FEB: ON FATPHOBIA & MISPLACED EMPATHY

How empathy can perpetuate harmful ideologies

This month’s article focuses on two things, Fatphobia and Empathy. I will be detailing my experience with these two so I feel I should warn that this article will be talking about fatphobia and anorexia (including images).

If you are following me on Twitter, you would have noticed that in the past 10 months or so, I have been very much in love with my body. It’s gotten so intense that I now have more pictures of my body than I do anything else. This obsession with my body isn’t new. What is new, however, is the affection that I have towards it.

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A few years ago, I was rushed to Unilag’s medical centre after experiencing intense constipation. After having a chat with my doctor, I was told I was anorexic. I wasn’t exactly surprised because I had read about Demi Lovato’s struggle with Bulimia and opened the anorexia hyperlink which, for a moment, felt like a detailed analysis into my life - the emotional struggle, the obsession, the delusion, the denial which brings me back to my hospital scene. I told her I couldn’t possibly be anorexic because I was fat. At the time, my diet consisted solely of garri and meat or Famous Amos and Fanta Pineapple. My justification for these was usually “I hate cooking”, but that wasn’t what my journals showed.

Now it’s important to note that anorexia is usually indicative of emotional challenges and at the time, I was drowning but my unhealthy relationship with Slimville helped me channel that sadness.

I may have been going through it in 2016 but my obsession with my body actually started in 2005, the year I started secondary school. I returned home from the Christmas holidays looking like a shadow. I barely got 4 hours of sleep, the drillings were excessive, the meals were unsavoury and being the youngest person in the school meant I was being bullied into doing a lot more by pretty much every student. Everyone but my parents were concerned. When quizzed on my weight loss, they simply said it was proof that the soldiers at the school were disciplining me. This is not when the fatphobia started. It started when my younger sister who now looked fat compared to me was awarded the ‘orobo’ title. As expected, I became lepa.

As one would expect this came with little quips that in hindsight were offensive but it was the 2000s and we were operating in a time of social insensitivity. What started out as jokes soon became a serious conversation targeted at making my sister lose weight. How did it end? With her in Command Secondary School partly for the education but mostly for the weight loss programme. I know this because my parents never miss a chance to bring it up along with other fatphobic anecdotes.

At first, I was uncomfortable with the tags but soon, they became a source of validation for me.

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Fatphobia is a two-pronged antagonistic tool based on the ideology that fat isn’t ideal. I call it two-pronged because it manifests itself in two ways.

Prong 1: Yunno, the one that deems every fat person as unappealing, dirty, smelly and unhealthy. This prong is blatant and targets fat people.

Prong 2: This prong is subtle. It’s the one that comes from a place of concern. The one that sees fat as a faint line between fitness and morbid obesity and feels a certain responsibility to voice concern. One odd thing about this prong is that it targets both fat people and people that have put on some weight.

It’s easy to clamp down and disable prong 1 because of the sheer vileness of it but the subtleness of prong 2 makes it so that it passes discrimination as genuine empathy and its rebuttal as oversensitivity.

Take before and after weight-loss pictures for instance. Once in a while, you find people pointing out how it's influenced by fatphobia and usually, you find comments like “how is wanting to be fit fatphobic?” or “Is it now fatphobic to want to be healthy?” This red-herring argument automatically ties weight-loss to fitness and then proceeds to argue for fitness.

Now, to lay it bare…

Fitness is made of health and skill components that range from strength to body composition to agility to cardiovascular fitness to balance to coordination and many more. Weight falls under body composition. And when it comes to body composition, we refuse to acknowledge the factors that determine what is healthy and what isn’t. We have chosen instead to take the binary approach — fat or thin, overweight or underweight — completely disregarding the fact two people of the same weight and gender can look completely different because of their weight compositions.

Fast forward to weight-loss programmes (I honestly hate that term). These programmes do one thing - acknowledge weight-loss as a side effect of fitness which is extremely misleading because weight-loss is one subset of body composition which is a subset of fitness. There’s also the fact that they almost always sell fat as unhealthy.

