Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability

Episode 21: On Being Fat and Disabled

November 01, 2021 Laura Stinson Season 1 Episode 22
Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability
Episode 21: On Being Fat and Disabled
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

This week I'm talking about two sensitive topics, fatphobia and ableism, and how they intersect in my life AND in the medical industry.

Realized I forgot to put in the outro music, so the episode ends somewhat abruptly. My bad!

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TRANSCRIPT OF “ON BEING FAT AND DISABLED”

[rock guitar music]

MALE VO [00:03]

This is Bad Attitudes.

[rock guitar music]

LAURA [00:21]
Hello friends and strangers! Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability. I’m your host, Laura.

Today we’re tackling fatphobia and ableism. This should be fun.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Barbara McCoy! Thank you, Barbara!

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[01:29]
As always, I want to remind you that disability is not a monolith. Although some aspects are universal, my experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community, but I am not the only voice.

[01:51]
So, ableism and fat-phobia. Honestly, I’m not even sure where to begin. This will probably be an emotional episode for me because talking about my body and especially my weight has always been emotionally fraught. Brace yourselves.

I was taught to hate my body very early in life. First for being disabled, and then for being fat. Let me tell you, it is EXHAUSTING to hate your body every day for almost your entire life. At some point in the last five years, I woke up and just decided, “Fuck this. I am TIRED of hating my body. I’m not going to do it anymore.” It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just happened.

But, we’ll get there.

I’m lucky to be able to say that no one in my immediate sphere ever said or did anything that made me hate my DISABLED body. That came almost exclusively from society at large. Learning to hate my FAT body, however, hit much closer to home.

Like most people my age, I grew up with a mom who criticized her own body in my hearing, and while this didn’t teach me to hate my body, I definitely learned to be critical of it. I heard all the language that we now realize shouldn’t be bandied around: Whether food is “good” or “bad.” What we “should” or “shouldn’t” eat. Thankfully, in recent years, my mom has made a real effort to change her behavior, which I think is as beneficial for her mental health as it is for mine.

The person who started me on my fucked up journey with hating my body is, unfortunately, my beloved grandma. I say it this way because she is an incredibly important person in my life. She helped to raise me when I was very small and my parents both had to work full-time. I spent as much or more time at her house as I spent at my own, and almost everything I did as a child was undertaken with the intent to make her proud of me.

Sometime in college I realized I could never actually be the person she thought I was or that she wanted me to be, and started worrying less about what she would think. I still want her to be proud of me though. I don’t think this episode is going to succeed there.

Let me stop here and say: I know my grandma loves me. I believe that SHE believes that what she did and said would actually be helpful. I don’t think she could even fathom how utterly UNhelpful it actually was.

And, in some ways, I think it’s generational. I don’t know if it’s all older people, or just people of my grandparents’ generation, but they seem OBSESSED with weight. Pointing out who has gained it or lost it. How thin or fat someone is, and correlating it with that person’s worth.

I’m not saying this to excuse anything. I mean, I love her, but she fucked me up GOOD. It is her voice I still hear — almost 30 years on — whenever I start having negative thoughts about my body.

It started when I was around 12. “Wouldn’t you like to wear the clothes your friends are wearing?” “I can still wear the dress I wore to your mama’s wedding.” Those two phrases can sometimes play on an endless loop in my head.

What I wish 12-year-old Laura had known and what it took me until MY 30’S [laughs] to realize is, I WAS NEVER GOING TO LOOK LIKE MY FRIENDS. My friends at the time were sticks. They would go into stores, try on a size double 0, and it would still be too big. And more importantly, I was a teenage girl using a wheelchair surrounded by ONLY non-disabled teenagers. I WAS NEVER GOING TO LOOK LIKE MY FRIENDS.

As you might have guessed, she would bribe me with new clothes to lose weight. So I would starve myself, restrict myself, push myself to lose weight and buy clothes I would never wear, because, inevitably, I gained that weight back. And as anyone who has ever dieted before knows, I gained more besides. And we did this dance at least a couple of times.

Then she moved on to simply offering to pay me and my younger sister to lose weight.

What did this teach me? That I wasn’t good enough if I was fat. If I was fat, she couldn’t fully love me. That the size of my body was more important than my intelligence, my creativity, or my accomplishments. That the size of my body was more important than how I felt about myself.

And the irony is, I WASN’T EVEN FAT! I just wasn’t stick thin! I spent so many years hating myself for being something I wasn’t!

Eventually, she laid off. I don’t know if my mom said something to her (although I suspect that was part of it) or if she just realized it was a lost cause. She still lets comments slip, but I thankfully learned not to internalize them, and now I am confident enough and knowledgeable enough to talk back. 

Fat-phobia from your family is bad enough, but where it becomes a deadly problem is in the medical profession. Fat-phobia is RAMPANT in the medical industry. Doctors will blow off patients with serious symptoms simply because they are perceived as overweight. Everything comes down to weight.

