He dealt with fatphobia by developing an eating disorder,
an obsession with exercise,
which is a unfortunately,
a very normal response to experiencing fatphobia
day in and day out.
He went on to marry my grandmother,
who was sort of the biggest girl in her family.
And I remember with her, you know,
I grew up learning like casual disordered eating,
casual like for example, she always said,
first of all, she wore a girdle every day of her life.
The minute she woke up,
that was the first thing she would put on,
and the last thing she would take off at night.
And I remember as a kid, she would tell me, you know,
don't forget to buy clothes,
it's a little bit too small so that, you know,
it's a reminder that as you eat
and your belly expands to stop eating.
So, I mean, this is like,
this is a disordered eating method.
Maybe y'all have like experienced something like this,
like the idea that you wear restrictive garments,
or you do certain behaviors to sort of create these rules
around, like, how much you can eat and whatnot, right?
So I'm being raised by two people who have a, you know,
a lot of fatphobia and disordered eating
and body dysmorphia.
My mother is the person who kind of, you know, really,
I mean, I think all of them were my champions, right?
They always told me how great I was, how smart I was,
how beautiful, and special,
and all of these things that I was.
So I didn't really learn to hate my body from them,
but they all hated their body.
So my mother at the point where I'm,
let's move forward in my story a little bit.
I'm five years old, I'm introduced to fatphobia.
I'm in like preschool, kindergarten,
and there's a boy in my class named Joshua,
and he's the first person who ever calls me fat.
And I don't really know this word,
but I know that from the way he's saying it,
that it's really bad.
And Joshua is the kid who looks up all the girls' skirts.
And I sort of like, I remember thinking even then,
I felt like a connection.
I was like, there's something about, you know,
he never looked up my skirt.
He never wanted to look up my skirt.
And there was like this misunderstanding of like,
there's some connection between the boy who's calling me fat
and the fact that he is also the boy
who's looking up all the skirts.
And I just even sense,
I didn't have the language, I wasn't a feminist yet,
but I would go on later life to understand, right?
This was the beginnings of like,
I was learning the connections between fatphobia
and rape culture from that very, like, first moment that,
so there was sexism, there was gender, there was like size,
there were all kinds of things that were embedded
in that moment with Joshua.
So from that day forward,
I proceed to get really emotionally pummeled
day in and day out for being a fat person.
And if you grew up a fat kid,
you probably know what I'm talking about,
like literally every single day.
Like if a day passed that someone
wasn't verbally abusive to me,
I would sit down when I got home, I would run home,
be so excited, I would write down everything I did,
everything I wore,
and try to emulate the next day,
every single thing with the hopes that I could control
what was happening to me.
So, you know, it progressed, right?
It started from like this deepest sense of insecurity
and sort of criticism of myself.
And then it moved into very quickly restricting food
because that was what I was told.
I was told, you're too big
because you have the wrong relationship to food.
So I internalized that, right?
If you stop eating, or you eat less,
or you eat the right amount, then people won't abuse you.
That was how I understood it.
So I was like, okay,
I'm willing to like basically eat nothing,
so that this abuse will stop.
And yet, because like again,
going back to the genetics, you know,
my body was always going to be this size.
No matter how little I ate,
no matter how many hours I exercise,
it never quite was enough for my peers.
So I'm now, let's sort of move forward in the story,
maybe like 10 years old.
And I've already experienced starvation for the first time.
I've already undergone starvation in between fourth
and rather fifth and sixth grades,
the summer in between I wanted to transform.
And so I started to eat basically, like, only lettuce,
and I would like dip it in a sauce,
like a ketchup or whatever,
which sounds, you know, quite terrible.
But like at the time was like,
oh, it's kind of like zhuzhing up the lettuce a little bit.
So I was literally living off of lettuce
and exercising two hours, sometimes three hours a day
over, you know, a three month period.
And I'm really thinking this time I got it,
I'm like, I can't eat pretty much any less.
I can't exercise really any more than this
as like a 10 year old or whatever.
And I go back in to see my doctor,
my family doctor before I go start sixth grade.
And he's like, whatever you're doing, just keep doing it.
You look great.
I mean, if you keep going,
you might be able to date one of my sons.
And again, kind of there's like that,
kind of reminder, this is about gender,
this is about desire,
and it's about male desire and this kind of idea
that like, you know,
that abuse is taught that somehow,
like if I become thin, then males will desire me
and they will not abuse me.
And that was kind of like, again,
I'm not really articulating this, but it's like,
it's in my subconscious.
So at this point I'm like, I can't go any,
like, how much less can I eat?
How many more hours can I exercise?
And I started to get really desperate.
And I remember at that point I was really,
there was a day where I was crying in the car with my mother
and I was like, you just don't understand.
She was like, you're beautiful, you're great.
Like, you know, once this is over,
you're gonna go to college,
you're gonna have everything you want.
You're gonna find love.
She was such a, like,
she was such a source of inspiration,
but I was like, you don't get it.
My life right now is trash. Like I need this to stop.
And I remember there was like a turn in that moment,
and that was like the day that I kind of realized, again,
don't really have the language for it.
That's the day I learned that
my mom also had an eating disorder, that she had bulimia.
So we were sitting in the car,
she kind of drove me to the grocery store and she said,
"The key to becoming thin
is learning to hate the food that you love."
So you make a list and you start with number one,
your favorite thing,
and you eat it until you're sick
and you'll never want it again.
And then you move on to number two.
And you know, I mean,
anybody who like grew up with a disordered eating,
or has hadn't eaten, like that's just,
I mean, it just gives me chills just thinking about,
this is the advice that my mother
who in her desperation to get me out of the suffering,
is extending a hand into teaching me what she had to do
because she went through what I did
and my grandparents went through what I did.
So, right?
And like, and the thing that's really nuts is like,
okay, so I'm aging, I'm aging, right?
I, I don't end up developing bulimia.
I've got this like, horrible fear of barfing.
So thankfully like, that didn't stick,
but I was still very anorexic and orthorexic.
So really, like, thinking food that had calories
and it was contaminated,
wanting to exercise all of the time,
feeling like I can't eat.
I wasn't purging, but I would eat
and then I would exercise obsessively.
So that was my life for like 20 years.
And then I kind of go to college.
It's a little bit different.
It's not like day in, day out people abusing me to my face.
It starts to look like, you know,
who wants to be your friend? Who doesn't?
who wants to date you? Who doesn't?
Your thin friends are having this experience
and I'm having this different experience in college.
And so by total happenstance in my mid twenties,
this is now after college, I'm like 24, 25,
I end up meeting a fat positive partner.
It's kind of this totally wild thing.
I had a like a radio show for a little while
and this person sent me an email and he was like,
you seem really cool. Can we chat or something?
I've listened to your show and you seem smart
and I like to talk to you.
And then it this turns into like, a six year relationship
and really like, you know,
it was incredible cause he was the first person
I'd ever dated who really said to me,
no one gets to tell you what your body looks like.
