Joyce Fegan: Fat phobia has been around for centuries and it's nothing to do with health

Social media feeds this January are awash with weight loss transformation pictures, but also feature superstar Lizzo dancing around in her bikini. Picture: PA

Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the algorithm or maybe it’s just January, but my social media feed is currently chock-a-block with “before and after” pictures of women who once weighed X pounds and now weigh Y.

Conversely, my feed is also filled with global superstar Lizzo dancing around in a bikini, useful thought experiments that call the bluff on “diet culture”, and tips from experts about how to actually improve your body image.

Halfway through a pregnancy and with Christmas under my belt, the latter is feeling a lot more productive and nutritious.

For 10 years, I have written about diet culture and body image, trying to improve my own in the process. I’ve never watched an episode of Operation Transformation, though had it been around in my teens I’m sure I’d have been an avid follower and an influence-e.

I did, after all, try to replicate unappetising recipes that cost the Earth from Gillian McKeith’s book You Are What You Eat back in the day. I never did eat the seed-based “cake”.  Where am I now?

The weighing scales can be our greatest enemy in January, but we shouldn't fixate on every pound.

I don’t own a weighing scales, and the only time I stepped on one in the last 15 years was in a maternity hospital.

I’d measure the scale somewhere around languishing, neither desperately lusting after the thin ideal, nor madly in love with the skin I’m in.

I do not actively participate in diet culture, I wear the togs, I eat the “damn burger” and I haven’t commented on another person’s weight in maybe 20 years. Commenting on my own? Yes, par for the course.

My body is currently in a state of expansion and change, hopefully growing a healthy brain, a set of lungs that’ll get plenty of airing, a beating heart, and limbs that will take another human being to the far-flung corners of this beautiful world.

It’s the kind of stuff you’d think would make you fall in love with your body — if appreciation of your body was based on what it does for you, versus what it looks like.

My body was not built for the current catwalks of the world, so why then do I give such credence to the aesthetic of it?

We’ve all been trained to do so. This is most certainly a case of “it is you, it is not me”.

Magazines as far back as the 1800s, such as Harper’s Bazaar, warned upper-class white women to watch what they ate.

“And they were unapologetic in stating that this was the proper form for Anglo-Saxon Protestant women. And so it was important that women ate as little as was necessary in order to show their Christian nature and also their racial superiority,” writes Sabrina Strings, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, in her multi-award winning Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.

Fat phobia is around for centuries. And its function is based on racism, not health.

A friend this week, mother to three children, and with no history of disordered eating, spoke to me of her body dissatisfaction.

This woman’s body is also in a state of change, in the form of the perimenopause. And while she intellectually knows this, and that her abdomen carried three humans to full gestation, these pieces of information combined do little to stop her from being dissatisfied with her torso.

The point is, in combatting diet culture and the thin ideal, individuals are trying to face off centuries of fat phobia on their own, in a society that holds slim as a sacred virtue. And if you don’t love your body as it is, or at least like it, or even appreciate it, the critic kicks in here too. Not only am I failing at dieting, but also at combating diet culture.

'Attentional bias'

New research about body image was published this week. It’s the kind of stop-you-in-your-tracks findings, even though it’s not at all surprising.

Women who are dissatisfied with their body shape spend more time looking at slimmer women. This research from the University of Bristol spanned 3,000 women and took in 34 studies in total.

So if you’re unhappy with your body, you have this thing called “attentional bias” where you frequently gaze at people who are supposedly thinner than you.

Such is the preoccupation that diet culture has instilled in humans for centuries, not only are we constantly checking and policing our own bodies, we’re scanning the frames of others too.

Have we become obsessed with the 'before and after' images such as those we associate with programmes like 'Operation Transformation'?

Which also makes no sense when you move up close to a friend, a sister, or a beloved colleague.

Alex Light, a UK-based activist in the world of body acceptance with more than half a million followers on Instagram, has this useful thought experiment. It’s about five things you’d never think about your friends.

When was the last time you wished your childhood friend wore one dress size smaller, or noted that your absolute favourite thing about your sister-in-law was her flat tummy, or that you’d love if your adventurous cousin’s triceps were more toned?

This is the kind of alternative content to “before and after” images that’s also available on social media.

Also available are actual tips such as those from Irish health psychologist Shauna Farrell.

“One of the best things you can do to improve your body image is not to change your body, it’s not to lose weight, it is to start to live your life in the current body that you have. It is to expose yourself to the things maybe you’re afraid to do in your body,” says Shauna.

Think swimming, dating, socialising, and wearing clothes you actually like. Also clothes you’re physically comfortable in. Body image, Shauna says, is “how we feel about our bodies” and, crucially, “how we think other people might feel about our bodies”.

I am not aiming to walk in spring/summer 2023 for the House of Gucci, so why care what this perfectly functioning, healthy, and life-giving body looks like or how others might judge it?

Back to centuries of fat phobia. It’s a deconstruction job, not a diet one.

It’s about actively employing the tips of Alex Light and Shauna Farrell and others like them, bringing the kind of willpower and discipline to our thinking that we’d ordinarily bring to obsessively trying to shift X number of pounds.

Chances are high that this kind of work will increase your body satisfaction a lot more, and for a lot longer, than changing one dress size ever will.