Phone-a-Friend: Lose Hate Not Weight with Virgie Tovar
1/29/16 - In this phone-a-friend edition, Ann calls author, fashion icon, and body positive activist Virgie Tovar. She shares her journey from happily jiggling kid to starvation-obsessed college student, to happy and healthy Virgie of today.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
TRANSCRIPT: PHONE-A-FRIEND: LOSE HATE NOT WEIGHT WITH VIRGIE TOVAR
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Every other week we'll be bringing you a special phone-a-friend episode between either Ann or me and one of our rad pals.
Ann: Hey, Amina. This week I talked to Virgie Tovar who is an activist, an author, generally fashionable and fabulous woman who runs a campaign called Lose Hate, Not Weight which is I think an important early in the year message when everyone is weirdly dieting-obsessed. And she's just a general body-positivity inspiration for ladies of all shapes and sizes so I was super excited to talk to her about her own self-acceptance journey and to hear what she has to say to all of us who are still on that long road.
[Theme Song]
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Amina and I are both huge admirers of your work so this is exciting for me.
Virgie: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Ann: I'm wondering if you could give our listeners a little bit of an overview of the particular brand of activism that you devote yourself to and what you're about?
Virgie: Yeah, I have this ongoing kind of campaign called Lose Hate, Not Weight. That's like my hashtag. It kind of summarizes everything that I do. I primarily, in terms of activism, identify as a fat activist. I do a lot of work around fat discrimination education and body image and I go all over the country and talk to universities and children and high school students and a lot of other kinds of people and do a lot of writing around this issue. And I've been doing this for probably about I think like four years?
(2:15)
I mean it's interesting because I was born and raised into a fat family. I was a fat baby; I was a fat kid. You know, there are just some people just have a body type that is not considered the ideal, right? And fatness is not considered a beauty ideal or a health ideal in our current culture. And so my life has been and is continuing to be heavily-shaped by being a fat person and a fat woman in particular in this culture.
And so I started writing about what it was like being fat and what it was like dating being fat and what it was like trying to find clothes and fixing clothes to suit my body and all these kinds of things, and it really resonated with people. And then I sort of started to really talk about the political side of things. Like I'm really interested in the history of how we arrived at this moment culturally where diet culture and the war on obesity is something that saturates every person's life, like it's inescapable.
So I started to write about that too. And so, yeah, it's just evolved over time to include all these different kinds of facets, primarily fat activism, body image, education, and working with people to really see that self-loathing or the ideology that I'm never good enough is something that we've been taught and that we don't have to live that life if we don't want to and we don't have to diet and put our lives on hold indefinitely. That we can live right now in this body on our terms.
Ann: Did you always feel awesome in your fat body? Or was there a personal component to this journey as well?
(3:48)
Virgie: Yeah, no. I mean the short answer is no. When I was a little girl, I was as I mentioned born into a fat family as a fat baby, fat kid. There were a few years before about five or six years old when I was definitely aware -- like I remember being in preschool, I was like four and I was the biggest kid in the class and I had this cute boyfriend who was the littlest kid in the class and his name was Ray-Ray. And I was deeply aware that I was bigger than him and other children. I was aware that I had a belly. I was aware that I was jiggly. And these things either had no meaning or they had positive meaning to me. This was sort of a pre-consciousness phase that I went through before I was educated in fat phobia, fat shaming, and diet culture.
So I have this beautiful period in the first few years of my life that I actually until recently had completely blocked out. Like I had totally blocked out the memories of just loving my body and/or feeling indifferent towards what it was doing and what it looked like. And there's this moment that I recently recalled in childhood where I would come home from school and I would take off all my clothes -- I love being naked -- I would take off all my clothes in the bathroom, and there was this long hallway from the bathroom to the kitchen, and I would run down the hallway naked as like a four-year-old or whatever. And I would stop at the end of the hallway and I would stand there and I would jiggle like my whole body. And I remember the intense pleasure of that feeling. I remember how much I loved doing it, how exciting, how interesting it felt to have all these jiggly parts. And then of course my family thought it was adorable and cute, so it was like this beautiful kind of experience in childhood.
