Monthly Archives: September 2020

General, Obesity, Running, Uncategorized

On Running, Anti-Fatness, Diet Culture, and Body Liberation

A few things off the top:

  • This post discusses bodies and weight stigma. Please proceed carefully if these topics are triggering.
  • I write this as a straight-sized, cis-gender, white women who holds tremendous privilege in the context of this particular conversation.
  • This post is meant as a conversation starter, a toe-in to a conversation I don’t see in the running community, but a conversation I think we need to have. I am by no stretch an expert on diet culture, anti-fatness, fat phobia, or fat liberation. I am learning and this post is a dialogue on some of what concerns me. I am guilty of much of the behavior I discuss here.
  • At its root, anti-fatness and fat phobia are white supremacist beliefs and behaviors. I do not get into that aspect here, simply for the sake of brevity (this post is already too long), but want to be clear that the these behaviors are white supremacy in action.

Over the last few years, the running community has started a reckoning with our deep history with eating disorder culture. We’ve acknowledged how women in particular have been harmed by sometimes (but not always) well-meaning coaches who place an outsized focus on body weight in competition. We’ve learned how girls as young as junior high and all of the way into the professional ranks have been scolded for the number on the scale. Runners who’ve been told they’re too fat to be fast, even while they compete at the upper echelons of the sport in very thin bodies.

But what I haven’t seen much of is a dialogue about how anti-fatness and diet culture have weaved their tentacles into running culture, particularly among the non-elite. Runners such as Mirna Valerio, Latoya Shauntay Snell, and Kelly Roberts have been vocal advocates for more inclusivity for fat bodies in the running community. As women in curvy bodies, and for Valerio and Snell black, curvy bodies, they’ve shouldered much of the burden of holding a mirror up to the running community. And while we work to make space for runners of all shapes and sizes, I don’t hear us talking about anti-fatness or fat phobia, or the ways in which it influences the behavior of straight-sized, mid-pack runners, never mind the ways in which it excludes people from the sport. I also don’t hear us discussing how diet culture repackages itself as a desire to be fit particularly among women athletes.

Anti-fatness: opposed to obese people

Fat phobia: irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against obesity or people with obesity

Diet culture: a system of belief that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue

Anti-fatness among the running community looks like clothing companies with limited sizing and with apparel that doesn’t take the needs of fat bodies into account. Shorts that are too short (longer shorts reduce chafing and increase comfort), sports bras that don’t account for an ample bust and in the rare instance they do, are ugly and utilitarian. It’s tops that aren’t long enough. Compression gear only in straight sizes. Sportswear catalogs and advertising that feature only straight-sized athletes and models. Running stores that carry clothing only for straight-sized athletes, or that carry a small offering of “extended sizes” on a small rack in the back corner. Running stores that don’t have any fat runners on staff. It is publications that feature exclusively straight-sized runners, except for the occasional feature about fat runners, which is the only time runners of size are seen.

Diet culture with a side of fat phobia is straight-sized, mid-pack runners monitoring their calories in the off season so as to not gain weight. It’s women wearing shirts when they run in the summer, until they are “thin enough” to run without it. It’s straight-sized runners saying they are fat – even as a joke – when they pick up a few pounds in between training cycles. It’s women wearing tights when the weather is hot (this can also relate to shorts not being long enough). It’s anytime someone covers their body for reasons that don’t include the temperature. It is going out for a long run to “earn” the cheeseburger, the pizza, the ice cream. It is the way we hide behind training, hide behind “wanting to be fast”, as an excuse for our calorie restriction. It is the folks who comment on Snell’s Instagram videos of her workouts, saying how they are smaller than her and couldn’t do what she does. It’s the people who see those videos and think that same thought. It’s complimenting each other on weight loss. It’s “transformation Tuesday” posts where the transformation is almost always a smaller body.

American culture is deeply fat phobic. Fat people are less likely to be hired for a job, less likely to have their complaints taken seriously at the doctor’s office – the solution to a sore throat is to lose weight, and more likely to be shamed for taking up space in public than straight-sized people. They are never the romantic lead in a movie. They are not the CEO of a company. Their size is always something to overcome, to succeed in spite of. Fat women of color are particularly invisible or when they are visible, it is never in positive ways. There isn’t a comparable state of the body that people are so thoroughly blamed for, even though body size is due to a very complicated set of circumstances, personal choices being but one incredibly small component. People are very comfortable making value judgements based on someone’s size. We are comfortable assuming how they (don’t) care for their body, and what must be their (ill) state of health.

