What is fat phobia (and why should you care)?

April Hélène-Horton:

I was wearing shorts. I have very, very noticeably like simply fat thighs. I have Beyonce thighs as I like to call them. And so, I was walking past this person in a bar and they went, “Oh dear”.

Xochitl dela Piedad Garcia:

It starts with the idea that thin is healthy. But I think it also then permeating the idea that thin is beautiful and then thin is the only acceptable body.

Karyn de Mol:

Eating out in public. If you eat something on a train and it’s something that’s maybe not healthy. The looks you get…

Georgie Owen:

We don’t know someone’s health by looking at their body, even if we did, it’s none of our business. No one owes us their health.

April:

The fact that they took time out of their day to say something mean to you, come on, they’re not a person whose opinion you value. They’re awful.

Sam Ikin:

The word fat is mostly used as an insult. It’s the first thing thrown at anyone living in a larger body when somebody means to insult us. The truth is, it’s a benign neutral descriptor of body shape. It’s like being tall or short or having blue eyes. But our society does not tolerate fat people. If you live in a larger body, you will be discriminated against almost everywhere from catching public transport or flying where the seats may not be big enough, but if they are other passengers they will quickly let you know that you’re taking up too much space There’s also shopping for clothes where outlets mostly don’t stock diverse sizes. And if you happen to wander into the wrong retail space, the shop attendants either won’t make any eye contact until you just leave, or they’ll make it clear that you’re probably in the wrong shop. We also face discrimination in the workplace, at the doctor’s office and let’s not forget the constant dehumanisation by the news media.

This is Butterfly, Let’s Talk with me, Sam Ikin and your friends at Butterfly, your national voice for eating disorders and body image issues and, in case I haven’t made it clear, this episode is about fat phobia.

Weight is one of the few targets of stigmatization where is still valid to openly stigmatise. Weight bias, fat phobia, weight stigma, whatever you want to call it, I’m sure you’ve experienced it either directly or indirectly whatever size, body that you happen to be in. It’s also a major driving factor in mental illnesses including body image issues and eating disorders.

Xochitl:

Part of the reason why it’s socially acceptable is because there’s this view one that it’s your fault that you’re heavy and two, that if I stigmatize you, that will motivate you to try to lose weight when in fact the evidence shows the complete opposite.

Sam:

This is Xochitl dela Piedad Garcia and she’s an expert.

Xochitl:

I’m a researcher at the Melbourne campus of Australian Catholic University collaborating with Associate professor Leah Brennan who is now in La Trobe, who does a lot of research in weight and eating behaviours. Through my collaboration with her we’ve started working a lot on research on weight stigma or fat phobia

Sam:

Weight stigma is associated with several negative outcomes for people in larger bodies that’s not necessarily related to their mental health. These include decreased opportunity in employment income, education, housing and social status. And it’s also indicated in inferior medical care.

Xochitl:

The core belief that people who are heavy are bad comes from the idea that people who are heavier are lazy or not self-disciplined. Knowing that that is not true should be one of the first steps towards moving away. However, I think that morally it is wrong to reject someone on the basis of how they look, right?

April:

It’s really difficult to exist in a way that’s unassuming as a fat person. And I say that as someone who is very assuming, I suppose if that’s the opposite of unassuming, I am an extrovert. And so, I find it easy to deflect what I sense to be criticism with either self-deprecating insults or other forms of comedy so that I can kind of make people feel comfortable with the fact that I know that they’re thinking something about me because of how much I weigh. For someone who might not be like me, so someone who’s shy you know, introversion doesn’t allow you to deflect instead you just keep taking it in.

Sam:

April is fighting back against fat phobia through her enormously popular online platform.

April:

I go by the Bodzilla online. I do that because it allows me to delve into those depths of my personality that I never really shared before. I started focusing on body acceptance, self-love, and all of the things that I talk about online. I’m a model, I’m an activist. I like to think of myself as a comedian, but that could just be me. And so, I love to work in the media and take opportunities that are not normally offered to fat people so that I can show other people how visible they can be if they’re if they’re able to and they’re willing to.

Sam:

April can remember fat phobia being part of her life since she was eight years old.