And then around age five when I entered kindergarten -- and this is kind of a primary school where it's K through 6 -- all of a sudden my body is no longer acceptable. I'm a fat person. I'm a fat girl. That is the entirety of what I am. I'm a terrible person, I'm a bad person, I'm an ugly person, and I begin to get this education in what it means to be a fat person in our culture. And, you know, it was very hard on me. I just felt like I was constantly paranoid about people saying things to me.
(6:08)
It was like every single day, at least once a day, usually a boy who was in my age group or a little bit older would tell me that I was fat. And it would just kind of . . . I mean it's literally like emotionally it's like you're constantly in the defense mode because you're preparing yourself for the emotional horror, just never feeling like I was allowed to exist. I was engaging in starvation behavior; I was engaging in excessive exercising, and I thought this was all very positive because I thought that I had to do whatever I had to do to be thin.
And so by the time I'm 16 or 17 years old I believe that I'm worthless. I believe that I'm the ugliest person on the earth. I really believe this. And this kind of set the stage for the ways in which I experienced sexual debut and romantic debut. So I knew that none of the -- and this is ultimately the turning point of the story in terms of my relationship to my body -- because I felt so ashamed of myself and I felt so unattractive and the boys in my class or whatever did not express any romantic interest in me I decided to take to the Internet and actually an anonymous telephone personal service.
Ann: Whoa. [Laughs]
Virgie: Yeah. This is before the big AOL boom and I was just about to graduate from high school. And so I get on this telephone personal service and I'm immediately bombarded with men's attention and it was like overwhelming and exciting and exhilarating and all these things. And I still kind of was okay, once they see me though they're never going to like me. They like me on the phone but they're not going to like me in person. And what I found was that was not the case. I found that dating and having relationships with men, which I was told that I was never going to be able to do as a fat person, I found that it was very easy. I had a lot of access to attention, romantic and sexual and otherwise, and it kind of blew my mind having these fun, romantic relationships with people I was attracted to and stuff. I still continued to diet for years and years after that. I even had a period where I gave myself scurvy.
Ann: Oh my god, like a weird pirate sailor type? [Laughs]
(8:28)
Virgie: Yeah. Like the kind you read about in eighth grade health class. Yeah. Turns out that if you starve yourself and you get no Vitamin C you're going to get scurvy. It's pretty inevitable. It doesn't take that long for it to set in. And it was ridiculous. Here's a story. So okay, I was in college. I was a freshman. I hated my roommates. I had like five roommates and I hated them and I was like oh, god, I have to get out of here. And it just so happened there was a study abroad program that was like a short-term three-month-long study abroad program in Italy, and I was like well I'm just going to go to Italy.
And so something overtook me. My diet brain, my diet mentality overtook me and I was like oh my god, I'm going to use these three months to radically alter my body and lose all the late I've always wanted to lose. Yeah! And so I was like okay, well I've only got three months and I've got like 80 pounds to lose so I should probably do something a little bit drastic. I know, starving myself. And it just seemed like completely logical thinking in my mind at the time. So I was telling all my friends I was going to starve myself. They're trying to tell me not to. I'm convinced they're just jelly.
Ann: Whoa. [Laughs]
Virgie: Like not eating -- like only eating a spoonful or two of food a day. And then within two months of that I start to lose equilibrium. Like I literally can't stand up for more than a few minutes because then I want to like fall over or throw up. It gets to a point where whenever I get up to go to class or go do anything I'm so exhausted that I would just sit down on a bench and I would fall asleep then I'd wake up at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. in the middle of some small town in Italy in the dark on a bench. And in my mind at that time I could not connect my starvation behavior to these outcomes. In my mind starving myself was a good thing. Starving myself was what I needed to do to be thin which was the most important thing to me at that time and I could not connect I'm not eating. My body is shutting down slowly but surely. Complete disconnect.
