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!

Are you Addicted Enough?

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

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

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

I used to ask myself,

Am I good/worth enough?

Do I belong enough?

Is there enough food for me? 

How can I become small enough? 

Did I burn off enough? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

---

 

48 hours

Stare at your plate

eat, take more

eat, take more

until you can’t 

take anymore

you remember 

this time last year

you were well 

because you invited god

to your table

where is your god now

and why did you make her small?

because it’s all you know 

how to do

shrink yourself,

to feel like your life 

is your own 

except god didn’t have to

get smaller with you 

it’s not god’s fault 

the same way it wasn’t 

your fault

when they chose self will

over unconditional love

so you sit here 

and stare at the plate 

taking more,

promising you’ll make up for it tomorrow,

hollow yourself out 

until your body is screaming,

you’ll keep choosing self-will 

over unconditional love

and you can’t hear your body

screaming

“We are both so much more

than enough.”

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.

View this post on Instagram

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.

View this post on Instagram

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.

Reintegration, Recovery & More

Being patient with my body size in recovery has been super frustrating recently–something that I haven’t entirely mastered yet. Especially lately, when the summer clothes are coming out of the closet, it’s been extra difficult to feel “at home” in my body (pride pun intended).

As I’ve said before in previous posts, I’ve definitely gained weight in recovery. I don’t know how much, but since starting my first phase of recovery, the OA diet, in 2016, and leaving it behind four months later, there’s an absolute possibility that I weight more than I did then. I haven’t gotten on a scale since last summer, but I can feel and see the tangible change in my Clothes sizes. (which are all over the place–M, L, XL, 0X, 1X, 2X depending on the brand!)

This all being said, I am a living example of diet failure. Those of us in the post-diet world know that relative statistic that 95% of diets fail. What this actually means is that the diet fails people, people don’t fail the diet. They are buying a product that came damaged, and are blamed when the damaged product doesn’t work. What the “95 percent” thing actually means is that 95 percent of the time, restriction based weight loss isn’t ever sustainable.

Further, it has been shown in studies that people who diet restrictively go back to the weight they were before the initial diet, and then gain 40 percent more. This isn’t meant to scare anyone, because I think the idea that “dieting will make you gain all your weight back and then some” is an anxiety provoking thought that has inherently fat phobic implications on its own.

Instead, I reframe this thought in such a way that reminds me that if I’m really anxious about my body size now, participating in the futile act of dieting to make myself smaller than I currently am will land me right back here and potentially produce more anxiety until I unlearn all the fat hate rhetoric that society has so fiercely bestowed upon me.

What I’m learning in recovery is to be happy and healthy at any size.

I’ve spent a lot of time since learning all these numbers and nutrition stats trying to find my own way to recover and re-integrate my body back to its own conception of “normal”. And what I’m developing is this process I have named and coined as re-childing. 

Shifting Recovery

When I started “recovery”, recovery looked a lot liked a diet–because it was a diet. Binge eaters are often prescribed weight loss as recovery, especially if they are subjectively “overweight” or “obese”.

Patients with anorexia (I say patients in this sentence strategically, because I was never a “patient” to treatment for an eating disorder since I was always a “normal” weight) are often prescribed weight restoration as their form of treatment. Their body weights put them in the hospital; but their disorder is seen by many medical professionals as my recovery solution.

I spent four months losing 26 pounds, and being under a lot of stress and anxiety over when (what time), I ate, how much, and who with. I weighed myself compulsively, and created a lot of anxiety about eating “on time” rather than listening to my body’s cues of hunger and fullness.

After four months, the OA lifestyle and all that came with it wasn’t sustainable. I had more people paying attention to what I ate at post-meeting diner gatherings than helping me work the actual program and all its principles.

I’ve met some WONDERFUL beautiful people in OA, who have encouraged me in and beyond my journey with that phase of what I considered to be recovering at the time. These same people respect that my disease is bigger than overeating. I come from emotional eating, bingeing, restricting, dieting, exercise purging and back again.

After this shift, I stopped exercising for a long while–a few months short of one year–and gained weight doing it. I kind of sat with this weight gain, however, because I was adamant to not exercise until I could do it without compulsively counting the calories, doing the math in my head that verified I had “gotten rid of” my lunch or worked out until I had “permission” to eat more for the day.

These processes were internal, and my relationship to exercise probably just looked really dedicated and motivated to the outside world, but I was doing so much damage to myself and my already tricky knees and back joints (I was a runner who loved to run until 10th grade when I discovered I had hip dysplasia that impacted my knees).

