Fatphobia in a Pandemic
[Image is tweet from @ alyssaharad that reads: Here is my late night tweet about all the "pandemic pounds" articles we are seeing/going to see: they are writing about physical weight instead of trauma, grief, depression, anxiety, survival and comfort. Fatphobia makes more money than attending to mental/emotional health. ]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ways that fatphobia has manifested during the pandemic in new and exhausting ways and I want to speak to it a bit. This tweet inspired me to finally write it out.
There is always money to be made off of making us all feel like shit about our bodies. The weight loss industry is projected to be valued at nearly THREE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS annually, worldwide by 2027. (Warning: that link is fatphobic and healthist.)
Capitalist driven fatphobia doesn’t rest during a pandemic. It doesn’t care that we’re experiencing mass trauma, continued disruption of our “normal” lives. It doesn’t care about our actual well-being...it never has and it never will.
Capitalist driven fatphobia likes that we can be better exploited for profit when we are vulnerable. We’re more vulnerable now than ever before, in many ways.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about how with vaccination taking off, many of us will be seeing family/friends in-person for the first time in forever. Take my specific case...I’m twice vaccinated and recently I saw family I haven’t seen in a year in person for the first time. I’d never gone more than 4 months without seeing those folks in-person before...like ever. Suddenly I went three times longer than that until I saw them in the flesh again.
Someone who you have seen for months and months on a Zoom screen or FaceTime from the shoulders up will begin to become a flesh and blood human in front of you again. So many of us will be navigating moments like this (and we may even have nerves about it, related to our own bodies.)
I think about the coworkers that I used to see every day M-F all year in person and I now only see on screens. Some of them have had entire pregnancies and given birth in isolation. Some of them have had major changes to their health situations and have received new diagnoses (I fall into this category.) Some of them have made major changes to their daily routines, their exercise and eating habits.
All of us have aged 12 months (so far.) Bodies change. They simply do, that is a rare universal truth. And they change in SO MANY WAYS that are normal and neutral in a year, which includes weight changes. If you see someone every day in passing, the changes are slow and often overall imperceptible. But if you have a mental image of someone who you don’t see for a year and then you see them in person those changes may feel jarring as you notice them.
There’s a good chance that if you were raised with even the smallest exposure to mainstream US media/culture, you’ve been indoctrinated with a fatphobic mindset. It’s natural and normal to notice changes in someone’s body when you haven’t seen them in a long time, but it is NOT natural or normal to find those changes to be negative when it involves weight gain and positive when it involves weight loss.
THAT frame work (thinner = better) is fatphobic programming driven by exploiting our shame to make money off of us. And it’s what we each need to push ourselves to just fucking END already.
Capitalist fatphobic programming is powerful and strong. You might not yet be able to control an automatic/unconscious neural firing of “I see my friend is heavier now and that is bad” but you CAN control holding that thought in mindful awareness, choosing to REJECT IT, and then....
*stay with me here*
NOT COMMENTING ON THEIR BODY.
Full stop. Just not saying anything about it...keeping your fatphobic thoughts to yourself and interrogating and naming the thoughts as fatphobic to start working on your own deprogramming.
Your own words, reactions, and the messages you put out ARE controllable and are your responsibility. This goes for making negative comments about your own body and how it may have changed.
You don’t need to be an extended tool of the fatphobic, capitalist make-you-feel-like-shit industrial complex. You can rise above this. We don’t have to be forever beholden to the narratives that produce shame in ourselves and others and continues to hurt fat people, by manifesting as discrimination in the medical system, in jobs, etc. \
You CAN free yourself from all of this and as someone who has been on my own journey of “radical self love” and deprogramming of internalized fatphobia for 15 years now, it absolutely DOES get easier. I may still backslide, but the vast majority of the time I feel free from the self-hatred that used to plague me and that’s a wonderful feeling.
If any of this piques your interest, may I suggest you check out The Body is Not An Apology (for ways to personally change your mindsets in practical ways) and @bigfatscience (for more of the science side of the topic.)