Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
When you hear the word "fat," what do you think of?
When I asked some of my classmates, here's what they said:
shameful,
scary,
unhealthy,
ugly.
Unfortunately, most of us in this room
probably share these associations with the word "fat."
I mean, that's what we've been told our entire lives.
Ads like this one have ingrained a fear of fatness in all of us.
As a young kid,
all I knew was that my body helped me to dance.
In the middle years of elementary school,
I remember being aware of this pressure to lose weight
because I was chubbier than most of my friends.
But it was in fifth grade
that I started being inundated with all this messaging
about how every single part of my body was wrong.
In eighth and ninth grade, I suffered from an eating disorder.
I didn't understand
why it was so hard for me to look like my thin, white friends.
I remember researching diets that would help me lose my belly fat,
pro-anorexia Tumblr pages that encouraged me to keep restricting
so I could be skinny,
be "perfect."
With the support of therapists, family, and friends,
I was able to overcome my eating disorder.
But I still walked around believing that my body was unworthy
because of its color, shape, and size.
Junior year, I listened to an episode of a favorite podcast of mine,
This American Life.
The episode was called "Tell Me I'm Fat."
It was largely based on Lindy West's book "Shrill,"
which is now a TV show you can watch on Hulu.
And it got me thinking about fatness
as a label and an identity that has been associated with shame,
not one that is inherently shameful.
Once I was introduced to the foreign idea that being fat was okay -
an idea I'd been starved of my entire life -
I was hungry for more.
I started researching body positivity and found out about The Body Positive,
an organization that has been helping people develop balanced, joyful self-care
and a relationship with their bodies guided by love, forgiveness, and humor.
I was amazed they had reached such a big community,
and I immediately thought,
"I need this.
We all need this."
So with a couple of friends,
I brought them to my all-girls high school,
where they held a two-day training.
Those two days changed my life.
I was introduced to two simple yet transformative ideas.
One -
it doesn't need to be the norm to hate my body.
Like, what?
(Laughter)
And two -
being fat is not a bad thing.
In the same way that some people are born with dark or light hair,
some people are born short, some tall -
some people are born to be thin, others fat.
But we're surrounded by a pervasive diet culture,
one that glorifies thinness and demonizes fatness.
Today, I'm going to unpack diet culture to fatphobia for you all.
We'll talk about how our society has come to stigmatize fat bodies
and the harmful effects of the stigmatization.
And we'll talk about a key solution to this issue:
body positivity.
Ever since we're kids,
we're inundated with messaging about the so-called "obesity epidemic."
The media's messaging
has led us to believe that all "obese people" are unhealthy
and that someone's weight is completely in their control.
We hear about the drastically rising levels of obesity
in the past several decades,
but that's partially because in 1998,
the National Institutes of Health
lowered the threshold for someone to be considered obese.
As CNN put it,
"Millions of Americans became 'fat' Wednesday -
even if they didn't gain a pound."
It's also scientifically inaccurate
to consider weight the primary measure of a person's health,
but the US health system is completely centered on weight.
Doctors in the media are constantly encouraging us to go on diets
and to lower our body mass index, our BMI.
But there are a lot of issues with diets
and with the BMI.
95% of dieters regain the weight that they lose within five years
and often gain back even more.
Dieters are caught in a cycle of yo-yo dieting,
starting with restricting,
which leads to the famine response,
where the body is so deprived of nutrition
that it craves even more food than it normally needs,
which leads us to binge eating.
And then we feel the shame of eating and go back to restricting.
And dieting is actually more harmful than any form of "obesity" itself.
We're told that obesity causes cardiovascular issues,
but actually, this pattern of weight fluctuation -
losing weight, gaining it back, over and over again -
increases risk of cardiovascular disease
by much more than just having a heavy weight itself.
As Glenn Gaesser, exercise physiologist, asks,
"Is it the obesity that is causing the disease
or is it the fact that people are trying to become not obese?"
Then there's the BMI,
considered to be a signifier of our health.
But the BMI wasn't created as a measure of health in the first place.
It was in the 1830s
that Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet created the BMI
out of his interest to observe average measurements of a population.
Quetelet's interests included statistics, sociology, astronomy -
not medicine or health.
His participants were all upper-class French and Scottish people -
a small subsection of the population.
He chose the two variables of height and weight completely arbitrarily.
Quetelet never intended for the BMI to be a measure of health;
rather, it was just a statistic
of a small group of white, upper-class Europeans of the 1800s.
In the 1900s,
eugenicists would use the BMI
to justify the superiority of white physical features.
So what doctors are using to measure our health
is based on two superficial features - height and weight -
based solely on white populations.
