just wondering, why don’t you like the artwork from arthlete?
WHAT WE'RE ABOUT
RBI focuses on using expressive writing, design-oriented work, photography, media, research, and community input to fuel fat positive, body acceptance, discussion, and outreach. Our goal is to redefine the way we view and think about body image, size, fat, discrimination, health, fitness, wellness, mental/chronic illness, stigma, and other related topics.
We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
RBI supports all races, genders, classes, and sizes. We try our best to make this a safe space for everyone. If we are not doing our job or checking our privilege, we invite you to please inform us.
Some of the artwork you see here has been created by our founder or moderators, some sourced when applicable. Please be kind enough to source this blog whenever you share it's content.
We are not health professionals. Any and all advice provided on this blog is supported only by our own research, studies, and personal experiences; nothing more.
This blog is part of the Safe Space Network.
We are constantly redefining our own perspectives, and therefore tend to write a lot about our personal experiences. Many followers and contributors are living with anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, depression, and a variety of other body image disorders or mental illnesses, so please be respectful and remember that health applies differently to everyone. Any and all potentially triggering content will be prefaced with a trigger warning.
RBI supports all races, genders, classes, and sizes. We try our best to make this a safe space for everyone. If we are not doing our job or checking our privilege, we invite you to please inform us.
Some of the artwork you see here has been created by our founder or moderators, some sourced when applicable. Please be kind enough to source this blog whenever you share it's content.
We are not health professionals. Any and all advice provided on this blog is supported only by our own research, studies, and personal experiences; nothing more.
This blog is part of the Safe Space Network.
- ArteToLife (via fatanarchy)
As an influx of reblogs have been clogging my notifications once more, I’m really intrigued to know why or how fitspo blogs find my “weight does not dictate your health or your worth” message inspiring enough to spread and feature in their online spaces.
I know that the message leaves a lot up…
I don’t know if Haley would consider OccupyFitspo “a fitspo blog” (and I’m not sure I consider it one myself), but I feel compelled to reblog and respond to her post, since it’s given me some thoughts on the subject of fitspo and size acceptance.
Haley claims that the image she designed and its message are being “appropriated” by “fitspo” blogs, and she has a problem with this. Frankly, I can’t see why it would be problematic for more people to identify with the phrase “you weight does does dictate your health or your worth,” if it brings more people, slowly but surely, to a place of self-acceptance and health, does it matter? If an individual wishes to lose weight, but still believes in the above message, is that so wrong?
Readers of this blog will know that I believe firmly in HAES, size diversity, and size acceptance. Although this is not a fat acceptance blog per se - because my interests are more in health, fitness and nutrition than in size diversity activism - I support fat acceptance for the same reason I support individuals’ (hypothetical) desire to lose fat: we own our bodies; we are our bodies. Do we not have the right to lose, gain, or maintain our weights as we see fit?
Of course, there are problematic aspects to the above statement because nothing exists in a vacuum. I started this blog because I find fitspo culture, especially on tumblr, to be poisonous. Search the “fitspiration” tag and you’ll find everything from “inspiring” images of super-buff women in candy-coloured sports bras to disturbing pro-ana propaganda. These are symptoms of a world unhealthily obsessed with weight and size, and a world that equates health with those same things. We may know this isn’t necessarily true; we may understand that correlation is not causation, and we may know that even if the above were not true, it would be wrong to discriminate against fat people or otherwise treat them cruelly for the reason of them being fat. Nevertheless, it’s a big world out there and most people aren’t even aware there are terms for discrimination against the fat, or that there’s a size acceptance movement. Railing against the appropriation of some piece of graphic design - the “wrong people” are liking this the “wrong way”! - is ultimately pointless.*
What do we really want here? I started this blog to, I guess, change fitblr culture from the inside out, even though I’m not really wedded to the fitspiration concept (because it tends to be so problematic) and even though I’m a proponent of size acceptance. But I really firmly believe in the concept of bodily sovereignty as well (see also: I am pro-choice and support trans* individuals’ rights to change their bodies as they see fit), and I think everyone deserves to know they have worth, regardless of their weight and regardless of their weight-loss. My priority is health, mental and physical. End of story.**
—————————————————————————————————————
*That said, the piece was designed and created by Haley and is thus her intellectual property. I’m not unbelievably well-versed in the intricacies of intellectual property law, especially as it relates to the Tumblr culture of reblogging (and, further, the fact that the piece is hosted on Tumblr’s servers), but I suppose technically she’d have a case for plagiarism or misuse or something if she really wanted to. But I digress.
