But First, Diet Culture: A Brush With Internalised Fatphobia Before I’ve Even Had Coffee
By: Kellee Rich
Tags: Feminism, Experience, Identity, Fatphobia, Self

DIET CULTURE

But First, Diet Culture: A Brush With Internalised Fatphobia Before I’ve Even Had Coffee

Please allow me to wake up before I deal with hundreds of years’ worth of social conditioning around women’s bodies

Photo by Ohmky on Unsplash

I walk to the counter and the barista is cheerful and friendly.

‘Morning!’ she says, while tidying cups, moving stray milk jugs out of her way, putting something in the till. I return her greeting, ask how she is; she asks me back.

‘Can I get you a hot drink?’ she says. I order a decaf flat white. She asks if she can get me anything else. I take a quick look at the pastries and cakes under the glass, and consider whether I’m hungry. I’m not.

I say, ‘No thanks.’

Then she says something that perhaps only a couple of years ago, I would have felt awkward about, but dared not respond to, feeling as I did so remote from my own body, so in need of remaining invisible, and therefore hopefully (but unlikely) free from judgement.

She looks at me with astonishment and says, ‘Such amazing willpower there!’.

I don’t get the feeling that she is making a comment about my larger body. I am acutely attuned to that particular vibration: there is something in the eye of the person commenting; intention cannot easily be masked. The comment seems more about her than me. But I pick up on that word: willpower. That made-up notion to make us feel that whatever is oppressing us is our own fault; our own inability to harness it in order to overcome any iteration of perceived weakness is a moral failing. Willpower does not take into account systemic prejudice, cultural conditioning, physical affliction. Easier to blame ourselves than to look at the bigger picture. The word is used so extensively as a measure of our value, depending on how much of it we deploy; except, it doesn’t exist.

When she comes back to the counter, I have to ask.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘what did you say about willpower?’ I smile widely, so as not to appear confrontational. This is a sensitive subject, and requires an extended smile to show her that I am asking with curiosity, not judgement.

‘Oh!’ She is surprised, but her cheer continues. ‘I said you have amazing willpower — I would just eat everything if I could.’

‘Oh, it’s not willpower,’ I say, ‘I’m just not hungry.’ Then I pause for a second, and ask myself if I’m going to say this next part — and before I can answer, I am already speaking. ’But you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want to.’ I meet her eye, trying to say this as lightly as I can. She looks away.

A woman suggesting to another woman, out loud, in public, that she can eat whatever she needs or wants, whenever she needs or wants to should not be a revolutionary act, but the air hangs heavy with treason. In general, women do not encourage other women to eat, and especially not in public — except sometimes, when that food is salad or soup or steamed vegetables, and only in small portions. If it is not one of these foods, it is usually suffixed with some conspiratorial mention of ‘treat day’ or ‘cheat day’ or ‘being naughty,’ or comes with a pledge to return to the diet — the one it is assumed that all women are on by default, or at least, should be — the following day.

There are other things at play in this particular situation, of course. I am breaking the perfectly pleasant but necessarily superficial fourth wall between customer and barista. I hope I don’t make her feel uncomfortable by doing this, but perhaps I do, and I have to own that. Also, I am saying these things to a stranger, and though I believe the notion to be true — that we can and should eat what our body asks for — it is a truth fairly new to me, and it’s the first time I’m trying it with someone I don’t know. I feel like there’s a neon sign over my head, LED arrows pointing down at me. I hear an internal whisper of ‘who do you think you are,’ that — thankfully — now diminishing refrain of my life. My personal journey around food and my body is still in progress; self-consciousness zings through my blood for a moment. I am not yet healed, but I cannot help feeling that part of the healing is to call out the bullshit that I have internalised as shame for my entire life thus far.

She is still busy making the drink, going back and forth between tasks. She returns to the counter, and continues.

‘Oh no, I can’t eat what I want. My problem is I would never stop.’

(I feel that this woman would be judged as straight-sized by anyone. I deliberate in mentioning her body at all, but it feels important in this context because fatphobia is not reserved for those in larger bodies, and it is just as often directed inwards as out.)

I say, ‘Oh’ in response, and my heart aches a little for her, but I can relate so closely to what she is saying, and I feel all the more grateful for what I have learned these past couple of years to help steer me away from all the dangerous messaging I have absorbed over a lifetime. She is telling me that she does not trust her body, just like billions of other people, and especially women and women-identified folx, all over the world. She will believe that her desires, especially around food, are a problem to overcome. She will resist making pleasurable food choices, calling them ‘temptations,’ making the resistance into something religious; making it sinful to want to eat delicious food, as if sinning were real, as if it’s not enough that the rest of humanity is watching her eat, that there has to be some deity keeping count, too. She believes, has been told over and over, that her body is the problem, that it is unruly and wild, and that it will not tell her when to stop, so it is best to just never allow it the food she wants. Her head is there to oversee and counteract the desires of her body. She may believe herself ‘good’ to not give in to her own personal desires, except the word ‘good’ in relation to desire is merely a euphemism for ‘obedient.’

In that moment, I feel grateful that I have been exposed to the books, blogs, fierce women writers, activists, campaigns and podcasts telling me that my body is okay as it is. That I am okay and that I always was. That I was born entirely attuned to the needs of my body, and that I have been conditioned over time to hate it, mourn its imperfections, punish myself for its unwillingness to conform to what is expected of it in this culture, to disassociate from its desires. I do not know how long it will take to entirely undo this damage, but I do know that I am standing on the other side of that joyless bridge now, and I hope that, when she’s able to, this woman will join me.

She glides back over.

‘Here you go, sorry for the wait!’

Her smile has been unbroken this whole time. She pushes the cup forward. The foam-and-coffee feather on top is beautiful.

‘Have a wonderful morning!’ she says, and before I can say ‘You too,’ she is already greeting the next customer.