Finding Body Solidarity and Why I am done with Diet Culture
It has been five months since I stopped partaking in any type of dieting. Even those diets that are lifestyle changes like intermittent fasting or cutting out specific foods and drinks (aside for ethical reasons obviously). I was a yo-yo dieter for most of my life. I have had what seems like every eating disorder and I have been all the weights if we start from birth ;). After thirty years of being some kind of outcast whether it was my weight, my hair, my vagina or my love for spooky, weird eccentricities I finally feel like I am living in my own body and I am the one making the calls for it, baby!
Last fall I was stoned on a day off and going through all my snacks and posting pictures of them to my Instagram requesting that viewers send me back their favorite “healthy snacks.” Emily Mrozinkski, host of the Wellscape Podcast, messaged me back saying she loved the snack I posted but also to try to refrain from labeling my foods “healthy” as it encourages bad eating habits and I should check out the book, Just Eat It, by Laura Thomas. I never thought of the act of labeling foods as good or bad to be a negative effect on the body so I was immediately intrigued. After that I was on a fat-positive, body-positive, body-solidarity journey and I will never come home!
I am writing this blog piece because I feel that this information should be common knowledge. I was heavily inspired by Virgie Tovar’s book, You Have the Right to Remain Fat, and I want to also share my personal experience. I am not surprised that diet culture is not perceived as a scam in a country where we think racism and misogyny are over and nobody is having sex before marriage! Not to mention that we also think sexuality and gender are a choice but not abortion! So, I believe it is our job as the people to keep telling our stories and pushing for a better country to live in.
Fat shaming and fat phobia are a form of bigotry. In Tovar’s book she writes, “Dieting is a practice of fatphobia.” Dieting is the result of unresolved fatphobia. We become terrified of what it would mean for us to be fat because we understand fundamentally how poorly fat people are treated. “We transpose that bigotry onto the fat itself, rather than placing the blame where it belongs: on the culture that created and promotes injustice and fat hatred. We thereby, perhaps unintentionally, end up blaming fat people for the bigotry they are experiencing. Even though fatphobia is culturally pervasive and treated as if it’s a totally normal part of everyday life, it’s important to recognize that it is a form of bigotry that really harms people and that must be eradicated (3.Tovar).”
I am ashamed to say that I too, was once also a person that has diet shamed, self harmed, and projected diet culture onto people. Just because I wasn’t sitting there calling others terrible names like my peers did to me doesn’t mean I didn’t project diet culture based values onto people. Our culture makes us this way. This is also why I had to cut ties with people in my life that don’t have the same core values as me. If you think any form of bigotry is okay then you are a threat to society and we can’t agree to disagree on that. You are delaying the train of progression and I have no time for that.
I remember an old friend once called me to catch up and as we were catching up I told her about the book I had just finished that was fucking amazing. The actress that wrote the book happened to be a person of size and as soon as I said, “Oh my God you have to read this it was so good!” This friend replied, “Okay, Katie but she is like morbidly obese, she needs help.” I remember being so shocked and then having another thought like “What does that have to do with her experiences and career?” This is the exact problem. When we fat shame or any type of shaming on personal appearance it also encourages the belief that fat equals uneducated. People should be able to be just as valued as others whether or not they are of size or have any other trait that makes them a minority end of story. Not to mention the misogyny that goes in hand with this kind of discrimination can be heavily put on women and especially women of color or women that live in poverty. Women are constantly told in society to take up as least space as possible, and that if we aren’t a certain body type or have traditional hair and make up that we aren’t worthy of certain jobs. Women of size are also pressured with narratives that they aren’t pretty enough to be loved etc. Hence my dumb ex-friend overriding my statement that the professional actress that is grossing millions more money than my ex-friend will ever make is still too big to be a respected member of society. This has got to end and I am going to just shed some education on this subject as well as tell my personal experience relating to fat shame.
Laura Thomas PhD says in her book, Just Eat It, that dieting causes the body to go into starvation mode which tells the body to hold onto energy and retain weight and thus GAIN MORE WEIGHT OVER TIME THAN IS LOST. YUP, which explains why I always go back to the same weight or heavier whenever I have fallen off any dieting or fasting. Every book I have read about metabolism and dieting has said this (highly recommend reading these and they are listed below for resources). Even if the body breaks through starvation mode and loses weight it still can cause the body to go into a state of shock causing side effects like autoimmune disorders, depression, hair loss, fatigue, heart issues and more. These are also all things that people identifying as skinny suffer from all the time already! Thomas also made a very impactful statement that if you are thinking about what you are going to eat, it will affect your body for 90% of your day you probably have an eating disorder. She then follows up that statement with another fact that the diet industry profits off people failing diets all the time and wants you to keep spending money on it so that they keep feeding their billion dollar industry. Diet culture drip-feeds pictures and ads into all of your apps and inspires influencers to constantly share content that is only forcing you to compare yourself to millions of people that are also probably not health professionals in any way. This is why you should also check sources from people like this when you decide to cut shit out of your diet. And finally she leaves the reader to ask one’s self to imagine what one could do if they were not thinking about food and actively dieting all the time. This was huge for me. Because of years of shame and yo yo dieting food ran my life.
