Is It Support? Or Fat Shaming?

I hate this weight loss book so much I won’t even tell you what its title is. I’m capable of relating only briefly what makes this book so abysmal. It is an example of what I see as a particularly insidious form of fat shaming—that which originates from what is presented as “support.”

Let’s start with this book, so horrific it shall remain unnamed! The author is the founder of some sort of self-styled “institute” based on his philosophies. It’s easy to dismiss the book for ludicrous passages such as this:

“If [a tomato] is picked by an underpaid migrant worker who’s given no benefits and few worker’s rights, then the tomato is hypocritical and lacks integrity. If it is chopped by machine along with thousands of other tomatoes, delivered to a fast-food joint, and slapped together with a bun and meat from a cow who suffered even worse traumas, then our tomato is now suicidal, or even murderous, because it has lost its soul and has no reason to live”

The tomato that has no soul and is on a Big Mac anyway so why does it have a “reason to live”??? The tomato is “murderous”?? How exactly would a tomato attempt to kill you? Or kill itself?

This book purports to convey a message of love—for food (assuming it’s not hypocritical), for your body, and for yourself, all wrapped up in this idea that if you love yourself and embrace some kind of accepting attitude about eating, that you’ll take control of your weight. Geneen Roth has leveraged this viewpoint into millions of book sales. It’s so familiar to us that we tend to ignore the corollary and what this view really means:

The idea that you could control your weight if you “love yourself” is based on the assumption that you are fat because you hate yourself and that you use food in a deliberately self-destructive manner.

This is a deeply vicious form of judging. I’ve never allowed anyone to tell me I’m filled with self-loathing and determined to punish myself. There’s a big difference between hating yourself and hating being fat. I just didn’t like being fat. And it did bum me out and could make me feel depressed at times because I felt it was something I didn’t choose and couldn’t control. For me, being fat meant feeling physically awkward and generally uncomfortable. I dealt with physical limitations on a daily basis. I remember when I started having trouble getting out of my car. I could not walk or even stand for as long as I wanted to. I didn’t even take the train because I didn’t want to climb the stairs to the platform.

I was always perfectly happy with being me. But there was no way I was ever going to try to convince myself I was perfectly happy with being fat. I never wrapped up my sense of self with my physical appearance; I did not need to accept being fat to accept myself.

I see accepting being fat as a form of surrender but I think it’s also very understandable. We can’t hope to take control of our weight if we constantly pursue strategies that are doomed to fail, strategies like believing we’re fat because we’re consumed with self-loathing. Years of struggle with weight takes its toll and it can feel easier to just give up. The feelings of failure can transfer into fat shaming we inflict upon ourselves.

Being fat is not who you are. You do not have to accept it as part of your identity.