One Thing. (no.20)

Post #20

Something happened at my daughter’s school. She attends a very small, incredibly diverse, social justice progressive k-12.

Well, this thing, really started months ago, with our bubble family.
My 7 year-old daughter started to grow a belly during the pandemic.
The mother of my daughter’s closest friend, let’s call her Jane, felt the need fat shame my daughter each time she saw her, pointing out her growing belly.
While stunned-- in order to keep the peace, I said nothing. (she’s a litigator and fights for a living so that was not a bear I wanted to poke).
I let it get out of hand, until one day I blew. I handled it poorly. I tried many times to make a repair, but she wasn’t having it.

Fast forward to last week, our school brings in Whitney Fisch, a mental health social worker, to discuss “Disrupting Diet Culture”.
In this discussion, Whitney says, “obesity is not a disease”.
This time, Jane was the one to erupt, that’s the very topic where we had our rupture 18 months ago.
I learned from the administration, she and her husband wrote a letter to heads of school, “who is this charlatan spreading lies about obesity, everyone knows it’s an epidemic. Fat people are the problem, if you are obese you are unhealthy and to blame…”

I didn’t actually read the letter, I’ve spent enough time with these folks, to know exactly what it said, because I’ve been listening to this fat phobic rhetoric for years, as our daughters play together. 

A few days later in our class chat, I shared an article from HuffPost called Everything You know About Obesity Is Wrong. It outlines how the medical community have ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives.

Jane was not happy about this, so she made our feud public.
And I finally spoke up.
I’ve dedicated my life to dismantling systems of oppression. I was not about to back down now, even at the great cost to my daughter and my social standing at this school.
It did not make me popular with parents but it did with the administration.

How we eat and view our bodies is like a religion for some. It’s like telling them the God they worship is false. This topic, where I live is more disruptive than vaccines, abortion and guns, combined.  It brings out the ugly in people fast.
And I was Jane years ago. Before 9 months of treatment.

I used to starve myself, hate myself, restrict, count calories, name a diet- I’ve done it. I work out daily, and still I live in a large body. Turning on myself marinating in my own internalized fat phobia. Buying the big lie that being fat is wrong. That I’m a failure because I couldn’t lose the weight.
Before I knew, I didn’t know.

Fat phobia and weight stigma is one of the last socially acceptable forms of oppression. I still hear fat jokes in social circles, on vacation tours and on the radio.

Just recently, I was flipping through the dial and I landed on a morning talk show right as I heard a female host espouse “if you are the mother of an obese child, you are a bad mother. You have no excuse for not controlling what your child eats.”

I was meant to hear that, I rarely ever listen to the radio.
This is in Los Angeles, on a popular morning show.
Where it is still apparently acceptable to shame mothers for rearing large children.

Replace the word “obese” with “black”, “Hispanic”, “homosexual” “disabled”.
And we kinda get it.

Wait you say, those people are born that way.

Fat people make themselves fat. Obesity, we are told is a personal failing.

Well, not according to the science. 95-98% of diets fail, would you use birth control or a vaccine with a 2-5% chance of success?

The reasons are biological and irreversible. According to the article mentioned above, “Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day for the rest of your life.”

We’ve all been socialized to believe there is one way to judge health, one road to beauty, which is an incredibly racist view based in white European thin ideals.

There is body diversity, we are meant to be diverse, not the same.

So blaming someone for being fat, according to the research, is like blaming them for being neurodiverse.

Jane & I have far more in common, than we do that divides.

This is why these big feelings come up, we both carry deep feelings of unworthiness.

She would let me in, in rare moments of vulnerability. She is a woman of color and has had to deal with a lot in her life. It’s made her angry, hardened. She’s the female version of M, my child’s father. I saw it from the moment we first met.

Toasted marshmallows, with this rough exterior to protect themselves from the world, with a soft gooey sweet center that few get to experience. 

Living in a small body is her one thing, the one thing that helps her feel superior, better than others.
Don’t take away the one thing.