Controlling Our Appearance when The World Feels out of Control

by Arielle Juliette. Approx. 5 minute read.

Hi, welcome to this month's blog installment, I'm happy you opened it! I have a couple of awesome posts/articles I came across in the past month that I wanted to share with you.

The first one is from Lindley Ashline, and it's about the changes that our bodies may be going through due to our "new normal".

Okay, so this is probably not going to come as a surprise, but I have seen - and I'm guessing you have seen- lots of people talking about changes to their bodies since the very beginning of the shit hitting the proverbial fan early in 2020. A lot of the time, it's accompanied by a desire to tighten up control, rein their bodies in, and arrest the changes they see and feel. It makes so much sense, and it's a feeling that I've felt before too. It's a natural human response to reach for what we've been told we can control, when everything else feels so out of control. In the blog article from December, I discussed this very phenomenon in my life, when I was trapped in a bad relationship and spending FAR too many hours working. It gave me a sense of peace to control my body, but it was a destructive control that ultimately harmed my health and kept me too wrapped up in my new "lifestyle change" to have the bandwidth to change the things that sorely needed changing.

Maybe this is relatable for you or a loved one, or perhaps it isn't, but I've seen enough people talking about it that I thought it might be helpful to share this post that Lindley wrote. Lindley is a photographer, author and fat acceptance activist who helps people reclaim their bodies through photography. Her writing truly is excellent! Some of this may be uncomfortable to read, but I highly recommend getting all the way through to the end. I hope you'll find the ultimate message as reassuring as I did!

These are the days your body was built for.

During this pandemic, so many people are finding that their bodies, for the first time, are now in the “plus size” or “fatter than I wanted” categories, and are finding it a pretty scary place to be. It’s scary because, if you’ve been alive more than five minutes, you’ve seen the way that fat people are treated, and it’s perfectly reasonable to want no part of that.

(Psst — it’s also a wakeup call to change how you treat and value people in fat bodies. If you don’t want to be treated like us, treat us better and advocate for equity so that if and when your body changes, you’re not in for the same treatment.)

No matter what size and shape your body ends up, you have exactly the same worth and value that you’ve always had. You will deserve the same respect, good treatment and dignity that you always have.

There’s no particular moral good in exercise, or in eating (or not eating) certain things. Not exercising doesn’t make you a bad person, or a less good person than you used to be. Ditto for fast food, or chips, or candy, or whatever “bad” food(s) has been helping you feel a little better over the past year.

It also doesn’t mean you’re weak, or any other negative thing, if you seek mental healthcare. Just the opposite — it takes a lot of strength to seek help!

For the folks who are afraid of binging during stressful times:

If you let yourself eat, and you binge, that’s okay. That’s your body reacting to the fear of not being allowed to eat enough. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure or a glutton. And it doesn’t mean you’ll binge forever. It’s okay to take it one day at a time.

(And as a person who is much fatter than you, let me reassure you that you can survive and thrive at larger sizes!)

For everyone:

If all you do through a global pandemic -- and, depending on where you live, a recession -- is survive, you are doing just fine.

I’m sending lots of ease and hope for you. Hang in there.

If you want to also be good to the fat people around you and who see your posts online, here’s what to do: Avoid talking publicly about your terror of existing in a body like those of your fat(ter) friends. It’s hard to also be trying to survive a global pandemic while constantly hearing and seeing that people are distressed because they now look slightly more like you.

That does not mean that you can’t talk about your struggles! It just means being a little more careful of how you share your body fears. Maybe instead of saying “I’m so afraid I’ll get fat” or “I gained 20 pounds and I hate it,” reframe it as “my body is changing in ways I can’t control and that scares me.”

No one wants to shut you up, or marginalize you, if you live in a smaller body and you’re talking about your body fears. We fat folks would just like to not hear for a few minutes about how terrified you are of our unruly bodies.

Because, after all, our fears really do come down to control. The culture we live in teaches us that we can control everything if we’re smart, strong and rich enough. If we could just control what our bodies do, if we just had enough discipline and willpower and determination and drive, we could mold and shrink our bodies so that they looked just like the bodies we’re told should be our #goals.

But we don’t have that control.

Our bodies have deep instincts and rhythms, anti-famine devices and intergenerational trauma, that are simply out of our conscious control. Not only have our routines and rhythms and, possibly, food intake changed recently, but we are quite literally in the kind of situation human bodies were built to withstand.

Your body is saying, “Oh, here’s the catastrophe I’ve been preparing for for a thousand years. Bring it on. We’ve got this. I’m here to support you.”

***** How tragic is it that we’ve been taught to feel like our life partners, our physical ties to this world, our unique earthly forms, are trying to betray us, when they’re giving their all to protect us? *****

Anyway, there’s no way to shrink our bodies that works for most people in the long term. And when we try to shrink, our bodies — just as in, say, a global pandemic and time of uncertainty — shriek “Famine! I must prepare and protect you!” and store additional weight to help us.

That’s why many people who diet not only gain back their missing weight, but gain more. Because our bodies are loyal and devoted and they’ve just geared up to help us through the next famine.

Anyone who tells you otherwise needs to show you a peer-reviewed, reputable study that shows a majority of the participants losing more than 10% of body weight and keeping it off for at least five years.

(Pro tip: That study doesn’t exist, because we don’t have evidence-based ways to shrink bodies and make them stay smaller.)

Those people who are set up as everything you should be? They don’t look like that, either. You’ve been lied to. Your parents were lied to. Their parents were lied to.

It’s important to understand that the reason you’re terrified of living in a larger body is because hundreds of years’ worth of white men have found power and profit in enforcing fatphobic and racist beauty standards on women.

When you resist feeling bad about yourself and your body, you’re giving the finger to thousands of people who want to make money from your self-loathing, and that’s a pretty worthy #goal, too.

Want to support a fat activist? Join Lindley’s Patreon starting at $1/month. Want to hear more like this every week? Subscribe to her newsletter here.

The second thing I wanted to share with you is an article that has me really excited. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I've been discussing all things body positivity, body liberation, freedom from body shame, Health At Every Size and the eradication of diet culture for over two years now, and I've been involved in those communities for close to four years. So much has changed in that time! This movement has gone from super counter-cultural and something hardly anyone had heard about, to being discussed in major magazines.

This article, entitled "The Unbearable Weight of Diet Culture", was printed in Good Housekeeping earlier this month. It's an excellent primer on what diet culture is, why it's harmful, and how to resist it. This was a well-researched article that really does the movement justice! It's subtitle states, "For centuries, we have been led to believe that there is a “right” way to eat in order to achieve a healthy, attractive body as a means to a more fulfilling life — and that any failures on this front are ours alone. But it's time to face reality." If you're intrigued, click the article to read more!

Thanks for hanging with me this month. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these articles!

-Arielle Juliette

If you have any questions about this article, or a question/topic for the next blog post you'd like to see covered, please don't hesitate to write me and let me know!