Your fat friend

Why yes, I am dropping this before you write your next holiday meal or New Year's Resolution, why do you ask?

I recently got to see the new documentary “Your Fat Friend” about writer, podcaster and fat activist Aubrey Gordon. (Here’s a link to the trailer.)

I remember reading her work (now mostly paywalled because so much has been converted into her book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, although you can read an amazing excerpt here from Lit Hub) when she was still writing anonymously. She wrote about seeking empathy. She wrote about the barriers fat people face. I had written one piece about fatphobia at that point but I was still putting the puzzle pieces together and she spoke so much more clearly and powerfully. I remember being so grateful and also being a little scared to share her work because of all the people who would see it as me making an excuse for my size.

I think the first diet I went on was at the age of 12. I’ve spent much of my life trying to lose weight and feeling ashamed of my inability to sustain the practices over time.

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I am so trained into taking responsibility for my size that the first time my current doctor tested my blood and my sugar levels came back high, I said, “Yeah, I’m over 30 and I’m overweight,” waiting for the diet lecture I always got. When he said, “no; it’s an unusual reading based on your charts, so I’d like to test it again.” I feel like that’s worth noting because I’ve recently learned that if I were thin, that’s what I should have expected. My current doctor (whom I’ve had for maybe eight or ten years) believes what I tell him about my diet and exercise and doesn’t try to fix me because all of my health indicators are really good. I’m just also fat. From the time I was ten til I was in my mid-thirties, my doctors kept trying to “help” me be healthy, when I already was. And I’m lucky—many fat people’s bad health is blamed on their size, resulting in doctors ignoring actual health issues, such as this woman’s experience of only getting diagnosed with endometriosis after losing 150 pounds, after years of debilitating cramps being blamed on her weight.

One of the things the documentary Your Fat Friend talks about is how quickly people think fat acceptance is about interpersonal issues, about being nice to fat people. It’s actually about policies and practices. (If you’ve worked with me as a consultant, you know that my mantra for anti-oppression in the workplace is “policies, programs, and practices,” so this lines up.) Anti-fat bias shows up in medicine, in the workplace, even in the courtroom.

I’m really lucky; my roommate in Oakland once introduced me to his best friend because he knew we would geek out about our shared commitment to justice. Her name is Tigress, and she’s the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance. (You might really enjoy their recent study on fat bias in the media.) They (among several great organizations) have been involved in addressing legislation to stand against anti-fat bias in the workplace, including a huge legislative victory in New York City, which is now one of six cities and states with anti-discrimination legislation in the US.

Physical size has become moralized in so many ways we often don’t notice it—thin people get praised for being able to eat whatever they want without gaining weight, fat people’s food being policed. (In the documentary, Aubrey Gordon mentioned a time someone in the grocery store took a melon out of her grocery store, telling her it was too much sugar for her.) It can be easy to forget that bias leads to lower hiring rates, lower wages, and disparate health treatment. Media messaging, cultural bias, and the massive marketing strategies that profit off of all of us hating ourselves prop up structures that cause real harm.

One of the ways I’ve learned more about size bias is because of amazing organizers. During the most intense part of the pandemic, I was inspired by how senior and disability rights organizations partnered with fat acceptance organizations to advocate for vaccine access and rigorous mask protocols at a time some politicians were acting as if the vaccine would be doing them a favor by eliminating those of us from those groups. That solidarity and how many of them recognized the connections between their work and the work to address how COVID was hitting front-line workers, most of whom were people of color and low-income people, built some strong organizing ties that I believe will continue to serve us in the years to come.

An amazing Oakland artist, Kathryn Max, created the art for these coasters. You can buy them here.

If you’re wondering how you might address size discrimination in your workplace, the Society for Human Resources Management has provided this 5 quick tips list and best practices guide, and the Obesity Action Coalition has a great guide for employers with what to do and what not to do.

If you’re curious about the inaccurate messaging we get from and about the health and wellness industrial complex, Aubrey Gordon has a great podcast with her co-host Michael Hobbes (who my partner refers to as my boyfriend, since Michael is a self-defined “methodology queen” and that is very much my jam). The show is called Maintenance Phase, and if you don’t know where to start, the BMI episode (here’s the apple podcast link) is a great one. I love the show because Aubrey’s been on all the same diets I have, so I don’t have to feel ashamed about having bought into the myths for so many years, but I also get to laugh about them.

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About a year ago, I was doing a workshop on intersectionality and I drew my own intersectional map. I always (after learning the hard way) clarify that this is a map of ways I get classified that are out of my control but come with perks or barriers, such as my gender, my orientation, my immigration status, the level of higher education my parents received, etc. If you’ve seen me do this, you know I sometimes leave one or two off so that people can name them, to get in the right headspace. And if no one thinks of them, I’ll add them in myself in the moment. I usually leave off disability so someone else can point it out and I can talk about how invisible it is to people not navigating the barriers it presents. And sometimes I have the energy to add my size to the map, and sometimes I don’t, depending on how much more vulnerability I can manage to extend.

I mentioned to the group a year ago that I go back and forth on adding my size because so many people still think it’s just about personal choices, but I was adding it for this group to think about because I knew they cared about workplace and medical discrimination among other issues.

One of the members of that group, who is not fat, wrote me later to tell me how glad she was I included it, because it was particularly important to their work, since a lot of the people in their network do make hiring decisions and need to be aware of it.

So I’m trying to get better at weaving this more intentionally into my own work. I hope you will, too.

OH! And since I’m sending this out before a lot of holiday meals with beloved friends and family who don’t mean to be hurtful but don’t realize how much they’ve internalized this narrative, here’s some helpful tips for responding to fat shaming at the holidays from Hello Giggles, and a tool specifically for thin allies from National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance.

One last thought. If you’re fat, I want to share some advice a friend shared with me when I said I wanted to stay oriented towards health without getting sucked into the anti-fat bias of the health and wellness industry. She said, “I have added a number of accounts of fat people on my instagram account, so I am reminded to celebrate the beauty of fat people, which helps me love my own body a little more.” (As an aside, the first woman I ever dated was the same size as me and it was life-changing to realize that if I loved her body, maybe I could love mine, too.) A few of my favorite accounts on IG are @iofthetigress, @katmaxisfree, and @unlikelyhikers, which includes POC and disability representation as well as fat representation in the outdoors. Also, I’m adorable, but if you’re on IG, I assume you already follow @sandhyainoakland. :)

Whew. This was a long one. You can tell I wrote this to avoid studying for my stats final! Congrats if you made it all the way to the end.

And as always, if you know someone who would find this helpful (including someone in HR!), please feel free to share.

peace,

Sandhya