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.
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.
“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.
Royally Incomplete 