April:

In your teenage years, you’re discovering yourself from a gender and sexuality point of view. And I just felt so apart from what I saw demonstrated as traditional femininity. Then in my twenties, I went through a number of different phases of what I would call self-harm because that’s essentially what I was doing. I was really, really harming myself—both my body and my mind—with different ways of trying to lose weight. And I was surrounded with a lot of people who encouraged me to do that because they also held those beliefs that a better body is the body that is slim and standard and normal. And so through diets, appetite suppressants, binge eating purging blah, blah, blah, blah, all of those things that we do that at the end of the day, don’t do anything that hurt ourselves. I had weight loss surgery at 30 years old, so I’m turning 37 this year, so it will be going on seven years at the end of the year. I think that’s right. I had gastric sleeve surgery and I was one of four people in my family now who have had that surgery. Now that we have more of a sense of what does body shape and body type and body mass look like in terms of science, it doesn’t actually look like if you just eat these certain macros, you’ll all look the same. No, genetics informs our body shapes and types. And so, I think that’s a reasonable tiny dataset that tells us that my family are generally on the fat side, but don’t want to be because that’s what they’ve been told not to be.

Xochitl:

It starts with the idea that thin is healthy, but I think it also the permeating idea that thin is beautiful and then thin is the only acceptable body. And one thing that characterises the basic core beliefs around fat phobia or weight stigma is the idea that because thinness is the ideal that we should all aspire to and thinness is believed to be achievable via exercise and dieting, anyone who is not conforming to that body is lazy or lacks willpower or is not self-controlled. It has a whole bunch of other moral connotations that are negative.

Sam:

In a recent survey, 38% of respondents agreed that obese bodies are disgusting, just under half of the people who identify as being obese said that they changed their behaviour to avoid unwanted attention because of their weight. I think it stands without saying that this way of thinking is harmful. We need to realize as a society that your body is not wrong and it’s not a problem that needs to be fixed.

Xochitl:

Weight doesn’t define the quality of a person. Let’s start there. Just as any other physical characteristic doesn’t determine who you are. That’s one side of things, but the other side of things is that weight is not solely determined by your behaviour, contrary to popular belief. It is not true that if you diet and you exercise, you will definitely lose weight and keep it off. Right? So there’s a lot of evidence from medicine and science more generally, that shows that weight is multi determined. So not only by your behaviours, but also by your genetics and physiology and various other metabolic mechanisms that determine weight.

April:

My goal is to keep pushing back to kind of do the work for younger me, the me pre weight loss surgery, the me that really saw what it was like to have people make the disgusted faces like,
“Why are you here? Why do you exist?” People literally look at you like you’re nothing but like your something awful. I was wearing shorts in a bar the other day – now as I said I’ve lost weight for weight loss surgery. So I’m in a smaller fat body and I was wearing shorts. I have very, very noticeably dimply fat thighs. I have Beyonce thighs as I like to call them. All those things are quite smooth and they’re very powerful and can break pants like that. And so, I was walking past this person in a bar and they went, “Oh dear” really loudly. It was almost to the point where I was like, “Oh, just yell out, ‘you’re fat and I hate you!’ like just tell the truth doll! Be honest with yourself”! Oh dear. And I just kept walking off. Imagine thinking I need to take time out of my day to comment on someone else. But that’s why we are here. You and I are talking because so many people take time out of their day. Some people take hours, days, weeks, months out of their life. Just to tell us how much they hate that people.

Sam:

Like all forms of discrimination, challenging fat phobia is where you start to change it and it’s people we’re talking to people on the front lines in this battle, people like April and our next guests who have just co-authored a book about their lives trying to hide from the stigma.

Megan Harris:

My name is Megan and I’ve been a therapist for about 10, 12 years now, and Karyn and I recently wrote a book called Eating Secrets. I came into this story through a lot of grief when I was younger, having lost my father when I was 10 and you know, my daddy was gone and so I turned to food for comfort. We wrote the book because we just we just felt that there were too many people out there that had eating secrets that were just suffering in silence and in shame. So we wanted to write a book and connect with as many people as we can, just to let them know that they’re not alone on this journey.

Sam:

Their book, Eating Secrets is subtitled The Ultimate Guide to Take Control and Overcome Bingeing and Self Sabotage. Just from that title alone, you can tell that they get it and they’ve been through some stuff.

Karyn:

I remember getting on a plane and being so upset because I couldn’t bring the table down – the looks you get from people on planes, if you’re sort of encroaching on their space. And you know, eating out in public. If you eat something on a train and it’s something that’s maybe not healthy, the looks you get, you know, and it could have been because I was starving hungry because I hadn’t eaten all day. So you do get a lot of judgments that make you feel so ashamed and then what you tend to do then –  for me – you secret eat. Hence the book because you tend to want to not let anyone else see you do it and then when you do eat something, you hide it. So it’s quite a shameful place to be and no one really understands. You might talk to someone and they’re very much, oh, me too, you know, like, I couldn’t fit into this top and so on. Well, you haven’t experienced what we’ve experienced when you go into a shop, and you can’t find something.

