Feeling Fat

This week we are diving into a topic that people of every shape and size have experienced: feeling fat. What does it mean to feel fat? Is fat a feeling (outside of feeling full and a bloated stomach)? What do you notice around your own experience of feeling fat? 

Join me as we explore these questions and more. We’ll also get an inside look at body image in women specifically, discussing several women’s experiences of feeling fat and what they are doing to overcome the messages we have received about our worth, value, and acceptability in relation to the size of our bodies.

Tune in today for insightful questions that you can ask yourself to start unpacking your own beliefs about the size of your body and your worthiness. This is an episode you may want to return to often as you start to get curious about what you want to believe about your body, and all bodies. 

Want to know why you struggle with food and what to do next? Start watching The Food Freedom Mini Series today. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Binge Breakthrough, a podcast designed to help you finally break through the barriers that keep you stuck, feeling out of control around food. I'm Master Certified Coach Jane Hoker, and I want you to know that no matter how long you've been struggling or what you've tried, food freedom is possible. And I'm here to show you how. After years of therapy, eating disorder treatment, restrictive diet, and reading all the books, I was still stuck in the on-again-on-igen cycle of restricting banging until I was able to see it all from a new perspective that changed everything. Each week I will share the strategies, tools, and mindset that allowed me to overcome my decades-long battle with binge eating. Your journey to body trust starts now. Let's dive in. Hello, trusted listener. Welcome to Binge Breakthrough. I consider you a trusted listener because I trust that you are going to hear something today that is insightful and impactful on your journey with food and with your body. We're really going to be talking more today about your body, about the experience that many of us feel in our bodies. And we're not going to be talking as much about food. In fact, you might notice I don't talk a lot about food specifically, because it really is not about the food. As much as we want to think it's all about the food, and we want to focus on the food and what to eat and what not to eat and how much to eat or when to eat, that's not ever what it's about. It's always about something else, something underneath the surface, something that we are experiencing, something that we are believing, something that we are sensing for ourselves. That's really what it's about, which is why I talk so much about going under the hood, looking under the hood. What's really going on here? When we have a binge, when we have an experience with food that we don't like, that is the light on the dashboard that there's something going on under the hood. That's what we need to look at. We need to open the hood. We need to look underneath. So this is what we're going to be talking about today. We're going to be talking about the topic of feeling fat. So this topic today, it's really inspired by my own experience and by many discussions with clients. This idea, this concept of feeling fat. If you are listening to this, you may, you might know what I mean when I talk about feeling fat. You might not. So I want to just kind of dive into this idea, to this discussion, and let's just see where we go. So the first question is is fat a feeling? Now I've heard teachings on this. I've heard other people talk about this concept. And some people just straight up say, fat is not a feeling. I have seen this quote on social media. I have heard other people say it. But when I have heard this, personally, for me, I have felt like my experience of feeling fat wasn't validated. Kind of thought, like, well, you don't know. I have felt fat before. Like, how do you know that it's not a feeling? So maybe it is and maybe it isn't. We're going to kind of dive into this a little bit. Like, what is feeling fat? Is fat a feeling? And what do we, what do we learn from this idea, this concept, this experience of feeling fat? So that's what we're going to kind of dive into today. But before we dive in, I want to acknowledge my own personal thin privilege. I live in a straight-sized body. I do, I have not personally had the experience of living in a larger body. I have lived in a body that is larger than it currently is. But I would say most people, even at my largest size, there are many, many people in this world who would never have considered me as fat. Now we can get into a lot of discussions about what is fat, the definition of fat. I don't even want to go into that, but I do want to acknowledge I do have thin privilege. But here's the other thing that I want to acknowledge. Feeling fat is an experience that can be had no matter what size of body that you are living in. Feeling fat comes from this idea of it really is very much based in the idea that fat is bad, that fat is wrong, that somehow fatness in the body is something to be um avoided. We'll dive into this more, but feeling fat in your body can be is is it's a it's a mental, it's it's it's a mental experience. So it does not, it is not an experience that is created by the amount of fat on your body. It's an experience that is created by the beliefs and the thought process, the thought processes that are in your mind, your beliefs about fatness, your beliefs about your own body. So the size of your body does not matter. So I, in a straight-sized body, can feel fat. There can be people in much, much smaller bodies who also have the experience of feeling fat, and people in much larger bodies who have the experience of feeling fat. So it is not dependent upon the size of your body. It really is this internal experience. But I do also want to acknowledge the reality that living in a larger size body is very different in this world than say me, who is living in a straight-sized body. The external experiences, the stigma, the bias, so many things are very different when you are living in a larger body. And I do not want to discount or um not acknowledge that. Okay, so with that said, what I want to talk about is I have a group