This started as a comment on another post, but I really wanted to post about it (and expand upon it) separately as well.
One of the most important things I have learned recently (within the last couple years) is to stop conflating “fatness” with “ugliness.” We, women especially, are taught to do this from a young age. When a friend says, “I’m so fat!” our response as her friend is always expected to be, “No, don’t say that, you’re beautiful.” In doing so, we position “fat” as the opposite of “beautiful,” and therefore as a synonym for “ugly.”
But “fat” is the opposite of “skinny” or “fit” or “healthy weight.” Not “beautiful.” Fatness is an objective measurement; you are either a healthy weight or not. Beauty, on the other hand, is subjective. But when we conflate an objective measurement like fatness with a subjective measurement like ugliness, we begin to think that ugliness is just as objective, and if we’re fat, we’re objectively ugly. And ugliness, unlike fatness, is not something we can so easily control. So maybe we start to think we can’t control our fatness.
Because of this, I stayed in denial about how much weight I had gained for too long. Accepting my fatness meant accepting objective ugliness, and I wasn’t emotionally willing to do that. By getting to the point where I could understand that these were different things, I was able to examine my fatness on its own as an objective measurement of my body. I am fat. That does not mean I am ugly. And only by being objective and honest about my fatness, without the conflation of ugliness, have I been able to take accurate stock and admit my need to change.
Now, this will be the most controversial part of my post, but this is why I hate the amount of hate that the Fat Acceptance movement gets. They are the ones that have really pushed the idea that we need to stop conflating “fatness” and “ugliness.” Without Fat Acceptance ideas, I would have continued to conflate these two things and continued to be in Fat Denial. Fat Acceptance and plus sized models also help drive an actually-fashionable plus sized fashion industry, and that allows me to keep my self-esteem and confidence in balance enough to avoid self-loathing depression. If you can’t find clothes that make you look good and professional, it’s easy to want to avoid interactions at work and just shrink away, because how you look is always on your mind, and that makes your performance suffer and leads to doubting your abilities, which can lead to stress and depression, neither of which are helpful for weight loss. But when I have an important meeting, I can put on my plus-sized striped blazer (yes, horizontal stripes, and they look good), slap on some boss red lipstick, and own that meeting like I’m supposed to. That’s only possible because there are plus-sized professional clothing options that look good, and we’re not just relegated to the world of muumuus and stretch pants. The Fat Acceptance movement also gave me the ability to accept my body’s existence in a new way. As someone who’s always been overweight, I just wanted my body to go away. I took up too much space in a crowd, I was in people’s way, I hated how I looked, I hated my body. I think most people who get healthy recognize that body hatred doesn’t lead down the correct path. But in Fat Acceptance, I saw fat bodies posing and doing activities and taking up space and not standing/sitting/existing in all of the unobtrusive and overly polite ways I did. It was only then that I started to have a positive relationship with my body. It was only then that I believed my body had a right to space like anyone else’s, including a right to take up space in a gym, or on a walking/biking trail. I don’t just admire the skinny women just sitting around in beautiful clothes anymore; I admire the women in the gym, hair up, no makeup, with their defined biceps and watermelon-crushing thighs. Now, I no longer hate my body, I respect it. I no longer think about how much happier I’d be if I made it mostly disappear, I think about all the things I want it to do. This is all entirely because of the Fat Acceptance movement and learning that myself and my body deserve to exist and be treated kindly no matter what size I am, haters and body-shamers be damned.
Striving to be a healthy weight is good, certainly, but keeping it up for the long-term requires establishing self-love first and learning to make the decision truly for yourself and not because of societal expectations. Before I could really start losing the weight, I had to find Fat Acceptance. Some people are still in the stage where they are learning to love themselves, and they need Fat Acceptance more than weight loss advice. Some people may never leave that stage. Because we are not them, we should not judge them harshly against the standards we set for ourselves. We don’t know their lives. The important thing is, our society positions us to have unhealthy relationships with our bodies. We are bombarded with unreasonable beauty standards (both male and female, not even considering the way those standards make trans* folks feel), media that conflates thinness with goodness (Disney’s fat characters were pretty much only villains and servants of the beautiful main characters - Shrek has a way better message than Beauty and the Beast in that regard), and constant advertising for the diet industry meant to make us feel bad about our bodies so we’ll buy more products. We have to learn to decide to get healthy on our own terms, for our own reasons, and for our own bodies’ needs.
Fat Acceptance empowered me to make my own decisions about my body’s needs. I am now truly choosing to lose weight for me, not because of the discomfort it causes society. And because I’m doing it for me, I have more motivation to keep going than ever.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2IhFU3P
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