(10:25)
And now that I do work with women this is very common. Like it's very common that women will engage in behavior around food that leads to really negative health outcomes or leads to things like irritability, dizziness, lightheadedness, and they cannot in their mind connect I'm not eating and that's why my body is doing this thing. So this is not uncommon.
Anyway, so even after this horrific Italian awfulness that I experienced I still didn't stop dieting. I continued for another few years. I was introduced to feminism around the same time. Still didn't stop dieting. The jump from dieting to never dieting again happened kind of slowly but it came around kind of logic. Like I'm a very analytical person. I have to be able to understand what's going on emotionally inside of me and I have to be able to analyze it and kind of map it. So as I was kind of maturing, coming of age, I'm about 24, 25. I'm still dieting. I kind of have this realization where I'm like right, so I hate dieting. This sucks. I want to eat cake. When can I eat some fucking cake?
Ann: [Laughs]
(11:40)
Virgie: And so I was like okay, when can you eat cake, Virgie? And it was like a year from now? No. Two years from now? No. Five years from now? No. Ten years from now? No. And I kept going like that until I hit the end of my life and I realized that that was the answer. Like I had to commit to this, this life that I hated, for the rest of my life because I was going to have to fight my natural fat body all of my life in order to keep it at a certain size. It was just heartbreaking in that moment to think of myself as an 80-year-old woman who was refusing herself cake, or perhaps eating cake for the first time in 50 years or whatever. It just stopped making sense slowly and then all at once.
And so as I've kind of made this journey starting out as a four-year-old who was jiggling and loving her body to this self-hating person who was dieting and starving herself to now where I'm just like I'm never dieting again, it's been a very long, kind of slow process. But I think what's so interesting and deep and intense and beautiful about it is I've started to really be able to take a step back from the culture and see how my behavior was part of this big legacy for women, for fat people, for people of color, for disabled people. Like this was all part of this bigger story and as I've taken this step back I've been able to kind of see how there's these really intense elements in the culture that are like Twilight Zone levels of not okay. [Laughs]
Ann: [Laughs]
Virgie: And diet culture is one of those.
[Music and Ads]
(17:02)
Ann: I think it's really interesting that one of your early -- and maybe one of your few in your young life empowering experiences that had to do with the idea of yourself and how you saw yourself came from dating because I think especially -- and it's so interesting that it was also this idea of a digitized or virtual introduction whereas now I know you get a lot of letters about it and I talk to lots of friends about the way online dating and the dating process in general can be really, really hard on people with fat bodies.
Virgie: Yeah. Yeah. If I were to go back in time knowing what I know now, to my 17-year-old self, I know there was a lot of stuff that at this point in my life I would not have dealt with. I mean there were lots of weird attitudes and expressions or whatever, but at that time I felt like I deserved that. I feel like I deserved criticism. I felt like I deserved to be -- I mean I was dating somebody, for example. I was in a long-term relationship with somebody who consistently critiqued my body and told me how I could improve it. You know, from my skin to my belly.
Ann: Wow.
(18:10)
Virgie: You know, he would give me advice on all kinds of things. And at the time this was not a deal-breaker to me. And I think it really has to do with context. I was not at a point in my consciousness where I felt like I deserved to have this amazing, adoring experience with a partner. In my mind I went from I am never going to be loved or desired to someone is loving and desiring me. And at that time that was really radical.
Certainly the circumstances were really fraught. I think back on again relationships I had at that time that I would not have at this time. But because of the nature of the flip, like it was literally a 180 at that time, so you can imagine the potential of shifting or changing or the radical potential of something when you're coming from a place where you literally thought that thing didn't exist and now it does. It just blew my mind.
(19:08)
Ann: Yeah, and so tell me, like when you talk to women now -- I know you do a lot of speaking -- do you see yourself as someone who is trying to win them over or convince them of something? Are you like a guru who shows up when they're already on this path? I would love to hear more about that.