I re-integrated an exercise plan into my routine and my life over the past few months. I have discovered what I enjoy (hiking, walking and yoga!) and learned to put movement that doesn’t suck into my daily life. And I’m doing only those things, with a touch of dance and everyday moving.

My favorite suggestion comes from Linda Bacon’s Body Respect: I park at the far end of the lot at my job and enjoy a few extra minutes of walking to the office to sign in each morning. I also have located several different spots nearby to walk, and my partner and I have visited them a lot throughout the spring!

Intuitive Eating

Intuitive Eating has done so much for me–it is insurmountable exactly how much. It has become about more than just eating when hungry and stopping when full–I have learned through the Intuitive Eating principles how to choose foods that help my brain function better, what food actually does for me, and how to re-process things about my body image that weren’t fully healed. It has taught me how to shut out the external food policing messages that come from family and social messaging, which have throughout my life solidified into concrete messages that have come to sound a lot like my own voice, even when they’re not.

The Ten Principles of Intuitive Eating!

These principles are so important to me, and have made me really interested in the nutrition components of food and what it can do for me. With intuitive eating, I’ve learned that carbs are in fact brain food and we need them if we want to keep functioning, even as we rest.

I have a serotonin imbalance, so I focus a lot on serotonin-producing foods and omega-3 fatty acids for mood boosting. I also hydrate a lot more often and have rediscovered my childhood love for raw veggies as snacks!

My Re-Childing Theory

Most of us have no memories of being newborns or infants–but scientifically speaking, our bodies were designed to eat when they were hungry and stop after we weren’t. Despite the fact that whoever raised us got no sleep when we cried out of hunger at 3 in the morning, we were listening to our bodies when they released ghrelin–the “hunger rumble” hormone in our stomach that told us to feed it.

As we grew, our parents or caregivers were the ones who created our eating schedule in an effort to structure our day as well as their own. But how much of that eating schedule was actually in tune with our own hunger cues?
How often as children were our bodies still hungry even an hour after dinner? It’s got less to do with the “growing boy/girl” nuances we push on children as they develop, and more about their hunger and fullness signals trying to fight against a somewhat arbitrary and self-imposed food routine.

The idea that “you can’t possibly be hungry” an hour after dinner is a myth, and as children, whether we are granted permission to be hungry and eat shortly after a meal affects our development and relationship with food and eating. I know personally that it did exactly that for me.

Lots of healthy foods were available in my life for most of my childhood, and lots of unhealthy ones were, too. I had a good balance of “play food”, quickly prepped food, and nutrient dense food–but was always told either when or how much to eat (my dad’s side of the family were their own Clean Plate Police).

While I understand that parenting is SO time-consuming and that dinner gets made when and however the person cooking often sees fit, more dialogue about family food preferences and hunger schedules should be taken into account.

In our society, its considered rude to eat before everyone at the table has been served. But what if I’m not hungry and everyone else is eating? There shouldn’t be judgment if I have to make a plate for myself and heat it up later.

I can still sit with my loved ones and socialize while they enjoy their meal. Food is so often a really important sociocultural bonding tool, but participation in the food, for me, doesn’t always have to be required. In the case of restrictive disordered folks, challenge yourself to participate in the conversations and the food. There is still opportunity to be present while honoring yourself.

Just the same, parents shouldn’t push kids who are done with their dinner. If anything, teach them that whatever they don’t finish can and should be saved for later, as an effort to not be wasteful.

In households who are privileged enough to have food security, training eaters from a young age to not take more than they need could be useful in creating intuitive eaters who are mindful of the presence of socioeconomically imposed food insecurity and wastefulness.

I am re-integrating my body to its natural state; by listening really closely and carefully and not eating after my body says it’s finished. I’ve done this sometimes by overeating by accident and noticing my threshold without judgment. It’s all about fine-tuning and sometimes, that means willing to be a little physically uncomfortable.

Another form of re-childing my body’s relationship with food and body image is reframing the way I experience and think about movement. Instead of saying “I wasted today and didn’t exercise; I’m so lazy”; I think about it in terms of my relationship with nature. I don’t want to waste my “outside time” or my opportunity for that day to interact with the beauty in my neighborhood and beyond.

When we were kids, there was NOTHING worse than not getting to play outside. I go back to this thought often. When I was a preschool teacher, we would often say to the children, “Clean up your toys fast so you don’t lose outside time!” and they would get right to cleaning up and have more than enough time to play and laugh and run around with their friends.

There are only so many daylight hours, and certain tasks can be done at anytime. Being able to do this social movement activity was so important to them, and not out of a compulsion to move. I don’t like losing my “outside time” as a grown-up, either!

