When You Say Exercise and Diet
[Trigger warning: discussion of fat-shaming and eating disorders.]
When it comes to obesity and fatness, many people will say that fat people should just eat healthy and start exercising, and then they’ll slim down to acceptable proportions. This concern-trolling suggestion relies on a number of faulty assumptions:
- That the fat person isn’t already eating healthily and exercising, and their current appearance reflects those behaviors.
- That the fat person is fat by choice, and has never tried to become thin–in a society where the images of idealized physique are uniformly thin.
- That becoming thin is easy and simply a matter of willpower–that if you diet enough and exercise enough, you will become thin.
- That being fat is not acceptable.
I’ve made my share of these shitty assumptions in the past, and my god, how I wish I could take them back. In the past decade and a half, I have watched the women in my life–and it has only been women, but if you’re male and have experience with fatness, feel free to speak up in the comments–torment themselves over the way they looked. So when you say that fat people should “eat healthy” and “just exercise,” blithely assuming that that’ll make a fat person slim down into a thin person, these are the people I think of:
Katie, Veronica, and Carly, in the 8th and 9th grade. We had class together a couple periods before lunch, and they would discuss their diets and compare what they’d eaten that day. Or more accurately, they’d compare what they hadn’t eaten that day, detailing breakfasts that they’d skipped, recess snacks they’d passed over, and lunches they were only going to eat half of. These girls were 12-14 years old and their brains and bodies were still forming. They needed to eat, they needed fuel for their growth spurts and their brain development and their full days of classes and P.E., and they were already starving themselves. They were children, and they were already counting calories. Before they’d left puberty, they’d already internalized the message that they needed to be thin, and that fat was ugly.
I particularly recall one day, when Katie showed the other two girls a Snickers bar, which was going to be her lunch. You see, Snickers bars have the calories written on the packaging, so they make it easy to count calories. Katie had skipped breakfast and the Snickers bar was going to be the entirety of her lunch. The three girls did become thinner–but tell me again how that’s an indication of health, when their behavior was blatantly unhealthy.
A friend came over for a visit when she was home on break from college. She’d always been plump and curvy, and the first thing my mom said when she saw her was, “Boy, you look great! You’ve lost so much weight!”
The friend had lost weight. She’d lost weight because she had had anorexia, been running obsessively, and been doing large amounts of cocaine and struggling with PTSD because a man raped her. Tell me again how being thin means you’re eating healthily and exercising properly and it means you’re healthier than a heavier person.
A college friend of mine was very short and very curvy in a way that reads as fat. She was a varsity athlete who spent 15 hours a week in the gym for sports practice and weight lifting. She ate healthily, with lots of fruit, vegetables, and grains. She was in great physical condition, but because of her build, she still looked plump. Looking fat is not the same thing as being unhealthy, nor is it an indicator of someone’s exercise or eating habits.
One year, my friend began exercising obsessively while skipping meals, and found that this made her look thinner. Nevermind the health consequences of doing weight lifting while skipping meals; she was becoming thin, by god, and talked about how if she could just summon the self-discipline to ignore the hunger pangs of starvation, she could keep up this routine and become thin and beautiful. She had anorexia.
Evi was a beautiful, intelligent, and fat woman I met in Rome. She felt uncomfortable in two-piece bathing suits because of her body. That summer, we walked miles all over the city on a daily basis, and ate very healthily, with lots of organic fruits, vegetables, and balanced diets, with little soda or junk food. Despite the common assumption that fat people aren’t physically fit, Evi had no problem with trekking all over Rome, up and down hills in the blazing heat, standing in museums for hours–or at least no more than any of the thin people did. Evi was just as fat at the end of the summer as she’d been at the beginning, despite getting tons of exercise–and just as beautiful and smart.
My mom is incredibly physically fit: rarely sick, golfs every day, goes on eight-mile walks, hauls 50 lb. sacks of concrete, and hikes up mountains. By American standards, she is thin. By Korean standards, she is fat and heavy. By any standards, she is extremely healthy and in top physical form. I remember, nevertheless, how my aunt ridiculed my mom when she wasn’t around, joking about how my mom’s feet were too big to find shoes in a Korean department store, and how she was really, really big. My mom and I have the same build, with one exception: she’s thinner than I am. Thanks, aunt.
Over the years, I’ve watched my mom guilt trip herself over eating a cookie (“I’m going to have to run an extra hour at the gym!”) and get frustrated with herself for not being able to lose belly fat or drop weight, all while eating extremely healthily and spending an hour at the gym every day. She couldn’t lose weight, no matter how much she tried, and when she went to the doctor to see if she had a thyroid problem, he told her that there was nothing wrong with her, and she just needed to eat even less and work out even more. The message here is that if you buy into this game, (1) you can never be thin enough; (2) exercise and diet are not magic bullets.
