from the newsletter… on fat & fatness
i’ve been thinking a lot lately about fat.
if you’ve been reading for awhile, you know i’m anti-diet, absitively posilutely body positive, and all for balance and moderation in most things, including moderation. and i’ve written before about fatness and fitness. today though, while i don’t quite have a cohesive manifesto, it feels somewhat urgent to share some thoughts about fat.
let's consider the following points:
fat is a thick, soft, melty substance that is loved for flavor, satiety, snuggling and to keep animals warm. sumo wrestlers, babies, steaks and breasts are all prized for their fatness, but when virtually anything else is fat, somebody has some kinda problem with it.
fat is for eating, but there's been a lot of debate over how much and what type is “ok.” possessing fat on a human male body means he will starve to death more slowly if there's no food around. possessing fat on a female body means she is prepared to feed a baby and also starve to death more slowly, but also somehow that there must be something wrong with her.
while fat itself is a real thing, fatness, or the quality of “being fat” is not an absolute. it isn’t the pull of gravity, the magnetic field of the poles, or the turn of the seasons. it’s culturally, temporally and actually relative.
how to measure fatness:
weigh it, but this only works for food. weight in a human body is water and bones and muscles and inflammation and organs and trillions of cells. which means that weight is not an accurate measure of fat in a human body. and it's all different on the moon.
the bmi. the body mass index uses math and a made-up chart to determine whether we are overweight (and thus at risk of poor health and general misery) or not. the bmi is bullshit. there are plenty of fit & healthy people out there that top the bmi charts on account of being densely muscled and not very tall. case in point: a close dancer friend who stands at about 5’6” and weighs in around 160 lbs (all booty and good jumping legs) was once told by a doctor she was overweight. this was preposterous. look at her and you’d see she was an entrancing, sculptural ball of energy, an artist in an athlete’s body. she’s also Black, and the bmi is based on measurements of white men, making it an inappropriate measure for a great deal of the population. the bmi is racist. this is not ok.
your jeans. sure, but it's not only fat that makes jeans tight. your ass is a muscle (actually 9 of them per cheek). plus bones change. and burritos exist. also: dryers.
calipers. ok but gross.
thus, fatness can’t be measured absolutely - only comparatively.
and this means we can't actually determine how fat is too fat, or for what purpose.
the quality of fatness in a body is a comparison, nothing more. while i have never exactly qualified as a person of size, i know that my same-sized body that was described as “athletic” in denver suddenly became “voluptuous” in nyc, and the *only* time i’ve been consistently complimented on my figure in the past 15 years (aside from my husband's continuous adoration) was when i returned from west africa with malaria and hadn’t eaten in a week.
if that ain’t relative (and way, way culturally loaded) i don’t know what is.
and because we can't truly measure it with accuracy, fatness is therefore an unreliable criteria for evaluating anything else.
culturally, when we see fatness on a body, we make subtle, often unconscious evaluations about that body, including but not limited to its beauty, health, athleticism, fitness and, when it's our own body, self-worth.
but as someone who works with many different bodies, let me tell you - you can learn a lot more about a person from their posture than you can their spare tire or double chin. so we must stop drawing conclusions from the possession of qualities of fatness.
from our tinder dates to our doctors to the little voice inside our heads, here are some incorrect assumptions often made about fatness that need to be checked:
fat people overeat, binge eat, or emotionally eat
fat people eat too much of one thing - sugar, meat, carbs, dairy, junk food, fast food, soda
fat people are greedy, or lazy, or incapable
fat people have low self-confidence
fat people are unhealthy. (this one reeeally gets my goat, but health shaming is a topic for another conversation entirely)
finally, that fat people would be better if they were less fat.
this last point is the one i want you to take home from this newsletter. it's wrong and it sucks and yet, it persists.
a dear friend said something recently that stuck with me. we were talking about being afraid to get pregnant because what if we never “got our bodies back” and she said, “people like you and i would never let that happen.” i know she meant it as a compliment, but it made me sad.
y’all. i’m a career exerciser. a movement teacher. a fitness professional. i am not a better person than anyone because i have (semi-)thin privilege and can still fit in my pre-pregnancy jeans (kind of). it is literally my job to exercise, i happen to live within a couple blocks of high quality food that i can afford to buy, and i have no moral high ground because of it. there is zero moral failing if a new mother isn’t exercising or losing the “baby weight” because she’s simply being a human woman in a certain time of life.
and there is zero moral failing in possessing, eating, or otherwise enjoying fat.
so, what now?
as i step down from my soapbox today, it's worth mentioning that i logically understand the observations made above, but - and this is a big but, so to speak - when it comes to applying them to myself? sheeyit. different story.
i'm as prone to having a bad day on account of a scale as anyone (which is why i rarely step on them). i appreciate curves everywhere on others but i have constant body dysmorphia and if i think i “look fat” i am frustrated and despondent before i'm cheery and stiff upper-lipped about it. and as much as i'd love a bigger backyard, i still have to talk myself down from the ledge when i can't button my size 4s. i’m trying, but i can’t fully shake it. it's that internal scolding when shit don’t fit, or the flush of shame being caught with my hand in the literal cookie jar.
but i have started to ask myself two questions:
1) will anyone else care about this?
answer: only if i treat them worse, communicate poorly, or get all moody on account of hating myself.
2) would the people of size who inspire me or whom i dearly love be more lovable, valuable or worthy if they were smaller?
(would Lizzo be more beautiful or talented if she were thin?)
answer: clearly not. they are all of those things - lovable, beautiful, talented, worthy, significant, inspiring - just as they are.
and you know what else? so am i.
and so are you.
that's it for today, babes.
i close with a final call to STOP fat shaming ourselves and others - and to stop nonfat yogurt because what good id it really doing in the world?