Tisha B'Av: the Senseless Hatred of Anti-Fatness

What is Diet Culture?
Diet culture is a system of beliefs that:

• Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.”
  
• Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.
  
• Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
  
• Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.
  

-Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, CEDRD

What is Fatphobia?
"Fatphobia is a form of bigotry and a form of discrimination that says that people of higher weight are inferior physically, intellectually, morally and health-wise"
-Virgie Tovar, author of "You Have the Right to Remain Fat."

1. How does the third text change your reading of the first two texts?
2. Is Diet Culture a form of idolatry? Why/why not?
3. How has Diet Culture desecrated Jewish spaces? Have you seen it at shul?

Aubrey Gordon @yrfatfriend on Instagram
People who have never been fat are not the primary targets of anti-fatness. People who have never been fat do not pay the greatest price for anti-fatness. Many people who've never been fat wouldn't say they are the primary targets of anti-fatness. But they enter into fat of "body posi" spaces as if they are, happily centering themselves and doing little to even acknowledge the experiences of people who are fatter than they are. And when they do that, they implicitly de-center fat people in our own spaces, and replicate the very anti-fatness they say has hurt them. It's an often unintended thing that is, nevertheless, deeply harmful.
(The same goes for non-disabled fat people talking about ableism. There is a LOT of talk abt anti-fatness as ableism, often from the same fat people happily insisting on their own "perfect bloodwork." I get where this comes from, I have done it, and it's VERY ableist! Let's not!)
None of this is to say that people who haven't been fat aren't hurt by anti-fatness. All of us are. But all of us (including fat people) ALSO need to acknowledge that people who are fatter than we are pay a different, and much higher, price for anti-fatness than we do. When we don't acknowledge that others pay a higher price for anti-fatness, we center our own privileges & biases. And we displace the very people who created the fat and "body posi" spaces we're in. We don't necessarily intend to do it, but we do.
So take a minute to reflect. How do you center yourself & your own experiences in fat & body positive spaces? What would it look like to both honor your own experience & decenter it? Where do you stop short in your support & advocacy for people who are fatter than you? How does that stopping short allow your own and others' anti-fatness to flourish? What could you do to better support larger fat people?
It's tempting to think of anti-fatness as something that's done to us by other people. But all of us perpetuate it, in big & small ways, subtly or overtly, when it comes to people who are fatter than us. And unless & until we uproot our own biases, we'll keep causing harm.

1. How do you understand these texts differently when you read them together?
2. Where are the narrow places of Diet Culture and fatphobia, both literally and figurativly?

"Fasting, Jewish Holidays, and Our Toxic Diet Culture" by Jillian Axelrod
It was around that time in my life that fasting became easier than eating. I looked forward to fasting holidays because they gave me a communally praised excuse to refrain from eating. I could justify what I was already doing: consuming as little as possible to shrink my body to the “ideal” size.
For the first time, I partook in Judaism’s minor fast days, Wikipedia-ing holidays I had never heard of, telling myself that the stories were important enough to me to forego food in their honor. While fasting, I silently felt a sense of accomplishment. I was acutely aware of the grumble in my stomach, and it felt good. My brain focused more on the shrinking of my stomach than the gratitude, the mortality, the connection to God or the words in the siddur (prayer book).
Only looking back am I able to notice what was happening — at the time I believed I was fasting with the same intentions I had as a child. But the practice was tainted by the role of food restriction, negative body image and diet culture in my life....
I thought I was finally in a good place with food and body image, but then another fast holiday came around. I tried to fast, but found my brain transported back to old, disturbing thoughts that I’d hoped I had left behind long ago. Diet culture had sucked the spirituality out of fasting. I made the decision to break the fast because I could sense my brain spiraling back into an unhealthy place.

1. How do the second two texts relate?
2. There is a halakhic requirement for those who are able to fast today. How might we separate Diet Culture and fatphobia from halakhic fasts? How do we maintain a holy focus when we abstain from eating and drinking?