coaching program. It's called Cultivate. And inside this program, we are literally cultivating a new relationship with food and a new relationship with ourselves and our bodies. So I brought this topic of feeling fat into my group. And I told them, I said, I want to have this discussion about feeling fat. And I'm going to use these answers, some of these answers, not nobody's, nobody's names, no identifying information, but I want to use some of these answers on the podcast so that we can talk about this and start exploring this idea. So here were the questions that I asked. I asked, how does the experience of feeling fat show up for you? So describe what takes place in your mind. Then I asked, what do you notice about your own patterns around feeling fat? Is there generally something that precedes it? And after you experience feeling fat, what patterns do you notice? And then I asked, why is feeling fat a problem? So I basically just asked the group, answer any of these questions, all of these questions, just whatever comes up to you. So what I want to do here is I want to share the answers from some of the people in the group. And in some cases, I will share how I responded to these people. But the reason that I want to share this is to see if you find any. There may be some of these answers where you think, oh yeah, I totally either I feel this way, maybe I have felt this way. It's just to get an inside glimpse into the mind of somebody else. Because here's what I find. So often we have these ideas and these thoughts about ourselves and about our bodies, but we don't want to talk about them and we don't want to share them with anybody else because we think, oh gosh, uh the way that I'm thinking, no, I wouldn't want anybody to know that I feel this way. But there's so much, I find there's actually really a lot of comfort in knowing I am not alone in my thoughts about myself, my thoughts about my body. And it really does not matter the size of your body. I can tell you that the these answers that I'm about to read to you, they are given by women at all different ages in all different sizes of bodies. So I want to just give you an inside look into the minds of other people who may or may not be just like you. All right, so here uh are some of the answers. So someone says, I feel intense shame at having gained back so much weight after losing so much over and over again. What must people think of me? That I really have a problem. Shame at failure. I swore to others and myself that I would never be fat again. Why is fat so bad? I can't really afford new clothes. Fat shows my weakness. At least I'm not hurting anybody else. So why not stay fat? But I'll keep getting fatter. It's hurting my health and mobility. So I must really be broken. Mentally ill if I can't stop this yo-yoing. And again, what's the use? Oh, I just read this and I think, oh my gosh, this person is thinking they personally are a failure, that they're wrong or that they failed in some way. They haven't failed anything. The diet culture, the idea that we need to be thin, we need to be some specific size in order to be acceptable. That is what has failed us, not us individually. So here's what someone else says. One and a half years ago, I was at ideal weight, but still considered the sagging skin, the fat. And I didn't like myself any better, except I felt better in clothes that a friend had given me. It's like there's that, there's that reminder, right? Like, oh, actually, I didn't feel any better at a different size. So someone else says, when I feel fat, I binge, I overeat, I feel depressed, I'm not motivated to exercise, I avoid mirrors and fitted clothing. I have been at different weights and felt fat and skinny at all of the different times. Feeling fat is definitely a state of mind for me brought on by a trigger. Usually it's trying on clothes that don't flatter or fit anymore, or an overeat. So my response to this person was it really isn't the number on the scale or the amount of fat on my body when I'm thinking, when I'm feeling fat. It's not the number on the scale. It's not the fat on my body. It's what I'm thinking about myself and my lack of worth or beauty because of the size or shape of my body. We're tying our worth to the size or the shape of our bodies. We have been taught to do this. So another person says, I've been learning more about body positivity and the culture of anti-fatness that I was raised in, which forms my thoughts about the word fat. It makes sense that our culture stigmatizes the shapes of our bodies. We have used our healthcare system as a weapon in shaming people. The media's images of what a healthy body does or doesn't look like limit our ability to accept ourselves just as we are. When I first heard the thought, I have a body, as an alternative to I feel fat or I am fat, it felt foreign. I have also experienced shame and judgment from a medical professional during annual health exams. Learning about the history of the BMI measurement, which is used as a benchmark in the U.S. healthcare system, was eye-opening. Side note, if you don't know about the history of the BMI measurement, do some Googling. It is very much rooted in uh white supremacy, essentially. There's lots of great information about this. So she goes on to say, I am unraveling these outdated notions. I reject stigmatizing language against mental health, individual abilities, and injustices against people based on how we look. And I want to reject it when used to describe my body. This is a process that takes time. I am learning to apply the same principles towards myself, a new concept at this stage in life, while swimming in a fishbowl filled with water that has not yet been cleared from this debris of negative thinking about bodies. If we all look the same, there would be shame and judgments about that too. So I choose to draw a line and say the excess fat on my body is beautiful. It enabled me to support my spouse who lives with a chronic illness. It allows me to work full-time and support myself. It fuels my ability to walk my dog wherever she wants to go. It is part of me showing up in the world as a caring person who loves serving others. She goes on to say, I am finding that hanging out with people who are younger than I am is liberating. They have embraced body positivity