**Of course, it’s not quite the end of the story, considering the anguish many people experience as a result of feeling they must lose fat to be acceptable, the self-hatred, the pain… I know it very well. And I know that losing weight is not a panacea for it. So I do not suggest that weight-loss should be the goal in and of itself, but neither do I think it is inherently undesirable for a fat person to, for example, lose weight when they change their diet and lifestyle for the better. This is a topic for another post, so hopefully I’ll get to that in more depth soon.
Never at any point did I ever say I had a “problem” with fitspo bloggers showing interest in the graphic.
Allow me to quote myself:
If most fitspo bloggers focus on weight loss as a “healthy” ideal, what is so attractive to them about this statement that suggests an alternative to thinking about how weight and health are not correlated? Was my intent lost or misinterpreted? I’m honestly intrigued.
Nothing I said was meant to imply that fitspo bloggers are not allowed to reblog my graphic. I simply wanted some understanding about how fitspo bloggers viewed and interpreted the message themselves, as I noticed a great interest from their community in spreading the message, which I hadn’t seen before. And now you’re misinterpreting my intent to an impressive degree and made up an issue that doesn’t exist, so…Awesome.
As an influx of reblogs have been clogging my notifications once more, I’m really intrigued to know why or how fitspo blogs find my “weight does not dictate your health or your worth” message inspiring enough to spread and feature in their online spaces.
I know that the message leaves a lot up to the viewer in that they can project their own views and thoughts onto it, but at nearly 10,000 notes I never thought it would be so widely shared and accepted across so many communities.
It was practically created as an alternative to fitspo (anti-fitspo in fact) but now it’s being appropriated in those spaces.
Most fitspo blogs hold a certain weight or body type as a “fit” and “healthy” ideal. Nearly every fitspo blogger has a “goal weight” designated for themselves in their content and feature idealized images of thin, toned bodies as an aesthetic goal. This would suggest to me that most fitspo bloggers believe weight and health are directly correlated and that this belief is being integrated into their own health and wellness narratives.
That approach clearly doesn’t jive with me. I mean, I have a “fuck fitspo” tag on my blog and have maintained a critical eye on the fitspo community in terms of its inability to recognize that people with disabilities (both mental and physical) find fitspo and weight loss messaging detrimental to their health and wellness goals.
I recognize that some able-bodied people find it to be helpful, but it is not and should not be toted as the end-all-be-all way of defining and inspiring good health and fitness for EVERYONE.
And so I come back to my original question - If most fitspo bloggers focus on weight loss as a “healthy” ideal, what is so attractive to them about this statement that suggests an alternative to thinking about how weight and health are not correlated? Was my intent lost or misinterpreted? I’m honestly intrigued.
I appreciate what this artist is trying to do, but a lot of her images focus on weight loss and I find them discouraging. I wish they could be body positive and not reinforce the stereotype that thin, lean bodies are the only healthy/strong/useful/desirable bodies.
Yep. I put the triggering “body positive” fitspo art associated with this post under a link because it’s fucking horrid.
Girl toes the line between “body positivity”, pro-weight loss and fitspo crap on the daily, so people keep reblogging her body-positive-leaning shit and not realizing that a lot of the messaging she puts out into the tumblr community does much more harm than good. I’m so fucking tired of her shit showing up on my dash. I don’t know what her stance is or whether she’s acknowledging this shit because I try to avoid looking at her blog at all costs, but I understand she has a very large following of people and with that comes the responsibility to fucking comprehend why this shit isn’t cool.
Let’s talk about weightlifting.
This is a typical GIS hit for “woman lifting weights.” Most of them are very thin, very lean, with no visible distinct musculature going on. (Unsurprisingly, stock-photo wise, they’re almost all exclusively white and long-haired and feminine, although I did see a few POC and an older woman in the hits which was INCREDIBLY refreshing!) They all tend to be lifting small weights.