We all are learning and growing in this recovery process, and it is up to us to find out who our inner child is and to feed, nourish and love that child back to life using everything we have learned as adults. I know for me, it has been the most gratifying, healing, sometimes frustrating but always altogether meaningful process thus far. Get to know who you were before the self-imposed rules, structures and external messaging.

How are you implementing reintegration into your life?

When an ‘Invisible Illness’ Becomes Visible

Eating disorders, like most mental health struggles, are for the most part invisible. That is, symptoms are easy to hide–until they aren’t. 

Most of my life, I was able to hide my eating disorder symptoms behind diet culture. The average age for girls in the United States to start dieting is 11 years old–and I can honestly say I started right around then, too. This normal attitude toward restriction kept most people in my life from believing I was getting sick. But it started even before that, with maladaptive bingeing as a response to trauma. 

My family was always really nutrition-oriented and didn’t give much thought to my weight as a kid. I liked to eat, but I always ate healthy, so it wasn’t an issue. My mom’s familiarity with Weight Watchers went well with my penchant for vegetables as an after-school snack–those kinds of foods were “free,” so I ate almost entire bags of carrots uncontrolled while watching The Wizard of Oz on my grandma’s bedroom TV. Even though I wasn’t consuming much by way of calories, I was still bingeing. But because it wouldn’t appear on my body, no one put much thought into that. 

This attitude of assigning value to foods and treating the “good ones” as unlimited created in me a sense that if I ate “too much” of anything that wasn’t mostly water, I was a bad kid. In middle school, I exercised for hours a day and that was just seen as normal teen behavior, especially in a diet culture world where it was always reinforced that caloric deficit is best.

 

I developed a love for running and joined both the track and cross-country teams, but wasn’t eating enough at my fourth period lunch (at 10 am) to sustain me for the rest of the school day, let alone for a meet or a practice. To me and to everyone in diet mentality, this was normal. I was doing the “right” thing by burning more than I ate. I maintained weight and thus, appearance.

Though I was undergoing extreme stress and trauma from bullying at school, family issues, and developing an identity, no one cared to think I was sick because I didn’t look sick. I was doing what is accepted in the life of every normal 12 year old girl–being thin ‘enough’ by any means necessary.

When I started gaining weight, people noticed–but never enough to call it an eating disorder. Binge Eating Disorder is my official clinical diagnosis, even though restriction and severe thin-ideal body image issues are a tremendous part of my story. When my parents split up, as I have said many times before, food became my friend. I have maintained these behaviors throughout my life, as if eating would or could solve any of my many problems. And I believed that it would, as long as I didn’t physically show it. 

Even when I gained weight, I was never seen as sick or suffering–it was always implied that I was just not trying hard enough to exercise, care for myself, or that something must be really wrong with me. Gaining weight, in our society, has people convinced that we are maladjusted to life; and “if we would just _____________”, everything would be okay.  If we would just be thinner. Go to the gym more. But what about eliminating stressors, oppressive factors, monitoring and asking questions about our body genetics, and accepting ourselves as we are RIGHT NOW were the answer, instead of put down the brownie and go for a run? 

My illness has manifested itself in depression, anxiety, being unable to eat in front of others, post-traumatic stress response, drinking/eating while no one was looking, exercise compensation, self-harm (that was always hidden, too), and self-starvation; but as long as no one noticed it, it wasn’t readily labeled sickness.

I had to explain my behaviors to my mom, my friends, and so many other people who had unknowingly crossed paths with my eating disorder, sat down and eaten meals with it, and watched it grow and take over my life. And still, it feels hard to be believed because this disorder is not just invisible but really freakin’ elusive.

Now, at this unbelievable, incredible amazing stage of my recovery, I can call myself out pm my behaviors in front of other people even as they happen. This is both a way of getting people to understand my disorder, rendering it visible instead of hiding behind it and being in my head, thinking about what other people think about my eating habits.

Last week, I was with some friends and someone brought a whole bunch of Tate’s chocolate chip cookies–and before taking three of them, I said, “Yaaaaaa my eating disorder is gonna LOVE this!” because I know my ED wants me dead, starving and miserable. And that was my way of saying y’all, I’m not gonna let this win over me.

 

 

Some of them uncomfortably tried to take the cookies away from me and apologize for bringing them, but I was like, no. I’m glad they’re here and I’m glad I can be around them and that I’m telling on myself so that I can self-monitor and have a room full of people to go to bat for me. Because when they understand, they can help. That’s the beauty of this whole thing. Telling on my ED is what makes it less apparent, less functional–and ultimately, makes me stronger.