No man, no woman, no one, right?
Like nobody you're dating,
nobody else gets to tell you what your body looks like.
It's yours. And it was just like, I mean,
this had never occurred to me at 24, 25 years old.
And he really helped, like not only,
I think that until I met him,
I really thought no one will ever fully love me.
I will have to trick them.
I will have to be very smart, very funny, very talented,
know a lot of cultural references.
I have to be the most sexually talented
and then I will trick someone into loving me.
They will never love me for my body.
They will love me in spite of it.
And he really showed me that,
I didn't have to settle for that,
which was really life altering.
He also coincidentally this like an angelic human being,
I don't even know,
he also helped me work through
a lot of my disordered eating.
Like he would sit with me in the kitchen
while we'd prepare food and he would hold my hand
while he was like, okay, we're gonna have pasta, right?
And to someone who was like really deep in disordered eating
and disordered thinking about food,
pasta is like saying like,
we're gonna throw a baby in here, it's gonna be alive.
And so it's like, right, it's terrifying.
And so I'm like, okay, pasta a panic attack, right?
So he is like, it's okay, pasta's not bad,
we can just put it in the little pot, it's great.
And then he is like, oh, I had an idea.
What if we put cheese in there?
I'm like, and cheese is like even worse.
It's like, just like little,
like let's just like kill a village full of people
-for no reason. -(audience laughing)
I just like, I'm, you know, again,
like in this deep disorder thinking
and I'm just like, cheese, I'm like freaking out.
And he's like, it's okay, you know, we're gonna do this.
We're gonna put it in the pot, it's gonna be great, right?
So we have like this mac and cheese moment,
it's just like etched in my memory is, like,
this time when, you know, my partner who,
and I think really like,
he really taught me that
if your partner isn't your community,
then they're not,
like they shouldn't be your boo.
If they're not here to like help you and gas you,
and like help you heal in ways that are,
I mean obviously not like trying to save you,
or anything like that, but like trying to support you.
Can give you those, like, those same pep talks,
those same things that your friends would give you,
then you probably shouldn't be dating them.
And it was just like, he really leveled me up
in a lot of really incredible ways through his, like,
the way that he thought.
And I remember at that,
so progressing when I'm now almost 30 years old,
I'm still diet, I still have like these residual,
like something's wrong with me.
I should probably be on a diet all the time.
I probably needed something, I'm gonna die.
All this stuff, right?
Like I believed everything that
I had been taught about being fat.
And then I end up in grad school
and I start being really interested in studying
how weight discrimination impacts gender.
And so that's a whole nother story.
But through that I end up discovering fat activism,
which is like this group of incredible human beings.
At that time in the Bay Area,
though fat activism was all over the world and I,
for the first time in my life was in a community of people.
Like, the story goes like this.
Like somebody was like, have you heard of this conference?
It's a fat conference.
It's like, in two weeks you should probably go,
'cause you're doing research related to that.
I was like, yeah, okay, I'm gonna go.
So I sign up to go to the conference, I get there,
I take like the commuter train, the bus,
or like 14 transfers,
finally at the hotel where the conference is.
And I'm like walking through the breezeway
of the conference center
and I'm just hearing laughter and splashing.
And then I like walk out
and there's just like this incredible scene
of like fat people everywhere at a swimming pool
wearing amazing bathing suits, like, really incredible.
And they're just laughing and they're having fun
and they're like wearing cute sunglasses
and they're floating on stuff and they're just like, living.
And I'd never seen anything like this before.
And then there's one person comes out from this side
of the sort of tableau
and she's wearing this like red white polka dot
vintage style bikini with cat eye sunglasses,
and she has this big belly, right?
And like big arms and big thighs
and she's just sauntering out,
and there's like this boy following her with a parasol
over her head.
(audience laughing)
And I was like, oh, like, I was like, oh my god,
this is possible. I like, I didn't know that.
I think I didn't quite know that was what I wanted.
And I don't think I definitely didn't know
that I could have it as a fat person.
And it was like that moment where it was like,
she was kind of like my saint,
like if people talk about religious experiences,
like fall to their knees,
like whatever I give my life over to this.
She was a little bit like,
she was like my religious ecstatic saint person for me.
And, you know, basically from then on
I just dedicated my life to doing this work,
to trying to end weight discrimination,
to helping people understand,
not only the data that the basic rate
that our culture is not only wrong morally,
for how it thinks about fat people,
but it's just wrong, literally also.
It was really powerful,
cause when I first started I was like,
I don't care about the health argument. I do not care.
I care about human beings. I know what I went through.
I know I've met like 50, a hundred fat people,
they've all gone through the same thing.
So this is clearly a human rights problem.
And I wasn't even interested in the research.
I was like, I don't care what the research says,
we've got a human rights argument right here.
People shouldn't be treated like that. Period.
And, but then, right as the longer I started this,
I've been in this career, the more I was like,
I gotta look at the research,
let's see what it says.
And I was like, what,
not only is this thing horrible and,
not only is fatphobia like horrible and disgusting
and anti humanitarian and terrible,
and we should all be ashamed of, like,
the fact that it's just running rampant through the streets,
but it doesn't even have a basis in research.
Like there's not even any research
that shows that this works, that weight.
Like not only does weight loss not work,
but it actually makes, like it moves people's set point,
which we'll talk about in a second,
higher over time that it actually in fact
makes people bigger.
Which I'm like, I'm here for people being bigger,
but that's allegedly not the point of this.
So it was really shocking to understand that.
I was like, wow.
So if fatphobia isn't just like hot flaming trash,
like on a cultural, like kind of just human level,
but it's like not even supported by research
and it was just like one of those moments where you're like,
what are we doing here, you know?
So that kind of, that's a long story. (laughs)
Thank you for listening.
We'll move on to the next slide, (laughs)
like slide three, minute 45.
Okay, so does it,
are you seeing the slide that says critically examine
the health? Okay, great. (laughs)
So that's what we're heading into right now.
Let's just move on ahead.
So right, kind of, I just wanna jump right into it, right?
The current prevailing question,
but isn't being fat just unhealthy, right?
This is kind of like, this is the question I always get.
This is the question I always have to address, right?
When I'm talking about this conversation.
And the problem with the question is that
the onus of the question, the onus really of like, you know,
this overall like, yeah,
this question falls on the oppressed group
to change in order to accommodate bias.
So it's the same, I mean, if you can kind of,
if you think more broadly about oppression,
asking this question is like saying,
well, in general, and this is an actual fact.
Black Americans live shorter lives than white Americans.
So shouldn't Black Americans just try to be white people?
Wouldn't that just solve this?
I think it's just a gross misunderstanding
of how oppression works
and it ends up becoming a method of victim blaming.
So the outcomes of this,
I just said victim blaming stress on the oppressed group
bypassing of consent, right?