much more than I have. And I look to them to teach me what I can imagine for myself too. When I read this response, it's like, yes, it's no wonder. It makes sense why we feel the way we do about our bodies. But we can reject it. We can draw a line. We can decide what we want to think about ourselves. We can, but it takes time. This does not just happen overnight. We have to educate ourselves. We have to get curious. We have to open up to different possibilities and different perspectives on this whole topic. So somebody else says, My clothes annoy me. I get sweaty easier, and I feel frustrated that I let myself get to this point and that I can't believe I'm actually this big. Everyone who sees me could see the actual size of my failure. It's like, oh, she is equating weight with failure. And it's like, again, she is not the one who has failed. Diet culture has failed us. So she says, Why can't I just fix myself in this area? Why can't I just be myself instead? I'm stuck in this foreign body. This isn't me. This isn't who I am, but it's who everybody sees. And she says, being thinner would mean I'm capable of getting my life together and I am not a slave to food. Like, oh, these messages that we have received. So this is what I responded to her. I said, what I see here is resistance. This isn't me. It's rejecting the part of you that has needed to eat to cope, to find relief in the only way she knew how in the moment. I said, sometimes I picture the younger version of me, the one who learned to soothe with food, in a closet where she has been locked up for being bad, wrong, and a failure. The more I keep her in the closet, the more she needs to eat because she's not getting the love, the acceptance, and the belonging that every little girl needs to feel safe and secure. What we resist persists. What we focus on expands. When we focus on our weight and resist or hate where we are in any given moment, we unintentionally magnify it. I went on to say we resist because we mistake accepting it, accepting our bodies for complacency. We're afraid if we accept ourselves, then we won't change, or that we'll just let ourselves go. But the opposite is true. We need to first let that little girl out of the closet and love on her so fiercely until she trusts that she is not going to be put back in there. So then another person comes in and she says, this is after a lot of discussion back and forth, and she comes in and she says, I was ready to answer these questions. And then I read all of the responses that have already been written, and I was in tears by the end. First, because I hate to hear everyone talk about themselves so harshly, because the ladies I've come to know here in this group are all beautiful, caring, precious people. And second, because you all wrote exactly what I would have written about myself. And she uses a crying emoji. She says, I have the same feelings of failure and weakness as a human being because I can't quit getting fat and shame and embarrassment over my body size. But I love what you said to this particular individual. I have a body. I love that. I have a body that has done amazing things and has served me well for 60 years. Fat or skinny, it has always been healthy. And I'm trying to remember that and appreciate that. Being in Cultivate, in this group with you, with you ladies, is changing my life in so many ways. And she went on to share a story about this powerful interaction with her daughter, where she was able to assist her daughter with some concepts and with some challenging emotions because of the work that we've been doing inside the group. It's so powerful. So powerful. All of this discussion is so powerful. She actually went on to share that she's um, she's in AA. And she said, I don't know if I've ever shared this before, but what we say in AA is that it's about so much more than not drinking. It's about living a life, a better life, and being a better person. And she says, I feel like cultivate is my AA for food. It's about so much more than not binging. I feel grateful to be part of this group, and I'm so grateful for everything that you are teaching us. But here's the thing that's I think is different about AA. I mean, I like the, I like the comparison because of the community and what she's receiving there. But we are not now one thing that's different in AA, there's this idea that we're powerless, right? We're powerless over alcohol. I do not believe we are powerless over food. The quite the opposite is true. I believe that we end up creating a sense of powerlessness when we try to focus on all of these other things. So that is one area that we're different. But here is what's so powerful about this is we don't have to have all of the answers. We don't have to have the answers to feeling fat, to finding acceptance for our bodies, to thinking that we're broken. We don't need to fix ourselves. We aren't broken. But here's what we do need: we need to find awareness. We need to get aware, aware of our thinking patterns, and particularly when what we are thinking and believing simply isn't true. Things like gaining weight equals failure, or the size of my body equals my worth, or that I am broken because I can't maintain weight loss that took place through restrictive and unsustainable methods. So we need to become aware where am I believing things that simply aren't true? Okay, so what do we do now? Ask yourself these same questions, same questions that I asked my group. What is the experience of feeling fat like for you? Is this a feeling or is it something else? So, and how do we make sense of even just the idea, like the the the experience of feeling fat? What do we do with this feeling or this experience? I like the idea of separating it, separating it physically from emotional. If I am feeling fat, Am I like, is there something going on physically in my body? Like maybe my pants just feel really tight. Maybe I am, maybe I just ate a lot of food. Maybe I just binged. And so I've got this uh pressure in my stomach from food. Maybe there's something else. What are the physical sensations I'm feeling in my body? What are the emotions? Now it is true that that fat itself is not an emotion, right? Fat is not an emotion. But if you are feeling fat, what's likely happening is that you are actually feeling other