Fat: What No One Is Telling YouI couldn't remember where I'd originally gotten the rec for this, so I went into it with a good deal of trepidation. I'm intensely political in a bunch of complicated ways about fat, and I was prepared to spend a lot of time yelling at the TV. I was really pleasantly surprised, and overall I recommend it. Also, shout-out to
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cassidyrose, who I recognized in the awesome section on the Health at Every Size movement!
It's a hard documentary to watch. I think I'm about as at peace with my weight as I can possibly be in this society. It doesn't mean it's been effortless to reach that point. I still have to flick off the tendrils of fatphobia that are so omnipresent in our society, and I have the occasional bad day, but all in all I love my body, I'm comfortable with it, and I direct my anger at societal bullshit, not at myself, and work to consciously unravel what gets so unconsciously planted. It's a science geek thing for me -- there's a lot of bad and compromised research about fat, and a lot of fatphobia disguised in thin veneer of "oh, but we're only worried about your
health dear". It's a political thing for me -- I refuse to be distracted from the big issues in life by putting all my energies into a battle with my own body, which should be my greatest ally in life. It's a feminist thing for me -- I get so angry at all the self-hatred, the insecurities, the disempowerment and suffering that our collective fatphobia feeds. I could go on... Being happy and comfortable in my body doesn't mean not dealing with my weight, it just means constructing my ways of dealing with it in positive and constructive ways, about learning more ways to push off the negative crap, to communicate with people about fat issues, to find the doctors I'm willing to work with, the partners who love my body like I do. And at 250 or so, which is where my body normally rests, I feel "right" to myself. I don't feel like a skinny person trapped in a fat body. I feel like a fat person, and there's plenty I like about that (softness, strength, resiliency, taking up space, the sheer physics of leverage, etc). I don't think every person should be fat. I don't think every person should be skinny. I don't think I'm anything resembling the peak of health, but I attribute that to smoking and being relatively sedentary, not to the size of my belly. I don't know that I'd be entirely physically comfortable at _any_ weight (when meds have shot it above what feels normal to me, I do notice that, and it's not something that feels physically ideal to me, but it's not something that makes me hate myself, either), and I don't think everyone has to have the same approach to their own weight and relationship with their bodies, but I want us to have honest, complex conversations about it. If you've got family or friends who could use a bit more of a clue, there are worse ways to start that with having them watch this.
The documentary is hard to watch because so much of the self-hating that can accompany all the messages we get about being fat is really obvious in the pain of many of the people they focused on. Hearing someone say they'll never be loved until they're not fat... I know how deeply untrue that is, and it just hurts to see the unnecessary pain caused by believing it. Similarly, the wide acceptance that fat is necessarily unhealthy (research on that is a lot more complex than is normally acknowledged) leads to people being obsessed with losing weight rather than just getting fit, and it's so sad to see that struggle so clearly in several of the people in the doc. It was a pretty well-nuanced approach, though, and gave good voice to the scientific complexities of the various reasons for obesity, as well as the varying ways that different people handle the social pressures and experiences of being fat. I was thrilled at the acknowledgement of the Health at Every Size movement, and I thought they did a really good job discussing the complexities of bariatric surgeries in their section on that, too. There were times when I think it still was a bit too unquestioning about framing obesity itself as "the problem", but all in all, a really impressive job. Go, PBS! Public funding for sanity!
Ways I'm political about being fat:
1. Being a nudist. Yeah, partially I just hate clothes. But I also know that modeling body comfort is valuable. I've certainly heard that feedback from a number of people who've known me over the years, and there's very little that warms my heart more than hearing someone say "seeing you be comfortable in your body gave me the feeling I could be comfortable in mine". I don't hide my body, I don't act ashamed of it. There have certainly been points where there was some "fake it 'til ya make it" about that, and continuing to take this approach to my body even when I'm feeling self-conscious is a helpful active rejection of all the bullshit floating in the air. It strengthens my own comfort level.