I think right now there's this idea that,
like there's something wrong with me and no matter what,
whether I like my body or not, whether I'm fine or not,
whether I'm like whatever the doctor's idea of healthy is,
or not, I should still want to be a thin person
and that thin people get to bypass my consent
because they are just somehow more knowledgeable than me
just by virtue of being thin.
This is what I mean by bypassing of consent.
It leads to medical bias,
which we'll talk more about in a second.
Less preventive care for higher weight people,
which there's research on this. We'll go into that.
A wage gap between higher weight people
and straight size people in general.
I know the research for plus size women.
Now mind you, 70% of people in the US are plus size.
So this is unlike other forms of oppression
where they're actually usually numeric minorities.
We're talking about a numeric majority
that is being oppressed in line with numeric minorities,
which is interesting kind of paradoxical.
For plus size women, the wage gap between, you know,
us and straight size women is anywhere between
9,000 and $19,000 a year.
And I'll talk more about that in a minute.
The invisible invisibilization of discrimination
when there's victim blaming,
that means that it makes it harder
to see the discrimination is happening.
Doctors prescribing food restriction, aka dieting,
which is correlated with eating disorders.
One in four people who are regular dieters
will go on to have an eating disorder,
which is one of the deadliest mental illnesses
that we have, that like on record.
And so anyway, doctors prescribing food restriction
to higher weight patients pretty much consistently,
I would argue the better question,
the more humanitarian question,
the question that I think is more substantiated by research
and that it's just better for humans
is what's the right thing to do if we accept it,
that weight bias harms people,
that it shortens life expectancy,
which I will get into in a second
and is therefore oppressing human rights issue.
So what's the moral imperative?
If we look at the research,
if we look at what weight stigma does,
what is the moral imperative here?
Not is this person healthy or not,
but knowing that stigma harms and kills people
and shortens their life expectancy,
what is the right thing to do?
In this situation, I would say it's superior
in that the onus falls on society, on all of us,
not the individual experiencing the oppression.
It falls on medicine to come correct
and people who want to oppress fat people.
And I wanna say here I'm calling out medicine
and I mentioned that there was a training earlier,
and I really, I don't think I have a slide
that says in this deck,
but it's important to understand that discrimination, right?
Like so, let me back up and say right now in New York City,
there's a bill that's up for vote,
that would add weight to as a protected category
at such as, you know,
added to like race, gender, disability, et cetera.
So it's important to understand that, right?
Like this is,
this work is part of a trajectory of like,
trying to end groups being discriminated against.
And with that in mind, it's important to understand that
just like weight discrimination,
there was a time when racism was justified
through the language of science.
There was a time when sexism was justified
through the language of science.
There was a time when, like racist science said,
that the human skull could be measured
and that criminality could be determined
by that measurement.
These were not cuckoo, weirdo, right people,
they weren't like, right?
These were like medical doctors. (laughs)
And so it's important to understand that
it's not like weight discrimination is sort of
medically substantiated or validated by medicine,
and we've never seen this show before.
It's that this is very much in line
with the ways in which oppressed groups
have been oppressed, right?
Society isn't just like the president and people on top,
society's made up of academia, the church,
the medical field, right?
Like there are sort of pillars of society
when we're talking about society, okay?
So the outcomes of this,
I would argue are individuals and entities
who practice discrimination will be asked to stop.
Health outcomes always improve
when individuals experience less stigma in addition to that.
So let's move on.
Okay, so I kind of also, this is another side by side.
So the current health focus approach, you know,
basically teaches us that to be suspicious
of embodied feelings and we're encouraged to adopt
an intellectual aka enlightened anti-human relationship
to food and body.
So the current health approach really does promote
a very intellectual relationship
to how you eat and what your body looks like,
and what your body feels like even potentially.
This system is characterized by binaries.
So good versus junk food, wrong versus right bodies,
good versus bad bodies, learners versus knowers.
I was just doing a lecture yesterday with Food Core
and basically talking about how in our culture we learn,
you know, basically there's two types of people,
the people who know how to eat correctly
and the people who don't.
And often people who are in the don't,
are people who are in marginalized bodies
and people who do know are the correct eaters or whatever,
they're often in like more privileged bodies.
This system is characterized by restriction
and control assimilation.
So food becomes a way of becoming a good citizen,
a moral citizen.
Utility food is primarily seen as something
that should promote health.
Food is seen as fuel for a machine, the body.
Fear that the wrong relationship to food and body
could lead to disease and death.
So right now, you know,
if you look over here on the left hand of the slide,
this is the paradigm that we're living in.
It's extremely anxiety-inducing,
it leads to body dysmorphia, leads to disordered eating,
it leads to all kinds of like fractured relationships
to the self, to intuition and to food.
We can, in my mind, right?
We can create both in microcosms
and also just in larger environment.
We can live in a culture that affirms
a pro-human relationship to food and body
rooted in instinct.
Hunger is one of those things.
Hunger is part of instinct, intuition, pleasure, connection,
care, cultural affirmation, play, fun,
comfort and self-trust.
And I kind of wanna say like, you know,
and what's interesting is that
the stuff on the right hand side,
which might sound a little bit woo or whatever,
is also substantiated by data,
to have better long-term health outcomes.
A great example is this research that came out,
this actually from the seventies,
but they discovered that when people enjoy food,
they absorbed more nutrition from the food.
So pleasure has an impact on actual nutrient absorption.
So these things aren't just like concepts that seem nice,
they have empirical bases and like,
actually help promoting outcomes.
So let's move on.
So as a culture,
we've been taught to see bodies and food
through a carceral, colonial and neoliberal lens.
And we're gonna like break that down.
So Carceral, you've probably heard,
I feel like there's a lot of attention
on carceral right now.
The belief that our bodies are dangerous
and always on the verge of rebellion.
Rebellion equals fatness and it justifies the need
to punish ostracize and dehumanize people
with unlawful bodies.
So carceral is basically a referencing to prison,
the prison industrial complex.
And what's interestingly is like, you know,
I think amazing prison abolitionists argue that
when you look at the culture, like, you know,
a friend of mine is a poet and he says,
if there's a prison in your city,
then your city is a prison.
A basically rate the ways in which society
has to be shaped and our psychology
has to be shaped in order to accept carceral
at the level that we have it in the United States.
So carceral shows up in diet culture
in how we treat our bodies in food.
Colonialism, right?
The body becomes the savage or the racialized other
that must be tamed, disciplined, and governed
by the more quote unquote civilized coded as white mind
and finally neoliberal.
So neoliberal is a term,
an economics term that references the way
in which American capitalism works, right?
Just like pick yourself up by the bootstraps.
If you want something bad enough,
you can have it if you work hard enough,
if you didn't get it,
it's cause you didn't work hard enough.
The individual is responsible for controlling their body
as private property in order to prevent social punishment,
including medical neglect and medical pathology.
So we're gonna keep going.