My oldest friend is fat. She’s also gorgeous, stylish, extroverted, smart, and funny. But she’s fat, and because of that, she hates her body and thinks she’s disgusting and life would be better if she were only thinner. She hates her body and loathes herself–how tragic is that, when she’s a great person?
Pocochina is funny and whip smart, and struggled with anorexia and exercise bulimia for years. She starved herself: “I remember breaking a fast after five days of band camp with a bullion cube in boiling water – didn’t want to use two, that’d have been excessive – and being disappointed in myself when I added a couple of crackers.” But she still wore a size 13, which is considered fat, and when she started eating again, the doctor told her she needed to stop. Poco gave up junk food and fucking starved herself and worked out and was still fat.
Edit: Update from pocochina in the comments:
Can I just add to the above some non-disordered behavior which might illustrate the resilience of my body? I spent two summers doing drum corps – that is fourteen hours a day, 7 days a week, of serious cardio and resistance training, and it’s a traveling group sport, so food is limited for financial reasons and diet is planned for nutrition. I was…one size smaller than I am now? Maybe two? Treating exercise like it was two full time jobs. One full time job per dress size, maybe?
That body is awesome. It let me be one of the more physically and artistically consistent people there. This was a huge step in my recovery, because I’d bought all the bullshit about your body reflecting how hard-working and worthwhile you were. And I had to get in there myself to learn that it didn’t.
Why does anyone think that diet and exercise are magic bullets? Why does anyone assume that fat people just aren’t trying hard enough, that they have no self-control, that they don’t exercise and don’t eat healthily? Why doesn’t anyone think about the havoc that eating disorders and obsessive exercise can wreak on your body, your mind, your self-esteem, before spouting off about how “fat people just need to try harder, like I do”? Do they have no fat friends? Do they have no female friends who’ve ever struggled with their weight, body image, and self-esteem? I don’t think that my experience with my friends and family has been atypical, and I know at least three women who had anorexia, and Katie’s behavior probably qualifies, as well.
I think of girls and women who are thin, who are fat, and who are all beautiful and interesting and who deserve so much better than being told that their bodies aren’t good enough. They deserve so much better than being shamed into torturing themselves, starving themselves and making themselves lightheaded with hunger and exhaustion just so they’ll lose weight–and being told, if they succeed, that starvation is a good look for them, and if they don’t, that they’re still not thin enough and they must not have tried hard enough or wanted it enough.
I’ll close with some fragments out of old journal entries from the fall of 2006, when I thought I was disgustingly overweight and ugly. I was eating healthy and working out every day, and still. Wasn’t. Thin. Enough.
October 2006: Goal: Get down to 135 lbs., then 130. Become … silhouette-skinny. [I.e. so thin that clothes would hang loosely and I would disappear when turned sideways. It's an aesthetic I've always liked, but one that my bone structure will never fit.]
October 2006: Losing weight is good. However, I need a belt because my fabulous Monaco size 6 jeans are slipping off my hips. I feel overweight now. … My goal is for my Gap 4s to be loose … I’m not sure that’s possible without starving myself, though, as well as running miles and miles.
November 2006: Get your life organized, manage your time, go to the gym, stop eating takeout, lose weight. [takeout once a week--a horror indeed!]
Obsessing over my weight and viewing food and exercise as means to lose weight rather than as things to enjoy and means to be fit only served to amplify my misery. I used to think I was weak for lacking the will power to be anorexic; that is how poisonous the “if you’d just eat better and exercise more” mantra is. No one should ever have to wish for an eating disorder and think themselves weak because their body insists on getting enough food. The fat people you shame might already be physically fit and eating healthily, and the thin people you praise might be suffering from eating disorders. Size is not a good indication of eating or exercise practices, at any size.
Why Internet Comments Matter
[Warning: fat-shaming comments are the topic of the post]
Kate Harding recently wrote a fantastic article for Salon that started with Southwest’s shitty treatment of a fat celebrity and went on to discuss the fact that shaming, mocking, ridiculing, despising, concern trolling, and loathing fat people happens all the time to regular, non-celebrity fat people (“Kevin Smith: The face of flying while fat“). In the article, she wrote how anti-fat policies on airlines almost kept her sister from being able to say goodbye to their dying mother:
Here’s the first thing I think of when this issue comes up, for instance: The weekend my mom was dying. Two of my siblings and I got to her bedside within hours of getting the call that she’d had a massive heart attack. Our other sister took two days to get there. She could fly coach, technically, with a seatbelt extender and the armrests digging into her sides. But she couldn’t afford two seats, especially on such short notice, and knew she might be forced to buy another if the airline decided she was too big to count as a single human being. She knew she might be bumped from the flight she’d paid for, and forced to wait around for one that was less full, for who knows how long, while our mother’s organs were shutting down in another country. And she knew that even if she was allowed to fly on the flight she’d booked, there was every chance she’d end up sitting next to someone who would spend the whole time sighing heavily and throwing her dirty looks — then probably spend the rest of her life telling the story of being next to that awful fat woman on a flight from Boston to Toronto, that disgusting creature who just booked a single seat without a thought to the people who would have to brush up against her monstrous bulk for a couple of hours, like she had to be somewhere so important it was worth inconveniencing strangers.