Now, let’s see what happens if we google female weightlifters, i.e., people who lift frequently enough to identify that way whether by hobby or career or whatever. (I’ve done this a few times, and the results are a bit skewed at the moment, given the proximity in timing to the Olympics, so suddenly lots more Olympic women are showing up—which is great! Just FYI.) The photo below is pretty standard for what you get usually—a very lean woman, with heavier looking weights, with visible muscles, a six-pack, etc.
Googling female bodybuilding yields similar results, only the women are much much bigger, much much leaner, with far more defined musculature. (This is what most people will think of in a knee-jerk reaction to the term female weightlifter, and is what many mean when they say they don’t want to “get bulky” by lifting weights. Guess what? Getting built like that, much like getting supermodel skinny, is based hugely on genetics and hugely on a ton of work an dieting and super careful eating and working out and supplements and often steroids. It’s not magic and it doesn’t just happen by lifting weights.)
Note the leanness. See the tendons? See the very visible delineations between muscles, the curves where muscles go places, in all three photos? What’s missing?
There’s a secret in the weightlifting fitspo communities. Once you move into weightlifting, the focus blissfully falls away from “Eat less! Do hours of cardio!” to “Eat more! Lift more!” For women’s resources, with the exception of great sites like Nia Shanks’s etc., the underlying message remains: lift weights to get slimmer and more toned. Lift weights to show off your perky butt. Lift weights to build muscle which burns more calories which makes you slimmer. Lift weights to eat more without getting fat. You have to eat more, but you need to eat more a certain way, or you’ll just put on body fat. Lean mass, no fat. Fat fat fat fat fat.
The body fat obsession. The obsession exists very much in men’s weightlifting culture as well, just differently—“Eat tons and bulk as much as you can to make huge muscle gains and to gain weight” alternates with “Try carbo backloading or protein binges or intermittent fasting to get cut.” “Gain tons of lean mass while reducing body fat! Gain weight while getting more cut! Stay toned!”
Toned. Cut. I hate those words. They’re the thigh gap of weightlifting, the collarbones, the ribcages, the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” of people who have broken out of the standard body mindset shell long enough to challenge and free themselves in some ways, only to get trapped in others.
I did. I totally did. I fell down the rabbithole. Because I fucking love weightlifting, because I’m short and thick and chubby and it makes me feel strong and sexy and powerful and my body yearns for it and loves doing it. Even while I was increasing what I ate because to build muscle, to lift heavier and heavier things, you *have* to eat more, you have to have a caloric surplus—you cannot build muscle out of nothing, building means creating, means you have to something there to make it out of—even while I was doing that, even when for the first time in my life I stopped caring about what the scale said, even when the numbers creeped up, even when I am at my all-time highest weight *and feeling healthier and more energetic than I ever have*—I found myself trying to cut weight.
I found myself embracing the muscles and the gain and the food, I found my metabolism and body rejoicing in the protein and the exercise, and I found myself hating the bits of fat I found. My stomach. My hips. Looking up diets, looking up weird eating patterns to cut fat, cut fat, fat fat fat fat fat. There’s that word again. Not cut, not toned.
Cut. Toned. You know who isn’t cut or toned, but still lifts really fucking heavy weights? REALLY fucking heavy weights that the rest of us dream of?
So fuck you, fitspo. Fuck you cut, fuck you toned, fuck you crazy diets and crazy exercises to burn fat. As long as I eat what my body needs to do what I want it to do, I just don’t care.
I fucking love this and totally want to take up weightlifting as part of my ~obese lifestyle~ cause pretty much fuck fitspo.
seriously, FUCK this shit.
i’m not “seeing results” because my body doesn’t give a fuck.
so i’ve stopped looking for “results” not because i’ve given up, but because it’s fucking common sense.
my body is persistently, unequivocally FAT.
it always has been, and always will be.
no amount of steps i take will change this.
what some perceive as giving up, i perceive as moving the fuck on with my life and accepting my role as a fat and fabulous woman who can eat, sleep, and exercise normally without losing a goddamn pound.
this is part of the thought process i have to go through every time i see a graphic like this, or ones like it that are more damaging - i have to rationalize my own body and existence and way of thinking. i have to reassure myself and remind myself of the past. i have to try very hard not to let my mind shift into a reductionist frame of mind that i’ve tried so hard to break, because it’s not worth it to my health and happiness.
fuck. this. shit. i want to wipe fitspo (and thinspo) off the fucking planet.
