Work + casual fatphobia
I keep wanting to rant about this…Someone I’m connected to in a professional capacity ALWAYS updates me about her various diets and weight loss efforts. It’s slowly driving me bonkers. She’s overall a kind and sweet person and social justice aware but NOT about her deeply internalized fatphobia. I can’t just fully, finally shut it down how I want to (given said professional context and related power dynamics) but it’s really, really unpleasant.
I say all the nicest versions of “love yourself, eat what you want” that I can, I very clearly politely steer away from the topic every time she brings it up, I question assigning morality to eating food you like (ie is eating what you want really being “bad?”), and I don’t engage with her reports of pounds lost with anything encouraging or positive, etc. To me, it’s abundantly clear this convo is a no-go for me but she doesn’t get it. I really REALLY want to say something final and firm like “I have worked VERY hard to free myself from fatphobic diet culture and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop bringing up anything about diets, food, or weight to me ever again.”
I’m pretty sure her mentality is that I, as a visibly fat lady, would inherently think weight loss is admirable and that it is forefront of my mind, etc. But like…the literal world I know her from is a girls serving org that is body positive and teaching girls to try to actively avoid getting trapped in self loathing, fatphobic shit. So like GIRL JUST LET IT GO ALREADY.
I know the fatphobic world is really really loud so in many other contexts and she’s probably experienced her views to be the norm but it’s very clearly NOT not in this context. So she is either willfully ignoring that or simply not cognizant of the culture in which she is operating AND she is going out of her way to also ignore alllllllllllllll the signals I am sending her of do. not. engage. with. me. on this particular topic. It’s making me very close to letting my mouth run like that line above and just see what happens.
That is, letting my mouth run in the most professional version of the sense, but still.