We are so entrenched in diet culture and fatphobia in our world. Being body positive doesn't mean I don't hear and see diet culture in many places–what it means is that I have the tools to unpack, question, and critique diet culture. This is the first blog post that will be a series of posts questioning the fatphobic norms we've grown up with our entire lives.
I just finished a reading for my Intro Sociology class, and it was a study by McLorg and Taub who studied anorexic and bulimic people in a self-help book, attempting to find the sociocultural agents that cause disorders (not just the psychological factors.)
The study is about deviance, and how people with eating disorders come to be labeled as deviant. People with eating disorders first conform to societal norms, and their behaviors are reinforced when people say things like "You look so great, you've lost weight!" But when their ED behaviors become clear, and they start to show more severe signs of starvation, people start to stigmatize them. One of the participants said though, that the "stigma of anorexia was better than being fat."
How messed up is that? People feel that going through the intense pain and distress of an ED is somehow worth it, even with all the stigma attached to it, because it's still better than being fat in our society. I certainly remember feeling that way when I was suffering with an ED. Our world rewards and reinforces severely damaging and unhealthy ED behaviors, while punishing fat people for simply existing in their bodies that we have no idea if they are "healthy" or "unhealthy," because weight and size are not measurements of our health.
Phew. That's it for now. Just some food for thought.