"No Fat Talk" Week: Cutting Fat Talk from Our Verbal Diets

Have you ever stood around a box of cupcakes or donuts with a group of female colleagues, friends, or teammates and engaged in an orgy of "I shouldn't"s, "I'm terrible"s, and "I'm never going to fit into that dress"es? If you live in America, chances are the answer is yes. "Fat talk," light but loaded chatter about bodies and food, has become a constant presence in our diet-obsessed culture.

The pervasiveness of this collective verbal tic gave rise to last week's "Fat Talk Free Week" a tradition started by the Delta Delta Delta sorority as an outgrowth of their national eating disorder awareness program. The group has produced a widely-circulating video as well as a promise form which participants can sign, beginning with the words: "Today I promise to eliminate Fat Talk from conversations with my friends, my family and myself." It's a pleasant contrast to the kind of endless, impossible pledges that dieters make: "this week, I'll eliminate all unnecessary calories, or desserts, or bread, or eating after 5pm." Indeed, instead of axing certain foods, we should all take a cue from Triple Delta's pledge and go on psychological diets in which we get rid of critiquing our own and others' bodies, buying and reading diet-oriented magazines, and paying attention to diet ads.

But to do this, we'd have to switch both not only our entire mentality but also our everyday habits. Because the examples of "fat talk" on the endfattalk.org site include the kinds of phrases most people, even die-hard feminists, hear, or say, everyday without thinking:

• "I'm so fat,"
  
• "Do I look fat in this?",
  
• "I need to lose 10 pounds,"
  
• "She's too fat to be wearing that swimsuit"
  
•  Even "You look great! Have you lost weight?"

To these phrases I'd add anything that associates food and dieting with morality or obligation:

• "I shouldn't eat this"
  
• "This cake is evil"
  
• "Oatmeal is good, and an omelette is bad."
  

 

Or...saying "I have to skip lunch today after dinner last night." And fat talk is spreading by the same means as the movement against it: Commenters on the internet have complained about fat talk proliferating in cyberspace, on Facebook and Twitter in the form of constant status messages from friends reporting on their weight-loss regimens.

It's hard to ignore the fact that the ritual has a special prominence between women, in groups or pairs. It's often a way of bonding at first glance --"You hate your thighs?" "So do I!" But under the surface, it often serves the purpose of reinforcing divisions and sometimes even a pecking order among women. Oftentimes a woman complaining about her size around her peers will only unleash their insecurities, and some women may even enjoy that sense of control. When women announce that they hate their body types in front of other women with the same body types, or shower others with praise for being "thin," telling them they're lucky or good solely based on their genetic structure, it creates a dynamic of inclusion and exclusion that can trigger eating disorders, or at the least, misery.

And in a culture obsessed with food indulgence and restriction as a sort of constant sin and redemption parable, fat talk makes it more difficult to have a rational, emotion-free relationship with diet and exercise--and that's the kind of relationship we need to be healthy. The irony is that by ridding ourselves of the fat-talk mentality we'd actually find it easier to make choices, to borrow a phrase from Courtney Martin, that are based on our authentic needs and cravings, rather than what we feel we should be doing. And if we listened to and valued our bodies' needs, rather than our society's demands, we'd likely treat our physical selves more gently--less mindless eating and skipping meals, less obsessiveness and guilt, and more normalcy.

But stopping fat talk is easier said than done, even for women enlightened to its negative consequences. It's hard to quit because it's such a common, knee-jerk instinct and because, as studies have shown, it feels mandatory and expected in social situations. As Jill Filipovic wrote at feministe:

I hate “fat talk.” It makes me uncomfortable when other women do it...And yet I’m the absolute worst when it comes to fat talk.

The external pressure and the unthinking habit of fat talk create a ubiquitous and poisonous atmosphere for women who would like to stop being in a constant state of angst about their bodies. So the conscious group mentality of "End Fat Talk Week" is an excellent way to start changing attitudes.

But even after the week is over, it's not impossible to keep the momentum going. Feminist critique of beauty and body-image norms, as Amanda Marcotte does here, and the language and logic of the Fat Acceptance movement are a great avenue with which to continue excising unhealthy ideas from one's life. Feminists and FA advocates describe making "peace" with their bodies, which is an incredibly attractive phrase, and advocate cutting off sources of unhealthy anxiety like women's magazines and commercial diets.  Another, less ideological way to move beyond the fat-talk mentality is to look around you and target someone in your life who appears to be comfortable with his or her body, who enjoys food without agonizing over calories, who never comments about weight as a reflection of character, and who participates in physical activity for its own sake, and pattern yourself after him or her.

At the amazing FA blog shapely prose, there's a 200+ comment thread about the best ways to cope with fat talk, both your own and more particularly in social situations. Some of the suggestions included responding to those who label food "bad" with "it's pizza, not genocide"; saying "I hope not!" when someone says "you've lost weight"; or asking bragging dieters "how are you feeling otherwise?" to change the topic of conversation. Regardless of whether its done with a snappy comeback, silent reflection, or a theory-laden lecture, stopping fat talk in its tracks is one of the best ways to fight back against our culture's unhealthy norms for women's bodies.