Confronting My Own Internalized Anti-Fat Bias Was a Monumental Step in My Recovery
As a person who has been fat longer than not, I have faced outright hate and discrimination because of my body size from others. This experience has not been easy. No, in fact, there were many times I chose to cancel plans, skip events, or eat in my car because the fear of the hostile anti-fat bias from those around me. Hiding from it was the best way for me to protect myself. Each of these instances was harmful to me; however, the anti-fat bias that has been the most harmful and detrimental to my health has come from me. It had been the result of years of internalizing anti-fat rhetoric and actions directed at me and at those other fat people around me, beginning in my childhood. Anti-fatness has been nonconsensually woven into my thoughts, actions, and beliefs my whole life.
WHAT IS ANTI-FAT BIAS, AND HOW DOES IT SHOW UP IN OUR SOCIETY?
Anti-fat bias is known as the stigmatizing belief that bodies should be thin and/or muscular to fit within commonly held standards of beauty, fitness, and health. I more broadly define this in my own way as any form of oppression, aggression, hostility, or any other feelings that focus on the disgust or dislike of a fat person’s body size. This tends to manifest within society as a communal need to lose weight, be “in shape,” or fit into straight-sized clothing sizes in order to achieve society’s approval. And do you know where this comes into play even more so than just the everyday obsessive dieting? Eating disorders. Eating disorders are a twisted mental health condition that can, at times, focus on the competitive need to be the thinnest, least fat person - all in an attempt to gain relief from anti-fat bias. And this race to the bottom can often prove deadly. In reality, eating disorders are complicated, and yet most eating disorders in some way have an element of desired weight loss that has gone beyond the usual communal need to lose weight to fit in and has become an obsessive need.
In college, I was trapped in that place myself — a place of wanting to lose weight to fit into the micro-community around me. What started as a passive desire to lose weight ramped up to obsessive thoughts, weight tracking, and heavy restriction. I lost myself inside my eating disorder and could no longer reason with my logical mind that the level of restriction I was partaking in was ultimately harming me. The fear of living in a fat body and not being found physically attractive by college classmates was stronger than my primal instinct to eat and be mentally safe.
It wasn’t until years after college that I was able to seek out hands-on support and care for my eating disorder. And it took years beyond that before I could discern where anti-fat rhetoric existed in the world around me. And even when I was able to do so, I was still actively plagued by the fear of living in a fat body in a world swimming in anti-fatness.
Being fat in this world is not for the faint of heart.
LEARNING TO FIGHT BACK AGAINST MY INTERNALIZED FATPHOBIA
At least a decade and a half after I first began to struggle with my relationship with my body, I was finally starting to unravel what led to those heavy feelings. And even while untangling those roots within myself, I began to notice the way the anti-fat rhetoric around me had started to come from within myself. I wasn’t just experiencing occasional anti-fat bias at the doctor’s office, at restaurants, or airports — my own self-talk had become the loudest source of that anti-fat hate.
It was then I realized that I was going to have to do much more work to fight my own internalized anti-fat rhetoric than just doing the work externally. And it was exhausting.
I started to consciously notice all of the unconscious thoughts I had about fat people around me and myself. I would call my own attention to the assumptions I made about fat people I encountered. I actively followed more fat Instagram creators (and ultimately became one!) that posted varied content. I let them teach me through their work that being fat wasn’t a death knell — it was a neutral indicator of body diversity. I also pushed myself to practice active body acceptance and body love when possible.
It was hard work. It was akin to pushing a boulder uphill in knee-deep mud during a monsoon. But I persevered and continued to try day after day. I did several different exercises to challenge those perceptions — I took daily pictures of my body in various levels of dress that required me to look at and notice my body in different ways, I completed group self-love challenges on social media, I bought my first two-piece bathing suit as an adult, and I read as many books focused on body liberation that I could get my hands on. I ran after body acceptance instead of passively attempting it.
It took years for me to reroute the neural pathways that had sat rigid for decades. Now, I am in a place where I feel strong in my recovery and like I have established my own version of body liberation.
Recovery has grown to mean so much more to me than it did initially. I have built my recovery in a way that centralizes activism and anti-oppression work. This reminds me that there is so much more “wrong” in the world than could ever be attributed to my body. Occasionally, I find myself feeling disgusted about my body, or at times, I will miss a meal; however, these are outlying events that I work diligently not to repeat. And even in these situations, I have learned to give myself compassion and kindness for those choices or lapses in self-care. Recovery and body image work are far from perfect or clear-cut journeys — I would never expect at this point for either of them to have a perfect outcome.
My ability to think critically about my perceptions and remain stubborn in my pursuit of recovery over these years has been absolutely critical to my ability to stay in recovery. Analyzing and critiquing my own anti-fat biases, internalized self-perception, and how I form opinions of others has shown up over and over and held me accountable in this space and this work. I’m truly proud of how far I have come and the work I have done to get here. It is so possible, even if it sounds wildly unachievable at times. It’s not perfect, but it’s meaningful to me.
