Fatphobia: Origins, applications, and unlearnings
After a particularly challenging few days in recovery, I wanted to unplug and de-stress by watching episodes of old TV series that guarantee an occasional chuckle and tend to lift my spirits. So I flipped on reruns of Friends.
It didn’t take long for one of the characters to drop a joke about one of the other characters (Monica) for being fat when she was young. Monica—played by the true-to-the-era, ever-svelte Courteney Cox—is presented to the viewer as someone who used to struggle with uncontrollable eating (“Wow I haven’t baked this many cookies since middle school.” “Oh, was that for like a bake sale?” “No, just a regular Friday night.”) and as an adult, is still ridiculed for the body she used to have.
Now I don’t mean to knock Friends; it’s one of my favorite comedies and I will still continue to watch it as a means of checking out from daily life. But on this particularly vulnerable weekend when the voice of my eating disorder was loud, angry, and annoyed (mostly because I’m actually letting my body rest, for once), these episodes speak differently to me.
I was born in the 80s and raised in the 90s, the era of low-fat, low-cal, lite, diet (insert product here), SlimFast, Weight Watchers, points, and calories. This, I recently learned, was when nutrition facts started appearing on our foods. (Yes, the nutritional labels we know today are only 28 years old!)
These were my impressionable years when, in the days before on-demand anything, Mom sat my two sisters and me down in front of the television and we watched whatever was on.
We couldn’t fast-forward through the infomercials that splashed on the screen before-and-after photos of people who had been fat and were now “alive, energetic, and so much happier” because they had lost all that “problematic weight.”
Fat people in media were shamed, ignored, and made fun of—that is, if they were even there. We were shown actors like Courteney Cox: thin, white, privileged, straight, cisgender humans, playing characters who are finally seen as full people because they are in socially acceptable bodies.
In the case of Monica on Friends, very little is revealed to us about her history of being fat. For example, did she have a hormonal imbalance? Was she diagnosed with Type I diabetes? Was she bingeing to fill a void or to numb some kind of childhood trauma, and was she purging afterward? And, the most interesting gap in her story, we have no idea how she lost all the weight.
Oh, and an ironic sidenote? She’s a professional chef.
I’m going hard on Friends here, but the truth is, this period of time was rife with such messages:
Fat equates bad.
If you’ve “let yourself” get fat, you’ve failed.
If you’re not always trying to lose weight to be in a smaller body, you’re most likely ignored.
If you’re comfortable in a bigger body, then something is seriously wrong with you.
So what is fatphobia? And where does it come from?
An image from Behind the Binge’s Instagram account helps explain:
Courtesy of Behind the Binge.
One of my favorite figures in this space, Aubrey Gordon, says in her book What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, “Fat hate starts young. Its trauma can last a lifetime, and early intervention will be essential to raising a generation of more compassionate people.”
Gordon talks a lot about the assumptions made about fat people, mostly that they’re all unhealthy, unhappy, and they wish they were thin.
“Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us.
“Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.”
I’ve never been what some doctors consider to be “overweight” (a term that implies that every human should fall within the same range of arbitrary numbers based on their height and taking no other factors into consideration, and if you don’t fall within this range, you’re something to be fixed). When I shared this fact with a few untrained therapists (the only ones I could afford) when I first decided to pursue recovery 15 years ago, I received perplexed stares and questions. They didn’t understand why, if I had never even been fat, I was struggling with disordered eating. (We’ll save my tragic run-ins with unqualified healthcare providers for another post.)
But I knew what it boiled down to: fatphobia.
I came into this world at the height of diet culture phenomena. I was praised for being thin, athletic, and active. I was complimented for my “willpower” to consistently eat healthily. Even when I studied abroad and unintentionally lost an unhealthy number of pounds, college friends commented that my severely underweight body “looked great” upon my return to the States.
But probably most notably, I carried around with me a mental image of those “before” photos from the TV commercials of my youth: people who were fat and then lost weight thanks to some miraculous new product or exercise machine. I can’t remember the names of those products, but I can remember the stories of those people. I vowed to never look like those “before” people. They were unhappy, lethargic, and hopeless, they said. And I believed them.
“In books, political cartoons, films, and TV shows, fat bodies make up the failings of America, capitalism, beauty standards, excess, and consumerism,” says Gordon.
“This cultural obsession with weight loss doesn’t just impact our physical and mental health; it also impacts our sense of self and, consequently, our relationships with others of different sizes.”
Now, decades later, I’m exploring this bias and reframing in my mind what it means to be fat.
I sometimes find myself confused as to why, after all the work I’ve done to come to terms with my own body image, I still carry certain beliefs about people in bodies of different sizes. I am now in the judgment phase, but not in the negative sense. Rather than judging people I see in different bodies, I am instead judging myself and asking questions like:
Where do these beliefs come from?
How do these beliefs reflect my own insecurities?
What makes these beliefs true/untrue?
“Body positivity” is a term that has been floating around since the start of the century, along with the introduction of “plus-size” clothing and models.
But these terms only further contribute to the conversation about body size and worth, that even if you wear a larger size, you can still love the body you’re in.
But what if you still don’t? How do we finally start accepting our bodies and the bodies of those around us?
By zooming out and removing the focus on body size altogether.
When you think about the people you love, ask yourself:
Why do I love them?
What personality traits do I connect with?
What makes them a good friend or family member or partner?
I can almost guarantee the answers to these questions have nothing to do with what they look like. And if they do, it might be time for a deeper discussion about your beliefs around body image.
From Gordon’s book:
“All of us deserve better than what thinness takes. We deserve a new paradigm of health: one that acknowledges its multifaceted nature and holds t-cell counts and blood pressure alongside mental health and chronic illness management.
“We deserve a paradigm of personhood that does not make size or health a prerequisite for dignity and respect. We deserve more places for thin people to heal from the endless social messages that tell them at once that their bodies will never be perfect enough to be beautiful and simultaneously that their bodies make them inherently superior to fatter people.
“We deserve those separate spaces so that we can work through the trauma of living in a world that tells all of us that our bodies are failures—punishing thin people with the task of losing the last ten pounds and fat people with the crushing reality of pervasive social, political, and institutional anti-fatness.”
Aubrey Gordon is also the co-host of an incredible podcast called “Maintenance Phase”, which takes a microscope to the wellness industry, and unpacks a world of misconceptions, false advertising, and all-around BS of today’s diet fads and trends. I highly recommend!
Pause & Prompt
What I think about when I think about fat…
