The BODcast - S2: E6

Good morning and welcome to another episode of the BODcast!

Today’s conversation is a bit of an unusual one for me - I am going to talk about intentional weight loss and weight loss surgery. Here’s a content warning - with the caveat that I have not changed my stance on body acceptance and fat liberation. It’s a discussion, not a confession!

I am friends with a bunch of people who’ve had weight-loss surgery. Some of us met because we were together in online support groups, others because it’s more common than you may think.

I’ve spoken with a few of them about where I am with my body - it feels safest to do so with people who understand and even though I try my best not to make my life about my body and how it looks/what size it is, I am not cured. I am not completely devoid of critical thoughts about my body.

One thing I miss from the past when I was smaller was my fitness. There are a lot of factors - I hate the culture of fitness groups and gyms that do challenges involving calories, food and weight loss; I work full-time and hardly make time to do things like sleep; I have asthma and since the bushfires have been more sensitive to anything that sets it off… and also, I am not motivated by exercise. I like doing it once it’s happening and I love incidental activity like absolutely thrashing it out on a dancefloor for three hours.

So when I say to myself, I want to ‘go back’ to what it was like when I was smaller - that was before I was also a mum, and when I frothed at the idea of having lowered my body weight for my daily (who am I kidding, at least twice daily) moment on the scales.

In the past, and on a regular basis, I get questions from people who’ve researched me and found any of the writing I did when my interest in diet culture was the driver of my content. No offense, past me, but I’m glad that’s not your vibe any more.

I also see the great conversations being had by my friends online - one such example being a question on Clem Ford’s ‘Friday Night Bites’. If you don’t know what I mean, head to Clem’s Instagram and suss it out.

The question basically asked, ‘can we truly be allies and activists in fat liberation when we have engaged in dramatic surgery or other means to lose weight? Are we not lying, to ourselves and the cause?’

I have been open always about the fact that I had a sleeve gastrectomy (AKA gastric sleeve, upper GI surgery) - in fact, the first time I started blogging it was about  weight loss through a diet company I shan’t name.

I shared intermittently across 2011-2017 about my different methods and ‘successes’.

I come from a family of people who both demonised fatness and were, for the most part, of average or above average body weight. In that family, I am the third and not the last to choose this option.

I recall writing about my past as a cleansing exercise - like I was putting being fat behind me as I worked through all sorts of harmful diets, drugs and disorders.

Let me be clear: I do NOT regret having the surgery. As Roxane Gay said:

I felt a swell of pride and then hated myself for that swell, for being so pedestrian as to take pleasure in the sort of validation that goes against so much of what I believe about how bodies should be allowed to be.

Of course I wanted to be thinner, that is why I had the surgery. But me, today, now - I want more than that. I want more for YOU and for the future.

The realities of surgery for me were that I was simultaneously love bombed by people whose own fat phobia made them believe I was finally going to become the thin person I was inside (to match my pretty face!) and judged for how the new way of life the surgery affected my ability to be a ‘normal’ dinner guest.

My hair thinned with my body, and with my patience. I no longer tolerated bad dates, rude men or looks in the gym that made me feel like I didn’t belong there.

I knew that even if I was still fat, I was getting thinner and I was ‘getting healthy’.

The morality attached to health and thinness still pervades my mind - I have gained weight since the surgery (a common occurrence) and so I regularly think about when I was thinner and what I could do to get back there.

Am I fixed? Am I cured? Of course I’m not.

Anti-diet, fat positive role models are only stepping into the mainstream now - and even then, are regularly silenced by patriarchy and insistence that we would all be happier if we were thinner. I don’t judge anyone who wishes to live in a smaller body, a body that conforms.

Why are thin people happier*?

*in this context - I acknowledge that thin privilege doesn’t preclude the difficulties of life  - ahem, intersectionality anyone? The fact I felt the need to mention this indicates that I have been subjected to multiple instances of whatabouting so if you felt that coming on, please rest assured that like anything, nuance is important.

But back to the question; the answer is because they are not constantly told - by the world, by fashion, by media, by their loved ones - that they can’t fit.

Never forget that anti-fatness is rooted in anti-blackness - the pursuit of thinness is a way to distance oneself from stereotypes which are racist and seek to make the Black and brown bodies of the world ‘what not to be’.

I don’t discuss my weight loss surgery any more because I don’t think fatness is a problem we need a solution for.

The problem isn’t us.

I fight every day for the liberation of fat bodies, because my fat body before this surgery deserved it, because every single fat body deserves it.

As a society, we must learn to accept and uplift the bodies we’ve always been afraid to have.

Because my body, your body - every body is a good body.