gateway
Fat Positive
feature 14
the
www.gtwy.ca
October 16, 2013
Written by Kate Black Illustrations by Anthony Goertz
Quetzala Carson is fat. She has been her entire life. As a child, her mother would point out other fat women on the street and suggest that Carson lose weight. She grew up longboarding, riding bikes and playing in bands and says her size never had a huge impact on her. But the little things cut her in a way comments from family members couldn’t, as she remembers how she would wear bell-bottoms because they were the only pants that came in her size. “It sounds so stupid to be like, ‘I had to wear T-shirts because I couldn’t wear v-necks,’ and it’s so heartbreaking, but it really does affect your life, you know? The fact that you can’t fit in with anyone else,” the third-year University of Alberta Native Studies student says. She quietly came to an epiphany about her self-view while naked, sitting alone on a hotel room carpet. She was “super depressed, hating life and hating everything” — her dad had recently passed away and she was preparing to perform at We Day, a leadership conference for teens. Looking at herself in the mirror, she realized it was time to make a change — and it had nothing to do with the numbers on the scale. “I was just like, ‘Who am I to stand in front of these kids and tell them to change the world? Who am I to do all this stuff if I’m just hating on myself?’ That was the moment where I decided that I need to love myself and believe in myself so I can go on to be a good person.” Carson struggled to find a community that shared this point of view — googling “Edmonton body positive” came up with nothing. Out of this, she created Body Happy YEG, an Edmonton-based think tank group focused on creating a body-positive and fat-positive environment. Conversation on fat positivity, a social movement looking to abolish anti-fat biases in social spheres, is rapidly popping up in both classrooms and chatrooms alike. While it’s something the western world has yet to fully embrace, it proves we may not know as much about fat people as we’d like to think.
epidemiologist Antigone Oreopoulos found that in patients with chronic heart failure, overweight and obese patients had “lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality rates.” So can fat people be as healthy — or healthier — than thin people?
Health at every size With roots in the 1960s, Health At Every Size (HAES) is a lifestyle movement focused on promoting health behaviours and size acceptance rather than weight loss. The movement is associated with improvements to blood pressure, health behaviours and positive psychosocial outcomes and is a response to study results showing that many people regain the weight they lost after being put on traditional diet-and-exercise routines. Mary Forhan, an Assistant Professor in Occupational Therapy and obesity researcher at the U of A, supports the approach, but notes that as with any practice, HAES needs to be considered on an individual basis.
Big, fat problems Most of us are familiar with statistics about the dangers of obesity. The Canadian Obesity Network reports that “One in four adult Canadians and one in 10 children are clinically obese,” meaning they have a Body Mass Index of 30 or higher. A joint report from the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Health Information also warns of “associations between obesity and the incidence of type 2 diabetes, asthma, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, chronic back pain, several types of cancers and major types of cardiovascular disease.” With these stats in mind, the fat positive movement naturally doesn’t come without its criticisms. Carson Liu, a Los Angeles bariatric surgeon, was quoted in monstersandcritics.org saying that he “cringe(s) at knowing more and more people are accepting being fat, and doing it proudly,” in light of the fat positivity movement. Arya Sharma, professor and chair of Obesity Research and Management at the U of A, writes in a 2011 blog post that “obesity deniers” often use similar strategies and arguments used by smokers to discredit suggestions of an “obesity epidemic,” citing strategies like personal anecdotes and discrediting published studies. But Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles reported that in a threeyear study of coronary artery disease where they observed 14,739 patients —some who had coronary artery disease and some who didn’t — fewer patients measured as “obese” and “overweight” died from cardiac death than “normal” weight patients Similarly, a study led by U of A
“I think it is possible to be overweight and be obese and still be healthy, but I don’t think that everyone who is overweight or has obesity can be healthy,” she says. But Forhan has yet to come across a patient that suffers from a disease that derives solely from obesity. It may increase one’s risk for conditions such as arthritis or diabetes, but genetics and environmental factors can play a significant role as well. As an occupational therapist, Forhan’s job isn’t to help people lose weight, but rather to help them navigate their own environment better. But she adds that focusing on the scale when trying to live a healthy lifestyle may be detrimental. “Numbers on the scale aren’t always an accurate feedback in terms of how healthy you are,” she says. “You’re going to get disappointed and frustrated and stop whatever (you’re) doing that actually could be improving your cardiac health or mental health that you can’t tell ... So by simply stepping on a scale (and making an assessment) based on the number that comes back to you is setting yourself up for failure.”
Being okay with being fat Kristin Rodier, a PhD candidate at the U of A, argues that fat acceptance isn’t a health issue, but rather a social one. She says that many health statistics present in studies are funded by a multi-billion dollar diet industry, but also notes the common discourse of stigmatizing people under the guise of being “concerned for their health.” “There’s always two things going on: I can protest and say the facts are wrong about fat being unhealthy, or I can say that even if it is unhealthy, the stigma isn’t deserved,” she says. Rodier adds that common arguments surrounding obesity’s strain on the healthcare system are unfounded. While the Canadian Obesity Network estimates the “total cost of obesity” on the Canadian healthcare system to ring in around $6 billion annually, it’s nearly impossible to directly correlate obesity with health issues. She also points out that weight wears a special stigma compared to other “risky” behaviours, such as extreme athletes or workaholics. Spinal cord injuries alone are estimated to cost the Canadian healthcare system $3 billion annually, while research done by the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health estimates the cost of depression at a staggering $51 billion. “There are all kinds of risky behaviours that put people’s health at risk and we really value those choices. For example, people who participate in extreme sports,” Rodier explains. “Even if (fat people) did (cost society more), we would still be weirdly picking on them, because their choices don’t conform with the body norm or the body ideal.” At the same time, she’s critical of “real women have curves” fat positive movements, noting that all women, even thin women, experience body shame. Instead, Rodier thinks we should see fatness as a social justice issue where we combat social stigma that sees fatness as a tragedy “People think fat positive means that you want everyone to be fat. All I want is for people to have the body that is the result of their environment and their choices, and to not be stigmatized on the basis of that. Whether they are fat because of their choices, their genes, or a ‘disorder,’ they deserve full social respect,” she says. Statistics aside, Rodier and Carson agree that fat doesn’t define a person. “As a fat woman who’s totally fine with being fat and totally fucking loving life, I have no problem with someone else who’s trying to lose weight, and that’s their decision just like they should have no problem with me doing what I want with my body,” Carson says. “It took me years to come to terms with the word ‘fat’... I was like, ‘That’s an insult. That’s kind of rude.’ But now ... it’s not an insult. It’s not a compliment. It’s just a fact. I think someone saying, ‘I’m a fat person’ is really inspiring.” Getting everyone on board with this idea hasn’t been easy for Carson, and Body Happy YEG is still a small group, boasting 15 members on its Facebook group. She muses that our society makes it hard to accept your body the way it is, and it will take time for more people to jump on the fat positive movement. In the meantime, she encourages her peers to take on a different kind of naked epiphany, stripping away the layers they’ve been dressed in by society. “In order to be in a body positive community, you have to accept your body first. You have to take off everything that we’re socially conditioned to think and supposed to be,” she says. “I just want to see what we can do to make people feel l i ke humans beings.”