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March 30 - March 31, 2021
But even as I fought to make myself smaller, my self would fight back. The diets would not stick, the laughter would not quiet, the opinions would not hide, the anger would not die. Every attempt I made to be less of myself would fail, and I would come back bigger than ever—in every way.
Perhaps all the love and acceptance that had been promised me if I could just hate myself into a new me didn’t exist.
How we value and honor our own bodies impacts how we value and honor the bodies of others.
body shame is a fantastically crappy inheritance. We didn’t give it to ourselves, and we are not obligated to keep it. We arrived on this planet as LOVE.
narratives about which bodies deserve to be seen and celebrated
Getting to our inherent state of radical self-love means peeling away those ancient, toxic messages about bodies.
The late poet and activist Audre Lorde said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”24
“The Danger of Poodle Science”
Hating your body is like finding a person you despise and then choosing to spend the rest of your life with them while loathing every moment of the partnership.
Consider this hypothesis: when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world around us, we make judgments about that absence. Invisibility is a statement.
Although well-intentioned, not seeing color is ultimately a reflection of our personal challenges around navigating difference.
We may be trying to convey how we don’t judge people based on racial identity, but “color blindness” is an act of erasure.
When we say we don’t see color, what we are truly saying is, “I don’t want to see the things about you that are different because society has told me they are dangerous or undesirable.”
In the depth of our hearts, we know that the answers have never been liposuction, gray-hair remedies, or the loss of twenty pounds, because in the grand scheme of a life well lived, eye liner, dress sizes, and ripped abs really don’t matter.
Our thoughts are an amalgamation of all manner of input mixed with just a dash of original content. Often it’s a mess in there, a vessel filled with self-loathing and judgment. It’s unsurprising that we avoid being present with our thoughts. We think tons of repugnant, petrifying, miserable things about our own bodies and other folks’ bodies every single day. It’s easy to slip into a pit of shame for having these thoughts.
Without our awareness, thoughts run covert operations all through our lives, assassinating our sense of worth and blowing up our connections with other humans. When we avoid our thoughts, they go rogue.
You are not your thoughts! Our thoughts are a hybrid of information forged from our own experiences, traumas, successes, failures, and massive input from our external world. All those media messages about good bodies and default bodies: they’re in your thoughts. All the government-endorsed ideas of safe bodies and dangerous bodies: they’re in your thoughts. You have been given thoughts, and just like that shame sweater, you do not have to keep them.
avoiding your thoughts will not help you train your brain to think new ones. You must look at them with gentle kindness and say, “Thank you for sharing.” And, with love, release them.
Over time, you will notice that your thoughts flow in alignment with your behaviors. The junk in your brain will start to occupy less space, and when it starts to reclutter your thoughts you will recognize it and move it out.
Over the years, we have collected some crappy beliefs about our bodies. We’ve been taught that our bodies are entities to control and subjugate. We have treated our bodies like machines that are always on the fritz.
In her poem “Three,” Nayyirah Waheed captures the fullness of the second pillar in six perfect lines: and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.’6
Depression, bipolar disorder, and other examples of neurodivergence7 are stigmatized because we are unwilling to extend the same care and treatment to our brains that we afford our bodies. If I broke my arm and never went to a see a doctor, not only would I be in extreme pain, but the people in my life would be incensed by such a reckless choice. Yet we make statements like “It’s all in your head” all the time, minimizing the experiences of our brains and neglecting their care.
Let’s stop telling people to “get over it” and start asking, “How can I help you heal?”
Body shame has severed our love of activity. In the chronicles of body shame, movement became a thing we avoided lest we jiggle while in motion!
Many of us cannot recall a time when moving our bodies was something other than a way to punish them for failing to meet society’s fictitious ideals.
From far away, transformation looks like a miracle, or the result of magical powers possessed by the transformed person. Transformation is not magic. It’s hard work. But it is also doable work. When we can see another person’s labor toward their transformation, we know it is not some secret sauce but instead a daily commitment to a new way of life.
Yes, we believed that our bodies were too big, too dark, too pale, too scarred, too ugly, so we tucked, folded, hid ourselves away and wondered why our lives looked infinitesimally smaller than what we knew we were capable of. Yes, we have been less vibrant employees, less compassionate neighbors, less tolerant of the bodies of others, not because we are bad people but because we are guilty of each of those counts against ourselves.
the only sustainable foundation for a changed world is internal transformation.
we cannot build in the world that which we have not built in ourselves.
Research repeatedly shows that weight stigma and bias lead to ongoing substandard care by medical professionals.
We live in a fatphobic culture that assigns default status to thin bodies while labeling all others abnormal, unhealthy outliers.
The pernicious lie of fatness as an individual failure of self-control, lack of discipline, evidence of gluttony and laziness all wrapped in a scientifically unsound narrative of health often leads even the most vocal intersectional social justice activists to promote weight loss and advance fatphobic body terrorism.
Speak up when you see your friends lauding weight loss as achievement and let them know how “before and after” pictures present “before” bodies as wrong and “after” bodies as better.
Equity proposes that we give people what they need to best meet their unique circumstances. Equity acknowledges we have varying needs and seeks to provide resource and opportunity based on what will help us achieve the best outcomes based on our specific circumstances.
