Our local farmer’s market is winding down as summer has officially faded into fall. On one of our last trips for the year, we stumbled upon something truly remarkable. Look at these babies!

They’re both potatoes, one fingerling and one white sweet. They both came from the same farm, raised in the same conditions, and harvested by the same person. And yet look at their difference in size!

We see examples like this every day, extreme variations among living things. And yet when it comes to human beings, we somehow think that everyone should fall within a rigid dimension of size and shape.

The fact is, that’s just not how nature works.

All types of organisms show wide degrees of normal. That’s why terms like “overweight” are not particularly useful or even particularly sensical.

And what’s more — while I didn’t ask them — the potatoes seem perfectly content to be their own unique size. They each exist as these beautiful and delicious products of nature, at home in their own peel.

Maybe we could try to do the same?

I’ve talked here before about weight stigma. I’ve shared my perspective on how weight stigma develops, how it exists among fat and thin women, and how our modern-day efforts to curb obesity are resulting in furthering the phenomenon. I’ve given lots of examples and even asked readers to share their own stories of weight stigmatization.

I’ve tried to use Nourishing the Soul as a vehicle for weight stigma awareness, because I think it’s so crucial. If we can’t see it, we can’t address it. And I want to put it in the face of each and every one of us, so that we can’t turn a blind a eye for one more day.

But in all this skill we’re developing to spot weight stigma — at the grocery store or in the boardroom or on an airplane — there’s often one place that’s sadly overlooked: the mirror.

When I say that weight stigma exists everywhere, that includes within each and every one of us. As progressive and educated and enlightened as we may be. As fat or as thin as we may be. As many friends of various shapes and sizes as we may have. We all have internalized our cultural weight stigma.

To deny this is to play the blindness card, and I can tell you how I feel about that. It gets us nowhere but further entrenched in our own biases.

It’s impossible to exist in our society and not have internalized at least some of the fear surrounding weight. This fear is often all-consuming for the patients that I work with; but even those without eating disorders are victims of the cultural obsession with thinness. Stand at a party or by a water cooler and you’ll hear it — the insidious whisper of fat talk.

It’s Weight Stigma Awareness Week. In honor of the occasion, I’m urging all of us –myself included– to take a long hard look at how our internalized weight stigma shows itself. It might be in the way that I treat the customer in line behind me at the grocery or the assumptions I make about my co-worker’s dating life. It might be in private ways or public ways; it might shout or it might whisper. But if you listen hard enough, you can hear it.

If you’re curious to learn more about weight stigma and get educated on the faulty assumptions about weight, I’d encourage you to start with some of these great pieces –

Weight Stigma: Notice Your Own Behavior First

In ‘Obesity Paradox,’ Thinner May Mean Sicker

Women May Suffer Fat Stigma Even After Losing Weight

The Skinny on Fat and Thin

 How do you observe weight stigma? 

I write about weight every single day. Whether it’s a blog post, a patient’s progress note, a journal entry, or a conference proposal, I’m constantly putting pen to paper on the topic of weight.

And without fail, every single time I write the word “overweight” – which let me tell you, is often – I internally cringe. It just doesn’t feel right in my body or my mind. And I think I know why.

It’s not even so much that I think the word is mean or hurtful, though it most certainly can be. It suddenly lumps an individual person into a category of people whom have been stigmatized at every single turn. I think that there are plenty of people who, like myself, use the word clinically to describe a person of a certain size, but do not have any intention of harming someone.

Of course, there is also a large sector of people who use the word with little regard for the person who is tied to the other end of it. They say it with disgust, disdain, or dismissiveness. It’s used as invective and meant to imply something about the individual.

So those things are true. But what I actually don’t like about using the word “overweight” is that it implies that there is a normal weight at which this individual should be. Plenty of physicians might argue with me (and I’d tell them to read Health at Every Size and get back to me next week), but after years of observing people managing eating issues, I can assure you that there is no one right weight.

In the eating disorders field, we often talk about a “healthy weight range,” and many suggest that range to be within maybe pounds. But the truth is that a healthy range is much, much larger than that.

And in fact, research shows that the underweight are at higher risk of premature death than overweight or even obese (the extremely obese are also at higher risk). Scientists believe that a little extra weight can actually be very protective. So if we’re really concerned about the health of this nation, why do we focus on “overweight”?