2. Talking openly about being fat. I won't lie about my weight. I won't pretend I want to be skinny, or feed the constant office diet chatter and the like. I won't ever talk about how I'm "bad" because of what I ate, and I won't feed the inherent moralism in that in conversations with others. I acknowledge my own size in the same matter-of-fact way I'd acknowledge any other feature of myself. It's fascinating how much that shocks people. I talk about fat issues when the opportunity comes up. I acknowledge the difficulties that crop up in day-to-day life around fat (finding good doctors, decent clothes, etc). When I place personal ads and the like, I don't beat around the bush about my weight, and I make it clear that if you don't want to be with a fat woman, you shouldn't be with me. I can't say I feel the loss of those who pass up the opportunity, and it means I come into things already feeling comfortable about their presumed acceptance of my particular size and shape. Conversely, I also refuse to participate in negativity toward slender and skinny women. Turnabout isn't fair play, and no one deserves that crap. I'm really not a fan of the phrase "real women have curves". Fuck that noise. There are wonderful things about all varieties of bodies. My personal tastes are all over the map, and I've seen and experienced a lot of beauty in all shapes and sizes.
3. Patient-Instructing. When I teach, I'm utterly matter-of-fact about my weight, and I talk explicitly about tips and tricks for doing exams on fat bodies. I talk about body variety as a neutral subject, about how getting good in medicine is about learning the basics and then learning all the little quirks, handy tricks, etc, for dealing with the infinite variety of the human body. I put body size in the same category as an anteverted vs retroverted uterus, or the distribution in glandular breast tissue among different women. I reference the role that doctors have in body image, and although it's not the place to get deep into that, I do try to get them to think about their role in that regard. These are our future doctors and nurse practitioners, and I really hope the experience with me helps them be more appropriate and skilled with fat patients almost as much as I hope it leads them to be more appropriate and skilled in general gyn care.
4. Speaking up about institutionalized fat-phobia. When I encounter crap that pisses me off, I rant about it. I write here, or talk to people about it, or take on trying to get it changed.
5. Celebrating a wide variety of bodies. Anyone who's been in my house knows that I decorate largely in nudes. Those nudes cover the entire spectrum, with an especial fondness for representations of fat women. I'm in the process of covering a large chunk of my available skin space with a similar celebration of the female form, in all its variety, and just having the tattoo is an opening to many excellent conversations about body image when it would likely not come up otherwise (with strangers on the bus, etc).
6. I absolutely and entirely refuse to feed the diet industry, either directly or through magazines that want to do nothing but tell me how it's "in" to obsess this year, how I can "lose that last ten pounds", etc.
I'm ridiculously lucky in a wide assortment of ways. I've watched families actively nurture their childrens' eating disorders. I never had to struggle against that. I owe a lot to my parents in that regard, and especially to my Mom's staunch clarity that me being fat doesn't make me a bit less valuable as a person (although we still have some disagreements on some of the science issues, I'm ok with that, and we have ongoing conversations about it).
Somewhere along the way I learned to actively find positive fat archetypes, to create an interior mental universe that does include space for my body shape as a positive thing. Academic feminism had a lot to do with that. My "fertility figures" tattoo is very much about writing that lesson on my body. And I'm lucky that where my sense of my own physicality/gender/personality goes is toward a desire to be big and strong. Cis-bodied? Whatever you want to call it, it certainly makes it an easier path for me than for someone whose body is really at variance with their mental image of themselves in some way or another. Sure, my idealized body might be bigger and stronger (
Standing Woman is a good image of that), but I'm not on the opposite end of the spectrum from that or anything. I briefly wanted to be little and willowy in high school, until I actually thought about how deeply that would change my physical interactions with the world, and decided I was much happier over here in "fat and solid" land. My fibro fucks with my body image a hell of a lot more than my belly does. To the extent that I have a "totemic animal" of sorts, it's most definitely the bear, both as an image of power and beauty that's nothing resembling skinny, and as a sense of connection to the Bear community, where I see a lot of my views and politics lived out.
And being bi, and being personally attracted to fat men and fat women makes it easier, too. When I know what I see and love in their bodies, it's easier (although not always _as_ easy) to recognize those things in myself, too. And I owe a lot to my social circle, all y'all out there that aren't feeding this bullshit, that provide positive images of fat in your own lives, or simply don't feed fatphobia around you.
cassidyrose and
cupcakecomplex jump immediately to mind as being especially inspirational, but if I were to just start naming names, it'd be a hell of a long list, and that's a fabulous thing.
OK, time to end the post, since the dogs are getting insistent about going out back.
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