Pandemic Onset Fat Phobia (Part 2)

Listen, I get it. We’re all going a little stir crazy. My hair is growing at an alarming rate and I’m fairly sure that I am going to look like a yeti when we are finally allowed to emerge from our homes and access services like salons and barbers again. And March felt like it lasted approximately 5,379 days and we’re not even close to the end of the pandemic, yet. We are all feeling a little wrecked and aged and not at all our best.

There is a right way to make fun of this predicament.

Two images of the same character (in this case Ichabod Crane as played by Tom Mison in Fox’s Sleepy Hollow).

And there is a WRONG WRONG BAD WRONG NO way of doing it.

Two different characters, one of which is muscular and other one of which is fat with a large beard.

DO NOT DO THIS. Your fat friends are paying attention to those of you who share this nonsense. How the fuck do you think we feel when we see this? If your biggest concern about coming out of this pandemic is looking like me at the end, then aren’t you lucky. It means you’ve had more than enough food to eat for the duration, not having to struggle with job loss or food insecurity. But your inherent fat phobia—that let’s face it was there before the pandemic—can’t let you imagine a worse fate. Fuck that noise.

Also, don’t do this:

What the shit is this??

I have no idea who this fool is, probably just a troll based on a glance at his Twitter feed. But this shit isn’t funny. So? People might end up fat. Woe. Start the pearl clutching now. Do you people realize that it feels like the world is ending? This is a HUGE trauma and some people respond to trauma with eating. Some people totally lose their appetite and can’t eat anything. Food is comforting and having access to food can make people feel safe, reducing their anxiety.

If you want a cookie, or a cake, or a whole pizza, why would you ever want to add more stress to your body by constantly denying what it wants? Eat a freaking cookie if it gives you a moment of joy in this hell scape!

And it’s not just memes and random troll posts that are illustrating all that tremendous fat phobia. Articles like this one about the higher death rate in New Orleans all contribute to the narrative that fat people are unhealthy and at greater risk of death. Once again “obesity” is linked to higher rates of diabetes and hypertension and folks, it’s just not true. Buried way down in the sixth paragraph is this gem:

Gee, ya think?

New Orleans just might have a disparity in access to healthcare. Maybe. Possibly. Because what we absolutely didn’t see when Hurricane Katrina hit was an economic disparity among the city’s residents. Not at all.

I can’t fucking stand this. On most days, I can take a deep breath and let this kind of shit pass by with an eye roll, knowing that fat phobia, internalized or otherwise, is a huge issue that is going to take more than just my tiny voice in one corner of the internet to solve. But in addition to the generalized existential dread involved in this time of crisis, it’s just piling on.

Please, miss me with all of this. Feel free to worry about your waistline somewhere else, but keep that shit away from me.

Pandemic Onset Fat Phobia

It’s been hard, in this time of uncertainty and fear over a world-wide pandemic, to find the energy to write about body positivity, fat acceptance, and fat liberation. But as more and more states and cities close their non-essential and non-life-sustaining businesses and facilities, the fat phobia has surged. There’s no shortage of it during normal, non-pandemic times, but as gyms all over the country close and lock their doors, the fear of becoming fat permeates the landscape.

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From a FB friend…

Stop. Don’t do this bullshit. Especially don’t do it to yourself. This is an unprecedented crisis and no one knows where it will end. Or when. I understand rampant fear. But if your biggest fear in this crisis is about gaining weight—and not about an unchecked virus running rampant through your community and possibly killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people—then you need to check your privilege. And if all of that is actually what you’re afraid of and you need an outlet for it, please, I am begging you, do not put it on your body that is just trying to get you through the trauma, fear, and panic. There are plenty of at-home workout videos you can do for joyful movement that don’t require you to go to a gym or have any fancy equipment.

Be kind to your body during these troubling times. And be kind to others no matter what. We are all struggling.

Living a Life of Loving Yourself

I was fortunate enough to be asked to do a sermon at my church, Unitarian Society of Germantown, yesterday. I knew that I had to use the opportunity to speak out my experiences of fat phobia and discrimination. It came out amazingly well, and I am lucky that my church records all our sermons. The the video is below. My wife did an amazing introduction for me and then there’s the sermon. The whole thing is about 16 minutes long.

