[acb-diabetics] The stages of Fat acceptance
Patricia LaFrance-Wolf
plawolf at earthlink.net
Sat Nov 12 19:20:21 EST 2011
An article about attitude.
The Stages of Fat Self-Acceptance: A Conversation With Carol Normadi
Diabetes Health Staff
Nov 4, 2011
Fat people can go through several stages before reaching self-acceptance.
Carol Normadi is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Northern
California who is co-founder of Beyond Hunger, Inc., a group dedicated to
helping people overcome obsessive concerns with food. She has co-authored
two books on the topic of food obsessions: "It's Not About Food: Ending Your
Obsession With Food and Weight" (Putnam, 1998) and "Over It: A Teen's Guide
to Getting Beyond Food and Weight" (New World Library 2001).
Normadi and Diabetes <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/> Health publisher
Nadia Al-Samarrie live near each other, which led to a recent conversation
between them about the stages that fat people go through in accepting and
dealing with their weight. In some ways, those stages-denial, anger,
bargaining, and acceptance-are much like those that grieving people
experience.
Nadia: What do you think is the source of hostility toward people who are
fat?
Carol: I think maybe it's suppression of the feminine, because fat is
perceived as feminine. Yet fat, happily, is what gives us the ability to
have a baby. You can't get pregnant
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/pregnancy/> if you don't have the
energy reserves-fat-to support a developing child. When we as a culture went
towards oppressing the feminine, we wanted to take off all those rounded
places. That's one piece of it.
The other piece is that we as a culture try to define things in terms of
good or bad, so religion, ethnicity, skin color, and fat are the areas where
we place shame and judgment. I can't tell you how much hate mail people in
the fat acceptance movement get when they put themselves on Twitter or a
blog. They get tons of hate mail-really abusive stuff. We live in a world
that is fat-phobic and prejudiced against fat. So, if you're dealing with a
body that is " overweight," you're going to have some shame about it because
that's what you've been taught.
Nadia: Let me play devil's advocate. If you have diabetes and are
"overweight," you have to worry about certain complications. There are
consequences that affect not only your own quality of life, but also
society. If you're not taking care of your diabetes, someone else has to pay
the bill for your neglect. This is where I think the topic gets really
complicated. It's not just about your image and whether people like or
dislike fat people. It also involves taking on the responsibility we all
have for our own health.
Carol: Yes, everybody has responsibility for their health, and everybody has
a responsibility to do the best to take care of their health, whether they
are thin, or have a normal body size, or are fat. The difference is that
because of society's prejudices, fat people carry around a layer of shame,
and that shame gets in the way of taking good care of themselves. It's not
that people who have larger bodies don't need to take care of their health
just as much as people with smaller bodies do. It's that their shame often
leads to self-destructive behavior. So, to get people like that to really
show up and take care of their bodies, you have to first take care of the
internalized shame.
Nadia: Could you say that not taking care of your body is acting out and is
a form of anger?
Carol: Absolutely.
Nadia: Can anger be an extension of denial? In other words, denial is where
you don't see any need to cope with weight issues. But anger comes when you
know you have to cope but don't want to?
Carol: Well, anger is a healthy response to being hurt or frustrated because
you know you're expected to give up things you love. You know all the things
you're supposed to do, and you resent them.
Nadia: Such as new considerations for your diet.
Carol: Exactly.
Nadia: And the social rituals you participate in.
Carol: Yes. Anger's a normal process. The thing is to have a relationship
with your anger so that you can hear it and have other people hear it. But
you have to learn how to express it without being self-destructive.
Nadia: Are there stages to working through denial and anger?
Carol: Yes. I think part of it is a matter of time. There's definitely a
stage where you have to integrate your anger and get used to it and how you
feel about it. I think that support is really important. If you see other
people who are in the same situation who hear and understand you, and say,
"Yes, this is really hard. I've been here," I think that's significant. That
kind of support and information allows you to shift your thinking and focus
on learning how to handle your anger and make a transition out of it. You
may have a big burst of anger in the beginning, and it will continue as you
hit walls along the way. But each wall you hit is part of the process of
coming to terms with your anger, being able to acknowledge and express it,
and finding people who can really hear you and empathize with you.
Nadia: Once people hear you and empathize with you, do you start bargaining?
Is that the right term? Do you bargain with yourself?
Carol: Well, you bargain with God.
Nadia: What if you don't believe in God?
Carol: What I mean is that you are saying to yourself, "Okay, if I do this,
I want the universe, or God, or my body to stop what's happening to me so I
can get rid of this diagnosis." So it's your mind's way of trying to control
what's happening to you. Remember, too, that all of the stages you go
through may be linear, but you may not go through them in a linear way. You
may move into denial, and then into anger, and then to bargaining, and then
all the way back to denial in one day. So you can move in and out of the
stages.
Nadia: Then bargaining is an attempt to control the outcome?
Carol: Right. You're trying to control the outcome, but can't. You can't
control the diagnosis. The only thing you can do is things that support your
body to be healthier. So, as you're trying to wrap your mind around having
to do things differently-perhaps radically differently-you go into the
bargaining stage. While you're there, you eventually come to terms with the
challenge facing you. You understand that what you wanted to be under your
control cannot be. But you also understand there are other things that can
be under your control. That's when bargaining moves into acceptance.
Nadia: When you move into acceptance, is it permanent?
Carol: Not always. Bargaining is the place from where you can move forward
into acceptance or backward into anger. You might go back to anger because
when you bargain, you're trying to control the situation by offering a sort
of bribe: "Hey, if I pray every night, or if I'm good to my mother, or if I
run every morning, the diagnosis will change." But when that doesn't work
and your body doesn't cooperate by accepting the bargain, you get angry at
it and at the fact that you're going to have to give up certain behaviors.
Nadia: It seems that you can be shifting between all of these stages all the
time. It's not like you have to complete one stage before moving on to
another, or that you get a certificate for completing each stage.
Carol: Yes! Monday you're in denial, and Tuesday you're angry, and by Friday
you're in acceptance, but by Saturday you're having second thoughts. It just
takes time and an awareness of what you'll be going through.
(Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of interviews that Nadia
Al-Samarrie will be conducting with Carol Normadi on the topic of people's
attitudes toward food and weight and how they can think about them in more
positive ways.)
_____
Categories: <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/> , Author
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/psychology/author-carol-normadi/>
Carol Normadi, Beyond
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/psychology/beyond-hunger/> Hunger,
Diabetes <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/community/diabetes/> ,
Diagnosis <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/health-care/diagnosis/> ,
Fat <http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/health-care/fat/> , Fat People
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/health-care/fat-people/> , Food
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/food/> , Food
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/food/> , It's
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/psychology/its-not-about-food-ending-y
our-obsession-with-food-and-weight/> Not About Food: Ending Your Obsession
With Food and Weight, Over
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/psychology/over-it-a-teens-guide-to-ge
tting-beyond-food-and-weight/> It: A Teen's Guide to Getting Beyond Food
and Weight, Overweight
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/health-care/overweight/> , Weight Loss
<http://www.diabeteshealth.com/browse/fitness/weight-loss/>
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- Nov 4, 2011
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