I have a good doctor. I like her. But EVERY SINGLE TIME I go in for a checkup, she asks me about my eating habits. EVERY TIME. And I’ve been seeing her for like 20 years. I am grateful that if I go in for a specific issue, she won’t ask me that, but it does get frustrating.

At my last visit, she asked me about my eating habits (of course) and then put in a referral for me to see a nutritionist. The same nutritionist she sent me to see a few years back and who offered no real benefits. Because my A1C was high. 

If you don’t know, A1C measures your average blood sugar over the past three months, and can be an indicator of diabetes if it’s above a certain level.

My A1C has been at pre-diabetic levels for a while, but it has not changed in 2 years. I didn’t see my doctor or get any blood tests at all in 2020 for obvious reasons, but my A1C was exactly the same in 2021 as the last time I had it checked in 2019. And I told her such when I refused to go back to the nutritionist.

But there’s some other things to consider. One, I have polycystic ovary syndrome, which makes it easier to gain and harder to lose weight. It also puts one at a higher risk of diabetes. Two, I am on at least two medications that make it easy to gain and hard to lose weight. Three, as a disabled person, I am mostly sedentary, even when I am active (if that makes sense).

And what do they tell you to do if you want to lose weight? Eat more fresh produce. Cook at home. Exercise more.

Here’s where the ableism comes into play.

Eat more fresh produce? Okay, great. Except that fresh produce is more expensive and the average disabled person is living at or below poverty level, meaning if they want to eat and pay their rent, that fresh produce may not be an option. Fresh produce also requires extra effort to wash and prepare. Remember when I talked about spoons?

Not only that, but so many people live in food deserts, they are unable to access fresh produce even if they want to. If they can’t get it or can’t afford it, they can’t eat it.

Cook at home? Oh, that sounds lovely, except, again, spoons. Cooking is a LOT of work. Even non-disabled people have a hard time preparing meals on a regular basis when taken in concert with work and family responsibilities. If your life is going to be made easier by getting take out or eating frozen, processed food, which option are you likely to choose?

But what about one of those meal kit delivery services? Yeah. Remember what I said about disabled people living in poverty? Those things are NOT cheap.

Exercise more? But my spoons! And what about exercise equipment? You can buy accessible in-home gyms, but the price is astronomical. Most public gyms are not accessible and have no accessible equipment. Those that do, the equipment is limited. And let’s not forget we’re STILL in the middle of a global pandemic and disabled people are some of the most at-risk.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that being at a healthy weight is unimportant. I am not saying that if you want to lose weight you shouldn’t. I am saying that a healthy weight does not have to mean having Scarlett O’Hara’s waist. And I am absolutely, definitely saying that NO ONE should have to lose weight in order to get their doctors to take them seriously.

I mean, ideally, I would like to lose weight. (Please, no one reach out to me with their fool-proof solution for weight loss, unless it includes a full-time personal chef and trainer, all expenses paid.) If I’m being honest, I think my first step for weight loss is going to have to be therapy. I think we can all agree my brain is pretty fucked up when it comes to my body and my weight.

[12:17] 
Like I said at the beginning of this episode, there was a day, I don’t remember when, where I was just fed up with hating my body. I was so tired of looking in the mirror and hating everything I saw. So tired of feeling like I was encumbered with my body instead of living in my body.

I’m not going to say that I love my body in that whole “body positivity” movement sense. Because I don’t. There are days when I get frustrated with my body, when I don’t like how it looks or feels. I definitely prefer the body neutrality movement where you accept your body as is, recognizing what it can do over how it looks. And when I think that way about my body, it becomes a lot easier to like it.

But mostly, I was just tired of hating it. Tired of feeling like I was failing because my body didn’t fit some prescribed parameters. My body, and probably yours, too, has been through a LOT. Injuries, operations, recuperations. And it is still here and it is still working. Is it perfect? No. Is it ever going to be perfect? No. But it’s good.

I have amazing hair. Like, ah-mazing. My eyes are beautiful. My arms are strong. My hands are deft. I have long toes, which for some reason I really like. My body has broken, yes, but it has also healed. It has its moments of weakness, but it is not weak.

So, yeah, I’m fat. I used to say it with shame. Now I try to say it with ambivalence. It’s just an adjective. Does any of that mean I or my body is unworthy? That my pain shouldn’t be taken seriously? That I am less attractive because there is more of me?

I am still learning how to accept this fat disabled body of mine. I am still learning how to acknowledge all the goodness within it.

We need other people to do the same, especially our medical professionals. Realize that fatness is not the cause of all problems and that eliminating fatness will not eliminate all problems. Take your patients seriously, regardless of their weight.

Oh, and a pro-tip if you didn’t know: When you go to the doctor’s office — any doctor’s office — and they ask you to hop on the scale, you are NOT obligated to do so. You can refuse. Every time if you want. No medical professional has the power to make you get on that scale if you don’t want to.

You’re beautiful, even if the voices in your head try to tell you otherwise. And maybe so am I.

[15:25]
Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you in the next one.


Intro
Disability is not a monolith
Episode begins
Wrap Up
Outro