Greetings from my new home of Los Angeles California! I have an oldie but goodie for you today about the problems that arise when someone confuses their experience for everyone else’s experience. Enjoy!
One thing that frustrates me about a lot of the discourse on the internet is many people’s assertion that their experience is (or should be, or will be) everyone’s experience, and that others should feel obligated to make major health decisions based on their experience/opinions.
I hopped on this train of thought because of a comment I received on my post “Stop Pretending it’s About My Health“ It may be triggering for some but it is also highly amusing to me. There is a warning on the comment that explains possible triggers.
Here’s the bit I want to talk about today:
“I am overweight myself. But I understand this and accept the fact that it was my own overindulgence that created the situation. I have gone from 280 in 1990 to 150 in 2000 back to 280 in 2010. It was all of my own doing, and I know it was wrong. I would never make excuses about it. Facts are facts. You cannot deny it any longer.”
Then, a Yoga Instructor who is on a Body Positive listserve with me wrote what I thought was a beautiful, respectful open letter to the Yoga journal and was repaid by someone writing a blog that called her personal health choices “bullshit” (Nope, I will not be helping that blog get traffic by linking to it here, and it was everything I could do keep my rule of not commenting on inflammatory posts).
My issue is this: I feel like I am very clear on this blog that I am not trying to tell anyone how to live. My goal is always simply to demonstrate an option that people can choose if it makes sense to them. It seems that Anna was doing the same thing with her letter. However, people seem to respond to this vehemently – almost as if my choosing something different than they chose is somehow threatening to them. My best guess is that their self-esteem is based on what other people think. Society values thinness, they are thin, therefore they are valuable. I, and everyone who agrees with me and does not value thinness over fatness, is therefore diminishing their value and a threat to their self-esteem. That’s just my guess, who the hell knows? Some days I’m just glad to be so separated from mainstream culture.
You’ll notice that the commenter starts off talking about his/her experience but then veers at the end to tell me what I can and can’t do. Since we’re not sharing a body, it seems like the only appropriate thing to say here is “I don’t agree with you and therefore don’t choose that path to health”. That’s a perfectly valid life choice. You go with your funky bad self. Saying: “I don’t agree with you and therefore you must choose my path to health” is not okay, as you are not the boss of my underpants.
If you want to post comments on my blog telling me that you disagree with me that’s fine, but may I first suggest that you complete this quick exercise.
First, just read through a couple of examples to get the hang of it:
- I think that the research shows that dieting doesn’t work so I don’t diet.
- You think that research shows that dieting is the path to health so you do diet.
I’m ok. You’re ok.
- I think that weight loss surgery has a low success rate, lots of dangerous side effects and virtually no health benefits so I don’t have weight loss surgery.
- You think that being thin means being healthy and that weight loss surgery will make me thin, so you pressure me to have weight loss surgery.
I’m ok. You’re NOT ok.
- I think that movement I enjoy is the key to health so I choose exercise options that I like.
- You think that you must do specific exercises to be healthy, so you do exercise that you hate.
I’m ok. You’re ok.
- I choose to concentrate on healthy behaviors to the exclusion of concentrating on my weight because I believe that it is my best option for being healthy.
- You choose to concentrate on being thin because you believe that it is your best option for being healthy.
I’m ok. You’re ok.
Now that you’ve got the hang of it, you try one:
- I find that a Health at Every size approach works great for me so I share my experiences on my blog. If you disagree, I support your right to choose your own path to health.
- You doubt the efficacy of the Health at Every Size approach, so you come on my blog and say that everything that I say is bullshit and that I need to think and act like you want me to.
If you guessed “I’m ok. You’re not ok.” then congratulations you are ready to comment! If you got it wrong, go back to the beginning and try the exercise again, or feel free to peruse someone else’s blog – you never know who might be looking for health advice and body shaming from random people on the internet!