Fat activist Caleb Luna states that fat phobia and anti-fatness pressures thin people into monitoring their bodies. I believe that many runners, particularly women runners, use running as one way of monitoring their body. A socially acceptable way. We can hide our internalized fat phobia and participation in diet culture behind our desire to be “fit” to be “fast”. I don’t doubt that we also want those things, but I don’t see how the pervasive anti-fatness of our culture isn’t also a factor in how we monitor our bodies in sport, especially when we belong to running groups that do not include any fat people, buy from companies that don’t make products for fat people, consume media that doesn’t include fat people or consider their needs.

Diet culture is an avenue for monitoring our bodies. Factor in a genuine desire to be a better athlete and it can be a perfect storm. Diet culture leaves us hungry and obsessed with food. It tells us to track our calories, to never be full. It tells us that low-carb/high fat will solve all of our problems, even if there is no medical reason to eat that way. It instructs us to skip the snack and to not eat after 7p. It is the belief that we need to earn our food.

Rejecting diet culture is understanding that we can eat whatever the fuck we want, whenever we want. It is the realization that we can be fit, we can be fast, without the obsession about our diet. It is acknowledging that we are humans who get hungry. Virgie Tovar says that “extinguishing our hunger is extinguishing our desire”. And that at it’s root, “desire is about power”. A patriarchal society thrives when women are kept small and distracted. Sociologist Sandra Gillman states that “dieting is a way that women express to their culture that they understand their role and are willing to accept it”. Gillman is a man, but his observation is accurate. Our hunger and our distraction keep us small. It keeps us focused on what we’re going to have for lunch instead of the art we want to make, the problem we’re trying to solve at work. It prevents us from being fully present with those we love.

Within the last year or so, Oiselle expanded their size offerings and now include runners of a variety of sizes in their advertising. They are one company, and a smaller company at that, but it feels like an important step forward. Oiselle has been called out over the years for not featuring diverse runners in their advertising and for not offering apparel for all sizes, and to their credit, they stepped up to the plate in both instances. Unfortunately in both cases, it was runners of color and runners of size who were the most vocal about the omissions.

When running creates space for fat liberation, it will be straight-sized runners pointing out these absences just as vocally. It will be straight-sized runners who notice the community isn’t fully represented, not just those who’ve been left out. Just as we’ve come to expect to see black and brown runners included in advertising and feature stories, we’ll expect to see fat runners included as well. We’ll expect to see fat runners in our local running groups, at the local run store. We’ll expect to see clothing for fat runners displayed right along clothing for straight sized runners. We’ll see companies developing cute, functional bras for fat women runners, just like they do for straight-sized women runners. We’ll realize the fat phobia inherent in our comments about our own bodies, and the damage those comments inflict on not just the fat people in our communities, but on straight-sized folks too.

Want to give white supremacy and the patriarchy a big middle finger? Embrace your hunger, love your body, run hard because it fills you with joy. Understand that bodies aren’t a problem to be solved, our own or other people’s. Consider not commenting on other people’s bodies at all. Stop viewing weight loss as progress, your own or other people’s. Take a deep dive into your own beliefs about fat people, regardless of your size. Read the work of authors who talk about fat liberation, authors such as Virgie Tovar. Eat the cheeseburger. Most of all, savor your food. What a tremendous privilege it is to have delicious, ample food.

Autoimmunity, General, Introversion, Reflection, Transformation, Uncategorized

Healthism is Ableist, Capitalist Bullshit and Musings about What’s Next

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Healthism: identified by Robert Crawford in 1980, healthism is “the preoccupation with personal health as a primary – often the primary – focus for the definition and achievement of well-being; a goal which is to be attained primarily through the modification of life styles.”

Ableism: discrimination in favor of able-bodied people

Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for-profit, rather than by the state.

Six years have passed since my health started its downward spiral. Fall of 2014 was the first clear inclination that something was up, beginning with exercise intolerance and weird night sweats. The downturn continued for four more years, with sprinkles of hope and improvement mixed in, but it would be fall of 2018 before any marked recovery took place. In that time, I burnt my career to the ground – not by choice, stopped running for months at a time, radically modified my diet, all in hopes of reclaiming a shred of the wellbeing I once took for granted.

It’s quite common in our culture to hear people brag about how they don’t take medication. It’s not meant to shame those that do, but folks take pride in being medication-free. It bothered me before, as someone who’s needed thyroid medication to function since I was 25, and allergy medicine to prevent me from taking my eye balls out of my head and scratching my face off since a decade before that. But as someone who now requires handfuls of supplements a few times a day, in addition to the aforementioned thryoid and allergy medication, to make up for the nutrient deficiencies documented within my body, it reeks of ableism. Folks who are medication free are largely so because of good fortune and good genetics.

