Let’s open up your fitness fears by Athena Nair

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 shared 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 helping a 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 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 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 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 that they had read 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 and to 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 dye culture in 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 were 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 I see a nun 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 u.s. 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 or 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 gasser 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 consider 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 Adolph get lay created the BMI out of his interest to observe average measurements of a population catalase interest 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 Ketel a 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 eugenicist would use the BMI to justify the superiority of white physical features so what doctors are using to measure our health is based on too 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 sizes 'm and fat phobia fat phobia 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 industries 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 follow 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 fat phobia becomes an issue of equity doctors spent 28% less time with obese patients during appointments and more than half of doctors from a 2003 survey the obese patients as awkward unattractive ugly and non-compliant this kind of fat phobia can be lethal Rebecca Hiles suffered from severe bloody coughing fits for six years she was very active but kept finding hard to breathe and she would go to the ER whenever she had her frequent coughing fits but when her blood tests 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 are 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 have been 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 are all of the time and half of three to six year old girls see that they're scared of being fat this is a world that is begging for change and that's where body positivity comes in Sonja 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 fat phobia because of the body positive I've come to a grounded understanding of sizes 'm and fat phobia and i've come to a place where i unconditionally love my body 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 reserved love for my body with the condition that it must be skinny I work through my body issues and come back to a grounded place of love not fear when I feel shame about my stomach rules 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 Audrey Lord 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 culture in most spaces I occupy every time I walk into a dining hall I somehow hears someone talking about the Freshman Fifteen or how they can't get dessert today because they're scared they'll get fat because but it's because of body positivity that I'm able to name dye 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 constantly 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 in 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 .