I was fat shamed quite publicly when I was about nine in my family. I guess I was given this sense of shame that my body was not good enough, and just the effect it had on me. I remember being a teenage girl and suddenly, I just grew a pair of boobs and because I was quite big anyway trying to get a bra that fit me, all these shops were just looking at me – looking through me – and saying, we don’t actually carry your size here, you’ll have to go to a plus size section. Which was soul destroying and completely crushed my confidence when I was young. But also, all the things that you can’t do when you’re shamed, you know, like swimming. I used to love swimming until I was shamed at a school carnival for my swimming outfit. Things like that affect you and they’re everywhere.

Sam:

They called the book Eating Secrets because of the secrecy that so many people living in a larger body force on themselves. It’s a kind of self-preservation behaviour as we try to avoid the judgment of anyone. And then the inevitable wave of shame that crashes over shortly after.

Karyn:

When you internalize it, you actually put up a front in front of other people. And I remember a time as a teenager going out and I was with another girlfriend who was also a larger body and I would put up this front and go, “Oh yeah, you know, give them the bird”, or whatever the case may be, and she would cry. I would internalize it, put up a front, but then go away and hide and cry in shame, where she would let it out there and then, which is probably a better thing, to let the emotion out. But for me, from a very young age, I hid it all. I would hide wrappers in the garbage bin because I didn’t want people to know I’d eaten. You know, I would go up the shop and buy something and then go to another shop to buy something else. That’s internalising because you’re not being true to yourself. You feel like you can’t even do food right. You don’t look right and you can’t do food right. And I remember having, and I still struggle with it today, a huge sense of, I’m just not good enough. And with that depression and all that self-shaming you do, once you get that loop in your head, it’s very, very hard to be positive. You really have to focus on the positive side of it sometimes, don’t you? And the media just keeps pushing it and pushing it. That’s what you’ve got to look like. They’ve come a long way from when I grew up in the 70s and 80s but they’ve still got further to go.

Sam:

I mentioned earlier the dehumanising way the media, especially the news media portrays larger people. It’s almost inescapable unless you completely unplug yourself from the news cycle. But that’s another very long and complicated story.

Xochitl:

They dehumanise people living larger bodies by showing from the neck to the knees when they show a person living in a larger body. They’re always eating a burger or they’re always having a massive ice cream. They never show a person living in a larger body eating a salad. And it is not true that people living in larger bodies never eat salads.

Sam:

Now’s a good time to bring out our next guest. This is Georgie Owen.

Georgie:

I’ve always lived in a thin, conventionally attractive body. Yes, I have body image struggles. Yes, I’m impacted by diet culture. But having body image struggles is very different to being oppressed by a fat phobic society, I can walk into a store any store and buy clothes that fit me. I can sit in public or post on my social media eating anything I want and no one makes judgments or assumptions about my health. But when you discuss what thin privilege is, it also tells you what fat phobia is because I am a thin person. That is all thin privilege. Then if we look at what fat phobia is, I hear fat phobia every single day.

Sam:

Georgie’s take on fat phobia comes from a place of staunch social justice. And while fat phobia isn’t her only field of interest, she has a really deep awareness of the problems that we face and wants to bring that awareness to others as much as she can.

Georgie:

It’s just so ingrained in our culture because of the health argument, even though one, we don’t know someone’s health by looking at their body and two, even if we did, it’s none of our business. No one owes us their health. It’s about the connotations of fatness. Let’s pretend tall has the same connotation as fatness. You would hear someone say, “Oh I don’t want to be tall. Oh, I feel so tall today. I look so tall today”, with this air of disdain or disgust. That’s fat phobia. It’s even more subtle than that. And again, if people are listening to this who are in bigger bodies, they’re probably like, it’s not subtle at all. We hear it so prolifically that it’s not subtle. You hear so many of these comments where someone says, “Oh that’s going straight to my thighs”, or “I can’t eat, I’ll be the size of a house”. I guess fat phobia in action is this constant obsession with wanting to be as small as you can. And because of what society tells us, that equates to being as attractive as you can be.

Sam:

Georgie says the only way to break down fat phobia, like any other form of discrimination, is to confront it, but because it’s such a deeply ingrained way of thinking for so many people choose your battles wisely.

Georgie:

Pull someone up where appropriate. This is my privilege speaking, but don’t put yourself in an uncomfortable situation. Quite honestly, if I’m around family members who I know get riled up about it and don’t understand it despite my attempts to have explained it, I’m not going to bang my head against a brick wall. I’m going to take that energy that I would have had with that conversation, not make myself and them uncomfortable, and I’m going to try and speak about it with other people.

