I Don’t Care if You’re Healthy

A button style badge, half pink and half white, with the slogan “NOT YOUR BODY. NOT YOUR BUSINESS.”
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Let’s be clear. I don’t actually give a flying fuck whether being fat is or can be healthy or not.

A person’s right to an enjoyable life, to be treated with respect and to have access to all the things I want fat people to have access to, such as quality medical care and clothes that fit, is not predicated on how healthy they are.

I am not interested in proving my worth to others by living up to anybody else’s standards of healthiness. My worth, like the worth of every human being, is self-evident. The right to basic human respect is not conferred upon us once we fulfil certain conditions, every one of us is inherently entitled to it.

How healthy I am and how much effort I put into developing or mainting “good health” is nobody’s business but mine. Not mine and my friends’ and family’s. Not mine and my doctor’s. Not mine and taxpayers’. Mine.

Undoing harmful stereotypes is valuable work, and I completely understand the desire of fat athletes to push the message that you can be fit, athletic and fat, and that fatness does not preclude displays of physical prowess. I think fat dancers and fat marathon runners and fat gymnasts and so on are excellent, and deserve as much credit for their skills as any thin athlete.

But where does promoting the existence of fit fatties leave those of us who are not athletes, who are not paragons of fitness, who have chronic illnesses or disabilities, or simply don’t care very much about jogging or eating all our vegetables? To me, the dark side of “fat people can be fit and healthy too” is an implicit support of the notion that being fit and healthy is what confers on fat people the right to respect and fair treatment. It isn’t. Being people is why we have a right to respect and fair treatment.

That only healthy fatties deserve respect is not the message fit fatties are trying to promote; I don’t for a moment think that activists like Ragen Chastain or other fat athletes who spend time pointing out what they can do believe fat people who are less fit or flexible or active than they are don’t deserve the same respect they do. But it’s a message that sometimes comes across anyway. Fat activists seem to spend so much of our time and energy debunking myths about what fat people can’t do, and yet fat stigma persists (as is clear from Ragen’s numerous posts about confronting fat hate with demonstrations of her own fitness). How many times have I heard thinner people or media say “I’m all for body acceptance, but you’ve got to be healthy” or “fat acceptance is fine as long as you’ve got a healthy lifestyle”?

No. Fat acceptance is fine, the end. If your “lifestyle” is not hurting anyone else then it is nobody else’s business.

You know what does make fat people unhealthy? Internalised fat stigma. And as long as not being fit enough or healthy enough or active enough or not putting some arbitrarily determined amount of energy into “being healthy” is an excuse to treat fat people like subhumans, then fat stigma and its negative health outcomes for fat people will persist.

Anorexia Jokes and Derailing

TRIGGER WARNING: Eating Disorders

I really don’t want this place to be about thinness. I don’t want to have to keep being distracted from the issue of fat liberation to talk about defending thin women, because that isn’t the point of this blog and it’s derailing and distracting. The whole world is about thin people, and this place shouldn’t have to be.

But eating disorders are part of my history and part of what has led me here, both my own and the experience of seeing far, far too many of my dear friends struggle with anorexia and other eating disorders. So when I see yet another stupid, ignorant comment about force-feeding someone a hamburger because she looks too skinny, I blow my top. Not because thin women have it harder than fat women, but because eating disorders are not a fucking punchline.

Have you ever sat at the dinner table with a loved one and begged her to eat just one more bite? Have you ever followed someone to the bathroom after lunch to make sure she didn’t throw up? Have you ever felt with crushing certainty that someone you love is really, actually going to starve herself to death? Sadly, I suspect plenty of you have.  I have, more times than I care to count. I’ve done these things while struggling with my own demons regarding food and weight, and felt the grotesque and horrifying combination of fearing for a friend’s life while simultaneously envying her for getting further along the path to killing herself than I had.

It’s not a joke, and it’s certainly not something that people who have never experienced an eating disorder – personally or from close by – should feel smug about.

The only time “force-feeding” someone who is anorexic is ever helpful is when they are actually about to die of starvation, and even then it’s not going to do a thing to “cure” the illness, it’s purely about keeping them alive long enough to find something that works.

Joking about force-feeding a person so her body won’t offend you, even if she is starving herself, is disgusting.

A person’s body is their home and who they are in one. Our bodies are how we constitute our experience of the world and our identities, whether our identity is in sync with the way the people around us code and interpret our bodies or not. And as the saying – now famous in body positive circles – goes, there is no wrong way to have a body.

Pause and let that sink in for a moment.

THERE IS NO WRONG WAY TO HAVE A BODY.

Of course, it’s certainly possible to feel like your body is wrong, and that feeling is perfectly real and perfectly awful. As a fat woman I have definitely experienced the feeling that my body was wrong – inside every fat woman is a thin woman wanting to be free, amirite ladies? – but the fact I felt that way certainly doesn’t make it true. That sense of wrongness is externally imposed rather than self-evident.

You cannot cannot CANNOT forward the cause of fat liberation by making cruel jokes about other people’s bodies.  One of the first things we all need to do in order to achieve body liberty for everyone is let go of our judgements about other people’s bodies.  Even thin women. Even women who are thin because they are starving themselves.