… my sister chose to drive a thousand miles as fast as she could, hoping she’d get there in time. While she was on the road, the doctors informed us that there was nothing else they could do, so the whole family’s focus shifted from wondering whether Mom would make it to wondering whether my sister would. … But that agonizing day of asking my mother to please hang on a little longer — while she was wracked with pain beyond the reach of morphine, moaning like a wounded animal when awake enough to communicate at all – is the first thing I always think of when the debate about whether fat people deserve affordable air travel comes up. You think of some lumbering beast who had the gall to “steal” an inch of your seat that one time. I think of a dying woman waiting for the last of her babies to say goodbye.
The main gist of the article is: people treat fat people like shit all the time, and this actively affects their quality of life. Awful, right?
Well. The article is making the rounds in Google Reader, and so I saw some comments on it today where the commenters had clearly skipped over all the portions about Kate’s dying mother and other fat people who have difficulties flying:
I think of the non-famous people who have been thrown off flights for making thin people uncomfortable — the brother and sister on their way home from their mom’s memorial service, the man who didn’t make it to a family funeral at all, the man living on disability who couldn’t afford a second seat to meet with doctors about a liver transplant — and all of the commenters at my blog who say, every time we talk about this, “I’m terrified to fly” or “I just don’t fly.” … because they’re fat. And they can’t afford two seats. … the risk of smaller-scale humiliations — sitting next to someone who complains about their size; absorbing flight attendants’ naked disdain; overhearing someone say “I hope I don’t have to sit next to her“; being told, as Smith’s seatmate on his later flight was, that they should really purchase two seats in the future to avoid making other people uncomfortable; plus the aforementioned dirty looks and heavy sighs — is often enough to keep them at home. It’s enough to make people say things like, … “If I start driving now, I think I’ll get there in time to say goodbye.”
Instead, their focus was on that fat celebrity that was kicked off of Southwest, and how they had no sympathy for him. I am uneasy about the ethics of reprinting comments posted in a Google Reader feed, which are semi-private, so here’s a summary:
- He’s rich, so he should be able to go to the gym, eat healthy, and pay doctors and nutritionists to help him lose weight. If he tries hard and can’t lose weight, he can afford weight loss surgery.
- He’s sedentary and eats lots of processed foods, so his fatness is entirely his fault and I have no sympathy for how he was treated.
- Won’t decreasing prejudice against fat people just encourage people to become fat?
- A person just shouldn’t let himself go like that.
- He’s okay with being fat, so he’s setting a bad example for the children. And obesity is causing many problems in the health care system.
- Genetics might have something to do with it, but I can’t believe it accounts for everything, so I’m going to assume that personal choices are what makes them fat.
- Fat people can lose weight and keep it off.
- I have the means (time, money, energy) to keep myself looking good, and I take pride in that. So fat people’s choice to not do that is their choice, and they have to live with the consequences of that.
- I know some people are poor and uneducated about healthy eating, and so they deserve my sympathy, but these other fat people? Totally fat because they choose to be fat.
In other words, the commenters demonstrated a complete and utter lack of empathy; a lack of understanding of how class, race, and able-bodied-ness often intersect with fatness; a lack of understanding of recent studies (NYT) that show that genetics play a huge role in body weight; and broadly speaking, a great dollop of anti-fat prejudice. We went back and forth in the thread and it was enormously frustrating trying to talk about why, exactly, shaming fat people is wrong and why a lot of their assumptions are bunk. (For a more detailed discussion of the topic, see the FAQ at Shapely Prose.)
So, why does this matter? It’s just comments on the internet, right? People say things that are privileged, prejudiced, rude, cruel, stupid, or downright ignorant on the internet all the time. What’s the big deal? Close your browser and walk away. Disengage.
The comments matter because each one of them is from a person (or this case, two people, who left those comments over the course of a thread). They represent a real person somewhere out there who holds those thoughts and who interacts with fat people–or who doesn’t interact with fat people, because they despise the bad fatties who choose to be fat and pity the deserving fatties, the ones who’ve earned their compassion by being too poor to learn about nutrition and health.
The kicker is? I know these people. They are acquaintances and I’ve met them in person and gone to their house and broken bread with them. They’re not just random people on the internet, which underscores the point that no one is just a random person on the internet. All the comments on newspaper sites and blogs and public boards and forums are from real people with real thoughts, and that’s why it’s important to engage in dialogue with them. That is why internet comments matter and why I care about them and why I become, let’s face it, angry and frustrated while I choose keep engaging with them. It’s never “just” the internet.
This post has been brought to you by excessive frustration with today’s Fat Bingo comment thread.
