I didn’t expect such a painful, vulnerable email.
A thin reader had written, detailing their mother’s relationship with her own body. The reader worried that their mother called herself fat; that she didn’t want to be seen in a swimsuit; apologized for eating anything that wasn’t a salad. She announced her fatness before others got the chance, eagerly making self-deprecating jokes that often sounded confessional, more heartbreaking than humorous.
This reader’s question was a simple and wrenching one: “How do I help my fat mom love herself?”
I ached for this reader, and for their mother. I knew the pain of watching a loved one hurt themself before my very eyes, of hearing the ways they talk about themselves. And I knew, too, the isolation of being a fat person surrounded by thinner ones, the constant expectation that I should, or must, explain my aberrant body to those around me. I was subsumed by their pain—both this reader’s and their mother’s.
But the reader’s question, while heartfelt, also seemed misguided. Like many thin people before them, this reader seemed to have assumed that the trouble lay with their mother’s body image. Often, thin people who have struggled with their own body image interpret the struggles of fat people through that lens, assuming that, like theirs, our struggles are largely internal, borne of a brain stubbornly thinking unwanted thoughts.
While a compassionate framework, assuming fat people’s struggles are borne of our internal body image is also a projection: an assumption that fat people’s bodies face the same challenges that thin ones do. For some fat people, their experiences of anti-fatness may include eating disorders, body dysmorphia, or other struggles with body image. Others are perfectly at ease in their own fat skin. But regardless of how fat people feel about our own bodies, we live in a world that expects fat people to be deeply ashamed of ourselves at every turn. That expectation is often reinforced even by our families, partners, friends, and loved ones. Some of us may want or need help in addressing our own body image, but all of us need a world in which it is possible for us to simply be in our bodies as they are.
So, to this reader, and to anyone wondering how to help their fat friends and family love themselves, I’d offer a question to reframe your thinking. Rather than asking how to fix someone else’s brain—an often impossible and invasive task—ask what you’ve done to create the conditions for them to simply stop hating themselves.
Fat people live in a world that withholds medical care from us, that assumes we are both unhealthy and immoral, that makes entertainment of our suffering. And when we finally speak up about all that mistreatment, those conversations are frequently derailed. Rather than assuming the problem lies in fat people’s low self-esteem, try looking at the conditions that demand self-deprecation of fat people, and that insist on our hatred of our own skin. What are you doing to create a world in which it is possible for fat people to love ourselves?
How do you talk about fatness, and what kind of anti-fatness do you tolerate? Do you talk about your dieting and weight loss goals with your fat friends? Have you asked for their consent, or how it impacts them to hear everything you may be doing to avoid looking like them? If you don’t talk about your own weight loss with them, do you interrupt others’ diet and weight loss talk? What about interrupting talk about the “obesity epidemic” and other popular frameworks that make our bodies into some kind of biological bogeymen? Do you interrupt anti-fat bias when you see it, or do you let it slide, instead prioritizing your own comfort, or believing that anti-fatness is a natural consequence of daring to be fat?
What are you doing to influence the systems and institutions you’re a part of? Does your workplace host a “biggest loser” competition? Have you spoken out against it, both for fat colleagues and colleagues with eating disorders? Knowing that many fat people have faced significant bias in doctors’ offices, have you spoken with your health care providers about anti-fatness? Do you shop at stores that also carry plus and extended plus sizes, supporting the designers and retailers that fat people need so desperately?
Have you assessed and addressed your own anti-fat bias? Have you used tools like Harvard University’s implicit attitudes test? Have you read books that are written both by and about fat people? Have you looked critically at the anti-fat myths that you may still believe? Have you done the research and the self-work to uproot the parts of you that still want to pathologize, pity, or condescend to fat people?
It can be painful to watch a loved one denigrate themselves. But it’s important to remember that, for many fat people, that is a belief we have been taught, time and time again, by those closest to us. For many fat people, anti-fatness is a learned behavior, and one that is often required of us by the world around us. In order to access health care, we often have to disavow our own bodies, insisting that we will shed them as quickly as we can. In order to get food at a restaurant, we may face long stares from servers and fellow patrons—a silent expression of their expectation that we justify or explain the bodies they find so unacceptable.
Instead of looking at what’s gone wrong in your loved one’s mind, look at where they’ve been asked to show that they hate themselves just to make it through the day. Look at the ways the world around them demands their shame as a toll for services or survival. Instead of looking at how to fix the symptom, cure the ailment itself.