A lot of words, thank you for hanging out with me.
Let's move into defining and examining fatphobia
and anti-fatness.
Here we go.
What is fatphobia?
What is anti-fatness?
It is a socially acceptable form of bigotry
against higher weight people
justified through the language of health and morality.
And I really wanna underscore the word bigotry.
This is another thing that happens when the conversation
gets completely focused on health, again,
it invisibilize the discrimination is occurring,
it creates a reality in which someone can discriminate
against a person and believe that they are acting morally
through the lens of health, right?
So it invisibilize the act of discrimination
to the person who is doing it and to the culture at large.
And the person who is also experiencing it.
Common fatphobic tropes and beliefs.
Fat people don't care about our health.
I was literally,
I had an interview with NPR a few days ago
and the person, it was the show here and now
and the host was like, well,
and we're talking about the New York City law.
And she was like, well isn't there a reason why for example,
like an employer wouldn't want a fat person
to sit at the desk at the gym?
And I was like, well, I mean, no, I don't think so.
And she was like, well, but I mean,
but like how would that person know how to operate,
like exercise machinery?
And I'm like, do you think the thin people
are just born with it?
I'm like, do you think every thin person
just knows how to and we just, none of us.
I was like, it was kind of, it was really,
it was one of those moments where you're like,
I'm so grateful that like you don't even know
how insulting 'cause I'm like,
it's so useful for me to understand the depths
of the bigotry where it's just like completely illogical.
And I'm like, it's not like thin people,
like are handed like, you know,
more software, like a pamphlet
and they all know how to do use exercise equipment
and we don't.
It's like, in fact, I don't know if this is,
has ever occurred to you host of here and now,
but is it possible that, like, as a fat person,
I am expected to know more about diets,
and food restriction,
and calories, and exercise equipment,
than someone who isn't experiencing what I'm experiencing.
And I think it, it kind of,
what's fascinating about it and the bigotry
is how real it is and yet how invisible it is
to people who don't experience it.
I mean, and I have to share this,
I shared this this morning, so if you were here,
sorry for the repeat,
but I remember a moment having a conversation
with a good friend who's a thin person,
just who was a eating disorder survivor,
anorexia like an, you know, former anorexic.
And she's always been kind of in a small body and she said,
Virgie, when thin people, people have always been thin,
they look at fat people and they think,
what would I have to do in my imagination to be that size?
They don't think this person is working their butt off
to try and like meet some standard
that they're never gonna be able to meet statistically.
They're thinking that, oh, you must never leave the house.
You must never go for a walk.
You must eat five times what I eat.
You must do 18 times more of this,
and 18 times less of this.
Because in order for me to be your size,
that's what I would have to do, right?
That's kind of the,
and it was like one of those aha moments, right?
Because I'm living, right? I just told you my whole story.
I was living with anorexia for 20 years and no one noticed.
And I'm like grilling rack every second
of every day is dedicated to becoming a thin person,
which I'm being told is possible.
And so this is like inconceivable. I'm like, what?
They don't know that I'm like out here hating myself,
like working out every day eating lettuce for three months.
How can they not know?
How can they not notice, right?
And so I think this is again one of those things where
if you're living in a marginalized body,
whether it's a racialized body,
or a disabled body or like whatever, right?
That like the people who aren't living that experience
have no idea how hard you're working.
They just think like they're out here like killing it
and like you're just sucking.
And I'm like, no, I'm not here working
six times as hard as you
and not getting a third of where you're getting,
just not even trying, or maybe you are trying,
but like, I mean I think
I learned this in college, right?
With with class privilege where it's like,
if you sort of start out in a place of privilege,
you can be working really hard.
That doesn't mean that you're not,
it doesn't mean you're not working hard
if you have accomplishments.
But someone who doesn't have that privilege
can be working three times, four times,
five times as hard and won't even get halfway
to where you are.
And so I think it's important to understand
in the conversation about body size,
that in fact a lot of higher weight people
have either historically or currently
working extremely hard to try and meet
the thin standard that our culture puts forward
and are dedicating their lives to it,
and aren't getting the results that they're supposed to get,
and they're blaming themselves.
I'm gonna show you the research of why
they shouldn't blame themselves
because the research is pretty clear.
Another trope is fat people can't have
a restrictive eating disorder like anorexia.
Fat people can handle more pain and suffering.
So this leads to things like,
I think this is very subconscious,
but this leads to things like doctors
not prescribing as much pain medication.
Doctors not prescribing care when fat patients come in
and have a symptom.
Fat people's desire and autonomy doesn't matter.
Including forcing advice and weight loss onto fat people.
Fat people don't know or understand how to be healthy,
otherwise they would be thin people.
And finally, thin people's beliefs about us
matter more than what we think, want, or need.
So again, this is where you see the clear,
I mean for me it's like the discrimination component
is very clear because the first class citizen in our culture
is supposed to be thin people
and the second class citizen
is supposed to be higher weight people.
And this kind of shows up in like,
very in I think subconscious attitudes.
So let's keep going.
Okay, so here are some more examples of fatphobic attitudes,
or beliefs. Some of them are a little bit more subtle,
so I wanted to really delineate them.
Higher weight people can become thin people,
this belief that any person of any size can,
if they want badly enough, to not only become thin,
but to stay thin their entire lives.
There's also a belief I think that higher weight people
somehow are ill.
And so if we get past a certain point,
or we lose a certain amount of weight,
then we will have shed the illness or something.
Which is, I mean, that whole framework is not correct.
And also very bigoted that higher weight people are sick,
or have an emotional eating problem.
That higher weight people are struggling with their weight.
Again all higher weight people
are struggling with their weight.
All higher weight people want to be thin people.
All higher weight people are always less healthy
than thin people.
Fat people are less disciplined than thin people,
need to be on a diet,
can't possibly have anorexia or bulimia,
already talked about that.
Are less capable or desirable as a colleague,
or a candidate, or a partner.
Will die young because of their weight.
Mind you, I would just wanna say, you know,
we're gonna talk about BMI in a second,
but technically speaking,
people in the overweight category live the longest of anyone
just putting that out there.
Should that fat people should accept
the prevailing public health approach to weight.
That fat people should uncritically obey
the medical field's advice
despite its history of harming people in larger bodies.
So let's continue.
I wanna get into some of like,
the impact the live reality.
So I talked a little bit,
I alluded to this in my own story, but in the United States,
most children have already begun to internalize fatphobia
by the age of five.
Researchers go in and they ask groups of five year olds
if they would rather lose an arm, or be fat,
or lose a parent, or be fat.
And they always choose losing an arm or losing a parent.
I already mentioned this figure 9,000
is sort of the bottom rate for,
or the bottom estimate of the range
of how much income that fat women lose per year,
in sort of in comparison to their straight sized colleagues.
And when the researchers got in and were like,
what is this about?
They found that in general that plus size people,
plus size women in particular in this case,
were often opting into or were getting pushed
into more care oriented,
non-client facing lower paying jobs.
