Ep. 38 | Take Care, Take Up Space: Learning to Trust Your Body

In this episode, Melanie discusses body trust, and learning to be comfortable with taking up space physically, mentally and emotionally. She explores how diet culture prevents us from trusting our own bodies, and how anti-fat rhetoric keeps folks in larger bodies in a cycle of distrust and body hate. Melanie shares reflective questions and journaling prompts that we can use to repair our body trust and practise taking up space.

Reflection Questions Mentioned

Take these to your journal, screenshot them, or come back to them whenever you need:

• What would it feel like to trust my body?
• What would it feel like to make decisions from a place of deep trust instead of fear?
• What is possible if I don’t fear my body?
• In what ways can I practice body trust this week?

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Transcript

Melanie Knights [she/they] (00:00)
Hello friends, hello my plus size pals, hello everybody, welcome back to a brand new episode of The Culture of It All. This is episode 38, and this week we are going to be exploring body trust. Specifically, learning how we can trust our own bodies. Because diet culture rips that bond from us.

It destroys our self trust and our body trust. And it's not a uniquely fat problem. However, as always, there is a lot of nuance. And I think for those of us in larger bodies, there are ways in which this lack of trust can be magnified.

It is certainly something that I was never taught. I was never taught how to trust my body. And what I've discovered over the last few years is that as I have divested from diet culture, quit dieting, embraced my body size, allowed body change to be inevitable, part of that healing process, part of that...

confidence and respect for my body, it comes from trust. It comes from trusting my body. One of the things that I've been very focused on personally is taking up space. Alright, this episode is called Take Care, Take Up Space. Two things that are really important to me. It's why I created a segment in full volume with that title, because whilst

body image and a lack of body trust isn't uniquely a fat problem. There are nuances and there are things that make it.

make it a fat problem. There are ways in which we are treated and the ways in which we are told to treat our own bodies through fat phobia and anti-fat narratives that can further push us away from trusting our own bodies and equally preventing us from taking care of our own bodies or taking up space in our bodies.

And not just taking up space, but being comfortable with that. Physically, mentally, emotionally, when I think of taking up space, yes, physically my body takes up space. And also it's about the mental and the physical and emotional space that I want to take up in this world.

I, like so many people have been taught that my feelings are too big or my passions are too much. For a very young age I felt like I was too much and I needed to shrink myself in every single way. And with that came an assumption that I can't trust myself, that I can't trust my body.

A couple of months ago I was speaking to Jessica from Nope That's Not Normal. We sat down and had a conversation about body neutrality. And as we were chatting about the ways in which I believe we can practice body neutrality, the tools that we can use, the practices that we can have, it really comes down to trusting our body. If we want to move through

the body appreciation spectrum. Instead of focusing on what is body love, and instead of sitting in body hatred, if we want to focus on the other ways in which we can appreciate our body, then we need to explore building trust with our bodies. And I do want to just caveat all of this by saying I am specifically talking about fatness.

and body change in terms of size and aging specifically today. I want to make that very clear. know that feeling, having a feeling of trust with our bodies or acknowledging our bodies, sitting in our bodies is not something that everyone is able to do. I recognize that.

So as I said, part of this process for me came when I started to break that diet cycle. When I started to divest from diet culture and ditch dieting and started to notice the ways in which diet language and dieting behaviors were still part of my life, were still part of my choices, my food choices. I still made decisions from those places. And I can't sit here today and say to you that I don't make any decisions.

that could be related to diet culture. I'm sure there are still decisions I make. And it's also not to say that there are times where I will feel a certain way about my body or I'll think about a certain thing, or I might make a food choice or I might look at food or anything. And that thought is not me, but it's diet culture speaking. And what I would say now is that

The more we practice, the more tools we have in our toolkit, the easier it is to notice, recognize, and kind of stop it in its tracks. And so really for me, Body Trust came when I started living my life outside of diets and restriction. Because for 20-ish years, I had spent so long trying to shrink my body. I had spent so long trying every diet, going back and forth and

never just... one of the things I realized recently is that even when I wasn't quote unquote on a diet, even when I wasn't thinking about specifically eating a certain way or losing weight, I wasn't following a certain program or whatever it might be, I was still living in a state of restriction. And I think that's something that many of us have probably experienced. The restriction, the diet becomes

so normal, right? It's so normalized. It's such a regular part of our lives that even when we aren't, even when we don't think we've been dieting, we probably are still restricting our bodies. And that's something I started to realize recently, that there were periods of time where I would have told you that I wasn't on a diet, I wasn't trying to lose weight, I wasn't doing X, Y or Z. And actually I was.

but it was such a normal state for me to be in, it was my body, my mind and my body were so used to restricting themselves that that's the state that became more normal for me. And so once I started to live outside of diets and restriction, I realized I needed to learn

Body change is inevitable for so many different reasons and that I didn't have to be afraid of it. I've noticed in the last year certain ways in which my skin is changing.

And it's kind of very easy to look at those things and question why it's happening. And more often than not,

At the moment I'm going, ⁓ this might actually just be because I'm getting older. And I thought a lot about this as I head towards 40. I've thought a lot about how as a society, it's so ingrained in us to look at certain types of people, certain people in the public eye. And we are told that this is what you're supposed to look like at a certain age. And anything other than that.

doesn't meet a certain standard, anything other than that is like unattractive. And I'm like, you know what, as someone who

I lost my dad when I was 16 years old. He was in his 50s. And so if... For me that means I get to age, if that means that I get to notice some different freckles.

or different changes in the way my skin appears, I'm okay with that.

