Written by: Dustin LindenSmith
Time to read: 9 minutes
Trigger warning: In this article, there are references to abuse and trauma (with no details described or disclosed). There are also sensitive emotional topics discussed which could trigger an emotional reaction in you if they resonate strongly or if they make you recall painful events from your own life. Please be mindful of your own state of mind right now, and exercise healthy boundaries around engaging with this article if you don’t feel emotionally safe, secure, and stable at this time.
My first blog post was tied to my first Aleo webinar about what it’s like for fat people to live in a fatphobic world. I suggested four specific actions we can take to find some peace of mind within that reality: (1) changing the way we think (and act) about fatness and our bodies; (2) cleaning up our social media feeds; (3) working on our boundaries; and (4) seeking professional support to work with any or all of the above. My second webinar was focused on how I started doing real work on that first step through the illuminating and inspiring work of the American Black fat activist Sonya Renee Taylor through her book, The Body Is Not An Apology. In this blog post, I will share some of the insights I learned from her powerful writing.
On developing the mental and emotional skills to enter recovery in the first place
Like any fat person, I have experienced various forms of discrimination and negative judgments from others—even from within my own family. But my suffering in that regard has also been strongly mitigated by the fact that being an affluent, cisgender White man affords me many privileges that help me overcome that bias in the external world. Even so, that privilege hasn’t insulated me from developing my own internal shame and self-loathing about the size and shape of my body, and for how poorly it has always fit into our culture’s apparent standards for attractiveness.
In order for me to enter recovery from my binge-eating disorder, I first needed to overcome that shame and self-loathing, develop accurate self-awareness and attunement to my own body’s internal states, and then adopt a more intuitive approach to food and movement that was driven by my body’s in-the-moment needs, as opposed to that of my emotions alone. I had to start that by changing my mind.
A reminder about how and why we arrived here
News articles abound on “the obesity epidemic” and how much our numbers are increasing year over year throughout the entire world. The traditional medical model for “treating obesity” has failed in almost every respect, and most of us have also experienced some form of fat-shaming at a doctor’s office at some point. The medical field has also been convinced by recent pharmacological innovations in satiety hormone re-regulation (i.e., GLP-1 inhibitors like Ozempic) that pathologizing the mere state of being fat and taking a drug to fix it will save all of us fat folks from our certain morbid fate.
Many fat people have also had a love-hate relationship with food and movement (i.e., diet and exercise) for much of our lives—not to mention our bodies themselves. We have often developed a distrust in our own judgment about what our body actually needs or wants at any given time. This is a natural result of having successfully lost weight so many times on a calorie-restricted diet, only to gain it all back—with interest—months later. Many of us also have trauma histories, relational issues, and self-image and body-image problems which all increase those feelings of disconnection, dissociation, disavowal, shame, and mistrust towards ourselves. Shame and trauma work together to convince us that our bodies are not good enough, not small enough, not strong enough, or not attractive enough. Dr. Becky Kennedy has also written about how common unresolved ruptures can be in parent-child relationships, but that many of us in larger bodies are likely to have experienced more of them by virtue of our family often trying to get us to diet or address our fatness.
Developing a new way to look at ourselves and our fatness
It was Sonya Renee Taylor’s writing that first truly awakened me to these five essential truths:
- at our basic, human essence, we are all perfectly good, and normal —no matter what size we are, or whatever number comes up when we step on a scale;
- for perfectly valid reasons (often arising from childhood trauma or adverse events), many of us have used food for emotional self-regulation since childhood—and this may have resulted in our eventually becoming fat;
- given those valid underlying reasons and our dysregulated eating habits and relationships with our bodies that resulted from them, many of us who now live in fat bodies are faced with inexorable pressure from all directions to lose weight, and we’re encouraged to think of ourselves as failures if we can’t manage to follow a weight-loss diet to get smaller;
- this process develops within us an adversarial relationship with our bodies; and
- no matter what size you are, you deserve to have a peaceful relationship with food and your body. You also deserve to eat full, delicious, nutrient-filled meals that will nourish your body and mind to accomplish all of the important things you do in your life each day. You also deserve to each those meals without feeling the crushing weight of internalized shame, blame, or negative judgment that makes you feel like a bad person inside.