So often more physically oriented jobs
that are lower paying.
And that thin or straight size people were more likely
to end up in client facing positions
that are more sedentary desk work that is higher paid.
So that's kind of one of the biggest theories
as to what this disparity is.
And I mentioned this already,
68% is the percentage of US women though across the board,
people of all genders in general,
about 70% of people in the US are a size 14 or above,
or are plus size in a larger body.
Let's keep going. Oh, these are a lot of words.
Again, thank you so much
for hanging out with me and looking at all these words.
So we're gonna get into kind of,
we're gonna get into the nitty gritty of the data.
Cause I think it's really, really powerful.
I'm gonna read this to you.
This is from a 2020 paper.
Health policies routinely emphasize weight loss
as a target for health promotion.
These policies rest upon the assumptions,
one, that higher body weight equals poorer health.
Two, that long-term weight loss is widely achievable.
And three, that weight loss
results in consistent improvements in physical health.
Our of the literature suggests that these
three assumptions are not supported empirically.
So what does that mean?
That's a lot of big words.
What it means is that we have these
kind of three very, very important presumptions
that go into how we think of health
and how we measure health.
And all three of them aren't supported by the data.
So the first one,
that higher weight people are always less healthy, not true.
I'm gonna, there's a data point in here
that I'm gonna talk about in there in a second.
That long-term weight loss is widely achievable,
also not true.
And that weight loss results and consistent improvements
in physical health, also not true.
So these are major presumptions in the health discussion
and the art and sort of like the cultural zeitgeist
the moment we're in right now.
Okay, so food restriction.
So I mean, what's interesting, right?
Let me go back really quickly.
No, I don't know how to click back.
What's important to understand is that there are
sort of like, let's call it three things
that really, you know, basically create larger bodies.
The first, the most, the biggest one is genetics.
Genetics is the biggest indicator of generally
what size you're gonna be
and what weight range you're gonna kind of be at.
Again, this is like, I mean,
I was gonna put an asterisks on it,
but that's gonna get too confusing.
So we're start there.
So genetics is the big one.
The other big one is dieting, that changes
and makes people tends to like move your set point,
which we'll talk about in a second,
higher and higher over time, the longer that you do it.
And the third is stuff we can't understand or explain.
So those are the three things
that kind of create larger bodies.
So I think it's important to understand that, right?
Like, you know,
I think that might be surprising to hear, right?
So yeah, so food restriction aka dieting
is not correlated with long-term weight loss,
but it is correlated with an increased likelihood
of an eating disorder.
Like I said, one in four people who diet
go on to have eating disorders,
depression, anxiety, binging,
disconnection from hunger cues,
worse long-term decision making,
delaying of important life moments
and kind of the ongoing dehumanizing
and stressful experience of hunger.
So again, food restriction is correlated with all of this.
It's not correlated with better long-term health outcomes.
Again, longitudinally speaking,
it's not correlated with people becoming thin people,
it's not correlated with better mental health.
It's correlated with these things.
That's what the research says.
So let's keep going.
So this is about kind of preventive care.
So higher BMI was associated with less frequent receipt
of preventive services among middle-aged white women,
elderly white women and men.
There's a lot of these data points,
this is just from one very specific paper,
but across the board in general,
higher weight people receive less preventive care.
What does that mean, right?
Like it means a few things.
First of all, that higher weight people
are perhaps opting out of potentially
discriminatory medical experiences.
And it also means that, you know,
medical providers are refusing to give the preventive care.
And this means that when medical providers
are seeing their fat patients over time
with less medical care, with less preventive care,
potentially opting out of medical care
because of discrimination,
they're now seeing this fat patient in the more acute states
of distress and more acute states of illness,
which reinforces the discrimination and the bigoted ideas
that the whole thing started with.
So it ends up kind of becoming this really vicious cycle.
And we see this with other discriminated groups as well,
like people of color, queer people, trans people also.
Let's keep going.
This is an image of Rebecca Hiles
who at the time of this interview in 2018,
she was 28 years old,
but she began to have really acute coughing fit
to the point that she couldn't really breathe
and went to the doctor.
So on several occasions and was told, you're just fat,
you just need to lose weight and these will go away.
It turns out that she had cancer.
And so this case is being,
I think it's still being adjudicated.
She went in and decided to sue her doctors based on neglect.
And I mean, right?
Like this is one of those outcomes which happens, right?
When sort of discrimination disallows doctors
from taking higher weight patients seriously.
And again, when I talk to people in larger bodies
about their experience with medical care in general,
the story is I come in for anything, a cough,
an ear infection, my knee hurts,
I have like, something weird is happening.
I'm having coughing fits,
the recommendation is always just lose weight.
There's no serious treatment of the issue typically.
So let's keep going.
Higher BMI was associated, oh, I already did this one.
Sorry about that.
It's, I need to, okay,
wait, sorry, I can't see.
Does this slide say weight discrimination was associated?
Okay. Actually, I'm sorry, I can see it.
You're right. You're pointing to me.
Thank you.
Weight discrimination was associated with an increase
in mortality risk of nearly 60% in participants.
This increased risk was not accounted for
by common physical and psychological risk factors.
In addition to its association with poor health outcomes,
weight discrimination may shorten life expectancy.
So this is a really important, again,
when we're talking about kind of the health argument
and the human rights argument,
one of the things that rarely gets brought up
in the conversation about health and weight,
is the ways in which stigma impacts health.
And again, there's a body of research
called Minority Stress theory that really talks about
how if you're in a marginalized group,
it creates outcomes like having a shortened life,
like having cardiovascular issues,
having high blood pressure, having issues with major organs.
These things are all connected to stress,
whether you're a person of color,
or you're experiencing weight stigma,
or you're a queer person, right?
Stress related impact on the body
is never considered when we're talking about
the issue of weight.
Let's keep going.
So I wanna meet,
I want you to introduce you to Adolphe Quetelet,
who invented the BMI.
Has anyone heard of Adolphe Quetelet before?
Yeah, there's been a lot of articles about
(indistinct) Adolphe lately.
So he was a Belgian mathematician
who invented the BMI in the 1830s using only white men,
specifically likes soldiers.
And the BMI is still used as the ultimate measure
of health in the United States.
It's important to take a second to talk about Adolphe,
because I think a few things, right?
So what Adolphe did was,
he brought in all these soldiers
and he weighed all of them and he averaged their weights
and it created a bell curve.
So then what Adolphe did was is he took the median,
sort of like the center point of the bell curve and said,
this is the ideal man
from which all other men deviate, right?
There's, again,
there's nothing in the data that indicate that median,
the median is just the median.
It has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority
by that person's ideal or not ideal.
But he sort of projected that his own opinion onto the data
and his work, it's important to know,
ended up becoming some of the undergirding of eugenics.