How often do you hear the term “underweight” thrown around? I’ll tell you. A quick non-scientific review of google search results shows 8,520,000 results for “underweight” and 54,200,000 for “overweight.” That’s almost 6.5 times as many results.

So in all this talk about achieving a healthy weight, the idea of what a healthy weight even means often gets lost. The National Institute of Health defines it through Body Mass Index (BMI). This measurement has inherent flaws, however.  For one, BMI makes no distinction between weight from muscle and weight from fat. That means that people like Tom Cruise, George Clooney, and Tom Brady are all in the “overweight” range.

Drs. Yoni Freedhoff  and Arya Sharma have a definition of what they call “best weight” that I really like. They say that one’s best weight is, “whatever weight they achieve while living the healthiest lifestyle they can truly enjoy.” Got all that?

What I like about this definition is that it incorporates the most important factor in this entire equation – living a healthy and enjoyable life. If you’re in the “ideal weight range” but sedentary, depressed, and/or have poor health indicators (e.g. blood pressure, cholesterol), what’s so ideal about that?

I also love all of the amazing reader responses to the question of “How do you define a healthy weight?”

As I’ve said at least a hundred times on this blog, language is crucial. Words create our realities, and so throwing around terms like overweight that may not mean, well, anything, seems dangerous.

What do you think of the term “overweight”? If you have been called this, what is it like for you? If you use this term, why?

{image credit :: samantha hahn via pinterest}

Once upon a time in America, the idea of colorblindness was thought to be an enlightened one. It referred to the belief that individuals and institutions would stop evaluating others on the basis of race. They would stop because, according the concept, they suddenly stopped seeing race at all. If I don’t see that you’re Black or Latino or Asian, how can I discriminate against you based on that factor?

The problem with that line of thinking is that it’s based on the idea that we can simply “turn off” our awareness of color. Oh wow, Rita, a minute ago I thought you were Latina, but now your race is invisible to me! Um, that doesn’t happen.

While many of us have opened our eyes to the fallacy of colorblindness, many of us, institutions included, have not. A recent article in Teaching Tolerance provided a classic example in which a teacher reassured an African American mother that the omission of African history from their curriculum was not based on prejudice. The teacher claimed that race isn’t even an issue and “We’re not talking about whether people are white or black.”

Well, why the heck not?!

We all, children included, see race. In fact, studies show that children as young as six months old are able to discriminate between people of various races (albeit, nonverbally). While they don’t yet have biases (which are formed by age three or four), they recognize that humans come in different shapes, sizes, and colors.

Colorblindness purports, with seeming great benevolence, to say that race isn’t important. But the fact is, race is important. And it’s actually a sign of privilege (often, white privilege) to say that it’s not. Ignoring race just makes the racism and prejudice go underground, and secrecy and subtly are not antidotes for bigotry.

You may have heard this all before – that we need to talk about race, bring it out into the open and recognize our own biases. You may believe that we need to create dialogue about it to truly do so. And you’d be right.

But what I don’t often see is the same idea applied to weight. While examples of weight bias are sometimes glaringly apparent, more often they are subtle and may even hidden behind the guise of weight-blindness. I have heard from numerous people that they simply “don’t see weight.” While I don’t think that this is relegated to people of a certain size, in my experience it’s always been thin individuals who have said this. This fact is what ties the idea, in my mind, so closely to the issue of colorblindness.

Thin individuals are privileged in our society. Period. And thus it’s easier for these individuals to claim that they don’t see a person’s size and that someone’s weight doesn’t matter at all. Because, more often than not, they are not the recipients of the direct attacks on self that larger individuals in our society are. Ask a fat person if they fail to see size in others, and I bet you’ll get a hearty laugh.

We do no one a service by claiming that we don’t see someone’s size. In fact, ignoring the issue only serves to enshroud it in more shame and, like racism, make the prejudice go underground. It’s hard to fight an underground battle, and in order to truly take down the stigma of weight, we have to be willing to acknowledge what we see.

This same concept applies to individuals who are of very low weights as well. I see firsthand the devastation that results when friends and family ignore an individual’s rapid weight loss for years. While the issues are admittedly complex, I wonder if we aren’t more hesitant to address eating disorders because they often deal with weight – an issue we’ve been told is not appropriate to talk about.

The bottom line is that “blindness” only leads us to flail around in the dark. To truly change our weight-focused world, we need to stop claiming that we don’t see each other.