat people can and are doing like getting up every day and taking care of themselves, going to school, finding cures for really crazy diseases, teaching someone else’s children, or volunteering to help bring food security to low-income families. We are not seen for what we are, for who we are, all because physically, we are “kind of hard to miss.” So why are our other attributes so easy to dismiss?

 

The answer is simple: there is a blatant prejudice that exists against larger bodied people thanks to the media, the medical industry, the diet industry (which, by the way, grosses $60B annually). We are not given a solution other than an unending list of “If you would just”s. 

We are instructed to aspire to thinness or “normal” weight, and used as an example of what not to become. We are invisible because the society at large is afraid that if people see us, they will think that (gasp!) you can be happy while you are also not thin. Thin people fear us because they desperately do not want to look like we do.

 

 

But wouldn’t that be glorifying obesity? Ah. No. I am not walking around telling everyone they NEED to be fat, they need to live in a larger body, that they MUST subject themselves to the everyday size discrimination and ridicule and invalidation that fat folks experience!

If anything, our society is doing the opposite; going to any lengths to glorify thinness–thin people are visible everywhere, and “fight the fat” ads troll local strip malls with exercise studios where I live in the suburbs. There’s a very strategic, discriminatory reason that there are advertisements for Weight Watchers, South Beach, YourWeigh, Nutrisystem and a gazillion other corporate diet garbage being projected into our consciousness. This is not the same as fat people asking for representation of their reality; the presence of fat people doesn’t immediately suggest that they are “pushing their lifestyle on the world.” They are simply asking to be seen and heard without being asked to change anything about themselves. Diet culture doesn’t ask–it demands–that we change everything about ourselves. I live in a society that tells big girls that the only way to exist is to be small–and eternally is reminding us that we aren’t doing it right.

There is no natural way for a fat person to keep up with “normal” weight standards without dietary restriction, invasive/ineffective surgery, or laxative abuse; shouldn’t that tell us that maybe the answer is to altogether stop trying to manipulate our weight? 

 

 

To tell someone who lives in, identified with, and accepts their larger body in an eating disordered community that they cannot refer to themselves as fat takes away their identity, cuts off access to their own reality and renders it a ‘problem.’ It is nearly as harmful as “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful!”…as if they cannot be both all at once. Fat is not a bad word, it is not a blemish or a curse. It is just as much a part of me as being white, female, queer, or a teacher or a graduate student.

But to dismiss it altogether privileges recovery of thin-bodied people in a way that says they deserve compassion while suggesting that fat people aren’t “really” eating disordered. It keeps the word “fat” in negative terms, further other-ing fat people in the eating disordered community specifically. Taking other peoples’ fatness away from them minimizes their experiences, and perpetuates the fear mongering around a larger state of existence that our society can no longer afford. 

It also doesn’t take into account that maybe a person’s large body and acceptance of the fact of their body can be a way of liberating themselves from their eating disorder–their decision to not engage in behaviors like obsessive weighing, portion measurements down to the gram–and just acknowledge that their weight will fluctuate the way it needs to based on stress levels, water intake, hormone reactions, and other body chemistry related factors. 

I took back the word fat as a self-referencing term because as was said by Audre Lorde: “Nothing which I know about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” For a lot of my life, in school and at home in my basement where I used to work out for hours, in the pages of the journals I used to tally up the amount of calories I burned just standing, I was preoccupied with never letting fat “happen” to me. Even when it was hurled at me in the hallways of my middle school or brought to my attention by a teacher, I internalized my otherness to mean something dysfunctional about me.

Now, it is a reality that I have come face to face with and not only just accepted but made complete and total peace with. It makes getting through brain-induced dysmorphia days a lot easier. It makes freedom a lot easier. Freedom from the venom of the word “fat” has been my entry into freedom from fear; and I’m never going to stop saying it. 

 

 

A lot of folks are triggered by the word ‘fat’ for a lot of different reasons. Maybe it was used to invoke violence on their psyche on the playground growing up. Maybe it was a value that permeated the walls of their household before, after and during meals. Maybe it’s the thing that people aspire never to become.

And I encourage those who resonate with the latter to understand that this fear of fat is rooted in nothing more than fat phobia. Maybe you didn’t intend for that to happen. You probably didn’t. Society sucks, like I’ve already mentioned–it sucks for thin people and fat people and people of color and trans people and LGBTQ+ people and disabled people and indigenous people and all marginalized people. But if ‘fat’ invokes fear in you, it’s time to fight back against the current that perpetuates this myth that fat means something bad.

Because if fat phobia continues to exist in spaces where people are trying to heal, recovery becomes less accessible to all of us. 

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I’m walking in this year’s NEDA Walk on Long Island! Please donate! Any little bit helps in the fight for eating disorder recovery. Love & Light ❤