It’s not like we do not acknowledge weight-loss as an indicator of one’s fitness journey but the fact is that weight-loss is becoming the sole indicator of fitness that we acknowledge. And when we pass off weight-loss as health, we inadvertently associate weight gain with ill-health. It's in the media, in the gym and slim tea marketing, in the “watch your weight” warnings we pass off immediately we point out how much weight they’ve put on. When we put all these in perspective, you’d agree that it’s not absurd for our standard of fitness and our concerns to be rooted in fatphobia.

And yes, we can talk about how it’s excessive weight gain you preach against? But ask yourself if you really are in a position to determine what counts as overweight? How much do you know about BMI, BVI or other weight factors? Is your definition of obesity hinged firmly of eating and exercise habits? Are you aware of the psychological, economical, evolutionary, environmental, scientific, social and genetic factors that contribute to obesity?¹ Do you pay as much attention to weight loss and its associated risk factors? What about the many fitness problems that aren’t weight-related? What about the other health concerns that cover people of all sizes? Alcoholism? Wine is fast becoming a millennial aesthetic. Drugs are making a comeback. These issues are prevalent but hardly make it to fitness programmes.

If you are concerned about the health of fat people but remain oblivious to health implications that come with weight loss, you don’t have a health concern, you have a problem with fatness.

We need to understand that we have not yet grasped how to address this situation, but we are increasingly understanding that attributing obesity to personal responsibility is very simplistic. Today’s priests of obesity prevention proclaim with confidence and authority that they have the answer. So did Bruno Bettelheim in the 1950s, when he blamed autism on mothers with cold personalities. So, for that matter, did the clerics of 18th-century Lisbon, who blamed earthquakes on people’s sinful ways.

- Davis Berreby in The Obesity Era.

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theifedolapo

A post shared by .. ..-. . (@theifedolapo)

Ever since I put on weight, I’ve had to deal with friends, family, and strangers expressing concerns about my health and sometimes my stomach and back folds (but never my ass, lol). And even when I point out how okay I am with it, they end the conversation with “sha don’t let it get out of hand”.

At size 14, I am constantly reminded of the “risks” associated with fatness but when I was a size 6 and down, it took several ER visits and a doctor’s warning for people to notice. By that time, I was anaemic, visibly exhausted, constantly constipated, and had developed amenorrhea. For each of these symptoms, there was a general suspicion and none of them was tied to my weight loss. Even funnier is the fact that recently, someone was able to draw a line between me suffering from amenorrhea and my weight gain.

My anorexia may have been an escape from a much deeper wound but it was fueled by the fatphobic environment I operated in. Many things could have been used to engage the sadness I felt at the time but the constant focus on my weight was an easy target. If I had chosen to eat my way out of sadness, people would have definitely noticed and not because they could tell something wasn’t right with me but because I was fat and that would have been the crux of their empathy.

Shesus × Asphodel (SFA) @TheIfedolapo

You know what's crazy? The fact that 2016 I thought I was fat when I looked like this.

I have always believed that a strong sense of empathy is needed to build the principles of a society but it's not enough for you to build your ideologies on empathy, you have to be sure that it's not coming from a place of discrimination. it's okay to worry about those you love but that would be insufficient (even harmful) if you worry about the wrong things.

This is an issue of human dignity. We need to learn to value and respect people for their own sakes.

it's important to evaluate our perspectives before showing concern or expressing our views in arguments. When it comes to conversations about a reality you cannot relate to, it's important to listen and research.

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PS: If you find it hard to love your body, here are some things that helped me:

• WHAT A TIME TO BE ALONE (A book by Chidera Eggerue). If you can’t get the book, here’s a TED Talk that might help. And another.

• Keeping my social media timeline free of unrealistic body standards. I follow and turn on post notification of plus-sized personalities, body-positive brands and accounts.

• Laying off the filters. They’re fatphobic. Refer to the comical nature of fat filters vs. the sensual appeal of others.

• Being around people that hype me the tf up. I let others save the criticisms for when I’d built enough confidence. Yup, safe spaces are a thing and they are valid.

S/o to Ayo, Hassan, Ope and Shola in the comments for their contributions and feedback to this article. Thank you so much.

UPDATE: I visited an acquaintance and ranted a little on the topic. You can listen here.

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SONG OF THE MONTH: Mrs. Potato Head - Melanie Martinez

1. https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obesity-era