Rights Denied

Recently, I was pondering how eating disorders are born. Part of the reason for this is my own experience, but another reason was that I saw documentary which showed women who suffered from anorexia and bulimia. Watching these women operate around food, one couldn't help but see that they consistently denied their right to eat, and when they granted themselves the right to enjoy food, they denied themselves the right to be nourished by it and vomited it back up.

I also have been having several days in a row in which I have been incredibly hungry and denying myself the right to feel sated. I finally relented and did something I do occasionally, and just ate. In fact, I ate too much. That is to say that I ate more than necessary to feel sated. I wonder if I did that because of a pent up need to allow myself to do what I wanted to do, rather than simply to be "full" for a change. At any rate, at the end, I didn't beat myself up or anything because that's not what I do. I just get back on the horse the next day and all is fine. Everybody eats a little too much on occasion. I have that right, too, don't I? Well, apparently not... if I'm fat, I don't have the right to eat to maintain my weight, let alone to ever eat beyond my caloric requirements. This would make my thinking pattern not altogether different from that of anorexic women. They also do not feel they should eat more than necessary. They just set the bar very low for what they feel is required.

I was thinking about the pattern that many women (and sometimes men) experience in which they start to question their right to eat. That moment starts with some sort of notion that their body is inadequate and would be less so if they didn't eat. This is a message that goes beyond personal desire to be a different body type. It's something which is reinforced by family, media and society on the whole. If you're fat, you don't have the right to eat certain foods. In fact, they'd rather you simply fasted until you shed all of your unsightly weight. The people who glance with disgust into your shopping cart, the ones who snort with derision when you eat at a fast food place, and those who walk up to you when you're having an ice cream cone and tell you that you really shouldn't be eating that are letting you know in no uncertain terms that you don't have the basic right to eat whatever you want.

For fat people, this curtailing of rights expands through time. You not only don't have the right to eat what other people eat, but you also don't have the right to wear certain types of clothes. You should cover the shamefulness of your bulbous body with dark, billowy fabrics. Cover your batwings and rounded calves. Don't accentuate those chubby ankles, and, for God's sake, don't wear horizontal stripes.

You're also told that you don't have the right to be loved like people who are not fat, and that you only deserve lesser partners. The partners that choose you (because, you know, you certainly have no choice since you're fat and nobody wants you) must be lacking in some way themselves if they would "settle" for a fat partner.

We don't have the right to be lazy. This is something I have had an issue with all of my life. I'm "not allowed" to spend a day lazing around in front of the T.V. I have to prove I'm not your typical "lazy fat ass" by running myself ragged everyday. I only allow myself to rest when ill or injured, and even then I complain the entire time because I don't like being "down". I've completely forgotten how to enjoy doing nothing because I have no right to let go and do nothing.

Frankly, many people would like to deny you the right to even appear  in public. You are so abhorrent to their sensibilities, that they would prefer to deny you autonomy, if only they could. While they can't do it legally, they can shame and ridicule you to the point where you will choose to deny yourself the right to be in public and hide in your home to the extent humanly possible.

The worst part of all of this is that it is all too easy to internalize the idea that as a fat person you don't have the right to enjoy food, be loved, dress attractively, or to be in public. You deny yourself those rights and as you do so, you devalue yourself as a person. You accept that your size renders you sub-human and passively comply with the wishes of those who detest you.

I've been a victim of this all of my life, and sometimes had the strength to act in defiance of such notions, but often have felt beaten down by them. Only recently have I realized what rights I've denied myself because I've found myself in a position to grant them again to myself. I'm still fat, but not hugely so, and I'm starting to feel that I have the right to be seen, eat good food, and be loved. I have the right to eat when I'm hungry. The fact that I have to offer myself special dispensation for that says a lot about how the people around me have shaped my sense of self, and my sense of my rights and value as a human being.

The fact that people would reinforce the notion that I don't deserve these same rights as other human beings based merely on body size makes me angry, but that anger really has no place to go. I know that nothing is going to change and that I am powerless to do anything about the oppressive nature of people's views toward and actions against people who are overweight. The only thing I can do is remember, understand, and never deny myself these rights again.

Maybe You Can't

What would happen if you went to a doctor and told him you wanted to lose weight; he ran a few tests, and told you that, for a variety of reasons, that you simply cannot lose weight. It could be that doing so would endanger your health in some bizarre fashion or you simply don't have the right physiological disposition. If that happened, aside from wanting to walk around all day with a sandwich board saying, “I am fat for medical reasons” on one side and a giant blow-up of the doctor's diagnosis signed and certified on the other (so people wouldn't “blame” you for being fat), what would you do? How would you feel?