Blog Project Update
The feedback about creating a fundraiser for two plus-sized Olympian weight lifters who are struggling financially and having trouble getting sponsorships because of their size was overwhelmingly positive. I’m working with the Olympians now to figure out how to do this in accordance with US Olympic Committee rules. I’ll have more details for you as soon as I have them.
Book Update!
The initial book order has been shipped! When that shipment arrives the pre-ordering will end and we’ll move to regular ordering including both the hard copy and the e-book. If you want to get an autographed hard copy with free shipping then, according to UPS, you have 2-5 days left to preorder. If you’ve already pre-ordered then thank you for your order and your patience, I’ll get the book to you asap!
Become a Member, Support The Work!
I do HAES and SA activism, speaking and writing full time, and I don’t believe in putting corporate ads on my blog and making my readers a commodity. So if you find value in my work, want to support it, and you can afford it, you can become a member (you get extra stuff, discounts, and you’re always the first to know about things) or a you can support my work with a one-time contribution. The regular e-mail blog subscription (available at the top right hand side of this page) is still completely free. If you’re curious about this policy, you might want to check out this post. Thanks for reading! ~Ragen
Ragen, you are more than okay.
I love the exercise idea. I think it’s important to listen to everyone’s experience for the good of our own horizons and education. I’m not afraid of opinions about myself, even if it includes “you should” blah blah. I know it doesn’t mean I have to do whatever they are suggesting, but I’ll still listen respectfully. I don’t know why this is where I stand on that, but it honestly doesn’t bothers me when I hear someone telling me “should.” I’ve somehow managed to learn to withstand criticism and judgment in stride and know I can either take the advice or leave it. Now if they keep pressing and become upset that I didn’t take their advice, that’s when I’ll suggest they back off because, well, the underpants rule and all. Of course this is just my own experience and it doesn’t have to be anyone else’s.
Some people have trouble with anyone who makes any decision differently than they do.
I’ve been dealing with that, lately (a family member, which complicated things… we had a lot of contact for a few months, dealing with a family situation.) She seems to view anything that I do differently as a criticism of her choices. Sometimes I do think her choices were/are wrong – but I try to avoid saying so – they’re her choices, not mine. Usually, I just think they are different – we are very different women, in different life situations – why on earth would we do everything the same?
But she thinks I should do everything the same way she does, and that she has the right to tell me so – and that, if I do not do what she says, then *I* am the one in the wrong.
And, yes, of course this means I should diet to lose weight… even though it hasn’t been really working for her. At the same time, it seems to mean I should not be as active – she seems to see that as a reproach to her, as she is extremely sedentary – and I should not avoid foods that I find do not agree with me – because she wants to eat them, even though she’s been told to avoid some for health reasons – and…
I think a lot of the criticism comes from that. If we say exercise and healthy food choices are more important *even just to us* than weight, we’re seen as criticizing their choice – whatever it might be.
If we exercise and they don’t – if we eat carefully and they don’t – they think we’re criticizing them. If they diet and we don’t (especially if it doesn’t work, it sometimes seems) they think we’re invalidating their choice. And yes – if they are naturally thin, and we say fat doesn’t matter, we’re taking away their pride in what many see as a personal accomplishment (especially, here, if they in fact do exercise and eat carefully… because they are certain we can’t, really, or we’d have their bodies.)
So they feel attacked, sometimes by our very existence, and hurry into Best Defense is a Good Offense mode – while we try to figure out what hit us, and why.
To quote Michelle, the Fat Nutritionist –
“Other People: Making Decisions I Disagree With Since 43,000 B.C.”
Oddly enough, this does not cause my head to explode. I don’t tell my friends who are runners that they need to cut that shit out because it’s going to make their knees hurt like whoa, because they don’t actually have my knees. I have my knees, and they have their knees. I don’t tell people they should never wear yellow because it looks bad on me. I don’t tell people who are unhappy that they should be taking four different antidepressants plus thyroid medication. And I don’t find any of this difficult. Why is it so hard for some people?
