Let's just stop with the fat shaming in everyday life

To The Daily Sun,

As I was driving on Monday a sign on a local business caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. “TURKEY TIME GET YOUR FAT PANTS READY” screamed the bold black letters. I was so shocked and appalled I didn’t know what to think.

Actually, I thought about a lot of things. Consider this: Eating disorders affect 10 million females and 1 million males in the United States. Four in 10 individuals have either personally experienced an eating disorder or know someone who has, according to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. And I was one of those 10 million females.

It started my sophomore year of high school. I was always outside and never really sat still as a kid but hadn’t been involved in any formal organized sports until I started playing field hockey my freshman year. I very clearly remember the first day of practice under the watchful eye of the legendary Mary Garside. She told us to run a mile to warm up, and I remember finishing one lap tired but proud of my accomplishment. Imagine my surprise when I was told I had to do it three more times to complete a mile! I wasn’t the most athletic, but I had a fun season and decided to pick up a lacrosse stick in the spring. Fast forward to the summer of my sophomore year. I want to make varsity, and badly. We have a new coach and she tells us that the first day of preseason we are going to run not one but THREE miles. I have a better understanding of what a mile is now, and I begin training. I want to be the fastest.

I’d never been uncomfortable in my body. I was never the smallest female, and I’d always had large muscular arms and strong legs that never fit in skinny jeans. And as I trained for that 3 mile run all summer my body leaned out. I’d never intended to lose weight, it was just the natural result of the increased activity over the summer. And then the first day of practice came around, and my coaches said I looked “good”. I won that 3 mile run test. I made varsity. And slowly, without even realizing it, I became very focused on the size of my body.

To this day I really can’t tell you why I developed an eating disorder. I remember very clearly two upperclassmen who were strong and muscular and who ate like normal high schoolers and yet would still challenge me in sprint tests. The size of their bodies didn’t seem to affect their athletic abilities. And yet I was eating less and less. I dreaded going to team feeds. I politely declined when Goldfish and Oreos were passed around on bus rides. No I don’t want a bun with my hamburger. No I don’t need any sides. No I’m not that hungry. Even though I was now in my junior year of high school and playing three sports, I was barely eating. I was smaller and lighter, but my athletic performance was suffering. I got up and ran 3 miles every morning before eating, even in the cold winter. I stopped getting my period. I was moody and tired all the time. I never counted calories, but I was probably under 1,000 a day as an active 17 year old. My parents were concerned and my coaches got involved. And it took over a year before I started eating normally again.

Initially I started eating more because I wanted to do well in athletics my senior year, but I still didn’t have a good relationship with food. I still felt the need to exercise before I ate something “bad”. Food was a privilege I had to earn. Even though I was now statistically within a healthy body fat range and BMI, I had a disordered relationship with food. I still wasn’t healthy.

It would take a few more years and an introduction to Crossfit before I began to change the way I felt about food. When I started Crossfit in the early spring of 2016 I quickly learned that the size of my body didn’t matter. What mattered was what I could do WITH my body. I was suddenly around athletes of all body shapes and sizes, not just high school females. I was forced to reconsider my definition of athlete. I stopped trying my make my body into what I thought an athlete should look like and instead began training like one. I stopped worrying about the weight of my body and focused instead on the weight on the bar. How much can I lift today? And when I come back the next day, can I lift even more?

So why did this sign about fat pants bother me so much? Because these are the kinds of subliminal messages that reinforce the idea that food = fat and fat = less. Less attractive, less healthy, less desirable, less productive. Arielle Tschinkel writing for Insider Magazine perfectly captures why this stereotype needs to end.

“Fat people are often treated differently by doctors, employers, and those disguising their commentary as well-meaning concerns about ‘health’, and it’s become so normalized to view fat as a negative that many of us use it that way to describe a day where we don’t love our bodies.

“We all have days when we don’t like the way we look, or when we’ve eaten more than usual and feel uncomfortably full but using ‘fat’ as a negative perpetuates the myth that being fat or having fat on your body is a bad thing, when research continues to prove that healthy bodies exist at all sizes.

“Also, fat is not a feeling. It’s simply a measure of body size.”

This Thanksgiving (and every day) give your body permission to BE. Be grateful for all it can DO. And let’s just stop with the fat shaming.

Sarah Szymkowski

Tilton