Questions 1 to 15 are cultural messages that are harmful, never helpful, while questions 16 to 19 show support for living proud, regardless of appearance.
How did you do? Don’t blame yourself if you found you’ve internalized and transmitted these negative cultural myths. They’re hard to avoid.
Instead, use this exercise to become more aware of them within your own thinking. Reason through them so you’re clear on why they’re harmful. Use the information in the first part of the book to counter those voices in your head and other people’s arguments and hurtful comments about weight, diet, and appearance, even if those “other people” are just an article in a magazine or another anorexic actress on TV.
Next, consider how you can respond differently when you hear these hurtful messages. For instance, if those negative voices in your head and in your life insist “You’d look so much better
if you’d only lose weight
,” try one of the following snappy responses:
• Oh, no. A heart as loving as mine wouldn’t fit in a diminutive body!
• Heaven forbid! There’s not enough of me to go around as it is!
• Bite your tongue! A personality this huge would starve in anything smaller.
• Why would I want to lose weight, when I’m so damn gorgeous right now?
Or my personal favorite:
• And make less of me to love?
Practice saying the ones you like—or develop your own responses. Then the next time you hear that demeaning comment, whether it’s inside your head or from your best friend, you’ll have the perfect answer.
If it feels too intimidating to challenge hurtful comments, try arming yourself with written information you can pass on. The HAES Manifesto in the appendix, for example, is a great tool to help you challenge weight myths. So is the How You Can Best Support Me in Good Health letter, also in the appendix, which my clients find helpful for getting families and friends off their backs.
Shape Your Own Values Around Weight
Since our culture has such a strong voice in defining thin as the only acceptable body shape and size, it’s difficult to appreciate your own size if you don’t create your own value system separate from society’s. Until you do this, you will never learn to accept yourself.
Creating your own values around appearance means deciding for yourself what’s important to you and what beauty looks like
to you.
It also means being able to separate your own needs from social expectations. Compare that to how most people behave these days: determining their self-worth based on how well they meet society’s expectations.
Those Dreaded Doctor Visits
Many large people recount horror stories of physician visits. Indeed, health care practitioners are among the worst offenders of weight bias,
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and surveys show that most heavy people have felt shamed by their physicians. The result? Many larger people delay or avoid medical care.
Don’t. People deserve the same treatment, regardless of size. You do not deserve to be flippantly told that your problems are due to your weight or will be solved if you only lose weight. You have the right to competent, unprejudiced, and sensitive care.
To help ensure that your visit doesn’t end with a weight-loss lecture, ask your friends for referrals or interview prospective health care practitioners about their attitudes toward weight before scheduling an appointment. You can also write a letter to the prospective doctor, introducing yourself and explaining your needs so you can learn up front whether or not you’ll get the care you want. Or supply your physician with the cover letter provided in the appendix, along with the HAES Manifesto.
And remember, you’re in charge of your body and health. If you don’t see the relevance of stepping on a scale in your physician’s office, you have the right to skip it! Or hop on backward if you feel the information is valuable to your physician, but may just trigger bad stuff for you. While it may feel scary to stand up to your health care practitioner, when you’re armed with the knowledge that your weight shouldn’t change the way your doctor treats you, it’s much easier to assert yourself.
Claim your independence from “them.” You know who “they” are . . . they’re the people who dictate what we wear (“
they
say capris are in style this season”), what we eat (“
they
say that soy milk is best”), what we listen to (
“they
say this is a great band”).
Pay attention to how
you
feel about things, whether it’s what you wear, eat, or say.
Here’s an example. Before she started the Health at Every Size program, Sarah associated ice cream with weight gain and ill health—the voices of the “fat police” that she had internalized. Though she loved the taste of ice cream, it was difficult to have a healthy attitude toward eating it and to fully enjoy it. After the HAES program, Sarah noted that those voices had disappeared. She could hear her own inner messages of satisfaction. She found she could naturally stop eating ice cream after a moderate amount, which was in sharp contrast to her pre-HAES days when ice cream meant guilt and no amount ever felt satisfying.
So in claiming your independence, you need to first understand what’s important to
you.
Determining what’s right for you is challenging, given the strength of cultural attitudes and our concern with others’ judgment. So give yourself a break when you feel comparisons coming on or a nagging sense of inadequacy. Deep inside your psyche, you know that
you’re
the only one who can determine if you’re okay. Remind yourself whenever necessary.
Surviving in a Social World
It is hard to accept your body and new lifestyle habits when you are constantly bombarded with messages that you need to change. You will always be surrounded by people who are dieting and obsessed with their weight and by people—ostensibly with your best interest in mind—who encourage you to do the same. It is a sad fact of life that women often bond over commiserating about their flawed bodies or failed diets. To stop participating in this ritual may require large and difficult changes in your social relationships.