So I think when we think about the BMI
and the history of the BMI,
which emerged at the height of colonialism, not an accident,
I would say so, right?
Like, you know, some people argue
just because a tool has a problematic history,
doesn't mean we should throw out the tool,
which I would generally agree with.
I think what's complicated about the BMI though is, right?
To this day, the BMI determines things like,
whether or not you will get life insurance,
whether or not you will get health insurance
and how much it costs.
It determines things like, you know,
like I think about the BMI
being taken from me in high school,
it determines where I rank in like kind of the,
in my PE class,
which is then sent onto this like,
national fitness standard test, right?
So I mean, and also BMI determines, like,
and when we're looking at populations,
BMI determines who's getting public health intervention
and who's not.
So if you're in a zip code that has higher BMIs,
you're more likely to be targeted
for all kinds of public health interventions.
So, you know, arguably,
even though this tool was designed
for a very different purpose,
it is still basically separating the ideal
from the non-ideal who will be intervened upon
and who will not,
who is seen as a learner, who is seen as a knower.
Okay, continuing on, I wanna talk about healthism.
It's a very, I think it's really important.
I already used the, I already talked about neoliberalism,
which is the idea of like,
everybody just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
That economic principle is applied to health
in our culture.
So healthism is the belief system that sees health
as the property and responsibility of the individual
and ranks the personal pursuit of health
above anything else.
And there's a little paragraph at the bottom, right?
Essentially, right?
This belief is not based in data.
I'm about to show you this as well. So, right?
Like again, when we're talking about weight,
we're talking about how there is this like belief
that the individual has 100% control
over how long,
and how long their life is and the quality of their life.
That's the belief in the United States.
And what I'm about to show you is like,
that's not actually what research says like at all.
But it's a very strong belief because, right?
Why?
Because essentially if we are all individually responsible
for how well we live, or how long we live,
then the culture doesn't have to do anything, right?
Like you don't need universal healthcare,
like anything that any other democratic socialist countries
slash not even many countries
that aren't even democratic socialist countries,
like you don't need that.
You just need to work really hard and cleanse
you need to like drink juice,
and you need to like do the,
and you don't need healthcare that's affordable.
You need to cleanse, right?
And so I think the whole, right?
And so it really goes back to that kind of individual.
Like who bears the responsibility?
Does the individual bear responsibility for everything
they experience?
Or is the culture that's like, right,
benefiting from the citizens,
are they responsible for something?
And how much?
So let's get into the research on kind of like,
why this isn't substantiated by data.
So this is kind of a question,
but the answer's already circled.
How much do individual determinants of health impact
our overall health as compared to, Ooh, I jumped the gun.
Hold on y'all, I need to back up and say something.
I'm gonna back up for real. This I did it. (laughs)
So our health is actually, you know,
every person in here,
your health is made up of a combination
of social determinants and individual determinants.
So that's like, you know,
everyone in here is overall health
in the pie chart of your health,
there's a combination of social determinants
and individual determinants.
So social determinants are things over which
you have no control,
whether or not you experience oppression,
whether or not you grew up having access to clean water,
public transportation, you know, basically if,
did you live in an area that had a lot of resources?
Did you grow up in a home with a parent
who was emotionally regulated or dysregulated, right?
Did you, like, these kinds of privileges, right?
Did you grow up with that or did you not?
These are things that people can't control.
You cannot control what home you grew up in,
what neighborhood you grew up in.
These things are very, very important
in social determinants of health.
And then there's the individual determinants of health,
which are the stuff we're talking about,
food, exercise, meditation.
A huge other part of individual determinants is genetics.
So within the overall pie chart, again,
we're talking about social, individual,
the question that I'm posing for you
is what percentage in the pie,
I've already, you already saw the answer,
but what percentage in the pie is social determinants
versus individual determinants?
And we come to learn that,
the answer is 30 to 40% of your overall health
is something you can individually determine.
And that 30% figure is the CDC and 40% is Kaiser.
So I mean, I'm more inclined to the CDC,
but I thought I put the Kaiser number out there
since it's a bit more conservative.
So anyway, I'm inclined to sort of believe the CDC,
I'm gonna favor that one
in this conversation moving forward.
So yeah, so just to kind of really, really like,
get it in there, right?
So our overall health in the pie chart,
30% of our overall health is individual determinants.
And within that 30% is genetics, which is probably,
I don't have the numbers on this one,
but we could probably guess it's probably at least 5%
if not 15%, if not a lot more, right?
I don't know, but let's just call it,
let's call it 5% be really conservative.
So 25% of the pie is what's left
of how you eat, whether you meditate,
whether or not you get enough sleep, all that stuff, right?
Is left in that 25%.
So, and again, this is sort of,
I mean, if you can go into the CDC website,
look all of this stuff up.
So I mean, the question for me,
the philosophical question becomes,
how are we so obsessed with that 25, 30%,
and why aren't we at least twice as obsessed
with that 70% figure?
Because isn't that where we should be moving the needle?
So I mean, right?
Like, I mean, I just kind of, I think again,
like when we're talking about this conversation,
I always learn that people really, really have this belief
that their individual behaviors
are what is determining their health.
It is terrifying, in fact,
to accept that how long you live
and the quality of your life is largely out of your hands.
It's really scary.
And that's where diet culture comes from.
The dealing with the terror of that,
dealing with the terror of the fact that like,
we kind of get the hand that we're dealt.
And it doesn't mean,
it doesn't mean that those individual
that trump that 25% doesn't matter,
but it really contextualizes kind of like,
what all of this conversation is really about.
We're really pushing for something
that is largely out of people's control.
Okay, moving on.
So I wanna kind of explore the frameworks of fat positivity
and food positivity. We've got a little bit,
I know we have to leave at six,
are we leaving at six ,
or am I supposed to end this?
What? 5:40, 40, okay, great.
Okay, gotta move it along.
I don't think we will have time for Q and A unfortunately,
but, okay.
But feel free to come talk to me afterwards
if you want. So we're gonna explore these frameworks.
I think they're really powerful.
Let's, I'm gonna skip ahead.
Oops. This one is formatted very poorly.
Oh no, it looks great on the screen.
Okay. So how do we shift the focus away from food,
away from like the fear of disease and death
and towards joy, positivity and aliveness?
And I think for me,
certainly as a person in a larger body, though,
I think everybody of all sizes can adopt
something called fat positivity.
So fat positivity is this set of principles, right?
Seeing fat bodies is a natural,
beautiful part of body diversity.
Understanding that weight gain or weight restoration
can be a very positive and important part of healing
for people of all sizes.
And I think really it's important to understand,
I'll get back to the third thing on the slide in a second.
It's important to understand that fatphobia
manifests in multiple dimensions,
that it manifests intrapersonally how you see yourself,
interpersonally how other people treat you
based on your body,
and institutionally how easily you can navigate society
based on your body size.
So really, right?
