I am fat. To be more specific, I’m considered ‘small fat’. And I’ve been pretty lucky that my journey to embracing my body, rolls and dips, has been a relatively short one. It’s a journey that has led me to appreciate my curves, my strength, and my uniqueness, to be able to look in the mirror and say, “I am literally obsessed with myself,” in full acceptance of being fat.
But – and it’s a big ‘but’ – it’s also a journey that has made me conscious of the importance of health. Both my parents have been ‘overweight’ (in their own words) for most of my life. As they make their way through their 60s, I see them struggle with a plethora of health issues and it’s a stark reminder of the harsh reality of how being fat can affect one’s health. As South-Asian people in a western country, you’re bombarded with constant warnings of diabetes, high blood pressure or heart disease as soon as your walk into a doctor’s office — like our food and our skin is an automatic death sentence.
It seems like my parents now live in a fear born out of a genuine concern for their well-being. Yet, that same fear has driven them to try drastic and unhealthy measures to shed weight rapidly. The experience is surprisingly relatable – although I never grew up thinking of the word ‘fat’ as an insult, I remember realising in my first year of uni that boys seemed to like me better when I threw up my dinner every night. Although this was, of course, a very different category of worries to the one my parents grapple with now, both are fear-based motivations for losing weight. Is that healthy? Should I be focusing on my health now, to avoid facing the same fate in 40 years time?
Fitness and fatphobia
The health and fitness industries do not make it easy for a fat person to unpack these questions. Demi Lynch, the host of the Faternise podcast, points out to me: “Literally from the day we’re born, we’re taught being fat is bad. Being fat is like the worst thing anyone can be.”
Personal trainers and gyms alike pounce on this rhetoric, bombarding us with messages that reinforce the idea that our worth is measured by our waistlines. Phrases like “shred that fat,” “get your bikini body,” and “sweat out the toxins” are constantly thrown at us, perpetuating the notion that battle to change how we look will be never-ending. Ironically, the obsession with aesthetics eclipses the vital health message, promoting an unattainable, often unhealthy, standard of beauty. Fat people are constantly told we aren’t good enough or thin enough to ever be ‘fit’ or ‘healthy’ by the fitness industry, which not only fuels body dissatisfaction but ignores the diversity of body types and the importance of overall wellbeing. Gyms are filled with this kind of messaging, so I understand why most people wouldn’t bother going.
But working out does make me feel good! It’s an aspect of my life that I prioritise and it brings me joy. I cannot disagree with the doctors or the gym bros – a 40-minute boxing class does ease my anxiety. So long as I can ignore the internalised beliefs that I’m “too fat for sport” or “my loud breathing will be a dead giveaway”, I get to do a thing that I enjoy and that dispels my fear of facing the health issues my parents face.
Win-win, right? Not quite.
Guilt within the fat community
What do I do with the guilt I feel at potentially betraying my fat community for wanting to become ‘healthier’? Jonathan Graffam, aka Jonno, is a fat liberation academic who has experienced similar feelings about working out as a fat person.
“It’s a slippery slope,” he says. “When I was doing work in Belfast on fatness I had been vegan for three months. And then I just started automatically losing weight and I’m like exercising, walking every day… And then I’m running, and then I’m running half marathons. It just sort of sneaks up on you. I’m not trying to lose weight, but at the same time I was enjoying that. It’s not supposed to be a bad thing but it can feel like it.”
Both Jonno and Demi pointed to celebrities like Adele and Lizzo who faced backlash from the fat community for either losing a significant amount of weight or pursuing ‘healthy habits’. Demi admits feeling conflicted about Adele’s weight loss. “In the back of my head I felt like a bit of betrayal. From an outside perspective, when you see a plus size person lose weight or get healthier, we don’t know all the details – all we know is they have lost a dramatic amount of weight. And for a lot of plus size people, the first reaction to think they did it to meet society standards for us to all be thin.”
Jonno says another layer of nuance comes with work-based discrimination against fat people, especially those on the higher end of the fatness spectrum. “There are very natural concerns about seeing people coming in and colonizing the space. I can certainly see how my perspective now, being thinner than I was, and other thin people that are working in this field… These perspectives are taken more seriously because we’re seen to be speaking ‘from the outside, in’.”
Society will always favour thin people even in fat spaces, so when I work out am I contributing to the problem by taking up space that isn’t rightfully mine?
Reconciling fatness and fitness
Demi tells me I have to accept that I’ll upset some people. “Either you have society telling you, ‘You’re gonna die being fat’. Or you have the plus size community that is critical of you, saying ‘You’re conforming to society’s standards’. It’s a very difficult thing, I think it does need to be discussed more.”
She’s right. Sometimes I feel like I’ve almost swung the pendulum too far and am once again doing a disservice to myself, living out of fear because I think I’m a better fat person when I don’t work out.
Working out or wanting to become ‘healthier’ has nothing to do with size and nothing to do with other people. It’s absolutely okay to want to take control of your health concerns, and it is possible to do that without being fatphobic. As Jonno says: “It’s about moving the body in ways that you enjoy and finding levels of self-acceptance that aren’t about digging your head in the sand around health, either.”
Health At Every Size (HAES) is a campaign that promotes health without the fatphobia. “It stems from the idea that the scientific evidence is actually pointing to the fact that it’s not size, it’s fitness,” Jonno says. “That is the major determinant for cardiovascular issues or diabetes, or the things that are most associated with obesity.”
The fat community has always been a place of love and radical acceptance for me, but thanks to the pressures from the rest of society I can’t say that I’ve perfectly worked out my feelings about the impact of my body on my health. What I do know is that I will no longer be deciding what to do with my own body based out of fear.
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