END RANT.
newbody4me asked redefiningbodyimage:
(This turned into a bit of a rant, so I decided to make it an actual post.)
I do not identify with fitspo messaging at all, nor do I think it’s universally helpful in finding peace, love, and acceptance in oneself both internally and externally. I have written and discussed this and arthlete’s work in the past, but I will elaborate.
Much of the artwork featured on that blog holds a body image ideal up on a pedestal, suggesting that certain body types are more healthy and fit, that we should aspire to reach this predetermined level of health and fitness, when not everyone has the privilege to center their thoughts, time, and energy around sculpting their bodies in this way. Not everyone will get those results. Not everyone finds that shit helpful.
For instance, exhibit #1:
This, from my perspective, is simply an unhealthy way of thinking about fitness. I say this based on my own personal experience, which many people have related to. It may be helpful to some people, but I actually find it very harmful - in fact, I find it contradicts this piece entirely.
When I look at that first image and read the associated words, I don’t perceive it as positive or helpful or motivational - it does nothing for those of us with mental or chronic health issues, who struggle some days to get out of bed let alone go to the gym. In fact, it makes us feel like the girl in the second comic - inadequate, like we’re doing everything wrong, because we can’t just “talk ourselves into it” - we have other shit to deal with.
I just can not look at it in those terms, I can not afford to maintain any sort of weight loss mentality, it’s like beating my head against a brick wall. I used to do that, and the guilt would be overpowering to a point where I couldn’t get out of this cycle of hating myself, before I realized that it’s not about that.
It’s about knowing and realizing what health and fitness means to me, personally, and separating that definition from this pristine level of health that is so often pushed in our faces.Just because my level of health and fitness doesn’t involve lifting weights or working out on a consistent basis doesn’t make me inadequate. It doesn’t mean I’m talking myself out of anything. I’m just doing the best with what I’ve got.
These are the stories that need to be told. This is the kind of messaging that needs to be spread - that all bodies are good bodies, health does not have one definition, and fitness looks different for everyone.
This:
…along with a lot of other similar body and health-shaming content that floats around the internet, passed along by blogs like arthlete, is what I aim to combat.
When I see shit like that, it triggers all of this intense hatred I had for my body in the past, when I would work and work and work to try to lose the weight and it never happened. It triggers the intense anxiety I feel as a person who has a really complex relationship with my weight, my fitness, my mental health, my everything. It pits one body type against another. It is so, so harmful and body-shaming and horrible to me.
If this sort of thing is helpful to you, that is fine - I can not speak for you. But it needs to be acknowledged there are different sides to this shit. That’s all.
TW: Weight loss related discussion
Food is Fuel. =)
Is this really about your journey to weight loss? Or is it about your journey to defining and achieving your own personal health and fitness goals?
I guess I’m just wondering, is it really about the weight and aesthetics? For you that may be true, but not everyone has that privilege.
If “food is fuel” is associated with power, nourishment and health, then why is it still about weight loss when it’s all said and done? How do you separate the health and the weight loss?
This kind of messaging that floats around sends mixed signals that leave a bad taste in my mouth. When I see words like these being thrown together, to me they seem to contradict one another. When I think about food as fuel, I don’t think about weight loss. I don’t want to associate it with weight loss. For many people, it shouldn’t be about weight loss. I just wish these things were considered more often, words more carefully chosen.
TW: Weight loss discussion, fitspo, fitness, health…
If it were about you being healthier you would:
- compare distance walked/ran from previous outings
- compare blood pressure results
- compare time to distance ratio on exercise
- say I swam 10 more laps today before I was beat!
- say I walked for 10 extra minutes today without skipping a step!
- compare weight lifted from when you started to now
- speak about extra energy you have getting out of bed in the morning
- compare x activity output from when you started or last week
There are so many things you could be saying about being ‘healthier’ than showing pictures of before and after and showing differences on a scale.