Virgie: [Laughs] Yeah, it's really funny, I always make jokes about being a guru.
Ann: [Laughs]
Virgie: I'm like an ENFJ which is like the Myers-Briggs of all dictators and gurus or something.
Ann: [Laughs]
Virgie: And so I'm just like it's like my past. Me, Malcolm X, and Pol Pot. We share a birthday. It's weird.
Ann: [Laughs]
(19:45)
Virgie: So I don't know, maybe a little bit. I think the way that I see my work, especially now more and more, I think there was a time when I was really proselytizing. I was really trying to convert people. And now I'm just kind of . . . I see myself as an educator who is offering an alternative.
One of the coolest things about doing this work is most people don't even know that they can stop dieting. Like the idea of me saying something like "Did you know that you don't have to diet?" is like a truth bomb that they've just never even contemplated. That is how intense the diet culture is on people. Like for example two weeks ago I was giving a talk at this high school and I was talking about the journey -- my journey from self-hatred to self-acceptance and self-love. And then one kid raises his hand and he's like "You know, my family's really upfront about my body and they let me know when they feel like I'm looking unhealthy and there's a legacy of men dying really early in our family and so we're convinced that it has to do with weight. And so I think that self-hatred is a good thing."
And I was like whoa, really? I'm taken aback for a moment because I've never heard anybody say that they love self-hatred and that it works for them. This is so pointed and so on-the-nose, right? And, you know, of course he's a high school student so he hasn't learned how to filter all this stuff out yet. So I take a moment and I'm like you know what? If you feel and you and your family feel that self-hatred works for you you should do that then. I'm literally just providing you with something that if you hit a wall with the self-hatred and it stops working for you then you now know that there's some other way that you can live this life.
And I think more and more it's like I don't want to force a bunch of people who don't want to live a fat-positive or diet-free life to live that life because that's just like fascism, right? I don't really want to be a proponent of that. But I think what's so powerful is when I show people the history of dieting, when I show the personal impact it's had on my life, when they begin to resonate with those things, I think there is a transformation that happens for people. I think there is a moment of pause and reflection, and that's a really intense, really beautiful moment for me.
(22:00)
Ann: Yeah, I love that idea of just kind of saying here's an alternative that the wider culture has not told you is an alternative. Like did not put on the table for you. Yeah.
Virgie: Exactly.
Ann: I'm an avid reader of your Ask Virgie column and I know that a lot of the questions you get, kind of like that high school student, are maybe about the middle ground, which is sort of like oh, how do I continue to love my fat body but feel good about holding myself to an exercise regime? Or listening to my doctor when my doctor tells me I should lose a few pounds, but overall still loving my body or trying to not hate? I'm curious about those questions that are like yes, maybe I'm not in the diet culture completely but I also want to take into consideration these other sources or these other messages I get that don't seem hate-based, that seem based on my well-being. Those are the questions when I read those that I'm like how does she answer these?
Virgie: One of the things that I've really come to understand especially recently -- like I'm so, in my healing journey, my self-compassion, like reading self-help books about fear and love and crying whenever I have a feeling moment in life, hopefully it will go on for a while, but what I've come to really understand is something that one of my former partners really taught me. He's somebody who has really severe anxiety and he's been in group therapy and other kinds of therapy settings for a long time. And one of the things he learned in therapy which he taught to me is the opposite of crazy is still crazy. And let me explain to you how this relates to what you just asked me: diet culture is crazy. Asking people to conform to one beauty standard and one "health standard" is nuts. There are so many kinds of bodies. There are so many reasons people have the body they have and there's nothing wrong with anybody's body. So it's completely nuts that people are working their asses off to try and achieve one ideal. That's nuts to me.
(23:52)
On the other hand, to completely abdicate anything we understand about the human need for vegetables or the human need of going for a walk, you know what I mean? That's also nuts. That's also bonkers.
