On the Unbearable Weight of Being

A newsletter on a triggering topic I can't seem to avoid

CW: Weight, disordered eating, etc.

the apparent ideal? Photo by Gaspar J. Ruiz Lindberg, Sourced from Elle UK

I don’t know how to write this newsletter.

I don’t know how to write about this topic at all, frankly.

But I’ve been thinking about it and mulling it over and observing the amount of space it’s taking up in my brain, and I thought I might try share it with you all.

It’s a risk, of course. I don’t quite know yet who my substack community is (perhaps this might be an opportunity to introduce yourself in the comments below? I’d love to know who you all are and what interests you in general!)… which also means I don’t quite know who will be reading this. I don’t know how to tailor the narrative, and have already begun to think of disclaimers I should add, lest I cause harm by my musings.

But alas, let’s not dilly dally any longer. Let’s plunge right in, shall we?

I went to a dinner recently, with a small group of new-ish friends and acquaintances. Lovely people who I genuinely adore and don’t have a bad word to say about. Partway through the night, the conversation made a sharp left turn into Bafflement Lane, arriving at a cul de sac I had sworn to forget, long ago. Calorie counting.

Someone pulled out their phone to input the contents of their dinner into an app, tracking whether they had enough ‘space’ for dessert. This was for a wedding, they assured us. They weren’t like this, usually. I noticed my heart skip a couple of beats, my breath rise up to my collarbones and stay there, shallow as a puddle. Are we here, again?

I thought we, progressive women in our 30s and 40s, were past this. I thought we had left this behaviour in the 2000s, along with low rise jeans and George W. Bush Jr.

I scolded myself back in line. Let the lady live, Yassmin.

Days later, I came across two separate posts by journalists I follow and respect. They used different language, but the takeaway was clear: I thought I had a good relationship with my body, but it turns out that was only because the desired figure had changed. Now that super skinny is back, I’m feeling myself slide back into disordered eating.

Soon, the algorithm was feeding me stories about Ozempic and related weight loss drugs. Originally created to treat diabetes, the drug has become so popular there is now reportedly a shortage of the medication, causing headaches for the diabetics for whom the drug was originally designed. This week, the New York Times Daily podcast covered the phenomenon, hot on the heels of tens of other breathless publications.

…gossip mills and social media are rife with newly svelte fans. “My cousin was always a little chubby,” says another woman from a prominent family. “And she tried every trendy diet and workout: F-Factor, you name it. Then recently she starts posting pictures of herself on Instagram looking incredible in these supersexy midriff-baring outfits. And what do you know—she’s on Ozempic.” - Town and Country

All of this makes me deeply uncomfortable, for so many reasons. Fatphobia sometimes feels like the last acceptable discrimination, one that folks who would say they believe in justice continue to perpetuate. Social stigma against fat people is virulent, rife and laden with a disgusting moral superiority I find reprehensible. I also find it saddening, when I see and hear people turn it onto themselves. So often, I hear women - and I am mostly speaking about straight, cis women, although I know it happens in LGBTQ+ communities - make barbs directed at their own bodies, joking about hunger, assigning a moral value to a meal, or remarking on their desire to lose more weight, lamenting at their inability to be smaller. Has this picked up over the past year or two, or am I just now paying attention? I don’t know.

What I do know is that this conversation is sensitive and difficult to bring up. Chatting about losing weight? That kinda banter is not only acceptable, but encouraged! To talk about your eating habits and your desire to change your body is small talk, it’s like talking about the weather, it’s a way to bond among strangers. To question the desire to become thinner is akin to being a teetotaler at a hen do. How dare you not participate in this collective experience! To not participate is to simultaneously shame everyone in the group and also position yourself as lower status because thinness, for women, of course, is status. Class. Wealth. Privilege.

And you can’t be involved in the conversation without your own body being a silent member of the discourse. Your ability to speak on this topic depends so much on the body you present yourself in.

I don’t know how to have a conversation with my friends and acquaintances about the ways we relate to our bodies. Now in my 30s, I am watching the lives and choices of those around me diverge. And if I am being brutally honest with myself, I am feeling some measure of betrayal. Not against individuals per se, but a generalised grief that I don’t know where to place.

Cos I was thinking - hey, we’re all pushing back against these bullshit ideals together, right? We’re resisting this idea that as cis women we are to be thin, and thus small, and powerless, and weak — we’re in it with each other, right?

And then I turn around and realise everyone has disappeared. Huh?

Do you talk about your relationship with your body and weight to those around you? How do you find this conversation? Am I missing something glaring here? Would love to hear from you!

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A few great related reads:

I smell a whiff of 2000s fat-shaming in the air. If you’ve never spoken out against it, now is the time

“As a Busy Fat Woman who keeps across online trends and movies and is semi-addicted to TikTok, I smell a whiff of 2000s fatphobia in the air.”

The Whale is not a masterpiece – it’s a joyless, harmful fantasy of fat squalor

An excoriating review of the critically acclaimed film ‘The Whale’:

…people respond positively to The Whale because it confirms their biases about what fat people are like (gross, sad) and why fat people are fat (trauma, munchies) and allows them to feel benevolent yet superior. It’s a basic dopamine hit, reifying thin people’s place at the top of the social hierarchy. Look at me, Mom! I’m doing empathy on the big greasy monsters! Thin people hate us so much that this is what it looks like when they’re trying to like us.

“Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia,” by Sabrina Strings, NYU Press, 2019

A review on a book that shows how fatphobia is linked to, surprise surprise, white supremacy.

By the sixteenth century, with slavery and colonization in full force in the Americas, extracted labor gave way to extracted resources, especially sugar. The reconfiguration of European diets and the mass accessibility of the “white gold” meant changing body shapes and sudden anxieties around fat, particularly among the male population. It is during the early Enlightenment that we first see the thinness admired as a sign of male rationality. Intellectuals from Shakespeare to Descartes dismayed corpulence as indicative of dim-wittedness, with excessive consumption being primarily viewed as an obstacle to higher thought. This was bolstered by the post-Reformation context in which self-regulation became key to cultivating morality, in which gluttony was one sin to be avoided.

But it wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that fat became a resource for racial categorization. The writings of early race scientists like George Cuvier, J.J. Virey, and Georges-Louis Leclerc drew direct ties between gluttony, stupidity, and the characteristics of Africans, whose idleness was attributed to their warm climate (a pervasive trope also found in colonial discourse about India). Enlightenment-era rationalism elevated food to the moral plane of asceticism required for intellectual pursuit. Soon, a thin physique had gone from being a sign of sickliness to evidence of the moral and intellectual superiority of Europeans, supported by the writings of anthropologists and naturalists seeking to codify and biologize a racial hierarchy. These works placed particular emphasis on the bodies of southern African women, who were depicted as grotesquely monstrous and animalistic while also serving as a source of voyeuristic fascination in formats like Cuvier’s traveling ethnographic menagerie, which featured pay-per-view displays of robust enslaved African women like Saartjie Baartman.

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Thanks so much for reading this weeks newsletter! Big shout out also to my two newest paying subscribers, Abadesi and Sophie. As a freelancer of almost a decade, income from this newsletter makes the world of difference, and every little bit counts. If you feel like you have the capacity to support my work, do consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

I shall leave you with a fun Tiktok… do you expect food at a party?

@ladshubAsking #people the same questions relating to ethncity / social experiment ⚪️⚫️ #foryou #fypシ #foryoupage #fyp #fy #inpublic #culturaldifferences #uktiktok #publicinterview #sameperson #viralvideo #improv #funnyanswers #orgin #race #parties #hulahoop

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Until next week inshallah,

Yassmin