Like we can be impacted on all three levels potentially,
but like even a person in a smaller body
can still have very high internalized fatphobia,
very high internalized,
like very high body dysmorphia rate, right?
So moving on, not seeing fat people as failed thin people.
There is not a thin person inside of me, you know,
and I'm not like,
it's not like I sort of just have the wrong body.
This is the exact body that I'm supposed to have,
this is the exact body that's right for me.
And so that was like a very important realization for me.
Seeing fatphobia as the problem that needs to be fixed,
not fat bodies.
Not asking or pondering invasive questions
like, how did you get this way?
Or, you know, do you have like a,
some kind of, a lot of, I mean,
I think I've had people presume that
when I say I've had a, you know,
I've had an eating disorder,
they don't presume anorexia,
they think I have an overeating problem.
So like these kinds of questions, right?
Like this kind of whatever.
And then kind of moving on,
creating access for fat people in the three dimensions
that I mentioned.
And finally imagining fat, joy, love thriving and futurity.
So imagining like, you know,
and creating possibilities for fat people in the future,
I remember like I really had internalized
and I'm still working through it, right?
I really had internalized the message
that I'd been told that fat people,
there aren't fat people in the future
because fat people die.
I really had this belief that I was like,
there's no way I'm gonna make it to 40.
There's no way I'm gonna make it to like 35, right?
I really have this with, I'm 41, just so you know.
And I also, I'm thinking, right?
I think back I'm like, wow, like my grandparents all lived.
I mean really, like at the end of the day
in general, like in the spectrum of body size,
with the exception of people in sort of like,
the extreme ends, most people will live to be
the life, like, the regular life is like, 81
or whatever it is, 85.
I don't even know what it is right now.
Most people will. (laughs)
And so I think like, you know,
there's this kind of myth that I really internalize
that like, I just was never going to see that.
And I think it,
that kind of myth is really perpetuated in media.
Like, one of the things I've noticed is,
when a fat person dies, it's just like they died.
It's like there's no,
there's sort of like a presumptive, like they were fat,
of course they died.
Versus like, I mean, I'm like, versus,
you know, if a 28 year old dies and they're a thin person,
there's like a very long explanation
as to how this, like, thing happened, right?
And that kind of subtle bigotry
and like how fat people's lives are reported upon,
it's like very impactful.
So yeah, I think for me it was a really powerful exercise.
I really would.
I remember, you know,
when I first started doing fat activism, I was like,
I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna do a meditation.
I'm gonna imagine myself being 30, and being 40,
and being 50, and being 60, and being 70, and I'm, you know,
I'm like dancing and I'm wearing clothes I love
and I'm being loved, and I'm in community,
and I'm in this body.
I'm not in a thin body
that I'm imagining I'm gonna have in the future.
I'm in this body and I'm gonna have wrinkles in this body,
and I'm gonna, like,
my partner is gonna kiss my face
before I go to bed just like he does when I'm 70,
just like he does today, you know?
And so I think like that was so powerful to do.
And to do that collectively is really incredible.
This is kind of a sort of plea
for anti-diet, food positive principles.
Because in our culture,
the way we think about food is very connected
to how we think about bodies and vice versa.
So to begin with, all food is good food,
adopting a positive and non-judgmental attitude
towards all foods.
Yes, even food that is labeled as quote unquote junk food.
At the end of the day, right?
Like, this is not to say that,
there shouldn't be a critique of a highly corporatized,
like our highly corporatized,
sort of exploitative food system.
This is saying that, you know,
when we have really intense labels on food,
it tends to lead to anxiety disordered eating,
it tends to lead to worse outcomes.
And I think it's important
to have a harm reduction approach.
So accepting that food restriction is correlated
with worse health outcomes.
Healthy eating can include all kinds of foods
as well as periods of making up for history
of not having eaten enough food.
Lowering the stakes of food and eating every bite,
in fact does not count.
I would say like weight neutral,
weight neutrality informed nutritionist
would tell you every bite does not need to count.
You don't need to like be obsessing over every single bite.
Understanding that food is not just fuel,
but is connected to emotion, memory, identity,
comfort, and culture.
Letting go of categorizing food into binaries,
like good, bad, healthy, unhealthy.
I've already said that.
Not presuming someone eats a certain way
based on their body size,
trust our and other's appetites and food desires
and have fun with and enjoy food.
And that matters.
Okay, we're gonna move into lightning round.
We're gonna talk a little bit about the history
of fat activism very quickly. (laughs)
So one thing that most people don't know
is that in 1967 there was a thing called a Fat-In,
in Central Park where a bunch of people gathered
and burned diet books
and also had signs that said things like,
fat is all right, fat's cool.
I wanna say I also read diet books.
This actually kind of didn't get a lot of coverage,
but Amazon has now put the same level of restriction
on diet books as it does on books about like cults
and, like, metaphysical belief systems,
because they're not substantiated by research.
So I just kind of wanna like, put that out there.
It's like, hmm.
So anyway, like, I mean, yeah.
So the diet book burning is kind of,
I found very visually exciting to think about.
One of the people who read about the Fat-in
which got coverage in the "New York Times,"
this is the cutout from this is the virtual cutout
of the 1967 article in the "New York Times."
One of the people who read about it got really inspired.
He started something called the National Association
to Advance Fat Acceptance in 1969,
and wrote a book called "Fat Power,"
which is basically like, you know,
whatever you weigh is right.
Kind of like one of the grandparents
of one of my books called,
"You Have the Right to Remain Fat."
Now, so NAAFA,
the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance,
like I said, emerges in 1969, very shortly thereafter.
Like you can open a chapter of NAAFA
anywhere in the country.
So there's this one chapter, and they're mostly women.
A lot of them are queer, like Jewish feminists, right?
And they're kind of like a little rowdier
than the other chapters.
And they get a letter from NAAFA,
they're like, NAAFAs like,
hey, you gotta like chill out.
Like, we're just trying to get, like,
we don't wanna like threaten these people.
We don't wanna threaten Americans with like,
all this like, other stuff.
And they're like, well then we don't wanna be part of NAAFA.
We're gonna start this thing called the Fat Underground
and we're gonna adopt like,
basically Black militant politics.
And so they basically wrote their own manifesto
called the Fat Liberation Manifesto.
And again, this is like where you start to see
the fat movement become like much more explicitly,
first of all, the fat movement fractures,
which a lot of movement does, movements do, right?
So NAAFA is kind of this like acceptance.
We're gonna do a lot of research,
we're gonna say fat people are healthy
and we're gonna be kind of non-threatening.
And then the Fat Underground is like, no,
we believe in militancy and separatism. (laughs)
And so this is kind of where the offshoot
of the more queer led,
more sort of women femme led
part of the fat movement begins, which is really exciting.
Cause that's really, we're on the trajectory as a culture.
When you look at body positivity
and fat aesthetics online right now, it's 1000% queer.