Spoiler Alert: You are NOT the Fat Whisperer

See this thread from author Seanan McGuire below because I’m not sure I could do any better. This shit has got to stop. Stop telling strangers what they should do with their bodies. Stop telling ANYONE what they should do with their bodies. You are not the endless font of wisdom that you think you are. I don’t even care if you are the foremost medical professional in all of the land. Unless you are MY doctor, keep your bullying, fat phobic comments to yourself. End of.

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Really? Bariatric Surgery for Teenagers is What We're Doing Now?

CW: Discussion of weight-loss surgery and disordered eating

This week the journal Pediatrics published a policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics that argues more children and adolescents should have access to bariatric surgery.

I’m sorry, SAY WHAT NOW?? Why are any children or adolescents AT ALL having bariatric surgery?

If you’re not familiar, bariatric surgery is a procedure that changes the structure of your digestive system, either by making your stomach smaller or re-routing parts of it, so that you can’t physically eat as much and you absorb fewer calories. The surgeries can be invasive and carry post-operative risks, and they require permanent changes to a patient’s diet. After surgery, patients are restricted to a liquid diet for 2 to 3 weeks and then need to slowly add soft foods then solid foods. According to this information on Medline, after gastric bypass surgery, which reduces the size of the stomach, patients can only consume about a tablespoonful of regular food at first. Overtime, this will expand to a single cup of regular food, when an unaltered stomach can hold 4-times that much. Patients have to limit or eliminate their intake of fats, sugar, carbohydrates, and carbonated beverages and have to take supplements so they get enough nutrients. Some of the most common side effects of bariatric surgery are body aches, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, feeling tired or cold, malnutrition, and ulcers, among others.

And we’re doing this to TEENAGERS. I’m 40 years old and I can’t imagine first having to undergo major surgery and then having to radically alter my entire lifestyle so as to completely restrict my food intake down to a few bites of low-fat dairy or skinless chicken breast, for instance.

And we’re not only doing this to teenagers already, a major medical association is recommending that MORE teenagers and children have access to it.

Source: https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2019/10/24/peds.2019-3223

Children and adolescents with “severe obesity” (as determined by BMI, which we already know is a poor indicator of health) also are more likely to have additional complications like type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and hypertension and are at an increased risk of developing these complications. And I am NO WAY suggesting that children with these conditions is a good thing or something we shouldn’t be addressing. I AM, however, horrified that instead of promoting greater racial and socio-economic justice to these underserved populations, instead of advocating for better access to healthier foods and the elimination of food deserts, instead of fighting to preserve open spaces and offer safe locations for children to get physical activity, this national group of pediatrics specialists recommends that more children be altered physically, often permanently, in order to do so.

My fear is that this recommendation will lead to an increase in disordered eating in adolescents because surgery will be used as a threat of last resort. “Lose weight, lower your BMI however you can or we’ll refer you for surgery. You won’t be able to eat any of your favorite foods ever again. Do you want that?” The AAP statement is very careful to exhort pediatricians to have meaningful conversations with their patients about the benefits and risks, to make decisions together with patients and family, and that bariatric surgery should not be undergone without taking into account psychological and developmental maturity. But they also say that the patients in one of the studies that supports their recommendation were majority white and female. Which just so happens to be the same population who is most likely to have an eating disorder.

I find this whole thing repulsive and disgusting, and my level of distress and anger over this recommendation is high. Personally, I think there are far bigger concerns out there for the health of children and adolescents (can we say climate change for one?) than access to bariatric surgery.

When Fat People Don't Die Like You Said They Would

Most of the interactions that fat people have with healthcare professionals can be boiled down to “Lose weight or you’re going to DIE!”

Guess what? We’re all going to die one day, fat or thin or in between. What the doctors and nurses and other providers mean, of course, is that you are going to die prematurely based on your given life expectancy for your socioeconomic class and region (which we can debate the merits of at another time).

Except now there’s evidence that some fat might actually provide protection against disease and not cause premature death at all… say WHAAAAAAAAT?

Researchers are calling it the “obesity paradox,” which is a bullshit name for the antithesis of a bullshit epidemic that doesn’t exist, but I’ll allow it. At its core, the so-called paradox is that some extra weight—individuals in the overweight or mildly obese BMI categories—offers a protective benefit against a list of diseases including (but not limited to) pneumonia, cancer, burns, heart disease, stroke, and hypertension.