How do you confront these cultural attitudes that might otherwise undermine your journey? No one should have to hurt and to rally their defenses against a hostile world, yet we all do. The most potent response is to fortify your own defenses. The more you cultivate your internal resources, the more you recognize your beauty and your value—and the higher your self-esteem—the less others can infiltrate your world.
Next, recognize that you didn’t get to your openness to kicking the diet habit and becoming more accepting of your body weight—if you are even there now—overnight. It probably took a long time for you to be open to reading this book, to accepting the futility of dieting, and to knowing there is a better alternative, and you yourself may be somewhere along that journey, still not totally convinced. We can’t expect others to be magically transported there. It takes time for anyone to make this journey, and we need to be patient with others’ process as well.
Everyone has received the same false messages about dieting and weight that we have, and it’s not surprising that others want to prescribe weight loss and their pet diet—and that many are doing so because they sincerely want to help.
Acknowledging that drive to help is the best place to begin. Your friends and family—your doctor—probably don’t want to hurt you and are not likely to be aware of the pain they are causing. Once they become aware of the destructiveness of their comments or advice, they may be willing to act differently. Let them know that you understand that they care and want to support you. Then teach them how they can best accomplish that.
What’s clear from the research is that social support is extremely helpful. Friends and family keep us afloat. If they give you a hard time, your process will be that much more difficult. But if you can bring them along, all of you are likely to benefit greatly.
Painful as it may be, your friends and family may not come around to support you. You do not have the power to change someone’s mind or to make people see the world on your terms. There may not be the perfect argument that will catalyze open-mindedness. All you can do is present your truth. And then you can make choices about whom you want to surround yourself with. You are worthy of love. There are people who will enjoy you as you are, who will love and support you, even if you haven’t met them yet. Make it a priority to find them.
Understand Your Internal Motivation
In exploring your feelings about weight and appearance vis-à-vis society’s messages, I want you to ask yourself a question: Do you
want
to be fat? Some large people unconsciously do. When I first present this idea, most people think I’m crazy. No one can even remotely consider that they might prefer to be fat in this fat-phobic culture. But suspend your disbelief for a moment as you try the following exercise:
Picture yourself at a party at your current weight. Pay attention to your clothes, how you feel in your body, how you interact with others. Now replay the party, this time visualizing yourself at what you view as your “ideal weight.”
When I asked my study participants to do this, the results were surprising. Even though they are the same person in each scenario, they report that their weight played a dramatic role in how they felt and the quality of their participation and interaction with others. Many reported that their fat afforded them some “protection”—it allowed them to recede into the background and hide. It helped them avoid being marketed, judged, viewed as a sexual object or in competition with others.
It’s not surprising that so many of us feel this ambivalence about our body size, that we revile ourselves for being fat, but we value the protection it affords. This experience derives from our social context. For some of us (certainly not all), overeating and getting fat is an unconscious rebellion against the social expectations placed on us.
Listen to what my study participants found.
Several women said they felt that while others at the party were judging the other women there, their fat enabled them to escape the pressure of evaluation based on appearance. It was as if their fat was saying, “Take me for who I am, not for who I am supposed to be.” The result? Relief that they weren’t being “checked out” by others.
Several women in my study connected their weight gain to motherhood. Once they became mothers, it meant that everyone else’s needs came first. So they learned to take care of others, but not to acknowledge or make space for their own needs. They viewed their fat as a physical representation of their role as nurturers and caretakers and a sign they had abdicated their role as sexual beings, which they felt was an important part of being mothers.
The benefit of this exercise wasn’t limited to women. When I asked a man I was counseling to try this exercise, he recalled being sexually molested as a child. His weight gain began soon after. It was as if he were trying to make himself unappealing so his abuser wouldn’t approach him anymore. He acknowledged that his current weight still provided the same protection; as long as he’s “overweight,” others are less likely to pay attention to him. When a woman flirted with him at work, it made him very uncomfortable and he started to binge.
Another client described his fat as allowing him to look (and be) substantial. It’s as if by taking up more space, he could be noticed and taken more seriously.
If you recognize yourself in any of these stories, it’s time you explored the benefits of being fat and the ways in which you rely on your fat to protect you. Otherwise, you may continue to sabotage yourself when it comes to developing healthier habits. If you feel stuck, it may be because you continue to address your weight as an eating/exercise problem you need to control, rather than understanding it as a protective device you’ve created to help you get through your days.
But be careful before you jump to this conclusion. Some of us may assign it to ourselves because we’ve heard it over and over—you know, the “fat people are fat because they’re scared of intimacy” stereotype. We generalize the legitimate problems of the minority onto the majority of larger people. Contrary to popular belief, however, studies indicate that larger people are not significantly different than thinner individuals with respect to sexual satisfaction.
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Try this exercise to help answer the “do-I-need-my-fat” question.