emotions based on your beliefs and your judgments about fatness. So I find that for me, when I am experiencing feeling fat, there are generally several other feelings underneath. Fat just becomes the catch-all. And this happens because I've had so much practice and experience blaming my body for my discomfort and my problems in life, that it feels almost natural to blame that. Oh, that must be the problem. It must be my body. So then I start to pull it apart. I start to get really curious about it. And I realize feeling fat is a go-to for me. It's like, oh, that's where I go. So, and if I give myself something else to focus on, like fixing my fat, as if fat were something to be fixed, then I don't have to look at the hard thing or the very real thing that is truly underneath the surface. Fixing the body becomes a coping mechanism. In addition to either using the food or controlling the food, and then we get ourselves into this very convenient cycle where the food and the body are continuously the problem. We keep focusing on the food and the body when what is happening really isn't about either at all. It's about our own inherent worthiness and value and accepting that we are truly whole, lovable, and worthy no matter what. I want to say that again. You are truly whole, lovable and worthy no matter what. No matter what you eat, no matter what you weigh, no matter what you do, no matter where you live, no matter your health status, no matter what, you are whole, lovable, and worthy. Fat technically isn't a feeling, but it's an experience. And this experience comes from an interpretation. This interpretation is that my body is bad, wrong, or flawed in some way. So the next time you feel fat, get curious, what else is going on? If this is just a light on the dashboard showing me that something else is going on, what else might it be? Where am I believing that I'm not worthy, lovable, or acceptable as I am right now? Can I find evidence of other people in this world who are in my situation that are worthy, lovable, and acceptable? Can I open up to the possibility that my fixation on my body and my weight has been a protective mechanism that has done anything but protect me? Am I willing to drop this and explore what else might need to be addressed in my life? Now, here's another question that I invite you to explore. If someone in a larger body than mine heard me saying the things I think about myself and my body, what might they think? What message am I sending to them about their body? This is a question that is very powerful and it's very convicting for me. Because I have often thought very mean judgmental things about myself and my body. And then I think to myself, wow, if somebody in a larger body, which is plenty of people, heard me saying the things I say about myself, what might they think? What message would I be giving them about their body? Most of us have very different standards for our own bodies than we do for others. But there is no disclaimer when we start to disparage ourselves. We aren't saying out loud, I'm gross and disgusting, but you, you're fine. You don't need to change. There are so many other people out there who would love to be in the body you have. There always will be. And there always will be people who would be very disappointed to be in the body you have. There always will be. So here's my question. What message do you want to be sending to other people about the size, worthiness, and acceptability of their bodies? I'm not here to say that it's bad or it's wrong to feel fat, but let's get really curious about what is happening when you are having that experience. It's likely a repeated pattern and something that you inherited as a belief about yourself and possibly others. Do you want to continue to think this way about yourself? Without changing the size of your body, what relationship do you want to have with bodies of different sizes, including your own? What relationship do you want to have with your body at the size it is today, right here, right now? This is big work. It's deep work. It is life-changing work. And it is work that is hard to do on your own. Now there are amazing resources out there as this discussion gets louder. There are books, there are podcasts and more. Or you can find yourself a coach, you can find yourself a group, you can find yourself a community to help guide you through this process. If you want my support in guiding you through the maze of food and body, I would love to come alongside you. We often don't know what we don't know until someone can help us point things out, things that we could not see on our own. But the amazing thing is that once you start to see it, you can't unsee it. And I love helping people see a new perspective so that you can create an entirely new relationship with your body and with food. A relationship where you have more mental space to live the one life you have to live. Imagine how much of your time might be freed up if you weren't fixated on your body, food, and feeling fat. There is so much more to you than the size of your body and what you eat. So there's this quote that you have probably heard from the poem by Mary Oliver. And this quote goes, Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? So my question to you is, are you willing to explore what truly matters to you so that you can live your one wild and precious life? That's what I have for you this week. I'll see you next time. Many people believe they need to stop binging in order to find peace with food. I believe that the more pivotal piece is learning how to bring kindness to yourself in the moment after a binge or after an out-of-control moment with food. You know, those kinds were filled with shame, hopelessness, and despair because you did it again. My next virtual event is going to help you navigate this exact moment. You will learn how to shift from self-clothing to self-kindness so that you can create more peace and freedom with food. And on day two, I'm gonna walk you through a transformational exercise with the food that you love, but don't allow yourself to eat. This event could truly be life changing for you. And the only cost to you is your time. Sign up today at janepilker.com forward slash kind. That's janepilker.com forward slash kind. K I N D. I hope to see you there.