By Shondrea Thornton
January’s ushering in of the new year positions it as the Month of Goal-Setting and, perhaps more recognizably, the month of weight loss. Cutting right on the heels of December’s holiday decadence, our cultural imaginations replace the champagne bottles and festive hors d’oeuvres of New Years Eve with protein shakes and keto-paleo-whole 30-weight-watchers-atkins approved cuisines. We trade glitter and crushed velvet for spandex and lycra and exchange our holiday decor for home gyms.
Wellness is en vogue; weight loss its most luxurious couture project. And who among us can resist? This month, doctors will advise weight loss by the ton, a penance for the holidays and sluggish breaks from work and school. The stores will feature “healthy” food inventories, “practical” work out gear, and “creative” solutions at moderate to exorbitant budgets. Ads will feature lithe, young, pretty bodies imploring you to “join” them on the path to happiness. The world and Planet Fitness will welcome the “new you” with open arms. It’s only rational. It’s only tempting.
It’s not entirely your choice.
1790 calories. That’s what MyFitnessPal informs me is my new number. 1790. As a generous plan, I can consume 500 calories at each meal with a spare 290 for a nice snack. What is most likely is that a small breakfast or Blender Bottle special will merge into a very light lunch, allowing the evening to have the majority of my calories for the day. A day of subtle eating. As I lose weight, I will eventually have two options: hit a threshold of 1200 daily (400 calories a meal, the minimum advised for women) or maintain my current count and prioritize the gym, putting in hours weekly to create the needed deficit of 500 to 1000 calories a day. And, of course, there is the third option of losing weight extremely slowly, with minimal calories lost per diem and minimal gym time. However, as the saying goes, “no pain, no gain.”
I write this from my couch, within arms reach of my phone which now serves as my pedometer, calorie counter, coach and lifeline; and my Halo Top, my good man in the storm. In about 3 hours, the “cycle” will begin again, same number, same tune. Another 1790. Another day of counting, measuring, and marking. Another day of losing. This is more than my resolution, but a vision of my new lifestyle, finally in accordance with over 10 years of programming. 2019 is the year I will lose weight.
I did it once before. The summer after graduation, due to an inexplicable yet chronic illness, a very hot summer on a campus with numerous hills and an atrocious cafeteria, a death in the family, and untold stress, I lost 40 lbs. My doctor was pleased. Men paid attention. I was seen, socially, intellectually, and with enthusiasm. Yet, as the stress of graduate school unfolded and I slipped into normalcy, the weight slowly returned again, with interest. My doctor bemoaned it. Those men’s attentions faltered and then evacuated entirely. Slowly, I faded again into the realm where fat women lie, unexamined and unnoticed. After three years, I sit here again at another starting line, another year of “before” pictures.
If anything I’ve said so far sounds like a cross between the latest Weight Watchers’ ad and the beginning of an expose, then you have a great eye and are onto me. When it comes to weight loss, you have no choice. Neither do I. My body, as Black, as woman, as I’ve come to know it, has never been and may never be my own.
And after years of cycling up and down, losing and gaining, fighting and fighting evermore, I’ve found a quiet peace in knowing that, perhaps, no one’s body is their own, at least not in the current fatphobic paradigm. Perhaps my feelings and failures are not an anomaly but rather a working part of the system, designed to create this tension and feeling of pressure. In 2019, amongst the calorie counting and planning, I take to heart that perhaps you, reader, are just a screwed as me.
I’ve realized that ultimately, in a month/year/world full of casual, overt, public and unceasingly accepted fatphobia, it is not my choice to lose weight but rather my compulsion as created through organized social coercion. I have realized that under accepted, universal fatphobia, there can be no consent in relation to the body. I have realized that we, as a collective, do not choose what we are but are forced to become what is required. I have realized that when it comes to weight loss, there was never any other option.
Have you been inundated with the propaganda of this time of year, dedicating yourself to counting calories and #gymflows and keto-paleo-whole-30-weight-watchers too? Maybe you were compelled years ago by a doctor who warned you of weight regardless of your issues, by peers who disassociated due to size, and by too few options and too much pressure in the media.
Maybe it was the dating scene, the fashion industry, social media, and the quotidien violence accumulated in the regular rigamarole of being fat in public. It could’ve been a job that only seemed to hire thin people (and if they did hire fat people, severely underpaid them) or the influence of a celebrity selling toxins. It could’ve been your own family and friends. It could be your own thin body and the acute awareness of what would come to pass should that body change. Maybe it started when you were still a small child, at risk. Somehow, someway, the fear and surveillance crept in and quietly, almost unnoticeably nestled in your brain. The choice was never there, but the fear always was.
The truth about fatphobia is that it is often unexamined, allowing it to thrive and seep into our very understanding of what it means to have choice and bodily autonomy.
We tell ourselves that it is only fair that fat people undergo extensive, sometimes even life-threatening, interventions for the collective benefit of society. We tell ourselves that our own predilections, to diet or not, exercise or not, are simply extensions of our being instead of moral and value signifiers. We convince ourselves daily, monthly, yearly, that we are unaffected and unassimilated and that the body itself is not a battle and frontier.
The choice we have in our bodies, however, is not freely given but cordoned off from a pre-selected range of options. Err too much on any side and expect immediate and unrelenting “corrective” measures.
Last year, I mused on what happens when the lack of choice becomes entirely too much. I entered the doctor’s office for routine blood work. Everything was fine save for a vitamin deficiency that, by the doctor’s own admission, most Americans have.
As she took my blood pressure, she asked if I had considered bariatric surgery. In between pumps, I quietly assessed the situation. Truth is, I have considered it, in my lowest and most desperate moments. Truth is, I have considered letting doctors remove 80% of my stomach, a vital organ, and fill it with nothing in return. I considered the hair loss, the vomiting, the loose skin, the multiple, additional vitamin deficiencies, and the life of less in pursuit of… something… freedom, allegedly…
The doctor met my silence with a shrug and continued on. “It’s your choice…,” she trailed off. My blood pressure was fine. “I just think it would really benefit you…”
Shondrea Thornton is an educator, feminist, and Black girl from the South living in Harlem. Her interests include media/pop culture, politics, education, and destroying hetero-cis patriarchy, anti-Black racism, and capitalism one well-placed meme at a time.