And – here’s the important bit – until we can stop bandying about bullshit like “give that girl a hamburger” we will never be able to decentralise the thin, young white woman from our discussion of body image, body shaming and beauty idealism. We will never actually get to the task of dismantling the systems that keep most women preoccupied with their bodies and marginalise fat people, disabled people, trans* people, intersex people and people of colour on the basis of their bodies and their looks. Because as long as we keep making ignorant jokes about force-feeding people and walking skeletons and models who look like boys and “real women” and other such nonsense, we’re focusing the whole conversation on thin women. We just keep having the same fucking arguments about whether or not it’s okay to pick on thin women, and some of us will keep having to defend thin women instead of working to liberate anyone else.  You know what that is?  It’s derailing.  And I won’t have it.

Hopefully now I won’t ever have to write about this again and can get back to talking about fat some more.  I think my next post should be about cake.  Or dresses.

Why I Don’t Need Any More Food Rules

I don’t want to talk about eating any more.

My socialisation around eating is fucked up enough as it is, and already plenty difficult to navigate without adding new ethical and health-related concerns. I am aware of ethical and environmental factors in the food we (and I) eat, and I hope people don’t assume that because I often choose not to engage with those issues I am not clever enough to understand or caring enough to feel. And if you have new rules (or new un-rules) to teach me about how to eat correctly or healthily or whatever then you can fuck right off. The truth is, I have little enough emotional energy to think about what I eat as it is, without adding more layers of guilt, shame or restriction to my diet.

As a middle-class westerner, I don’t conceptualise eating as being a purely pragmatic exercise to fuel the body. Whether I “should” or “shouldn’t”, the reality is that for me and my family and my culture, eating is not just fuelling the body, it is linked with pleasure, luxury, comfort, celebration, family togetherness and recreation as well as sustenance. As a social creature, I cannot separate myself from those things with ease, even if I wanted to (and I don’t want to – I enjoy the pleasures and comfort of food ).

As a woman, I’ve been socialised to view food in a number of gendered ways, both as one of the languages with which I can show love and caring (as the women in my family do and did for their loved ones before me) and as something vaguely dangerous that I need to be careful about. Not only should women worry about how fattening their food might be, we should also be aware of how eating might make us look. As a woman I have learned, without being explicitly taught by anyone, really, that I should eat delicately and neatly, never take the last slice of cake, and say “no thank you” when offered food even if I want to eat it, especially if I’m trying to make a first impression.

As a fat person who has never been thin, even as a child, my socialisation around food is even more complicated than it is for thinner women or fat women who were thin when younger. I am twenty-seven years old and even though I’ve I have spent the last five years learning about and campaigning for fat acceptance, I have still spent more than half of my life on a diet of some kind. I have so many rules crammed into my head about food that I’m not sure I know which ones are sane and sensible and which ones are crazy, dangerous or just plain lies any more. I do know that negative calorie foods don’t exist, and that spicy foods don’t really help you lose weight (or that if either of those things do result in a calorie deficit, it’s so small as to be meaningless). I don’t know if sugar and fat are good for you or bad for you or both or neither. My way of dealing with this has been to dismiss them all and now I really don’t care. I don’t know if it’s right that I respond (internally) to an acquaintance’s repeated assertions that she’s “just GOT to lose weight” by side-eyeing all the high energy food she eats and scoffing to myself that if I were her I would have been at my goal weight years ago. Actually, I do know that’s not right, but I am pretty sure that I am “better at” losing weight than she is, even though it’s been a long time since I did it. I’m a fucking expert at losing weight. For years and years, even while studying for my degree, there was nothing I put more energy into.

And wow, would you look at that. I’m still fat. Actually I am fatter now than I ever was.

As a person with a history of eating disorders, my internalised ideas about food are still more messy and complex than those I’ve associated with the categories of “western middle class”, “woman” and “fat”. I have spent my entire adult life struggling with disordered eating of various kinds. I’ve engaged in most of the eating disorders I’ve ever heard of; some of them were mere exerimental dabblings and some of them I committed to with every fibre of my rapidly shrinking being. I learned (and sometimes made up) even more rules about how one should approach eating. I spent so much of my energy in my early twenties trying to deny my body’s urges regarding food that I no longer feel regular hunger or satiety; I don’t notice I am hungry until I am so ravenous I want to throw up, and I don’t notice I am full until I am so full I feel sick (I don’t always eat until I am that full, but I sometimes can without realising I am doing it). That is what comes of spending all of your days permanently hungry; you learn to ignore the messages your body is giving you, and then you forget how to pay attention to them again.

I realise that in the process of explaining why I don’t want to talk about eating, I have now spent about eight hundred words talking about it. But I just had to get that out there. I don’t want to talk about eating. I am sick of thinking about eating. I want to just eat and get on with my life, without having to justify it or discuss how to do it correctly ad nauseam with my every friend and acquaintance. Perhaps one day I will want to think about it more, and I can certainly say that I’m almost guaranteed to post about it here again someday.  I do get why people want to talk about it – it’s such an integral part of our lives that of course we’re all going to have opinions on the subject.

But I know how to eat. You put edible things in your mouth and chew and swallow. Right now, for me, everything else is just indigestible garnish.