Before I move onto more of my rant I also would like to share some quotes from Caroline Dooner’s book, The Fuck It Diet. She writes:
“ You are not a robot or a machine. Your feeling system does not work like a machine. You are significantly more complicated than that, and your metabolism has evolved to slow down when you are not consuming enough. That means that calorie calculations are rendered totally moot and pointless when you understand that your metabolism is adjusting itself to purposely keep on weight when it senses restrictions.
Your body is trying to conserve energy and also trying to get you to eat. So, restriction of any kind will cause you to fixate on food, be hungrier, more tired, and put on weight quicker- all to save your life. Those symptoms are often signs of a slow metabolism.”
Dooner and Thomas also touch base on BMI in their books. I know a lot of us know that BMI isn’t accurate but did you know why? BMI was created by an insurance company in 1959 as a way of explaining their rates. It was heavily criticized by scientists and still is! Doctors and Insurance companies still use it because it just simplifies their work. In 1998 the World Health Organization relied on the International Obesity Task Force to create updated BMI recommendations which we’re primarily funded by pharmaceutical and insurance companies that literally only have weight loss drugs on the market at this time. So all together the BMI cutoffs got randomly trained and more than half of America’s population went from the term Normal Weight to overweight. Donner wrote, “The whole thing is arbitrary, because many studies have found that higher BMIs actually have lower mortality rates. And Many studies have shown that weight loss or too much exercise has been associated with poorer health, higher stress hormones, and increased mortality.” This also explains why my vitals, bloodwork and thyroid have all been stable for years because I actually do eat a balanced diet and workout a lot. I struggle to get down to some crazy size because my body probably is comfortable at a heavier weight. This never seemed to be even an option to me.
I spent my entire life being raised by parents offering me money to lose weight, talking about that day I would be skinny, telling me there is a skinny girl inside of me etc. Friends and family would also tell me things like “You would be so pretty if you just lost a little weight.” Then there were the occasional bullies throughout life that fat shamed me with terrible names. It has been to the point where bullying in general just numbs me now. Everyone always makes it seem like being skinny is going to solve all my problems when in reality my skinny friends also have their own struggles with how they are perceived by cis-men.
Another struggle that should be addressed is how mothers pass down these self hating thoughts to their kids. I don’t want to say that they know what they are doing. Chill out moms, this is a societal pressure that has been put on women for years but statements like, “I just can’t lose any weight, I look terrible! Don’t post that photo of me! We didn’t have to eat this, Nobody wants to see my ugly old lady body.” Those statements are absorbed by the young minds you are raising and the kids see themselves in you so thus they start behaving in a manner that supports the negative results of dieting and disordered eating. To be frank we are all tired of anyone shaming themselves publicly in a world that has so much more devastating news that needs to be addressed and worried about. You may not be able to lose five pounds but hey! At least you aren’t a child in a cage or being shot down by an officer or a sad little polar bear just trying to live at all.
Sonya Renee Taylor taught me this and writes in her book, The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self Love, “The United States has had only one woman of color serve as governor and one lesbian woman. All the other intersections of identity… zero. This country is not an anomaly in its history of centralizing political power toward a very specific sort of body; most nations have a default body in their government structures. Although social and cultural realities may shift what those bodies look like, using default bodies to establish a social hierarchy and distribute power and resources is a global phenomenon. The statistics above illustrate an irrefutable truth: body shame and oppression are both symptoms of and tools in a far more complex and sweeping system of access and resources. A system that impacts not only how we feel about ourselves but also our opportunities and ability to thrive in the world. There is a reason we hate our bodies, and it isn’t because of Curtis, our mamas, or even our low self-esteem. We are saddled with body shame because it is an age-old system whose roots and pockets are deep. Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.”
I have firm memories of my mother throwing out *fattening snacks* and her telling us she was saving us. Saving us from what? My dad’s genes. My mom was a tiny polish woman from Philly as are all the women in her family and my dad was a big dude as was his sister and everyone would always tell me I look like him. I never understood the resemblance as a kid, I would constantly be saddened because at the same time I was also getting called fat and fire crotch at school and so here was another cool trait to add to the mix. Great! I look like an old man.
