Thanksgiving Food Minefield

A tip of the hat to good friend and loyal blog follower Emily Joy for reposting this graphic from more-love.org:

Much of what we consider to be polite conversation during this food-based holiday actually highlights disordered eating. For people struggling with body neutrality or an eating disorder (or both), the Thanksgiving holiday can be a nightmare to negotiate. The chart above gives some helpful scripts for remembering to focus on the person and the people and not the food. And also, take your food police badge off. It has no place at the table.

Kudos to More Love for being a resource committed to helping parents “to raise kids free from body hate, disordered eating, and eating disorders.” Check out some of their other Thanksgiving tips!

Never Nothing to Write

Every time I think I’m going to run out of things to write, something happens to remind me that this work is hard and ongoing and there are too many assholes out there to name. Forever 21 will decide to start sending diet bars to their online customers or there’ll be another awesome t-shirt that doesn’t come in anything like my size or one of a thousand other microaggressions that might come our way. As of this writing, I have been doing this blog twice a week for 3 months and I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the things there are to talk about. I am so, so grateful to everyone who has shared and commented and encouraged me so far.

Being in a fat body is hard work, and sometimes it gets the better of the best of us. Today was a hard day for me. One knee in particular decided to be problematic and cause me lots of pain. I didn’t manage to accomplish everything I wanted to and it left me feeling defeated.

Body positivity doesn’t mean you are going to love your body all the time. Sometimes it is enough to get through a day with your soul and spirit intact and you need to celebrate that. And when you can’t is when you need the members of your fat community to step in and help lift you up, remind you that there are too many assholes in the world, and give you the strength to face tomorrow. Because if you can celebrate your body each day, even a little (even when everything hurts), it makes the world so much easier to take.

Tips for Soothing a Hostile World

The world is terrifying. There are so many things wrong and it feels like things are spiraling out of control. Going through the world in a fat body adds layers of complexity and anxiety to just existing. But this article of 51 Ways to Make the World Less Hostile to Fat People offers some good points. I recommend it to everyone who needs a little encouragement and maybe needs a little help feeling like they’re not imagining the way the world is against them.

Here are a few that particularly resonated with me:

This. THIS THIS THIS shit right here. From October right through to New Year’s Eve, everything is about parties and food and indulging with family and friends. And then BOOM. January 1 and its diet industry palooza. We must now attempt to shrink ourselves down and then fail so that by October we can start the cycle all over again.

When fat people tell you that things are terrible for them, believe them. Commiserate with them. But don’t pretend you understand if you haven’t experienced systemic fatphobia and hatred yourself.

Every time my office asks for suggestions, I ask for visitor chairs without arm rests. Up until I asked for a new office chair, there wasn’t a single chair in the entire office that I could comfortably fit into. There’s also a really good Twitter feed called Can We All Go that points followers to inclusive and accessible stores, restaurants, etc. If thin people contribute to gathering this information, it helps make them aware of the lack of inclusivity that we face on a daily basis. I am so tired of squeezing my hips into chairs and finding bruises days later.

So boosting this article to other fat people feels a bit like preaching to the choir. But if you’re a thin person reading this blog, read the article. And then share it with your thin friends. Then put these 51 tips into practice. Unlearning fatphobic behaviors takes time, but these are a really, really good place to start.