Ann: [Laughs]
Virgie: Like we cannot take the pendulum from one side all the way to the other because we're in the same place. It's really important when I'm talking to people who are like okay, how do I live between two polar opposites of crazy? That's where people are negotiating. Most people are negotiating their lives. And so I think it's really important, the autonomy, right? Is it working for you? Does this feel good? Does it feel like it's serving you? If it doesn't, what ideologically do you need to let go of to make this work?
I think the second thing is having an incredible amount of compassion and patience for yourself. And I think a lot of women relate to -- and a lot of people, but I work primarily with women -- but a lot of women relate to policing themselves, surveiling, never feeling good enough, always feeling like they can do something to be more pretty or more whatever. And I think that this kind of mindset doesn't really work for people. And as they're leaving diet culture that mindset doesn't go away even though they've decided that dieting doesn't work for them. And so it's important that as the transition from self-loathing to self-acceptance happens, it's very important to have patience and allow yourself to make mistakes sometimes, to learn from those things.
The final thing I'm going to say about it is it's really important to me to have a measured response to what's happened and to not send somebody reeling into another intensely prescriptive ideology. This is the dangerous place that a lot of times political movements of all kinds tread. People have been traumatized by the culture and they react by isolating and creating a very prescriptive ideology for the people who are in that group.
(25:50)
And I relate to that. I was there for a long time. I was a very militant, separatist-oriented person. It stopped working for me. It stopped serving me. I felt policed. I felt surveiled. Like when I give people advice or answer people's questions I'm coming from that place of I've seen both sides, both polar opposites. Neither one is sustainable in my mind, neither one works, and so we have to figure out what's here in the middle ground while really honoring what we need and what we're learning from just making mistakes and living our lives.
Ann: You're very open about your own story and the ways you negotiate these issues. How do you do it when you're like well, maybe I didn't handle that the way I would advice someone else to handle it? Do you try to be transparent about those moments? Do you talk about the best self that you wish you had been? I don't know. I don't mean to place you in a guru role that you're not in except by your Myers-Briggs thing.
Virgie: [Laughs]
Ann: But I'm curious about that, like as you said, your own whole process is evolving too.
Virgie: I would say that I'm fairly transparent. I think there are moments where, for example, I do a ton of writing and sometimes I know what I have to do is to limit my writing to let's say 30 minutes to an hour because I have five other articles I have to write this week. And of course when you limit yourself to 45 minutes of writing, like an 800-word piece or whatever, there's going to be moments where you didn't think through every single word of that piece or you could've phrased something a little bit more clearly or you could've taken more of a clear stance on something. And then people kind of let you know that that's what's happening. And it's difficult, right? Because because my work is so deeply personal it sometimes feels extremely personal when someone is critiquing my work, and it feels like -- sometimes it even feels like this almost betrayal, you know what I mean? I'm like oh my god, I'm doing all this. I'm being so vulnerable. I'm working so hard to show compassion and to show my process and share that with people and somebody was mean to me.
Ann: [Laughs]
(27:52)
Virgie: Like it's hard to take a step back and be like it's okay that that person is having a feeling and it's okay that it's happening publicly. I think that what I love about the notion of having a brand -- and I think of myself as kind of a brand. I'm a writer and also an activist. What's exciting to me about that is if you're following me, if you're following my work, if you like my work, you're following me and the dynamic nature of a human. You're following me as I go on this journey, right? And I think this is true of anybody. Like if you love a writer or you love a public figure of any kind, what's exciting about it is watching them change. It's watching the way that their engagement with the issues and with more people shifts who they are in this world and what they write or how they write or how they do whatever their craft is. What's most astounding to me in terms of my personal transformation is how intensely people's engagement with my work has changed me. And I think that more and more the more I work with people the more compassion I just automatically begin to manifest. It's just so clear to me as I begin to know people and work with people intensely over periods of a month or a weekend or whatever. I begin to understand the incredibly complex nuance of their lives, the anxiety they feel about approval, the anxiety they feel about making the wrong decision. And it's deeply personal to me. It's not a theoretical person who is remotely someone and I don't really care about them and I'm not invested in them. I feel invested in the people I work with, and the more people I work with the more grey life becomes.
