lystn

I started writing about how to heal from disordered eating and body hatred seven years ago, back when I was f---king* sick of being afraid of rice, and being full, and gaining weight. My life was hijacked by the obsession with beauty and thinness and health and purity. And I was f---ing over it. I didn't start this website to become instagram famous or become a "thought leader" or "influencer" in this space. (Ew?) I didn't set out to work with people or run groups. And I definitely didn't think I was going to have a book coming out on not-dieting. I was just a writer --and I was anonymous for the first three years. I was just f---ing exhausted of diet culture and my own f---ing brain and I felt very strongly that I needed to write about it, for my own sake, on a little blog that no one read. I was writing about what I was applying to myself as I clawed my way out of the miserable hole I was in. We all just needed to f---ing eat and rebel against absurd body standards. I kept writing, and learning, and eating, and writing. Eventually I put together workshops and courses, teaching some of the ways I helped myself process fear and resistance and diet culture. I've always had a special interest in the way we avoid our bodies, and our emotions, and our humanity, plus all of the subconscious cultural beliefs we are operating under that need to GTFO. My "expertise" is on how we are afraid of our hunger - and how that will always mess up our eating. And a huge part of that, if not the core underlying factor, is our fear of our bodies, and our cultural fear of, and misconceptions about, fatness. That's always been clear to me: Fat-phobia is the reason we are messed up around food, and the reason we fear gaining weight above anything else. But still, no matter how much I care, or how important it is to me: I will always inherently have blind-spots in writing about the full scope of these issues, because of my many privileges. It's just a fact. I am not an ultimate authority on body image, body acceptance, body positivity, or fat liberation, even though I know how important those things are. My thin privilege inherently becomes one of my shortcomings on this subject. In the BIG PICTURE, me learning to accept my body isn't really that radical, because I have always naturally been on the thinner side. And even when I've yo-yo'd A LOT, I've always had thin privilege. A thin girl saying: "stop dieting! we should be allowed to get full and gain weight" feels safer to people. (But still ...not that safe. People still tell me I am giving dangerous irresponsible advice). But if I were fatter saying the exact same thing, so many more people would say: "Woa woa woa, stop trying to make excuses for your lack of willpower and laziness. Stop 'glorifying obesity'. Stop leading people into disease." And then they'd probably tell me to die of heart disease along with other explicit and aggressive threats. I have always been able to say things that people in larger bodies also say, and people listen to me, because they assume TFID is "working" for me, because I am thin. And this is based on major misinformation about how much control we have over our weight, and what weight means about us and about our health and our habits... and all the other s#@t our culture teaches about fatness. So that is one of the first problematic things - I have been given a voice and a platform because of the systemic prejudice I am trying to talk about - the assumptions we make about people based on their size. The assumption that I'm doing something right, and that fatter people are doing something wrong. Also, TFID is meant to be for every body and every size: the instructions are the same. But one piece of those instructions is to rebel against societal beauty standards, and a fat person learning to rebel against society will experience a lot more pain and pushback than me being like, "oh,