But the BMI is regarded as the golden standard
for measuring our health,
and it's turned into a tool to specifically target fat people,
especially fat people of color,
in the forms of sizeism and fatphobia.
Fatphobia and size discrimination assert that all people should come in one size -
a ridiculous notion if we consider
someone arguing that we should all have the same hair color or arm length.
Our capitalist society has taken advantage
of the medical industry's equation of weight to health.
But thin people can be unhealthy.
A thin person could smoke a pack of cigarettes every day
or not eat a generally balanced diet.
But they wouldn't get the same criticism about their health
that a fat person would.
Studies have shown that it is habits that matter,
not weight.
A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years
found that unfit skinny people are twice as likely to get diabetes
as fit fat people.
Habits, not weight.
But it is fat people that carry around the burden
of being labeled as "unhealthy,"
"out of control,"
and "morally deviant."
This is where fatphobia becomes an issue of equity.
Doctors spend 28% less time with obese patients during appointments,
and more than half of doctors from a 2003 survey
viewed obese patients as "awkward, unattractive, ugly, and noncompliant."
This kind of fatphobia can be lethal.
Rebecca Hiles suffered from severe, bloody coughing fits for six years.
She was very active but kept finding it hard to breathe,
and she would go to the ER whenever she had her frequent coughing fits.
But when her blood test came back normal,
the doctors told her that the solution was to simply lose weight.
This didn't help Rebecca.
Finally, at the age of 23,
after another trip to the ER,
the doctors decided to do a CT scan,
and they found a tumor in her bronchial tube.
Rebecca's doctors of the past six years
had ignored her symptoms and focused on her weight.
And it's because of this
that she had to have her entire left lung removed.
Rebecca is not alone in this.
There are countless stories
of fat people who have had PCOS, a thyroid condition, cancer,
whose debilitating health conditions were attributed to their weight
so that they were diagnosed far too late.
We're living in a world where fat people are being ignored by our doctors.
We're living in a world brainwashed by the fear of fat,
so that 45% of adults are preoccupied with their weight some or all the time
and half of three- to six-year-old girls say that they're scared of being fat.
This is a world that is begging for change.
And that's where body positivity comes in.
Sonya Renee Taylor defines "radical self-love"
as "our inherent state of being as worthy and enough."
To me, body positivity is radical self-love.
It's an unconditional love and appreciation for my body.
It's fighting to live in a world free from diet culture and fatphobia.
Because of The Body Positive,
I've come to a grounded understanding of sizeism and fatphobia
and I've come to a place where I unconditionally love my body.
It doesn't mean I like it every day.
I mean, I unconditionally love my family
and get into fights with them all the time.
In the same way,
I love my body and sometimes I have bad days with my body.
The point is,
I don't reserve love for my body with the condition that it must be skinny.
I've worked through my body issues
and come back to a grounded place of love,
not fear.
When I feel shame about my stomach rolls, for example,
I ask myself,
"Who is profiting off me feeling this way?
What institutions have socialized me to feel this way?"
I think of all the amazing things that my stomach allows me to do,
and I hold myself with unconditional love.
I remind myself that, as Audre Lorde said,
"Loving myself isn't self-indulgence,
it is self-preservation,
and that is an act of political warfare."
I'm now a first-year in college,
and it is tough to be surrounded by diet culture in most spaces I occupy.
Every time I walk into a dining hall,
I somehow hear someone talking about the "freshman 15"
or how they can't get dessert today because they're "scared they'll get fat."
But it's because of body positivity
that I'm able to name diet culture for what it is
and I fight to bring us back to a place of radical self-love.
As a body-positive person, I am liberated.
I have so much more capacity to commit to my academics,
my activism, my friendships, my family
now that I'm not thinking about what clothes I can or can't wear
or what food I should or shouldn't eat.
And by loving myself, I have more love for others.
We talk about loving ourselves as if it's something we'll achieve one day,
when we're old and gray and retired.
But why do we have to wait till then?
When we were babies, we loved ourselves without a second thought.
We can get back to that place of radical self-love,
and we can do it now.
Study after study has proven
that weight and size aren't a measurement of our health.
So why do we beat ourselves up
for having bodies that fight to keep us alive and well every single day?
Why do fat people face judgment and discrimination from our society
for simply existing in the bodies that they were born with?
There's no good reason.
So I offer you the choice today
to join me and so many others in a place of radical self-love.
Because when you begin to love yourself,
your love for others and your capacity for life
will grow too.
You can take it or leave it,
but why the heck wouldn't you take it?
Thank you.
(Applause)