And I think it's the grey where we see evolution where we see compassion, where we see love. I am transparent about the dynamics of my life. Like I'm literally writing a weird experimental novel on a blog right now and it's so personal, like I'm just sharing so much of this stuff that I'm actually extremely vulnerable about around my family, around my body, around mental health, around all these kinds of things. I want people to see that. Like it's important for me to go through that journey somewhat publicly. It feels right for me. It feels cathartic for me. And I don't know if that will be true forever, I really don't, but right now it works.
(30:15)
Ann: Yeah. I mean I know that writing is sort of a primary mode of expression for you and it's the way that I interact with a lot of your work but you also just sort of in your physicality, in your sense of style, I feel, are kind of political/expressing something through that as well. So talk about that a little bit, like your fashion and style and other ways of being an awesome, active person on this issue.
Virgie: There's two parts to the fashion. On the one hand I love wearing quirky, weird stuff. Like I love bright colors. I love loud print. And I've always been drawn to eccentricity, like I'm just that person. I'm just kind of being myself, and the culture politicizes my behavior, because as a fat woman I'm not supposed to wear bright colors or loud prints or huge jewelry or bright, pink lipstick. But because I just want to do those things the culture kind of creates and imposes meaning upon that. So that's part one.
Part two is I think there's absolutely a narrative of, for me, visibility and performance. To be completely honest I grew up in a household where I was the hero child. I was the performer. I was the one who made everybody happy. My mother is very transparent about the fact that she had me to make people happy. People were sad and then she decided to have a baby because babies make people happy. And so she's very clear about my purpose, like bringing me into this world.
(31:45)
And so I think who I am, who I was born into this world to sort of become, plays a big role in that eccentric performer style that I have in my wardrobe. Like yes, it absolutely gives me joy to be performative and engage in costumery. It's exciting. It's healing. For so long I didn't feel like I was allowed to wear the clothes I wanted and I couldn't find clothes that fit me throughout most of my early adolescence and it was awful. It was awful constantly wearing black, a black top with black pants and black shoes every day. And so putting together an outfit becomes this way I can channel that creative energy that's kind of built up and create something really special and beautiful.
The other thing that I really like about the fashion is it not only kind of broadcasts that I'm a person who wants visibility and expects to be seen, I think it also invites people in which I think is something -- I'm somebody who thrives off of connection and it's almost like an outfit that is loud is an invitation for other people to engage with me in this kind of unusually intimate way. Like women -- strangers, especially women -- talk to me all the time because of what I'm wearing and there's something really beautiful about that moment of another woman seeing you and recognizing you from the last time she saw you.
Like I just was at a store and this woman was like "You come in here a lot. You always have these great outfits on." And it's just kind of this moment of this humanity that we share. And in my mind there's something kind of feminist about it, like there's just kind of this visibility that they're recognizing and that I'm kind of receiving. And it becomes an opportunity to compliment them and see them. There's so much complexity to the whole thing, but yeah, it's absolutely political and deeply connected to who I am and who I was kind of . . . like who I was in childhood and all the things, right?
Ann: Yeah, oh man. And do you . . . I mean it sounds like that has been a healing and empowering and otherwise awesome thing that you now put your time and energy into. Is there something else that you would say, or maybe a couple other things that feed you the same way or that hit on all these levels?
(34:08)
Virgie: Hmm, that's a really good question. Like on some level I think I have that relationship with food. I can't believe how delicious food is. Like every day my mind is utterly blown at how amazing food . . .