It's 1000% derived from queer feminine fashion
and aesthetics. (laughs)
And because it comes from queer high femmes.
So you've got this like Fat Underground
and basically they're like, listen, this is not,
what's the point of fighting for my right as a fat person
if I can't be a woman, if I can't be a feminist.
So I'm getting oppressed for being gay.
Like this movement isn't enough for me.
And so you see the intersectionality
kind of emerge very, very quickly
within the fat activism movement.
The Fat Liberation Manifesto emerges in 1973,
and you can read that online.
I won't read you the whole thing.
It's really exciting to read,
but it's sad to read because basically
none of these demands have been met even to this day.
And they're basically like, doctors treat us with dignity,
people treat us with dignity,
very quickly kind of thereafter we go into like,
the sort of the nineties,
where you start to see the influence of riot girl,
zine culture.
This is kind of the fat activism du jour.
It's highly influenced by not only queer aesthetics,
but like sex positive.
I mean, obviously it's hard to,
it's difficult to separate queer aesthetics from sex positivity,
but insofar as you can,
it has a very kind of a assertively sexual vibe,
which is really exciting to see
because one of the biggest things that fatphobia does,
is it says it renders fat people as like asexual,
or gluttonous or basically we're not agents
of our own sexuality.
And so I love kind of seeing Fat Girl zine,
which is all about like being slut
and like writing smut and being in a bathtub,
being worshiped, and being fed cake,
and like having a bunch of partners. So exciting.
So yeah. So anyway, like, and you can see even here,
this is like from the nineties, right?
Fat and healthy.
They're talking about these conversations
that we're still having right now,
very pressy and also like very, I dunno,
very real, very exciting to see.
And then kind of like, I'm gonna, this is the last slide,
but I have a little more to say,
thank you for,
I know we're going over if you have to go,
but this is kind of like the fat activist,
fat positive community that I'm a part of.
And these are some of my friends
and people I hang out with,
and work with, and do life with,
and hang out in swimming pools with, and eat ice cream with.
And you know, I really kind of think about, you know,
like, what does fat activism teach us
about how to deal with fatphobia?
And I think like, as, you know,
as like folks in college potentially,
I know not everyone here is a student here, but, right?
You're being introduced to this political ideology.
It's very, very upsetting to hear a lot of the stuff
that I just shared.
And it brings up a sense of rage.
It brings up a sense of anger and a sense of grief.
And all of those things are really, really important.
And I kind of wanna sort of say like, you know,
things that I've done briefly
to kind of deal with that rage
and that sense of kind of like, this is so wrong.
What happened to me is so wrong.
The very first thing that I did was try and find community
of people who could affirm what I went through,
who went through what I went through,
and who could collectivize tools with me.
Things like how do you alter a garment to make it fit?
I mean, this was before like,
the plus size revolution, really.
But how do you, one of the things,
first things I learned from another fat person
was how do you alter a garment that's not made for you?
How do you like literally deconstruct it
and then resew it up together,
so that it looks like something that you like,
that looks good on you.
How do you learn to love and compliment other fat people?
How do you learn to see other fat people as desirable
when you spent your whole life being told
that people who look like you are not desirable?
So like, having that community of like-minded people,
and it doesn't really, right?
I don't think that it's like size dependent,
but I think that if you're in a larger body,
certainly for me,
having other friends in larger bodies
really, really mattered
and was a really, really big part of like, working through
all of the feelings,
whether it was joy or rage,
or grief for all of those things, right?
And I kind of wanna say another really big way
for me to work through it, and for us to work through it
has been through our activism.
Whether it's putting together like a fat clothing swap,
or it's going to like a conference,
or that's all about talking about how, you know,
basically children who are nine and over a certain weight
should have weight loss surgery
and like going in there and just being fat at them.
You know, and there's kind of, right?
Like, I think like there's all of these fantastic ways
and I think certainly the last thing I was gonna say
in terms of a tool,
for me it was like setting boundaries.
Who gets to be around me?
Who am I dating?
Who am I looking at as potential people?
A big one for me, like a big,
this became like a friend rule and a dating rule, right?
Like, I deserve to be protected from fatphobia.
So A, I'm not dating people who talk about my body,
or other people's bodies,
or how I eat, or how other people eat.
Like if someone talks about literally,
like, if you are dating someone
who talks how other people look,
I would not be dating them anymore. (laughs)
Frankly, I'm sorry, that's a strong statement,
but like, I think like striving to be in a relationship,
whether it's romantic or otherwise,
with folks who are not putting toxicity into the world,
is really important.
And I think also, right,
like a big moment for me around my boundaries
really came around recognizing, like,
I think for a long time when people
would sort of spew fatphobia at me,
whether it was overtly fatphobic,
or them talking about what, you know,
they're disparaging to fat people or whatever,
disparaging to gaining weight or whatever.
I used to get really activated by that.
And there was a point at which like,
I was like, oh, you are triggered
and you don't know you're triggered,
and you don't know how to deal with it.
And I have dealt with the trauma.
I'm working through the trauma responsibly
that you haven't dealt with,
and I need to protect myself from you.
In the same way that if someone were super triggered
and had no idea they were triggered,
and they were activated and they were like doing,
they were flailing and flailing,
it's not my job to get you out of the water.
It's my job, right?
To be like, this is what's happening.
This is what my responsibility is and this,
I need to sort of protect myself from this.
So I think that when, like, when specifically,
I remember I used to hear when people would talk about
going on diets, it used to set me off like,
maybe I need to go, even though I was deep in fat activism,
I was like, oh, maybe I need to, maybe after all this.
And again, hitting a point where I was like,
oh, diets are what you do
when you're triggered from the trauma
of being taught that fatness is horrible.
Like, you don't know what to do with that
because our culture has just not given us any tools.
And your way of dealing with it is by not eating food.
And my way of dealing with it is fighting the system.
And so I think like, you know,
I mean just kind of really situating,
I'm like really situating where is my power?
Where is my sort of like, locus of power?
Who is set off and like, who can I, like,
who is my friend,
I'm invested enough that I wanna help them?
And who are the people in like farther out where I'm like,
I can't even touch that.
Like, I can't even touch that because like,
you're not someone in my inner circle.
That was a lot of information (laughs) we went over.
I'm just so grateful to have been here.
I like, I know I shared like literally every single piece
of data I've ever seen
and also every tool I've ever developed.
So I appreciate you listening.
Can I do a quick selfie?
-(audience cheering) -Yay. Yay. (laughs)
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
Okay. Yay.
I'm gonna do one like this.
I'm gonna do like four, so hold whatever you're doing.
Wait, it's on a timer.
Hold on, hold on.
Okay. Okay, ready? (laughs)
Here we go. Here we go.
Okay. Hold it. Hold it.
Oh my god, it's happening.
(audience laughing)
Okay.
Yes.
Okay. (laughs)
Thank you guys.
(audience applauding)
Yay.
Wow. (laughs)
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. (laughs)