The Fat Chronicles

I have been thinking for a while now about fat acceptance and what it accomplishes. It is no small feat for a woman, fat or not, to make peace with her body and accept it no matter her size or weight. For a fat woman, peace often, perhaps usually comes only after years of struggle and failed diets and internalized shame and feelings of self-loathing. There is no denying that accomplishing this, that coming to accept and hopefully cherish one's body is not only desirable but far more healthy than living with the daily stress that self-loathing and the other accompaniments of hating one's body create. I support and embrace this goal wholeheartedly, having worked hard to get to that point myself.

But, it seems to me to be at best an uphill battle if I look outside myself and my very small circle. I am open about having long ago stepped off the diet train and about my embrace of HAES and of fat acceptance. I can say that I have made small differences in the people close to me because as I have changed in relationship with my body and with fat and body acceptance, those closest to me have also. But no matter what I do, no matter how open I am, have to face the reality that I and people like me make up the tiniest part of my culture. And I cannot see right now how to make significant impact on those whose attitudes need to be changed -- doctors and other health care providers, insurance companies, media outlets, airlines, stores and on and on. Because the bias is massive and pervasive and supported day in and day out with a constant drumbeat about how bad fat is and how much a drain on resources fat people are.

That is the headline for an interesting piece in The Scavenger this week. Susie Orbach's book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, was a controversial book when it was first published in 1978 and in fat acceptance circles remains so today. For me, it was Orbach's book that first got me to consider that my fat was might just be something other than a focus for my personal hatred and shame about and for my body, that maybe, just maybe there was meaning to be found in my body. Of course, when I read it, I was convinced that once I digested the message, that fat was in part a response to patriarchal oppression, I would find the pounds would melt away as i would no longer need them to make the statement for me. I got the message, my body stayed the same. But that book was important because it was the first step away from 30 years of dieting and weight cycling and toward acceptance of my body.

Charlotte Cooper, in her blog, Obesity Timebomb, has addressed the objections many have to Orbach's work. And I agree with many of them. Orbach does conflate being fat and compulsive eating and in fact kind of lumps all fat women together when she does. This is a common error in all writing about obesity that I have seen from psychologists. And I also disagree with Orbach that obesity represents, stems from an eating disorder, which is properly treated will get the fat woman to the slender body that is the natural state for women.

I am struck as I read many of the reports in the news about obesity and treating it by the number of important unasked questions. Over the next few days I will look at some of these from recent news.

Did you hear last week that bariatric surgery is the cure for Type 2 diabetes? It was covered by all the major news outlets and touted as being the best hope. There was no discussion about the mortality rate due to Type 2 diabetes or that fact that thin people develop it as well. As I listened to these reports. my attention was caught by the remark of one surgeon that improvement in blood sugar was seen immediately following surgery, before any weight is lost. Why wasn't this surgeon asking himself why that is, because to me it suggests that a common factor is involved in both those patients' fatness and their diabetes rather than the fat itself causing diabetes.  That seems to be a very important issue. 

Today I read in the Atlantic, "Is Bariatric Surgery the Solution to America's Obesity Problem?" and this very issue comes up in the article, though without the question, which to me is why push surgery when this very provocative finding seems that it might lead to a more productive, less mutilating treatment possibility.

My first analyst was a woman. I chose her because at the time, she was the only Jungian analyst within reasonable driving distance of where I lived. I was just 40 with two children and an unhappy marriage. I had in mind that I would someday like to pursue Jungian analytic training, but that was not my primary reason for seeing her. It was that I was 40 and I knew I needed to deal with what I wanted in my life in the years ahead. Things got off to a difficult start because she looked very like my mother so before we began there was something of a negative mother transference. She was slender and very well dressed, the kind of woman with whom I often felt clumsy and ungainly. 

I believe at the beginning I said something to her to the effect that the issue of my weight was non-negotiable, a stance occasioned in large measure because of her resemblance to my mother and because I had worked so hard through my thirties to make peace with my body, to stop dieting and hating myself for being fat. In spite of that declaration or maybe because of it, after a couple of sessions, she told me of a dream she had had when she was in analysis, a dream she had had, she believed, for her analyst who, like me, was fat. In the dream, Jung told her that "every extra ounce costs a pound of consciousness." She told me her analyst had been grateful to her for telling her and had undertaken to lose weight because of that. I was not grateful. Not at all. I was angry. And hurt that she had so clearly not heard me when I said I was not willing to make weight loss a focus of my work with her. I know I wrote to her about my anger but I also know that my expression of it was pretty impotent. i wanted her to be willing to see me as I was, to sit with me as I was and allow me to open up to her and to myself my experience in my body, in my life. I needed to be able to speak and be heard without blame, the blame that comes with the belief that all I had to do to be "normal" was to eat less and move more. But that was not to be.