All of this is from an article in Quartz about the “obesity paradox.” It should come as no surprise that researcher after researcher has tried to deny these findings after data from over 100 studies and over 3 million people had been incorporated. First they attacked the data. When nothing wrong could be found there, they attacked the patient populations.

The upshot is, no one can make the “paradox” go away. No matter how they crunch the data or reconfigure the patient groups, the evidence is still there.

So how come healthcare professionals still stigmatize and shame fat people? Shouldn’t this mean that fat people are treated the same or even better than thin people who statistically will have worse outcomes in these areas?

No, of course not. That’d be ridiculous. It’d run counter to decades of fat bias and diet industry conditioning that thin is always healthy and fat is always unhealthy.

Source: https://qz.com/550527/obesity-paradox-scientists-now-think-that-being-overweight-is-sometimes-good-for-your-health/

According to the article, even the researchers whose work helped to identify the paradox don’t know what it means and do not back away from recommendations that fat people should lose weight to be healthy. The article concludes that HAES seems to be the best way forward and that research has shown that a HAES approach (opposed to a weight-loss approach) “…leads to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and other metabolic markers.”

But the idea that a fat body can be healthy and actually be protected from poor outcomes from disease is such an anathema that it seems like people can’t wrap their heads around it. The article stops short of examining why that is. My guess is money related to the diet industry (ie, being paid for their research by the diet industry or sponsored as key opinion leaders by the diet industry), internalized fat phobia, and learned fat bias.

The article also does not give critical information on the debunking of BMI and the fact that it never was an indicator of health. So even the basis of the research on this paradox is pretty much bullshit. But the good news for us is that weight cannot and should not be used as a measure of our worth or our health. Even the scientists don’t know what it all means.

Practicing Body Neutrality

While fat phobia and fat discrimination knows no gender, it is women who are most publicly and predominantly held to the ridiculous standards of beauty that subject even those who are thin or thin-passing to scrutiny, comment, and criticism. As an audience, women are served a seemingly endless diet of commentary on other women’s bodies to the point where only the smallest few of us can honestly say we are happy with our bodies exactly as they are.

But there is danger in thin and thin-passing women claiming space in the fight for fat positivity. Columnist and author Laura Jane Williams wrote about this in an article for Red in 2018. In the article, she discusses the ways in which she in her “slightly-above-average-sized body” has “never truly known fatphobia.”

Source: Laura Jane Williams, 2018

I think Williams is completely spot on with her take and the voices she chooses to amplify. When thin and thin-passing women participate in discussions about their bodies, regardless of their intent, the idea that bodies should be discussed and commented on is reinforced. I particularly love this quote Williams uses from Bethany Rutter:

Source: Laura Jane Williams, 2018

Thin and thin-passing women must endure commentary about their bodies, yes, and that commentary can be hurtful; but they will never know what it is like to step outside their doors braced for the day and the onslaught of micro and macroaggressions against their bodies. They will never fear stepping onto the beach because someone might call them a beached whale and get their friends to laugh at her. They will never fear going to the gym and being secretly filmed, their unconsented-to image posted online to be served up for ridicule.

Source: Laura Jane Williams, 2018

Which is why an Instagram post from Hilary Duff like this one doesn’t truly help:

This is from 2 years ago, but I came across it the other day, reposted in a Facebook group with the hashtag #bodypositivity. It’s obvious that Duff posted this picture of herself so that paparazzi and tabloids wouldn’t be able to use it against her. This is a thin actress who has perfectly normal thighs for someone with a body talking about her “flaws” and extolling women to “stop wasting precious time” wishing we were different or better. She talks about her body being “healthy,” which we have culturally decided is the same as “not fat.” And by characterizing any part of her body as having flaws, Duff only reinforces the idea that bodies HAVE flaws.

Contrast this with Jameela Jamil’s approach. Jamil is a diet survivor among many other things and she has been leading the fight against photoshopping her image in any instance, including promotional images for her show The Good Place:

What is important to me, and where I think Jamil and Williams are in line with each other, is that Jamil points out that she is not telling us that WE have to celebrate our back fat. She seems to recognize how bananas a sentiment like that is coming from “some slim actress.” I love her hashtag #letabitchlive. Yes… just let us live. All of us! Normalize fat bodies and disabled bodies and dark-skinned bodies and trans bodies and all the other kinds of bodies out there!

