11 Comments
Oct 23, 2022Liked by Mikala Jamison

Taylor: Admits she, like everyone else in our culture, has ingrained fatphobia that is problematic and a history of disordered eating/thinking that she is grappling with.

Internet: Pillories her for not performing her unlearning perfectly, or ideally, never talking about it at all (unless with her therapist, except oops what if her therapist has a larger body, now she has to worry about offending the therapist) because "she's thin and should know she's the beauty standard," despite it literally being the point of beauty culture not to allow anyone to permanently feel like they've "made it." (Because if you feel thin and pretty, who's going to buy the skinny teas and waist trainers and cellulite creams???)

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Found you via a FdB comment and I’m so glad. These are the kind of nuanced conversations we need to have about our bodies. Thank you thank you thank you.

I was talking to a friend last night about how I’m significantly heavier than when I met my husband 20 years ago, when we were teenagers. (I mean, duh.) but what’s actually difficult to grapple with is an aging, changing body that doesn’t match the self image I have, which was solidified when I was an athletic teen. Weight is an easy proxy while “I’m entering middle age and I’ve had three kids but in my mind I feel more able/capable/fit from what my body now allows and that truth is confusing and unsettling” is much more difficult to express and deal with.

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Dec 25, 2022Liked by Mikala Jamison

Wow. If I was a dysmorphic/underweight ED patient of that therapist, well yeah I would clam up and wonder what was wrong with me, feel ashamed. It’s truly awful that she put that out there!!

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Oct 24, 2022Liked by Mikala Jamison

Thanks so much for this. This discourse has been challenging for all of the reasons you wrote. I am in a thin body and I am in recovery for disordered eating, and it feels like I’m not allowed to feel how I feel. Like, I know I’m fat phobic. That’s literally how all this started. I have absorbed the messaging around ideal bodies for 44 years. It’s not my fault our culture is the way it is. Do I not get to have my experience just because I’m not in a bigger body? This is also partially why I quit ED therapy. It very much felt like there was a right way to feel and a wrong way to feel. No nuance. All black and white. Idk. Like you said, the internet is just too much lately.

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Oct 24, 2022Liked by Mikala Jamison

From ''but when a therapist takes to the internet" through "I would not want to feel I have to be a perfect, non-problematic patient to get quality care" is, like, everything I'm feeling right now. As you said, a clinical setting is not the same, but .... what if she IS like that in a clinical setting? 😬 Imagine telling your therapist you feel fat and getting hit with THAT backlash.

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