Ann: [Laughs]
Virgie: I'm like oh my god, you guys, have you tried this thing? It's called food. And I think especially coming out of hating food for so long -- I mean I thought food was the enemy. I hated food. Food would talk to me. It was just nuts. I had this really, really fraught relationship to food for a really long time and my anxiety around food would lead to these long bouts of nausea. Like years -- I went years being nauseous because of how anxious I was around food and what it would do to me and how it would make me fat or whatever.
And so now that I've kind of restored this relationship to food I have this very . . . and if you kind of follow my social media you will see how much I love food. Like I'm photographing food. The other day I took a picture. I went and got coffee and there's this caf down the street from me and they have this special thing where it's like they make the bread there and they have this raw cheddar and they put butter on the bread and then it's raw cheddar and bacon, right? And it's like that's the thing. Then I stacked the cheddar and the bacon and the sun was coming down on this globule of bacon fat in this beautiful, perfect, poetic way and I sort of took a picture of it and I was like "Yes! This!" And I even was waxing poetic about it on Instagram. I was like oh my god, this globule of fat, the sun glinting off the globule of fat says to me the universe is speaking to me through this fat. And it's saying all the beauty of the world is at your fingertips. And so I think, yeah, food has that.
Ann: [Laughs]
(35:58)
Virgie: Food is performative. It's something that I get to relate to people over and it's deeply pleasurable. It's something I can put all my energy into. And it also has this element of a restorative relationship that was once really awful and sad and now is beautiful and just pure and amazing.
Ann: Oh my god. And so it's funny, I know I told you that I wanted to ask about this as well but for people who are listening to this and are sort of like well, I feel like I don't identify with younger Virgie who was in that really bad place but I'm thinking of a friend I have or someone who I would like to support -- with the full knowledge that I'm not going to evangelize or I'm not, you know . . . I can't bring someone along to where they might not want to go or be ready to go -- how do you be a friend to people who are in sort of not the great place that they could be?
Virgie: What's hard is that sometimes people are in a place and they're not ready to hear a thing. Like I think about myself and the interventions my friends tried to provide for me and just the love for me they had and how I just was so angry at them for it. I remember even in college the first time I ever heard about fat activism I was probably 21 years old. I was not ready to hear the message. I remember going -- it was like a poetry reading and there was a fat girl who was reading a poem about her fat body and having sex with her partner. And she was going into really graphic details about her rolls and her stretch marks and stuff, stuff that now I would be totally all about, but at the time I was so embarrassed. I was so angry at her for exposing my secret, like the secret of my fatness or whatever to the whole room. Even if they're not ready to exactly go for it, to kind of be that support system.
(37:53)
Like when I think about my own life, when somebody says to you "I'm thinking about not eating for three months," that you're that person who's like "That's probably maybe not the best idea. You really matter. You're important. Maybe you shouldn't do that thing."
Ann: Maybe you don't want to pass out on a park bench in Italy. [Laughs]
Virgie: Exactly! No, I mean I think what's interesting is, you know, that moment didn't hit me at that moment, or when my friends were trying to intervene. It didn't hit me at that time. But I know that they had this aggregate effect on me over time. I think the other thing that's important is to check in with how you're talking. One of the things that's most common when I'm working with women, their biggest burden to bear is actually their coworkers. Women who are like "I've been able to let go of friends who criticize my body," or "I've been able to let go of that magazine that makes me feel like shit," or "I've stopped watching Sex and the City reruns." You know, the coworkers kind of remain. And I think that this sort of speaks to the ways in which we are unconsciously reconfirming diet culture all the time. When you talk about food being good or bad; when you talk about how much you need to go to the gym. They're so embedded into our language, especially if you're a woman.
I think it's really, really important to take a moment, even if you can just take two or three days or a week, where you're kind of really just checking in when those things are coming out of your mouth, when you're having those thoughts. Sometimes people want to give my book like Hot and Heavy to somebody who's not ready to be told that they're a fat person and I can imagine how traumatizing it is so I'm like no, that's probably not a good idea.