My parents have told me they think I am pretty but they also have always hinted at the idea of losing weight and never shied away from telling me when I gain weight. Or never shied away from saying that I don’t HAVE to finish my Chipotle burrito. Like I said I would get offered $1000 to lose weight and then I would get all the clothes I dreamt of and life would be better. I spent so many days at the gym on the elliptical forever just thinking it would all just fall off. Losing weight when you are already a chubby person genetically is already hard but this country believes that all this can be fixed so easily. The truth is that a lot of the way people look is genetic or their lives are structured around workouts and planned meals with a nutritionist. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people put themselves through gastric bypass and plastic surgeries to obtain weight goals.
Yes, a lot of people have lost a ton of weight on shows like the Biggest Loser, or in studies where people cut stuff out of their diets, not eating but what is not mentioned is that these are all done in conditions that are forcing the body to go through intense starvation and over exertion. Sure people can all get down to a pant size that sounds nice but you can still die from all the health issues you are causing from stressing your body the fuck out.
I cannot tell you how many times I have done this to myself and the best part about it is because I am still over 200 lbs, people don’t even believe me. When I tell even my friends or mother I had eating disorders my whole life they scoff and say shit like, “YOU were anorexic?” love that, really I do. A great example of this is when intermittent fasting and keto came out my doctor told me that it was new but a lot of people have been losing weight so why not try it. I started doing the fasting and I read the book, The Obesity Code by Jason Fung which has great evidence that fasting can cause weight loss and fats are good for you but he mostly focuses on the idea of eating when one is hungry. So I, having years of disordered eating, took it to the next level and overdid it. I was shocked that I actually never felt hunger, which actually also can be bad. Then my ex friend I talked about previously at the time expressed that she too was doing IF and Keto. My friend became my weight loss partner but in reality we ended up inspiring each other to go days without eating. I am not kidding, I literally went five days without eating. I do remember weighing myself and seeing that I lost a pound after all of that and boy is that worth all of that.
I still kept on going and took keto to the next level. My entire meals were mostly spinach and fats and I started losing way more weight and really fast. Probably also because I was fasting and only eating fats. So as I was losing a ton of weight I also was losing a ton of hair and my complexion was very faded. Finally, I scored the highest score of getting an outbreak of sores and ulcers in my mouth for six months only to find out after going to three dentists and an oral surgeon where she biopsied my mouth and found out because I have been starving myself and dropping so much weight my body already having thyroid disease thought I was attacking myself so it started attack me with an autoimmune disorder called, Lichen Planus. I was pissed.
All along while doing these years of yo yo dieting, being anorexic and bulimic and whenever I would lose some weight, telling my friends shit like “I just work out and eat fats!” My thyroid actually stayed in perfect range somehow. I never questioned the thought that hey! your thyroid is fine, maybe you are meant to be heavier and maybe your body is turning on you because you are freaking it the fuck out and maybe you should just try to eat all the foods and relax. Maybe don’t still run four miles when you throw out your back so bad your arm goes numb in a plank.
I never had these thoughts because everyone around me and all my health professionals just assume that everyone wants to be skinny. When you say you lose weight most people say, Yay! I cannot even imagine the horror stories that my friends have endured that are just a bit fatter than me who were turned away from their doctors for being fat when they had a UTI or an ear infection.
Another great bit of information that Laura Thomas shares is that as much as a doctor is labeled as the end all be all of medical education they still are usually focused somewhere. A lot of primary doctors aren’t actually nutritionists and so you are absolutely better off going to an actual nutritionist than someone that checks your body for cancer lumps. Who would have thought? One time I got a pap from my PCP and she looked at my cervix and stated, “Katherine, you are going to need a colposcopy and you have a polyp.” I am lucky enough to work at Planned Parenthood to think it is strange to say that before even sending out the lab and also since my last pap was normal. I decided to go have my lovely coworker check it all out and she said I did not have a polyp, it was a Nabothian Cyst which is 100% normal and that my cervix looked fine. So we waited for the pap result for her to call the shots for me and it came back normal. When I sent the records to that Doctor she never even responded. I am sure she just never does Pap smears that often because she is a PRIMARY CARE DOCTOR but still this is why there are specialists and if you are as confused from dieting and nutrition as I am you probably know damn well that a nutritionist would do us better with our diets. No wonder a ton of doctors are eating their words for encouraging keto now from all the bad side effects. Doctors are human and fuck up just like us. And if they tell you that you are too fat and you need to lose weight before they can feel for any possible signs of cancer you can swear them right off and report them for malpractice. It is their job to do better and figure that kind of shit out.