I was really upset this morning when I got a newsletter from my health care group that basically put an article front and center about how one of their nurses had weight loss surgery and it “saved my marriage/life/nothing bad happens to me anymore!” What compounded onto the triggering feelings for me was that she was quoted as saying something along the lines of, “how can I tell my obese patients that they need to lose weight (remember, this is a NURSE, not a doctor here) if I myself was fat?”
First of all, she’s obviously in the initial post-surgery stage, where she lost weight really quickly (and the picture of her looks kind of malnourished, which makes me sad- she sees herself as thin and all I can see is what the surgically-induced malnutrition is doing to hurt her body. I understand that it’s her choice, but I think it is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to use her anecdotal story to explicitly argue that WLS will “save your life/marriage/etc”….especially when the divorce rate after WLS is like….80%, and pretty much every single WLS patient will eventually regain the weight, even if they can hardly keep any food down.
It makes me really sad that this stuff is being peddled as “scientific fact” and the sensationalist “losing weight by mutilating my insides made my life BETTER!” plays into the Fantasy of Being Thin, which harms so many people because they often don’t want to learn the facts or diminish or dismiss them in the pursuit of a smaller pants size.
I think that it’s one thing to say, “respect people’s choices” but it’s also important to note that when people in positions of power and influence are hocking dangerous and non-empirically proven methods to the average layperson, that it can cause IMMENSE harm, and I honestly feel like it should be ILLEGAL to insinuate or outright STATE these magical mystical “improvements” for weight loss when the truth is much more sinister and might actually lead to an early death (WLS can HALVE your life expectancy, yet you NEVER hear people talking about that, just their happiness at wearing smaller clothing).
What gets me all the people I know who opted for WLS are fully aware of the kinds of side effects that could arise. And, ultimately, every single one of them decided that having a shot a thin privilege was worth more. I’m not saying everyone comes to the decision this way, but in the case of the people I know personally, it wasn’t about health, it was about vanity. Have we really made being thin so important that people are willing to throw away HALF their life for a chance at it?
I guess when I’ve thought about doing it, it isn’t because I want to be seen as “hot” by guys, because that makes me uncomfortable, or to have people ooh and ahh over how thin I look, because that triggers disordered eating behaviors, but because I want to disappear. I don’t want to be noticed, and being heavy gets me noticed in negative ways.
In my experience, it’s a combination of privilege and ignorance derived from privilege that leads to people literally not understanding that their experience is not universal. You know the kind of people I’m talking about– they live in a bubble of such comfort and purity that they think incest survivors are liars, because who could possibly sexual abuse their own kin? It’s funny, because I find this world view has a lot of optimism about fairness in the world, which can be a good thing, but is still very much out of touch with reality… which is a problem. Because this optimistic/ignorance can quickly turn into arrogance and apathy. For example, a naturally thin person thinking that they have more will power than someone who is not thin because they can’t recognize what they were given and what they lucked into that other people do NOT have access to. Or, my favorite, folks who blame the homeless for being homeless while at the same time being completely oblivious to how much help they’ve had along the way that people who end up homeless do not have access to.
And that’s where the thorn sticks in my side. Most people can at least, intellectually, recognize we all have different experiences. The rub comes in when people don’t see that they have access to RESOURCES that other people do not. For every “boomarang” college kid who goes home after graduation, there’s 5 who have nowhere to go. For every person in urgent care, their is 10 who are turned away for not having the money to pay out of pocket. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had (wealthy) friends tell me just to “ask my parents” for help financially as if (1) I have that kind of relationship with my parents or (2) more to the point, as if my parents have the money! Truth be told, they’re struggling just as much as I am.
So, yeah. Not only are our experiences vastly different, but we don’t all have the same access to resources.
The thing so many people I’ve come into contact with just flat out don’t want to accept is that their experiences are valid for them and my experiences are valid for me. Yes, there are times when we’ll have an experience in common but more often than not experiences vary between people. Nowhere is this more true than weight and weight loss. No two bodies are the same and no two weight experiences are the same.
