Exploring body changes
Things I have noticed as my body has been changing.
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My body has changed. Not dramatically, but it has changed, and this change have brought me to a place of examining my own internalised fatphobia. Some people call it internalised weight stigma.
In this great article by Aubrey Gordon she argues that if you are not fat or have ever been a fat person, then what you are experiencing is not internalised fatphobia but internalised oppression.
Internalized oppression is a longstanding concept in social sciences and social justice work: one that has been discussed for decades and one that transcends movements. Internalized oppression and its twin concept, internalized subordination, refer to the ways in which a group targeted by oppression begins to internalize the messages of their oppressors and begins to do the work of oppression for them.
I don’t and have never been fat or plus size. Even though my body is bigger right now than it was a few years ago, I still don’t qualify for even “small fat”. My body holds plenty of thin privileges in the way that I can easily access clothes that fits, not having to worry about seating or being told by medical professionals that any and all ailments would be “cured” would I just lose some weight.
I can’t speak for any person where living in a large body is their lived experience. And I sincerely wish nobody would have the experiences of weight stigma and size discrimination and that they were well and truly uprooted from our society.
But as long as the concepts of health and weight are intertwined, it is still likely that there will be.
It is not about the body. It is about the cultural expectations on that body.
I think the vast majority of us, especially those of us who are socialised as women, have internalised fatphobia (internalised oppression as per above). And I think that the best way we can uproot it within ourselves are to keep talking about the influences of our culture on how we experience bodies, other people’s as well as our own.
I recently had a conversation with a colleague and mentioned that back in the day when my own binge eating struggles were at their worst, I thought that this was just a ME problem. And I feel like even in my earlier education on eating disorders and helping people heal their relationship with food, eating and body, it was still framed as a personal problem. If we want to create a world where eating disorders and disordered eating is on the decline and not on the rise, we need to keep talking about how Diet Culture and the endless worshipping and upholding of thinness as the ideal drives our own internalised oppression. No matter what size we are.
When we talk about body image, we often talk about the part that is how we experience our reflection in the mirror. But it also includes the interoceptive awareness we have of our bodies, as well as the proprioception, the sense of our body is space. Body image is made up of these different aspects and the thoughts and feelings we have as a result them.
We all have a body image. Sometimes it is positive, sometimes it is negative and sometimes it might be neutral. You might like what you see, or you might hate it. Sometimes your body feels like a comfortable place to be in, sometimes it is not. Sometimes you might not be aware at all that you have a body. Or you are actively trying to forget about it.
Being able to be with the body changes.
What has been interesting to reflect on is that the internalised self-hatred, is mostly not there. And if it is, then it is like a whisper rather than a roar. Perhaps this is the joy of personal growth? Or maybe it is the benefit of now being in my early 40s and caring less about what other people might think about my body? I am just happy that it is functioning well enough.
In relation to how I have noticed my body changing over these past number of years, that my thinking and feelings about these changes have changed too.
Another thing I have reflected on is how those internalised thoughts about how I felt about my body has been there for decades, regardless of how my body changed. Even when it was smaller they were still there. Which makes me think that it was never really about my body size. (Again, I want to make the point here that this might not reflect the lived experience of someone in a bigger body who are also experiencing external weight discrimination.)
Have you ever had the experience of going into a changing room, trying on clothes and happily finding some items that fit and as a result feeling quiet good in yourself? Only to walk across the road, picking up items from a different store in the same size and them barely fitting, now feeling lousy about your body as a result?
Well, your body or weight didn’t change in any dramatic way in that short space of time, but how the clothes fitted did. As a result of the physical body discomfort from the ill-fitting clothes, how you perceived your body in the mirror changed too.
The same thing can happen when our bodies are changing, may it be momentarily or over time. You might “feel fat”. Fat isn’t really a feeling but a descriptor. And most of us when we “feel fat” are not actually fat. We are experiencing physical discomfort with our bodies. They may be bloated or swollen, sure and that is incredibly uncomfortable. Sometimes when you say “I feel fat”, you might mean I feel uncomfortable in some way. Maybe you feel stuffed, over full or bloated and now your pants are too tight. Totally valid. But it is not fat gain.