Sometimes I wonder if people would be relieved. How many people are fat and full of self-loathing because they think they should change, but fail when they try? How many hate themselves because they are told that they are disgusting and out of control? Would a medical “license to be fat” like a plump “007” relieve them of their low estimation of themselves?

This morning while I was washing dishes (another of those mentally empty tasks which sets my mind wandering into deeper thought territory), it occurred to me that it might be easier if someone had a crystal ball which they could look into which told them definitively that they could or could not lose weight. It wouldn't matter if it was psychological or physiological; the important thing is that you would know for certain that your efforts would be futile if you tried. Would that breed absolute despair or total relief?

For me, it would create despair because my main motivations in order of importance have been the cessation of physical pain, improved mobility, and stopping the emotional abuse and prejudicial behavior from fat haters. Losing weight will fix all of those problems. Being told that I could not lose weight would mean living in constant pain and essentially being disabled by that pain when attempting any but the briefest walk. For those who are not (at least, yet) in my shoes, I wonder if they would just be happy not to be “responsible” for their weight problem and would be freed from the constant mental battle of trying to change their habits, failing, feeling demoralized, and trying again. I know that I went through a similar cycle of failure for many years until this time when I seem to be succeeding. You know the feeling, you fail so many times that you stop trying because you can't face the prospect of failing once more. Note that I am reluctant to declare the “war” won when I've been winning battles for only a year. This is, after all, a lifelong issue, and I hope to be fighting the good fight for at least another 25 years.

This morning, I spent some time pruning my RSS feeds of dead and defunct blogs. Many of the blogs I unsubscribed from were from people who started out very gung-ho and determined to deal with their weight problems effectively “this time”. Their blog comment boxes were filled with encouraging messages saying, “you can do it!” A good many of them have abandoned their blogs because they couldn't do it. I wonder if they really “can't” do it because they don't have the right environment, physiology, or aren't in an emotional place to address their problems. Maybe they never will be, and I think that's something we have to accept and treat with compassion. Nobody wants to be unable to “put down the fork” (a phrase I detest). If they really could, they would, because for the vast majority of people, living life as a fat person means a life of difficulty and despair.

One of the signatures on someone's post or blog somewhere once said something like, “the only thing standing between you and success is you.” I think that that's true, but “you” is a formidable obstacle that is very hard to clambor over. We can't keep simply telling everyone that they can lose weight because we think they should be able to or because we have been able to. There are multitudes of personal changes that have to take place in order to succeed at losing weight and keeping it off, and some people cannot do it. They really cannot. Accepting this fact is not “giving up” on anyone or encouraging them to give up on themselves. It is actually the first step in ending judgment and fat prejudice and allowing people to stop torturing themselves about a part of their lives that they can't change for either physical or psychological reasons.

Fattism and "Natural States"

Recently, I read an article on “fattism” in the U.K. An obese woman was riding a train and an average weight woman attacked her violently for no other reason than she was overweight. The article itself was scary, but the comments were of greater interest to me.

A comment that particularly caught my eye was one that said that being fat isn’t a normal or natural state. As “evidence” that this was the case, the commenter noted that people weren't grossly overweight or morbidly obese 22,000 years ago. Setting aside the fact that this person has no way of proving the presence or absence of people who were very overweight so long ago, the comment betrayed some interesting myopia.

The question really isn’t whether or not people were obese prior to the dawn of civilization. The important thing to consider is whether or not they would have been if they were exposed to the same circumstances that we are current living in. If people thousands of years ago had been given access to plentiful amounts of highly caloric food that could be acquired without physical effort, you can bet many of them would have been obese. In fact, there’s every likelihood that they would have seen being fat as a good thing as it would have ensured survival and been an indication of one being part of a tribe that had consistent access to food.

The thing that frustrates me about fattism is that people don’t seem to realize that evolution is what has lead so many people to be obese. Fattists act as though obesity is an unnatural state which is incomprehensible through any lens other than one of personal failure. The human brain developed as a result of the consumption of fat. In fact, the brain itself is composed of layers of specialized fatty tissue. Our intelligence and higher functioning would never have developed if our ancestors didn’t have a taste for the fattiest foods available.

Being overweight is not a natural state, but eating everything in sight is a natural act. The behavior that fattists find so reprehensible, a lack of ability to resist available food, is actually the most natural behavior of all. The part of our lives which is unnatural is not our actions in stuffing lots of food into our hungry maws, but the easily available food. It is actually far less natural to be surrounded by food and choose not to eat it than to choose to eat it all. If we approach obesity as the consequence of our biological nature (as it has been shaped by evolution) rather than an unnatural state which only people who have failed to develop habits that "normal" people have acquired, it might be easier to deal with and treat the problem.

Of course, fattists are not interested in logic, evidence, or science. They are only interested in blame and finding a way to feel smugly superior to people who are overweight.