Inquiry # 7, 9, and 12: Body shame origin story
Sonya Renee Taylor’s book is peppered with thoughtful journal and meditation prompts to propel you along this path to self-discovery. Three of those inquiries focus on the body shame origin story. She explains that this developed in our youth in response to rapid or unexpected change—often arising from puberty. It occurred when we became aware of difference, and it made us assume there was some “should” about our body which then became attached to our feelings of value and worth. If we happen to have experienced abuse, that complicates our body shame even further because of how we may erroneously perceive our bodies to have incited that abuse.
Here are some of her prompts for you to consider about your own body shame origin story:
- When did you first become aware of difference, and when did you first start to feel different from others?
- When did you first become aware of something your body should do/have/look like?
- Who in your life is most affected by your body shame, and how is it impacting them?
Sonya Renee Taylor also encourages us to make peace with not understanding all of these differences we notice. She asks us to make peace with those differences, and then to make peace with our bodies.
Inquiry #19: The fog of living in body shame
Sonya Renee Taylor asks: In what ways has the fog of living in body shame hindered your most amazing life? What is incomplete, unexplored, ignored inside you because of your belief that something about you and your body is wrong?
Personal Note: I noticed real grief arise within me when I did this inquiry. I experienced grief for the years I had spent harming myself with food, and for all the opportunities I had missed out on being mindful and happy with my family and friends because I had spent so many years living in a chronically dissociated state from being in that fog of body shame. I encourage anyone who does this work to be gentle, loving, and graceful with yourselves as you contemplate what you may have lost as a result of this way of living. Take solace in the fact that you are recognizing where you are now, and that you are ready to inhabit your body and your life in a much more open and embodied way than you ever have before.
You are not your thoughts
As we continue to reflect on these prompts, Sonya Renee Taylor encourages us to reflect on the differences between thinking, doing, and being. She reminds us that:
- we are not our thoughts;
- not every thought we have is true; and
- many of us are caught in negative thought patterns about ourselves and our bodies that are simply not true.
She asks us to notice the next time our actions are not in alignment with our thoughts or our beliefs, and to ask ourselves: what is our body trying to tell us? And how can we listen to what our body has to say if we’re not used to doing that or don’t have the first clue of how to start?
On the challenges of becoming embodied
Many of us are unskilled at listening to what our bodies have to tell us. Not coincidentally, if we have engaged in chronic weight-loss dieting, we have trained ourselves to ignore our body’s calls for food that arise from being in a state of caloric deficit so often. Listening to our body and noticing what comes up simply does not come naturally to those of us who can’t even stand the sight of themselves in a mirror or who feel like they will never find love because they’re fat. We are simply too accustomed to living in a disconnected state from our bodies during most of our waking hours. Extend some forgiveness and grace towards yourself, and see if you can gently extend a helping hand to your own self to guide yourself out of the fog.
As I bring this article to a close, I would like to invite you to experience the gift of your own body right now through this short mindfulness exercise:
take a few moments to let your body settle gently into a relaxed and comfortable position
observe yourself take three… deep… breaths…
bring your attention to your body, starting with the feeling of your feet in contact with the ground
let your attention flow naturally up through the tops of your feet, your ankles, your calves, your knees, your thighs, and your hips
let your attention keep flowing naturally up through your belly, your chest, your back, and your shoulders
let your attention flow down your arms, all the way to the tips of your fingers, and then back up to your shoulders
as your attention moves up from your shoulders to your neck, let all of the tension in those muscles release…
and as your attention continues to flow upwards through to the top of your head, let the tension in your head, face, neck and shoulders release
now
let your attention rest on your breathing
and let yourself sit in silence for as long as you are comfortable