The way to normalize all human bodies is to stop analyzing and critiquing them and commenting negatively on them. And definitely don’t comment on other women’s bodies to anyone. Keep that poison to yourself. You don’t have to be body positive or fat positive all day every day, but practicing body neutrality with yourself and others goes a long, long way.

Workplace Food Police

When I was in college, I had a co-op position at a local engineering firm where I worked in their marketing department. The head of the department was a large, loud man who generally rubbed me the wrong way. But there was one day of that 6-month job that still stands out to me, 20+ years later. Someone brought in donuts or something for the department and all of us, including him, gleefully enjoyed them. Though during our enjoyment, he turned to me and said something about how I shouldn’t enjoy them too much. I think he actually nudged me with his elbow to show that he was being kindly and just giving me good advice. I felt the shame wash over me as I looked down at my plate. I held back tears as I went back to my desk and looked loathingly at the food I had just been enjoying.

All of 20 years old at most, I had no idea how to deal with this food shaming by someone who was in power over me, much less an older man commenting on my body. Somehow, I found the courage to confront him about it later that day, no longer able to hold back my tears. His excuse was that he was just joking with me, in solidarity, because hey, he’s large, too, and he shouldn’t be eating that stuff either. It was a perfect experience of internalized fat hatred and misogyny rolled into one awful experience.

Today, I know better how to handle these kinds of things, but as this article in the Atlantic points out, workplace food policing is still an “acceptable” form of workplace bonding.

Source: Atlantic Article

It’s not unusual for conversations about food to take place, especially when the only time coworkers often get a chance to socialize is during lunch. Noting what your fellow coworkers are eating, especially if it smells particularly good, is a normal human interaction. But it too often veers into commenting on one another’s diet and food choices, up to and including making judgements about the kinds of food they’re eating.

“I really ought to be eating a salad today because last night I was so tired that we just ordered some pizzas. I ate four whole pieces myself and now I feel totally bloated.”

How often have you heard a conversation starter like that as the same person eats a slice of leftover pizza in front of you? Moreover, how often has that conversation then devolved into rounds and rounds of self-deprecating commiseration over their own poor food choices or lack of exercise? It’s practically inescapable on a normal day, but then there’s the dreaded “workplace health challenge.” Then these conversations are completely unavoidable.

Source: The Atlantic.

My current workplace has the “Chubber Club,” an annual weight-loss challenge that takes place in the new year to shed the holiday weight after all that indulgence. The best thing I can say about it is that the weigh-ins are done in private and only the people who choose to participate get the updates/information/etc. But you can always tell who is involved because everyone is suddenly talking about “what they are doing” to lose the weight and “win.” Oh, and the scale is in a prominent public area that also holds our snacks, just in case you might want to check your weight before you decide what to eat.

It’s so disheartening to come up against it every year, especially when I’m trying to fight my own body-positive fight from my tiny little corner of the office. I don’t think the conversations about food and diet are ever going away, but if we can all recognize some of the basic facts, I think we can keep these conversations from being toxic:

• Weight is not an indicator of health

• Weight loss is not always desirable or an indicator of good health (see those with eating disorders or extreme health issues)

• Fat shaming is harmful to fat people’s health

• Disordered eating is widespread and dangerous (in fact, it’s possible we don’t even know how widespread disordered eating actually is)

The most important thing that everyone can do—coworkers, friends, family, everyone—is mind your damn business. If you can’t do that, at least be kind. You might not know what someone is struggling with on any given day.

When Fat-Shaming Gets a Presidential Platform

I had no idea who Marianne Williamson was until I started hearing her name in a positive light after the first set of Democratic Presidential debates. Mostly people seemed to consider her a joke, but apparently she had scored some points during that first debate. So as the second debates grew closer, I started paying closer attention to the people further afield from my chosen favorites. That’s where I came across this opinion article from MSNBC and learned that Marianne Williamson isn’t just far afield in political polls; in my opinion she’s far afield from reality.

