Join the Revolution!

How do we free our society from the oppressive forces that rule and limit our lives as women of all shapes, colors, ages, and backgrounds?

I’ve been getting tremendous support from everyone around my personal journey with my body image and I’ve been told how courageous I am for taking steps like writing the letter to my family I shared with you a few weeks ago and being open about my struggles. The feedback that I’ve been getting sometimes implies that it takes special courage to do what I’m doing but I’d like you to consider the possibility that you can do this too, f you’re not already doing it.

One of the reasons why I’m able to take some bold steps to move forward and to be more outspoken about the issues that I struggle with is because of all the support that I’ve been getting from both people in my support system but also from a bigger, mostly online community of like-minded women who are part of a skyrocketing body acceptance and body liberation movement. As much as things out there are looking really bad around body obsession and weight stigma there are also more and more women who are tired of all of the BS and are committed to ending it.

Today I want to invite you to join me in becoming a freedom fighter.

I’m beyond thrilled because today I’m launching my new brand: Embodied Acceptance - Compassionate Movement for Body Love.

It means that I’m officially and publicly committing fully to putting body liberation and inclusivity front and center in my work.

I’m proud to say that I joined ASDAH (Association for Size Diversity and Health) and that as part of my transformation, all of my offerings are becoming HEAS® (Health At Every Size®) aligned.

If you’re wondering what HAES® is, it is “a continuously evolving alternative to the weight-centered approach to treating clients and patients of all sizes. It is also a movement working to promote size-acceptance, to end weight discrimination, and to lessen the cultural obsession with weight loss and thinness. The HAES® approach promotes balanced eating, life-enhancing physical activity, and respect for the diversity of body shapes and sizes.” (from the HAES® website: https://asdah.org/health-at-every-size-haes-approach/)

When I ask you to join me, I’m not asking you to take on any form of wide-world activism, although I’d be very happy if you decided to do that. I’m asking you to consider the idea that, to the extent that you’d like to see a more compassionate society, the only way that things can change on a collective level is when individuals take steps towards their own liberation.

The revolution starts with you. It starts with me, with us.

How do we liberate ourselves as individuals, as women? There are 3 steps to our liberation:

1. We are so used to taking care of others first so we have to start with prioritizing our own wellbeing by taking care of ourselves mentally, emotionally, and physically. We can do that by engaging in compassionate healing and self-care practices like Joyful Movement for example.

2. We figure out what are other things that keep us small and quiet, refuse to engage in those activities, or better yet, find ways to go in the exact opposite direction. For example, if we’re being told that we’re only worthwhile if we look a certain way, we can focus our attention on positive embodiment practices that allow us to feel and sense that we are more than just a body, use our awareness to experience our bodies and possibly derive pleasure from it from the inside.

3. We understand how oppression works so that we don’t keep buying into it and allow it to do a number on us, as well as being able to stand up for our sisters who are also being oppressed.

As for the last point: one of the things that I realized that has affected me more than I ever acknowledged, is anti-fat bias. Since I gained weight I started becoming more aware of what it means to not be what’s considered straight-sized and I started becoming more interested in how people who are even fatter than I feel. The more I read the more I’m pissed off and the more I feel like I want to do something about it.

Did you know that “as of 2020, in forty-eight states, it is perfectly legal to fire someone, refuse to hire them, deny them housing, or turn them down for a table at a restaurant or a room in a hotel simply because they’re fat.”?

For a deeper dive into how cruel anti-fat bias is I invite you to read the book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubry Gordon.

The author is a fat activist that talks about her experience as a super fat person. She and other fat activists started reclaiming the word fat as a neutral descriptive word devoid of any moral value, like being browned-hair or tall, and have been rejecting other morally loaded descriptors for fat people.

“The term “overweight” implies that there is an objectively correct weight for every body. A growing number of fat activists consider obese to be a slur. Both terms are derived from a medical model that considers fat bodies as deviations that must be corrected,”

In addition to anti-fat bias being so painful for fat people, I’m gaining a deeper understanding of how it has affected me and how it practically affects everyone in our society because when you’re really being honest with yourself, don’t you think that being fat is the worst thing that you can be? If you do, don’t worry, it’s not your fault, you have been taught that but it might be a good idea to start questioning this assumption and wondering where it came from.

Did you know that recent studies show that all forms of explicit biases are pretty much falling except for fat bias? That means that people are allowing themselves to say things to fat people that they don’t allow themselves to say to anybody else, thinking that they are morally justified to do so.

In The Obesity Myth, Paul Campos argues that "as overt racism, sexism, and classism fell out of favor among white and wealthy Americans, anti-fat bias offered a stand-in: a dog whistle that allowed disdain and bigotry aimed at poor people and people of color to persist, uninterrupted and simply renamed.”

No wonder that pretty much all of us are obsessed with how to not become fat.

I know some of the things I presented might be hard to swallow so as always, I’m inviting you into a conversation about all of this.