Stop the bullshit and lies about it being about health!
Yep, exactly! If you want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons then YOU WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT FOR AESTHETIC REASONS and that’s cool, but please stop doing all of this dieting shit under the guise of “being more healthy” when it is complete bullshit.
Truth. Health can not be visually represented in an accurate fashion. Neither can fitness. The way these things apply to our lives is unique and can/should not be based around weight or aesthetic goals. We need to separate aesthetic change from these factors in order to make sense of them, otherwise the implications will remain.
A good friend of mine who is fat - about my size or a bit smaller - has been working with a personal trainer for months now. She can run for miles without being winded for the first time in years. She has made huge strides in improving her overall health and wellness, based on her own personal fitness goals.
But because she isn’t seeing the number on the scale go down, she says she has “nothing to show” for her efforts. She acknowledges that she feels healthier, she has more energy, and there are all of these positive effects - but she can’t get past the instinct that tells her she is failing, despite improving her overall health and wellbeing.
This shit is the number one most frustrating thing ever. Hell, I can’t even keep it from weighing on my self-esteem from time to time, and I fully understand where it’s coming from and why. Ugh.
Word. I can’t count the number of times that I have quit fitness programs because my main goal was to lose weight (always combined with a totally unsustainable diet, of course) and when it didn’t happen, I gave up. Now that I’m done with school and have some time to start taking better care of myself, I’m making an earnest effort to really get fit — as in, get stronger and improve my cardio endurance. But even now, it’s hard to escape the weight loss mentality. It helps that I no longer have a scale and don’t know what I weigh. It also helps that I do a fitness assessment after every 10 workouts and, having just done one, can now state with certainty that I am more fit than I was two weeks ago; I can do more push-ups, more crunches, and more squats. (And it feels totally awesome!)
If you’re going to post thinspo, just call it what it is. Don’t make it about “fitness” or “health,” because, as the OP said, that’s bullshit.
I just needed to say - Escaping the weight-loss mentality is the bane of my existence. It is the single hardest thing for me to overcome. I don’t know why.
Thank you! I never know how to reply to fanmail messages - I tend to just post them publicly, otherwise I have no record of them, and I like it that way. I hope this is appropriate.
But yeah, I’m glad you can relate! Also, as a general rule of thumb, I think it’s very important to limit the amount of media and the kinds of messaging you take in on a daily basis. Prefacing applicable posts with a “trigger warning” is super, super important - As well as unfollowing those blogs that feed into destructive thinking, of course.
Thanks for contributing! <3
TW: Weight loss discussion, fitspo, fitness, health…
If it were about you being healthier you would:
- compare distance walked/ran from previous outings
- compare blood pressure results
- compare time to distance ratio on exercise
- say I swam 10 more laps today before I was beat!
- say I walked for 10 extra minutes today without skipping a step!
- compare weight lifted from when you started to now
- speak about extra energy you have getting out of bed in the morning
- compare x activity output from when you started or last week
There are so many things you could be saying about being ‘healthier’ than showing pictures of before and after and showing differences on a scale.
Stop the bullshit and lies about it being about health!
Yep, exactly! If you want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons then YOU WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT FOR AESTHETIC REASONS and that’s cool, but please stop doing all of this dieting shit under the guise of “being more healthy” when it is complete bullshit.
Truth. Health can not be visually represented in an accurate fashion. Neither can fitness. The way these things apply to our lives is unique and can/should not be based around weight or aesthetic goals. We need to separate aesthetic change from these factors in order to make sense of them, otherwise the implications will remain.
A good friend of mine who is fat - about my size or a bit smaller - has been working with a personal trainer for months now. She can run for miles without being winded for the first time in years. She has made huge strides in improving her overall health and wellness, based on her own personal fitness goals.
But because she isn’t seeing the number on the scale go down, she says she has “nothing to show” for her efforts. She acknowledges that she feels healthier, she has more energy, and there are all of these positive effects - but she can’t get past the instinct that tells her she is failing, despite improving her overall health and wellbeing.