My personal favorite invasion of my underpants comes when someone finds out I am a vegetarian. For some reason people feel the need to tell me how I’m making myself more unhealthy and that I can’t possibly be a vegetarian because I’m fat (LOL) or that my reasons are stupid (this is always said before anyone even knows why I don’t eat meat).
It would be wonderful if people just learned to accept that the only person they need to be concerned with is themselves.
Sometimes as a fat person, I feel like a heretic in the Middle Ages. “Arrest the unbeliever!” with peasants preparing to tie me to the stake. Okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but that’s how I feel sometimes.
I feel that way too lol.
Just found your blog…love it!
I encounter this sometimes, and it occasionally strikes me that someone is upset that they think I am somehow “breaking the rules” by eating what I want and moving how I want, and not really using external to guide me. It’s as though they think I am “getting away with something,” and they are threatening to tattle on me as a means of getting me back in line…except there is no one to really tattle to, seeing as how we’re all adults who get to run our own bodies. So mostly they just resort to the Vague Future Health Threat, telling me I’ll be X in Y years, since there’s no Food Cop they can go tell on me.
This is doubly true for people who are ex-fat. They swear up and down that weight loss saved their life – which, great, they get to be the expert of their own experience – but because I’m fat and still alive, I apparently represent some kind of threat to them. So if I don’t drop down dead as expected, that is very upsetting to them, and to their tale of amazing life-saving weight loss. Because I guess they think everyone has to be exactly the same?
I don’t know, but it’s really confusing. I could spend all day trying to figure out how this kind of “logic” works.
I think ex-fat people frustrate me more than people who have never been fat. I have a very good friend who had a medical condition that was causing her to retain a lot of weight, it was one doctors should have caught and didn’t (because she was fat so there was nothing wrong that losing weight wouldn’t fix). Since having this medical condition finally taken care of she started to lose weight, she became obsessed with weight loss and body size. In the beginning she had no opinion on the bodies of other people but lately she’s started to join in on the fat shaming, as if she forgot that two years ago she would have been shamed right along with the rest of us. I always thought ex-fat people would have a better perspective, they would understand why it’s so important NOT to shame someone and NOT to bully but my experience has shown me that ex-fat people can often be worse than people who were never fat.
This has, sadly, been my experience as well.
I’ve noticed that too with regard to weight loss, quitting smoking and kicking a drug habit — and interestingly enough the be a royal tool towards people thing seems to start about the same time that people stop heaping praise on them for their success.
I’ve been frustrated in the past by bloggers who have poor eating habits, compulsive overeating, binge eating disorder, etc. and insist that if you’re fat and say you don’t have these issues, you MUST be lying.
In other words, because it was their own experience that they had “bad” habits” or disordered eating, every fat person must have similar habits and just be lying about it. Nothing can convince them otherwise; you’ve got to be deceiving yourself, consciously or unconsciously, if you say otherwise. Sigh. I find that reasoning to be sooo frustrating.
OTOH, I do have to understand that this is the experience of some fat people and respect that. Some really do have disordered eating. I may not agree with how they go about responding to it or treating it (i.e. dieting or WLS), but I have to acknowledge that it is the experience of some. But I sure wish they wouldn’t generalize it to ALL fat people.
What’s even sadder is that until recently, I sometimes wondered if I _was_ subconsciously fooling myself. I know now I wasn’t, but how many others have been long shamed into feeling the same way?
Wow, I love that you’re looking into a fundraiser for the plus-sized olympic lifters! That is awesome! I absolutely love all forms of athleticism – and love practicing it myself. But the extreme stereotyping and image women are expected to portray is horrific. I went to a local Muay Thai fight, women fighters were up… one of them didn’t have a very “girly” face and that was ALL the crowd could focus on. She was one intense fighter, with unbelievable strength and conditioning, but that didn’t matter because she had a “manly” face.