I’m fat. I have been fat all my life except for the two times I dealt with anorexia (and bulimia to boot one of those times). My mother put me on my first diet when I was seven and has harped on my weight all my life. She is Taiwanese and grew up with very toxic and harmful ideas about girls and weight, and she has never gotten over it. For the first thirty years of my life, she was obsessed with losing those mythical five pounds (and only stopped when she actually did it). She is 5’2″ and was 90 pounds when she moved to the States. She gained a lot of weight because of her love of American ice cream (she told me this frequently as well), and that caused her to be self-conscious about her body.
I’ve documented several times how dying twice and coming back to life has made me do a 180 on my body. I used to hate it with a passion. Taiji helped me calla an uneasy truce with it, but I still did not like it. I hated looking into the mirror, and I refused to let anyone take pictures of me.
I had to explicitly tell my mother by email when I was in my thirties that she was not allowed to mention my weight. I preempted her by telling her that no, she could not do it under the pretense of ‘health’ or being concerned for me because that ship had well-sailed. When I had anorexia for the second time, her only comment was that my waist was smaller than hers, and it was said in a tone of jealousy. She never mentioned either time that I was dangerously thin (which was most definitely bad for my health!) and all her comments were focused on how fat I was and how it marred my looks (“Your face would be beautiful if you weren’t so fat.” Actual thing she said to me when I was a kid.) So, yeah, no. Suddenly switching to concerns about my health was not going to fool me. She meant I was a big fat cow and she was disgusted by it. I know she saw it as a reflection on her and she was horrified to have a disgusting blob for a daughter. Because she never went after my brother about his weight. She never told him he could lose a few pounds (that I can recall). He was never as big as I was, but he certainly could have been called chunky as a kid. He was a boy, though, so it wasn’t as important than he be skinny to get a man and. Seriously. That was the whole undercurrent of what my mother was pushing: You need to be skinny so you can snag a man and have children.
Yes, it’s horrible outdated and outmoded, but that mentality still exists, sadly. And, even without the ‘so you can attract a man’ part being explicitly said, the mentality of a woman is always better if she is smaller is definitely still prevalent. No ‘but the health though’ glow-up can hide the fact that it’s not about health. Before my medical crisis, I had low blood pressure and was the only one in my family not on high blood pressure meds. I had no indications that my weight was a negative on my health. What happened to me last year was not weight-related at all.
I mention all this because I was reading my AMA stories and went down a rabbit hole of ‘click on an older article’ until I came across one that was about weight. I remembered reading it at the time, and it was interesting to read it and the comments again. In a nutshell, the letter writer (LW) was talking to a coworker from another department, Sam, at work. Sam’s boss, Ariel (fictitious names) interrupted to tell LW that she looked like she had lost weight. The LW was surprised and said that she didn’t think it was appropriate to talk about weight at work. She was louder than she intended and Ariel, while not her boss, was higher up the hierarchy. Two of Ariel’s reports gasped at what LW said and Ariel herself looked shock. even worse, afterwards, Ariel was harsh and critical to Sam if he talked to the LW at all.
The LW stood by what she said, but not how she said it. She wanted to know if she should apologize to Ariel and how (if she should). Alison had a measured and thoughtful response (as usual), and in this case, the more interesting dialogue happened in the comments.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the discussion was whether the LW was out of line at all. Or rather, whether she needed to apologize at all. Before I get into that, there were a few people who defended what Ariel had said (“It’s normal to compliment people who lost weight” as if normal is always a good thing), but by far, most people agreed to some extent that people should not comment on other people’s bodies. One person noted that if someone was losing weight on purpose and wanted phrase for it, they would let you know. This is so true. Plus, there are so many negative reasons for losing weight, it’s best not to bring it up at all.
I will never forget when I was deeply depressed and went to my doctor for an antidepressant. I have this weird reactions to SSRIs. The first time I use one, it works really well for a year until it stops working. Then, if I try it again, I have a negative reaction to it. This happened the last time I requested an antidepressant. My doc put me on Celexa. It was the second I had taken it and I knew I usually did not do well the second time around, but I was desperate. Normally, the negative effects the second time were just that it didn’t work or it made me mildly lethargic or something like this. This time, though, it made me deeply suicidal. I could barely go about my daily business without thinking about how to kill myself. Because of this, I made an emergency appointment with my doc (this was my normal doc, not a shrink).
The first thing she commented on was how I had lost 19 pounds in a month (because I couldn’t eat) and how great that was. That was her specialty, by the way. Weight stuff. Had I known this ahead of time, I would not have chosen her.
I told her the Celexa was making me suicidal and I couldn’t eat. She looked disconcerted, fumbled for a few seconds, then said, “Well, at least you lost the weight.”
Now. I know that she was discombobulated and was grasping for something to say, but come the fuck on. She’s a fucking doctor. That was the best she could do? I was so deeply offended that I never went back to her again. I also stopped taking the Celexa, obviously. The suicidal ideation stopped immediately and I have not tried an SSRI since. But think of how fucked up our society is about women and weight that the first thing my DOCTOR (a woman) said when I told her I had lost weight because I was suicidal was, “At least you lost the weight.”
Back to the AAM article. Let me preface this by saying I have no fucks to give when it comes to shutting down weightloss talk. I am not going to finesse it or be nice about it. My body is a temple, and I worship in it now because it brought me back from death twice. I fucking love my curves and anyone who doesn’t can step the fuck off. We don’t change norms by coddling bigots. I don’t think the LW has anything to apologize for. Ariel SHOULD be embarrassed, and if she didn’t know that she shouldn’t mention weight at work, well, then it’s about time she learned. The fact that she punished Sam for it indicated that she was not a rational person. If the LW did want to apologize, I think it would have been fine if she said something like, “I apologize for saying this in front other people. I should have brought it up in private.” I would be tempted to add a lecture about not talking about other people’s weight, but you really shouldn’t tackle that onto an apology.
I would do it, though. The whole ‘compliment a woman for being smaller’ is so endemic in our society, we need to jolt people out of this mentality. I also don’t think what the LW did was out of line. At all. She didn’t cuss Ariel out or tell her she was a fucking jerk or to keep her sizist comments to herself. Or what I would be tempted to do these days. “My body survived two cardiac arrests and a stroke. Fuck you.” Honestly. I’m so tired of losing weight STILL being considered a worthy goal in and of itself for women. We need to move past that.
P.S. There was an update to the letter–Sam decided he had enough and left the workplace. The end.