This shit is the number one most frustrating thing ever. Hell, I can’t even keep it from weighing on my self-esteem from time to time, and I fully understand where it’s coming from and why. Ugh.
from as-thin-as-fuck:
——
I want to thank you for this blog and applaud how amazing and brave you are! Reading it has reduced me to tears and its really touched me in a way that no other body-loving blog has managed too before.
I have an eating disorder, my formative years have been spent struggling with one, but gradually I’ve been able to make the odd change here and there for the better such as quitting purging. Essentially my ED and I have declared a truce.
Fitspo blogs have always repelled me and I simply assumed that was partly due to the fact I was sick, but they would go on and on about this kind of muscle tone, and how great it is to be super strong but that has never appealed to me! Sure, a bit of tummy definition maybe but the thought of having body builder abs freaks me the hell out… most NORMAL people do not look like that, was it so wrong for me to want to be normal??? And I felt pretty much the same about blogs that would point to skinny girls with small boobs and talk about how ‘real women’ were meant to look. I don’t have small boobs myself but I think they look awesome, boobs are boobs right? Whats all the fighting about??? I didn’t like those sites either. All these places ever seemed to want to do is take away my personal ideas of the ideal body and replace it with their own and it just did not work for me (think of how vampires respond to holy water and you’ll have a rough idea of how I reacted to those sites).
I get a fair few messages on my blog telling me that I’m silly to not eat and that working out and eating healthy is the way forward, as if I’m too stupid to work that out, as if my ED has anything to do with my weight on anything but the most superficial of levels. I see healthy blogs that make numerous posts about the dangers of eating too little and how it frustrates them that silly ED girls looking for a quick fix never listen to these messages and they would be happy if only they did -_-
The post of yours I ever read was you talking to your doctor about being healthy and loving your body instead of blaming everything on your size like your physiologist seemed to want. And for the first time I was reading a self-love post that made a lick of sense. I am so so sick of seeing how many posts saying ‘yeah, this woman looks strong cos she works out and thats how people should want to look, not silly and scrawny’, or ‘yeah, this woman has curves not like those skinny thing girls that don’t even know what being a woman is about’. Believe it or not I don’t look at pictures girls so underweight they’re most likely on deaths door wishing to look like that either, partly because I’ve been working on the way I think and also because all I’ve ever seen in those pictures is pain and I’ve never understood how people don’t see it. Where is my middle ground???
I cannot tell you want it means to me to see a blog that doesn’t have silly captions on each post or telling me how I need to look in order to be a real woman or to be healthy because I already have an ED to do that for me and it is very good at that, why do I need other people chiming in?!
I am in love with the message of your blog. I’m struggling with this new stage in my life A LOT and gaining weight is not a idea I can happily wrap my head around (I’m not underweight so theres no immediate worry on that front anyway), however, loving myself, being happy within my own body, this is something I can wrap my head around. I like the idea of getting healthy on my own terms instead of having other people simply change the finish line for my never-ending race towards self destruction, people never seemed to understand that I can hate myself whilst earning rock hard abs in the gym just as well as I can eating a slice of cake or simply not eating at all. Once I fix my mind and come to peace with my body everything else will fall into place, maybe I will want abs, maybe I wont. it doesn’t matter so long as I’m happy and healthy.
So I just want to thank for giving me a message of happiness that wasn’t shoving a thinly disguised warning down my throat that unless I look how they think women should look I am wrong. And thank you for being the first blog about loving your body that hasn’t make me recoil in horror. And thank you for giving me hope that I am on to something by choosing to find peace with my body and health instead of chasing some ideal in the gym. And just thank you. <3
——
I am so very touched by your thanks and appreciation. I decided to post this because your perspective is very interesting.
Thank you so much <3
- Haley
Fuck fitspo.
‘Cut’ abs and muscular legs are not the only way to be healthy.
Do you see this picture? ALL of these women are Olympians, and all of them are healthy.
What about Holley Mangold?
She’s 374lbs. No, you can’t see her abs. But she just got into the Olympics as well. Do you want to tell me she’s unhealthy?
How about Ragen Chastain?
She’s a professional dancer who’s ‘morbidly obese’ and yet she’s in tip top shape, and even runs a blog about her work.