And sometimes it might be emotional discomfort we mean but don’t have the words to name, so it becomes projected on to our body instead.
Unlearning the internalised BS
Trying to undo our own internalised fatphobia, whether it is actual weight gain / fat gain or just coping with the fear of it, is something that is necessary when healing disordered eating and repairing our relationship with food. Whether is new body changes or it is a physical momentarily discomfort, checking in on the language we use, helps. Often when we can get curious about this experience, we might discover what else we might be feeling. And by challenging “I feel fat”, we can also challenge the stereotyping about people in bigger bodies. Because by doing this, even if I “feel fat”, aka. uncomfortable / bloated / lazy it is better to just say so, instead of continue to uphold these internalised oppression.
If we can interrogate why we feel like we do about our own bodies, whilst also examine what we think about people in larger bodies, we can make an active choice if these are values we want to hold on to. This can be both liberating and painful.
Examining my own body perception
Another thing that I have noticed as my body has changed, is that I am not entirely sure what size I am now.
My body changes have been slow and gradual over the past few years, it hasn’t been like I woke up one day and nothing fitted. There have been a few realisations that some pants and tops just no longer fitted and that something different were needed. In one way that has been helpful and made acceptance of an ever changing (and aging) body so much easier.
The interesting thing though is that when I pick up a clothing item now, I cannot accurately judge if it is likely to fit, or not. Because for so long what did fit me looked a certain way and now it looks different. I also find myself between sizes now which also makes ordering things online a little more challenging.
I have realised that my perception is skewed. When doing a recent wardrobe clear-out I put away a dress that I got more than 10 years ago, which I most definitely could not fit into now, but that at the time I thought looked “big”. None of this matter much when I can hold it all with neutrality. It is only when I am making it into something that is coloured by the messages I have internalised from Diet Culture, that my body changing is somehow bad. And that as a result I am bad.
Undoing, unlearning and unhooking from Diet Culture, weight loss desires and cultivating acceptance and peace with one’s own body is feels like a life long practice. At least for me. But it most definitely feels like a path that still feels worth continuing on.
Here are some resources that have helped me along the way and that you might find helpful too:
with some practical tips on what to do when clothes not longer fit.From the podcast archives this episode from Shauna Farrell talking about Body Acceptance and in this solo episode I give some practical tips to deal with some body image discomforts.
Books
Fat Talk – Parenting in the age of Diet Culture by
More than A Body by Lexie & Lindsay Kite
The Body Is Not An Apology – by Sonya Renee Taylor
The Religion of Thinness by Michelle Lelwica
What we don’t talk about when we talk about fat by Aubrey Gordon
On my current reading list are these
The Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun Harrison
The Invisible Corset by Lauren Geertsen
Unshrinking by
Fearing the black body by Sabrina Strings
What has been your experiences with body changes? Please feel free to leave a comment or email me a reply.
Wishing you a lovely rest of you week.
Such an emotive subject written about so well Linn. I am currently avoiding a health check that I know will label me with a clinical weight term that is horrible to contemplate, that will come with a generous side order of judgement - both internal and external. For years after gaining weight, I felt like a thin person in a fat person’s body. I’d always been slim as a child and in my early twenties and couldn’t reconcile the outward changes in my mid to late 20s and into my 30s to this inner view. Until I realised that I had passed the point where I had been fat for longer than I was thin. Ironically, in my late teens and early 20s, I wouldn’t wear sleeveless tops because I thought the tops of my arms looked too skinny. I feel reconciled more to just being who I am, but I do have an inbuilt worry about how people see me and the health metrics of my size.
Linn, this was such a beautiful post and love the new pic of you (at least it's new to me).
Here's the line that resonated the most for me and captures the heart of what drives the work we're doing: "If we want to create a world where eating disorders and disordered eating is on the decline and not on the rise, we need to keep talking about how Diet Culture and the endless worshipping and upholding of thinness as the ideal drives our own internalised oppression. No matter what size we are."