But what is healthism, beyond the overly stuffy definition quoted above? Our attitudes about overweight and obesity are perfect examples. Folks are blamed by society if their bodies don’t fit our fucked up ideas about what bodies should look like. All bodies must be thin, ideally white or white passing. Anything other than that is subpar and a problem to be addressed. Never mind that a person’s body sized is influenced by many factors, most significantly genetics. It’s also affected by income levels, food security/insecurity, access to healthcare, stress, a community’s built environment – or how people move about one’s community (are there sidewalks, is it safe, is it bikeable), all things partially or completely outside an individual’s locus of control. In spite of all of that, a person’s weight is viewed as a moral issue. An urgent problem that must be solved.

How many companies exist for the sole purpose of “helping” people lose weight? Who is making money off of our culture’s obsession with thinness? Who benefits? Certainly not women who are taught from a young age that our unruly bodies are something to be controlled and managed. Our healthcare costs are some of the highest in the world, our outcomes not befitting those of a wealthy nation, a nation obsessed with health. Where’s the disconnect? Never mind that our bodies are no one’s business. The size of it, the state of it, what we do with it, how we treat it, none of it.

The chronic flare of my autoimmune condition started because of stress. Specifically stress at work. I cared deeply about my job and it was incredibly challenging. So I did what many women do, I ran myself right into the ground, without a second thought. I spent the decade before burning the candle at both ends and getting away with it. I climbed ladders, took on more responsibility, earned a decent salary, all for someone else’s – namely my employer’s – benefit. Sure I had some money in the bank, but I was not the main benefactor of my labor. It’s what I was supposed to do though, right? Bust your ass, even if it costs you nearly everything. This is capitalism. An economic system that benefits a small class of wealthy people, not the everyday folks stuck in the middle of it.

So now I am a person with a chronic illness, someone who will forever exist outside our culture’s obsession with health. I no longer possess the capacity to burn the candle at both ends. Most days I feel pretty good, but I still have days I can barely get off the couch. Less often than a few years ago, thank goodness. I sleep a lot, not by choice. It’s the only way I can function. I spend an inordinate amount of time prepping food. Taking care of myself feels like a full time job most weeks. I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out where my career fits in the midst of all of this. I’m young enough that I still have a lot I want to accomplish, a lot to offer. I want to be of service, to make all of this mean something. I explored, and even started, going back to school. I’ve explored a number of other options, none of them feeling like the right fit. All of those options have been within how we traditionally define work, namely my working for someone else. My pay, my worth, defined by others.

Finally, it occurred to me that perhaps the way forward isn’t the way it’s always been. What if I worked for myself, on projects that matter most to me? Where I have complete control over how and when I work, taking advantage of when I’m feeling great, scaling back when I need more rest. What if I created a career for myself that can go wherever I go, wherever we go?

Months of soul searching, questioning, and facing a whole host of fears I didn’t even know I had (thanks to M for his tremendous patience while I worked through these) has me on the cusp of starting my own business. I’m a few months from launch, but I am starting Juniperus, a leadership and communications coaching service focused on quiet, introverted, empathetic women who want to cultivate more courage and resilience in their work and in their life. What I loved most about being a leader was mentoring and bringing up other women with me. When I thought about how I wanted to spend my limited resources going forward, I realized it is here. I think the concept of work-life balance is bullshit, especially as someone with a chronic illness. Work-life integration is what I’m going for, and what I hope to help other women manifest in their own unique ways. In addition to my nearly two decades of experience as a quiet leader, I’m also taking a life coach training that starts in October. Not because I want to be a life coach (NTTAWT), but because I want to enhance my question-asking and listening abilities. And a coaching certification seems important in the longterm. I’m exploring anticapitalist pricing strategies and plan to increase our giving as I earn income again. I have very modest goals initially, but I’m not ashamed to say that I want to make up for the income that I’ve lost out on the last five years. I believe I can help quiet women leaders be more effective and fulfilled in their work AND earn a decent salary while I do it. Creating work that accounts for my very real limitations in a way that doesn’t feel like a compromise feels pretty damn good too.

I’ll post on the socials when I officially launch, but none of this would be happening without this persistent, relentless flare, and the wildfire it created. Without being forced to burn it all down, I wouldn’t have had the time or the space to think about the kind of impact I want to have with my work and how I can make that happen. In a different society, one that valued true health and wellbeing, that honored different abilities, I could likely go back to a more traditional career. I could still be a leader in an organization. That is not an option for me, or thousands of other people in similar situations. And what a loss that is. Our talents and our skills are missed because our capacity is different. Because workplaces care more about my butt in a seat for eight+ hours than the quality and quantity of work I can offer. I’m grateful for the privilege to go out on my own. Grateful for a husband that’s been a rock through these last terrible years. Grateful for our good financial decisions that provide the resources to get Juniperus off the ground. Grateful to Vasavi Kumar, the extremely talented business and mindset coach who’s helping me nail down the specifics of this business.

The fire is out, the smoke has cleared. Little bits of life are poking up through the charred earth. I turn 45 in eight weeks. LFG.