Your Questions Answered #2: How Do I Stop Hating My Fat Body?
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I see this question asked a lot. I was asked this question by multiple people, and the answer I gave was, I think, a little too pat to be entirely accurate. So I’m going to try again.
How do I stop hating my body as I gain weight?
People will qualify this often, making sure I know that they don’t hate other people for being fat, but that they are struggling with something inside themselves that they don’t know how to overcome. My response was to read fat studies books, follow fat activist twitter accounts, and generally arm oneself with knowledge, but I regret not going into this further. I will rectify this now.
First, I feel it will help you to understand why you are upset when you gain weight. To do this, we’ll need to get into Julia Kristeva, abjection, and Le’a Kent’s wonderful essay Fighting Abjection.
Fat has become abject in our culture. Abjection, Kristeva explains in Powers of Horror, is a process of primal repression that founds subjectivity. The abject is that which must be expelled in order for life itself, things like pus and piss and shit, things that are necessary for our very life but also are necessarily opposed to a sense of self. Often, we think of abject as symbols of death, and fat has certainly become that in a culture where we have become obsessed with the so-called “obesity epidemic.” Fat has become that which must be separated from the body, as Razza explains, in order to achieve the new American Dream, one where not just economic success is measured, but a metric of “fitness and health” is introduced.
This is why you feel the urge to reject your own body, to treat yourself, as Kent describes, as the abjected “before” image. You cannot imagine the fat identity within yourself, and your fat sits atop you like a separate layer from your own actual, lived embodiment. It’s why you live inside your face rather than the rest of your body. As Marcia Millman points out in Such A Pretty Face, fat people often focus on the face because it possesses a “high degree of synthesis and unity.” We could say that’s why we spend so much time taking selfies from flattering angles rather than keeping a record that reflects our bodies. We are seeking disembodiment from the horror of fat embodiment, the stress, the harassment, the pain, according to Jerry Mosher in Setting Free the Bears.
Knowledge helps. Understanding the why of this cycle does help. There is a kind of timeline to fat activism, however, a giddy brightness when it is first discovered, followed by a period of rawness, at least for me. Everything hurt. Everything I learned was like a splinter. Most days, I cried. How could I not? What I was learning was forcing me to confront the realities of deep traumas, heavy stones I had been carrying for years. Letting go of them was painful.
I love myself most days. I don’t love myself every day. I don’t know if it’s possible to love myself every day, but I try. I try not to live in my face, outside my body. I try to feel the sensuality of my body when I dance, alone, with the door closed. I touch my skin sometimes, or close my eyes and focus on the sensation of my husband touching my skin, the tactile sense of closeness. I breathe, and feel my lungs expand, and feel each part of my body as part of a whole, a whole that is me.
I feel like counterabjection has helped me. Kent talks about the zine FaT GiRL in her essay, and describes what she sees as counterabjection: calls to vomit on diet centers, descriptions of horrifying faux births performed in response to fatcallers making comments about one looking pregnant. These abjections take the abjectifying moment and abjectify that, the vomit on the diet center a literal expulsion mimicking the bulimia those centers so often encouraged, the grunting, staggering performance of a faux birth of whatever one can stuff under their shirt a primal, animal reclamation of the insult hurled at them. A good portion of my healing required me to feel angry, to perform my fatness crudely, to shock and repulse all those who had called me repulsive.
This anger burned itself out after a while, though. I felt tired after that. A deep exhaustion. That was a hard stretch. Every day was a climb out of that hole. That was when I started reading fat studies books very seriously, taking what had been a light hobby and turning it into a devotion. The things I read sometimes make me angry or surprised or sad, but never with my own body. I don’t feel the same wistful regret I used to feel. I don’t feel the same sadness.
I love my body most days. On the days I don’t, I can still show my body compassion, this piece of me which carries me, this piece of me which is me. I can show compassion to my body, and I can show compassion to myself. I cut away the people who hurt me. I stand up for myself, and be the hero I need people to be for me. I consider myself worthy of protecting and loving and caring for, and I had to trick myself into doing it at first. I had to just act like I felt that way, but I do feel that way now.
I have difficulty explaining this concept to people who have never been in recovery for addiction: I tell myself I’m not going to hate myself today. I live in the now in my body. We are addicted to hating ourselves, weaned on it, trained to crave it. Unlearning that takes conscious effort. It takes not doing it one day at a time until you finally stop, and when it creeps back in, it means forgiving yourself and trying again, just trying not to hate yourself for as long as you can.
A lot of self criticism is learned gendered performance. By deconstructing these behaviors and seeing them for what they are, I can know them, and name them, and reject them as I need.
I meant what I said when I said that fat studies will help one learn to see these things, learn to overcome them. Knowledge set me free. But it was compassion for myself that eased my pain.
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