I could keep going.
Health is NOT visible. You cannot tell how healthy someone is by looking at them. You cannot tell how far or fast they can run. You cannot tell their level of fitness. You cannot tell how much they can lift, how often they work out.
And likewise, just because you look a certain way, or just because numbers on a scale are dropping, doesn’t mean you’re healthy.
BMI is bullshit. Everything they tell you on The Biggest Loser and Dr. Oz and the 5pm news is bullshit. Unplug yourself. Body size is NOT an indicator of health or fitness. And health does not dictate what your body will look like.
And most importantly at all: if someone isn’t healthy, it is NOT YOUR BUSINESS. And if you’re unhealthy and you’re happy, no one can tell you you’re wrong. Your body is YOUR body.
TW: Medical fat shaming, fitspo, and mental health discussion.
So, after a year of being in denial about my mental health, I went to see my psychiatrist and my therapist yesterday.
I saw them separately, first my psychiatrist and then my therapist.
It was interesting to compare the two sessions - the medical versus mental approaches.
When my psychiatrist asked me about my weight, I knew the conversation would take a nosedive. From that point forward, half of what he told me and/or scolded me about was weight-related.
“You know, your BMI is worrying.”
“You know, you could lose the weight if you tried.”
“You know, just be more active.”
I shrugged the comments off and said simply, “I don’t mind my weight, it’s a non-issue. My concern is with being healthy and feeling better.”
He looked at me like what I was saying was some alien concept and continued to press his body shaming diagnosis.
“You should see your family doctor and rule out any weight-related issues.”
I was about to tell him I’d had everything checked out recently and happened to be quite healthy, but he ushered me out the door.
Fast forward to the conversation I had with my therapist wherein she asks me what the doctor had discussed with me. I told her about the weight comments and she actually laughed and sighed with exasperation.
She said, “I want you to disregard everything he told you. It’s not the right way to think about your health. You need to do what’s best for you, and what’s best for you is not focusing on weight loss - it’s focusing on your health. They aren’t one in the same.”
This was nothing I hadn’t heard before obviously, but coming from her, in that moment, after what I had just experienced with the MD - the words carried more weight than ever before. We continued to have a very empowering conversation about health and activity that made me feel better than I had in ages.
I was shocked that body shaming of any kind would be brought into the conversation by my psychiatrist, a professional whose goal is to support and diagnose mental illnesses. If I had been in a more damaged frame of mind, his comments might have made me second guess everything about myself and my body. It may have triggered me into regressing back to hating my body and blaming myself. I fear for his patients who may not have found body acceptance.
This is why focusing on weight loss as a goal for a fatty with anxiety and depression is impractical, for ME. I need to remove weight loss from the picture entirely and focus just on what feels right. I can not afford for my body ideal to be grounded in physicality. Instead, it’s grounded in mental health and wellness because that is what I need to concentrate on in order to find happiness and contentment.
I’ve received a lot of messages regarding my fitspo-related content wherein commenters fail to empathize with my inability to focus on weight loss. Instead they turn it around to make it all about them, blaming me for “shaming people who are trying to shape their bodies to match their ideal self-image”, when that is simply untrue.
Contrary to what people may have taken away from my previous post, I have not and will never judge anyone for wanting to change their appearance. Wanting to change your body does not mean that you hate it - but not wanting to change it doesn’t mean that you hate it, either.
If others can find happiness in their journey to attaining an ideal self image, I am not about to shame them for their privilege of being able to do so - but that privilege needs to be recognized.
All I want is to incite a level of understanding from the fitspo community that while their methods may be right for them, it is not a universally healthy way of thinking for everyone. Because health is different for everyone. Because attaining a “fit and lean” body type is a privilege that should not and can not be expected of everyone.
Sometimes I wonder if being this honest about my physical and mental health in such a public space is worth it. There were a few times this week where I considered putting this blog on hiatus for a while.
But when I get messages from people recovering from eating disorders and struggling with mental disabilities or body dismorphia telling me how much my words mean to them, how much they can relate and are touched by what I am saying, I am reminded why this is all worth it.
I’ll continue to keep my heart on my sleeve and my thoughts in the open.