See this woman, Laura Caterall? Well a lot of folks are all aflutter because they see it as ground breaking that she is on the cover of the French edition of Cosmopolitan -- because she is a PLUS SIZE  model. That's right, at a size 14-16, she is considered to be plus-sized. I don't know about any of you, but I have never in my life looked like that, not even when I was a size 14-16. Maybe in France she is a size 16. But not in my world.

If like me you are thoroughly tired of seeing images of headless fatties I have an artist to suggest to you -- Fernando Botero, a Columbian painter with a unique style and an appreciation for large bodies. I first became aware of Botero around 20 years ago when I was in New York to see an exhibit at the Met. In the center section of Park Avenue for several blocks I saw monumental bronzes and I was mesmerized. And had to learn more about this artist. Do take a look -- I think you will find delight in his figures like these two --

I began this work as an argument with Marion Woodman. Using myself as a single case study, I set out to demolish her theses about obesity. Along the way, quite to my surprise, I found myself agreeing with some of what she said. I admit to feeling some ambivalence about it.  On the one hand, I see the complexes she emphasizes present in myself. There is no denying that. But Woodman presumes to be speaking about all fat women and within this assumes all fat women are compulsive eaters, all fat women are hiding in their fat, assumes all fat women can be thin and if they don’t want to be it’s a psychological issue, that fatness is the other side of the coin to anorexia. I know what she says is not true of all fat women. And I know that much of it is true of me. Woodman sees cause where I see co-occurrence. Having a negative mother complex, father complex and the rest are neither necessary nor sufficient to cause a person to be fat. But when they occur together with fat, they do indeed amplify pain and suffering. I know I am heir to a complex brew of genes and exposure to bacteria and viruses and hormones and who knows what else all interacting in a way we cannot yet define with how I feel, how I was been treated in my family and in the world, what I do with my anger. 

A debate on this point was in the NY Times last week. I'm still pondering it. On the face of it, it seems that it would go without saying that there should be legal protection against discrimination. And I certainly am not supportive of discriminating against fat people. So what gives me pause? I am leery of what could come along with new legislation. Like defining obesity as a disease. That would go against fat acceptance, at least in my mind. If we want to be seen as within the scope of normal, that is that weight has a range of variation, then it would not be a step forward to have obesity made a disease. And shouldn't employment be based on ability to do the job? Ca legislation be drafted that simply covers any difference without pathologizing difference? 

So what do you think?

Stacy Bias, on her blog Fat Girl Speaks, posts today about the long lasting effects of being kicked out of ballet class because she was too fat. I wonder how many of us longed for the pink tutu and leotard, white tights and delicate ballet shoes and heard we were too fat? 

I was one of those girls. When I was 9, I wanted to learn ballet. I begged my mother to let me take a class. She told me no, that I was too fat for ballet. So I got a book from the library, a book that showed the five basic positions for feet and hands. And when my mother wasn’t home, I would stand in front of the mirror and try to teach myself ballet. I wanted so much to be a graceful and beautiful dancer. But of course, there were limits to what I could teach myself. I practiced those five foot positions and hand positions again and again, trying to imagine myself a ballerina. What I saw in that mirror was my chubby body and lack of grace, just like she said.

Then, at my mother’s insistence, I took a course in ballroom dancing and etiquette. She was certain this was how I would become graceful and ladylike. I was terrible at dancing; I just couldn’t get the hang of following. I didn't know how to let the boy lead, to feel the music, let go, give up control and allow him to take charge of the dance. It is something I have yet to learn, though in my dreams I am able to let go, feel the music, and dance, my partner leading. And if I can do that in my dreams, perhaps I can do it in waking life.

In addition to my personal interest in how we think about, talk about, and act on fat and fat people, I also have a professional interest, both as a psychotherapist and as a Jungian. When I started writing about this almost two yeas ago, I was surprised to find almost nothing in the Jungian literature about obesity. Since Marion Woodman wrote her book, The Owl Was a Baker's Daughter, published in 1980, the Jungian world has been silent on the subject. I have been able to find one article in Jungian journals since then. That alone strikes me as odd, given how prominent the concern about fat is in the culture as a whole.

I finally got to reading that lone article recently and will critique it in some detail another time. One thing that stood out for me was the author's reliance on statistics and studies as reported in Truthout.org, a progressive, i.e. liberal, journalism site.

I consider myself a progressive and a liberal. As I reflected after reading the article, I realized that I had not thought much about the intersection of politics and the issue of obesity. I tend to see fat acceptance as progressive and liberal, radical even. But here I was faced with the reality that a source I generally agree with embracing spurious statistics and wholly aligned with the dominant paradigm about obesity as the great danger to life as we know it. I mentioned this to my husband, who is very active politically and also a progressive. His response was that he sees the left as believing that people can be perfected and that is how he sees liberals falling into this dominant discourse about obesity. With the right social programs and use of government policy, programs and influence, the argument would go, fat people can become slender people, i.e. more nearly perfect.