There are testimonies all over the internet about people that were turned away for being fat when they truly needed a cancer diagnosis and doesn’t this all boil down to the fact that everyone that fat shames literally says, “It’s cause I care.” Bullshit! You are projecting your own fears and hate onto people that are just doing their best. Also now learning all the information I most recently have given you do you feel like you are helping? I really don’t understand why fat shaming just continues to slide under the radar but it has to stop. I am so sick of people even just getting uncomfortable when I talk about my body image jokes because they couldn’t fathom even being in my body but also it just reads how taboo we have made body image. Saying I am fat is a dumb adjective describing my appearance. It is not saying that I am an idiot or some pedophile rapist stop trying to sugarcoat shit. We need to also stop saying shit like, “OMG YOU ARE NOT FAT,” let people talk to you about how they identify. It reminds me of when I see this employee that has down syndrome at my local grocer and all the older white ladies go up to them and say shit like, “I want you to know you are doing a good job, you are amazing.” Dude! They are an active person in society holding a job! They don’t need any of your input and you are doing that again because you pity them and it makes YOU feel good. You know what feels good? people respecting people’s boundaries, acknowledging others appearances and treating them like any other person you see out and about.
I think if we all could start recognizing that bodies are just built differently and that it needs to be respected we would be in a world of compassion and empathy which absolutely would feel better than where we are now? We never just express our truths and put on a “I am fine and I am awesome” wall which doesn’t help anyone. I think about the times I would throw up expensive food that I didn’t think I deserved and the times I didn’t eat. I think about the times I would always just hook up with a guy even if he didn’t have a condom cause I never thought guys would like all of this. I think about my rape and how I never went public because I also just didn’t think anyone would believe me and because by being too fucked up I was asking for it. I think about wearing dumb tank top swimsuits or swimsuits that didn’t just show off my curves and tummy. I think about all the times OTHER WOMEN have told me “woah you ate that fast!” I think about the term FUPA and how it makes me laugh but only when I talk about my own or someone talks about theirs. I think about the times I hurt myself because a cis-man called me fat. I think about all the before and after photos of myself that barely look different unless I was famished. I think about how all those years I always looked okay but I never felt it. It’s fucked up and I got to stop.
Seeing the body-positive, the fat-positive and the body-solidarity movements have given me a place to feel at peace. I finally feel like I can talk about my weight and chubby, fat, heavier are all just descriptions of my body. My body is just a vessel that gets thrown through hell. All of our bodies are out here just flying through hell at light speed. I believe that my soul is lucky to have a body at all at this point. any vessel or vehicle that can carry me at all. This year has been a constant uphill battle of pain and loss. What more can we take? The idea of still putting on focus on diet culture at this point seems so selfish to me. So narrow and cold.
When we look in a mirror we see ourselves but we should ask ourselves to also try and imagine what we want around us, Do we want thousands of likes and photos of just ourselves? Or do we want to see ourselves immersed in mass human communication. The pictures I have hanging on my wall are of myself, my family and friends doing amazing adventures. Never once have I hung up a selfie and thought, what a good time. Maybe a headshot but YOU KNOW WHAT I mean. I want to be done with giving all my time to trying to meet unrealistic goals and especially the goals people have for me. I am my boss and no I never asked for your opinion thank you.
Ever since I have let go of trying to be some super skinny gal I finally feel that I am in my body and nobody can shake me. I am not scared of being acceptable or what people think. I feel strong and have learned to love plus size fashion. I rarely even think about food, isn’t that crazy? I just eat!
I want to get off on one last juicy quote from Sonya Renee Taylor, she just eases my soul and I hope this resonates with you.
“Saying I’m fat is (and should be) the same as saying my shoes are black, the clouds are fluffy, and Bob Saget is tall. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it just is. The only negativity that this word carries is that which has been socially constructed around it.… We don’t need to stop using the word fat, we need to stop the hatred that our world connects with the word fat.”
― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology
Thank you for reading, love you guys.
-Bowman
Resources:
Just Eat It by Laura Thomas PhD, RNutr
Instagram @laurathomasphd
The Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner
Instagram @thefuckitdiet
You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar
Instagram @virgietovar
The Body is Not An Apolog: The Power of Radical Self Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
Instagram @sonyareneetaylor
Emily Mrozinksi, The Wellscape Podcast,
Instagram @emilymro_moves