Ann: For people who are ready and who are listening to you and are nodding, do you have follow-up reading suggestions? Or like oh my god, don't watch that Sex and the City rerun; watch this show.
Virgie: You know, one of my favorite pieces of advice, and I do this program called Babe Camp and the first exercise we do together, the first assignment I give them, is do a body image audit. And that essentially means keeping a journal for anywhere between three and seven days and you write down every time you have a negative thought about your body and you write down what triggered the thought. And then when you're done with that three to seven day period you go through and you look at what on this list can I eradicate immediately?
(40:12)
And so for example, really common things, a magazine like Cosmo. You need to really cancel that subscription. Or a certain show that you watch. Then when you're done kind of going through and eradicating the easy to eradicate things, then you look at the stuff that remains, then you have to learn how to manage it.
So, for example, let's say you have a parent or a family member, they really matter to you but they say really fucked-up things that hurt your feelings. And so what you begin to do is say okay, I'm going to dedicate half the time that I had dedicated to that person previously for the next three to six months. And then when that period ends, check in with yourself, see how you're feeling, and if you're feeling better then cut it back another 50%.
So for example if you talk to that person once a day, every day, cut it in half to three days. If you talk to them for an hour, talk to them instead for half an hour. So you begin to learn kind of how to manage the elements in your life that are really causing these really intense feelings of negativity. But in my feeling that's a fantastic exercise for anybody who's ready to eradicate some part of their life that isn't working for them or learning how to manage it.
But in terms of follow-up reading there's so much. Like there's a book that just came out called Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls that my friend The Militant Baker wrote. Hot and Heavy is my book, Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion. It's fantastic because it's an anthology and it's 31 women writing about why they decided to stop dieting. There's so many places to look, and I think for people who are really interested in the health aspect of things, really rethinking the medical establishment's stance on fatness, a really good place to start is to just Google the term "health at every size." There are books and articles and websites dedicated to rethinking data and rethinking our cultural attitudes towards health.
Ann: Awesome. Well thank you so much for being on the podcast, Virgie. This has been awesome.
Virgie: Of course. Thank you.
[Interview Ends]
[Music]
(42:15)
Ann: Emoji siren for people in Los Angeles. [Sirens]
Aminatou: Air horn!
Ann: Air horn! We are doing a book with Rebecca Traister who has been one of our most beloved podcast guests so far.
Aminatou: Yes! Rebecca Traister! Ugh, this is going to be major.
Ann: Yeah, she has a new book coming out called All the Single Ladies which is about essentially the cultural and political importance of single women in America and we're going to talk about it.
Aminatou: A.k.a. us. If that's not incentive enough to come I need everybody to know that we are prominently featured in this book, so if you want to find out embarrassing things, a.k.a. how I lost my virginity or how our friendship has progressed, these are all things that you should come to this event for.
Ann: This is an incredible-selling event where I feel really comfortable monetizing our friendship for this, I won't even lie. I'm like yes, put our friendship out there. Let's have the event. I back this book so hard.
Aminatou: This book honestly contains the origin story. Exclusive. Call Your Girlfriend exclusive.
Ann: And also just Rebecca is the smartest person in thinking about how personal and political issues intersect for women in America and I cannot wait to read a version of this story that is aware that not only white women have friendships and not only rich women have friendships and I'm just so excited.
Aminatou: Also just an exploration of what it means to be an unmarried woman in modern times and how it's actually not as modern of a construct as you think. Rebecca is like the smartest writing woman in the whole land right now so buy the book and come join us in L.A. March 7th at the Downtown Independent.
(44:08)
Ann: You can buy tickets at allthecygladies.eventbrite.com or you can follow a link from our website callyourgirlfriend.com.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet, on our website callyourgirlfriend.com, download our show on the Acast app, or on iTunes where we would love it if you left us a review. You can tweet at us at @callyrgf, or email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. You can even leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac. See you in Los Angeles.
Ann: Oh my god, see you in Los Angeles.