I think the question was more about like what we can do with the weight stigma. I don’t really know that I can answer that because I don’t have the lived experience. But I think for me it’s just like the listening learning and using my privilege where appropriate to try and have these conversations with people because I have friends, Sam, who didn’t realise that when I said thin privilege, I was referring to them. I think people think thin privilege is you’re a Victoria’s Secret model. No, thin privilege is you walk into a store, you buy clothes, you go to a doctor and they treat you and they don’t blame everything on your weight. You eat a big greasy burger in public and no one’s looking at you with disgust. That’s thin privilege. You don’t have to be a Victoria’s Secret model. So, I think just being aware of your privilege, honouring your own body image issues and then, from that place, extending your learning to people who have a different lived experience to you in a bigger body.

Sam:

So it’s one thing to shine a light on fat phobia and reveal it in its bigoted glory. But from the point of view of a fat person, it’s difficult to see any significant changes happening anytime soon. It’s just such an integral part of our society.

Speaker 3

Xochitl:

We want that to change. If we can create interventions that allow people to say, “I’m not taking that bad thing”. I would say a bad word, but I’m in a podcast, so I won’t. I’m not taking that. My value is independent of my weight and so on. Many interventions that target body image and health at every size and these sorts of interventions are trying to do that. The problem with saying this is that there’s a little bit of a risk that people take it to mean that it’s the person in the larger body’s fault that they’re not feeling well. So I want to make it very clear that this is just putting on the band aid, while we are actually fixing a societal problem.

April:

There’s usually three situations where you find yourself: Your family, mom grandma, or dad, it could be anyone but family. If you feel comfortable, you just say, “I actually am doing this thing where I’m not talking about bodies, mine or anyone else’s. So, can we just change the subject?” Politely ask people to just check themselves. Because when you say that then they go, “Oh”. And they might not, and that can be frightening, and I get that. I think in that situation you simply pretend you have the spicy cough and stay at home. (That excuse is going to run out at some point so I’m going to be cross. Then the second situation would be with a partner. So, someone that talks to you about your body in the context of your relationship for example. And – I’m not using a direct example from my own life – if you, say, got engaged and that person said, “But we can’t set the date and get married until you weigh 100 kg”. Yeah. As I said, definitely not a real example from my actual life! Yeah, you break up with that person and then you never talk to them again. But if breaking up with him immediately and disappearing to another country is not the option that’s available to you, then certainly saying to them how hurtful that is and telling them to never speak to you like that again. Making sure that that’s a boundary and that’s the most important thing. Then last of all, number three, strangers. You know, the “Oh dear” lady from my story who feel like they can make public commentary on you just simply as you’re walking down the street. You need to remember that’s their problem. The fact that they took time out of their day to say something mean to you, come on, they’re not a person whose opinion you value. They’re awful, they’re terrible and they probably feel really crap about themselves. So instead of worrying about what they said and internalising it, just remember that person is a sad sorry little person with lots of insecurities.

Sam:

I’m afraid that’s where we’re going to have to leave this episode. But don’t forget to check out our extended bonus interviews, we call them, Let’s Talk In Depth and they come out in between our major official episodes like this one. It’s a good chance to hear more from your favourite guests. And if you’d like to hear more from anyone that we have on the show please drop us a comment and we’ll see if we can make it happen. If you’re struggling with disordered eating or body image and you need some help, check out Butterfly’s website. They have a huge referral database. They can connect you with a professional wherever you are in the country. And if you’re a professional who would like to be listed on the website, the best place to start is Butterfly.org.au. And don’t forget the Butterfly Helpline is there seven days a week from 8 am until midnight. The number is 1 800 ED HOPE, that’s 1 800 33 4673. And you can also chat online at Butterfly.org.au if you prefer that. The Butterfly: Let’s Talk podcast is produced by Ikin Media for Butterfly Foundation with huge thanks to Camilla Becket and Kate Mulray who do pretty much everything except for the talky bits and editing. That’s done by me, Sam Ikin. Our guests this week were April Hélène-Horton, the Bodzilla, Xochitl dela Piedad Garcia, Garcia, Karyn de Mol, Megan Harris and Georgie Owen. Thanks so much for joining us again. And if you’d like to help us out, one thing that you can do that would really help us is to leave us a review and give us a rating wherever you get this podcast. And if you could share it with anyone who you think could benefit from it, we’d really appreciate it. I’m Sam Ikin, thank you so much for joining us.