It’s true that she says some things that make sense regarding social, cultural, and racial justice, including advocating for slavery reparations, which her fellow candidates seem hesitant to do. But the MSNBC article does a very good job of taking apart her dangerous rhetoric that centers all bad things on the individual for not “loving” themselves or their enemies or apparently anything enough. In Williamson’s world, depression can be cured by increasing spiritual wellness, so that antidepressants aren’t necessary and patients with HIV can cure themselves by trusting in God.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/marianne-williamson-s-democratic-debate-performance-raised-eyebrows-she-s-ncna1035956

There’s really no better example of her toxic rhetoric than her approach to fat people. Williamson has written several self-help books, and of course one of them is geared solely to women on losing weight.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/marianne-williamson-s-democratic-debate-performance-raised-eyebrows-she-s-ncna1035956

The article provides a link to Williamson’s book on Google books, so you can poke around it for yourself. I thought that it couldn’t possibly be this bad, but it is. This is just from the first few pages of the first chapter:

Source: https://books.google.com/books?id=9QCpUYKTwKwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+course+in+weight+loss&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihip-457njAhXSK80KHcGJDYkQ6wEIMDAB#v=onepage&q&f=false

This is abhorrent and the implications of it make me want to vomit. On the surface, Williamson’s beliefs are all about “love”, but dig just a little bit and it’s the gaslighting “you’re this way because you don’t love yourself enough” kind of love. It’s hate masquerading as love and concern, which is something that fat people have had more than their fill of.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/marianne-williamson-s-democratic-debate-performance-raised-eyebrows-she-s-ncna1035956

It’s not a leap to think that people who believe in Williamson’s way of thinking would feel free to stigmatize fat people, to their faces, which as I previously wrote, is actually more harmful than the fat we carry around.

There has always been a fat-shaming problem, and politics is certainly no exception. The rhetoric on the left about Trump’s body has shown that over and over again. Williamson is certainly not the first person to be running for president that hates fat people, but to have someone running for president who has written a whole book on how fat people are just full of twisted and disordered thinking is just another symptom of this weird political time that we are in.

Fat Stigma Stokes Paralyzing Fear

Anyone who does work in the body positive and fat acceptance space will eventually have the same epithet hurled at their feet: You’re glorifying obesity!

What people really mean is they can’t understand how anyone would want to live in a fat body. It sounds like a nightmare to them. A guarantee for a loveless, sexless life full of disease and a premature death.

THAT is the stigma that a person in a fat body has to fight against Every. Single. Day. And over the last several months, I have read more than one article that says it’s not the fat that’s killing us… it’s the stigma. The stigma against our bodies, the hatred—internal and external—of our bodies is harming us more than our fat ever will.

Take this article from January in FiveThirtyEight:

“Even perceiving yourself as overweight when you aren’t is linked to poorer health down the line.” The PERCEPTION of being fat is harmful to your health. Because “beauty standards” are impossible to meet and yet we as a group hold people to them until they are literally dying because of it. The rest of the article veers off into a ham-fisted discussion of weight loss and personal responsibility and how science is JUST NOW figuring out that weight is not as simple as calories in and calories out (though everyone in HAES could have told you that a long time ago), but the main topic remains: “If the public health goal is to curb obesity and improve health, stigma just makes everything worse.”

A recent entry in the Scientific American blog takes it a step further:

This gets directly to the core of the issue. Fat hatred has it’s roots deep in discriminatory and bigoted behavior and it does nothing but harm people.

I really want to quote the ENTIRE blog post because so, so much of it is on point. But this is really the crux of the issue:

Linda Bacon and Amee Severson correctly place the blame at the feet of systemic injustice. Because hatred is intersectional. These issues are not just about fat people, but queer people, people of color, and every other marginalized group. An inclusive society helps EVERYONE be healthier.

Fear is a paralytic. It keeps people where they are and doing the things they have always done. I am part of a community of fat people who encourage healthy and joyful movement and day after day I read their stories about going to the gym to celebrate what their bodies can do only to be used as some thin-person’s “inspiration” or to be “congratulated” for doing something to be healthier. Or, worst, to be made fun of for being fat while at the simple act of exercising.

No one can be healthier until this kind of shit doesn’t happen. Until we can all get clothes we are comfortable in and can move in without a major sports brand being taken to task for “glorifying obesity.”

Every day that I step out of my door challenges the agenda of fat hatred. Every day that I put on clothes that I like, that complement my body, is a radical act of fat acceptance. And I long for the day that it isn’t.