And I want to be more accepting of that. And I want to also be very honest and say that that is not how I've always felt. For me, that loss at such a young age led to some deep, deep, deep health anxiety. I'm going to talk a little bit about that today, but it really led to a lot of fear. My very young brain, defaulted.

And consistently, probably 15, 20 years, felt like every time I was going to achieve something, or was going to work on something that was really important to me, I would become very afraid. And I would self-sabotage it, because my fear was

if I got what I wanted then something bad would happen.

And what I will say is that divesting from diet culture, quitting dieting...

learning about fat liberation,

Becoming less afraid of body change, softness, fatness, aging, things that diet culture, the beauty industry, the patriarchy, all systems of oppression, want us to fear.

by becoming less afraid of those things and unlearning that false association that health equals thinness, it's really helped me to...

recognise the difference between self-awareness and health anxiety. It's helped me to, it doesn't mean my health anxiety does not still exist, and it very much does, but it's also allowed me to recognise and reframe some of the ways I might think about my health, some of the ways I might think about my body and ageing, and it's helped me to

practice trusting my body and trusting myself.

Diet culture prevents us from trusting our bodies. It consistently gives us messaging that tells us we can't trust ourselves. Again this isn't a uniquely fat issue, but the reality is if you're in a fat body those messages are not just you can't trust yourself, there are fatphobic narratives.

in addition to you can't trust yourself.

And so what we find is that if your body does not match these patriarchal beauty standards, you're consistently in this state of fear. You're consistently being told you have to work on this. This is your job. This is what you should be doing in your free time. This is your hobby. This is how you succeed. This is how you fit in.

And it's, it is a form of control and it is, it is a lie. It is a lie. The narrative that you don't know your own body because if you did, well then you wouldn't be fat. That is prevalent right now because now what we've also got in addition to that is, well, you have no excuse. The amount of times I have seen and heard this.

over the last 12 months is wild. The amount of times that complete strangers have said this to me and I'm like, you're missing the fucking point. I don't want to. It doesn't matter if this is what you genuinely believe. I don't want to. I said to somebody the other day, there's two things that they fundamentally miss and that's the first thing is that being fat was not my choice.

The second thing is that even now,

despite all of the rhetoric,

I wouldn't swap my softness, my fatness for thinness, for the pursuit of thinness. I wouldn't do that. That is my choice. Autonomy.

But what can happen as we grow up in this society that puts thinness on a pedestal, whether it's the pursuit of thinness or just thinness in general, when they put this on a pedestal and associate being thin with health, for those of us who do not fit into these stereotypical beauty standards, for those of us whether we're in larger bodies or anything else, and we spend our life trying to...

fit in and conform

one of the messages we get is that we lack willpower. We lack motivation.

I really cringe when I hear those words come up. I know inherently those words are not negative. But for me, I am so triggered by those words because I spend so long-

so much time, so much energy focusing on managing willpower, managing, creating willpower, trying to build my willpower, trying to grow this like, this thing that you can't do that. And the language we use matters. The language that these brands use, that these industries use, that these companies use to sell us their products.

The language matters, it is marketing. And so when we're consistently told that someone in a fat body isn't motivated...

As someone in a fat body, I would take that on board and

I would spend so much time trying to prove to myself and to the world around me that I wasn't like that, that I wasn't that person. The same with willpower. I would spend so much time trying to prove my worth, trying to prove that I wasn't this stereotype, never realising.

A. I have nothing to prove and B. It doesn't matter.

Because ultimately these things are associated with thinner bodies. They're associated with certain types of people. They're associated with certain lifestyles.

And can also happen is that when you feel like you have control over it and are constantly trying to...

manage or adjust.

There is a complete disregard for the fact that there are so many people in society who don't have that opportunity or choice.

You know, being able to spend my life focusing on not fitting into these stereotypes is a privilege.

And it consistently takes us away from our body,

And it consistently breaks that trust. You know, for some of us, we never even learned to trust our bodies. I talk about the fact that from a young age, I was never given the opportunity to figure out what autonomy looks like for myself in terms of food. I was never given the opportunity to understand what nourishment or nutrition looks like. didn't, I was put on diets before I was even allowed to make my own food choices. ⁓ And because of that,

It's the same thing with trusting my body. I was never given the opportunity to build that relationship. That wasn't necessarily a conscious decision. I don't think anyone knew that that's what they were doing. But by teaching me from a young age that food is only about making myself smaller, teaching me that clothing is about hiding myself, teaching me that exercise and movement is only ever about shrinking, at no point

was I ever encouraged to listen to my body? I was never encouraged to rest, I was never encouraged to take a break. I was very much brought up in a space that was focused on working hard, and that if I worked hard and if I followed all these certain rules then I would, you know, quote-unquote be successful.

But that success also meant I had to be thin. And so as I got older, and even when I started to divest from diet culture, what I realized is that I have no fucking idea what body trust looks like or sounds like. I don't know what it feels like. I had no idea what that relationship could be.

And this is why I think that body neutrality is such an underrated feeling, or body feeling, or relationship that we can have, because...

Body trust is kind of neutral. It's a practice to get there, but it's kind of neutral. We're not forcing ourselves to think or feel a certain way about our body. We're trusting that our body knows what to do. We're trusting that our body can, you know, can clear its toxins, that it can tell us when we're hungry, that it can tell us when we're full. We're trusting our body

to tell us when something is wrong. And also we're trusting ourselves to be able to recognize that and hear it and listen.

That is something that I was never taught. And I also know from my experience of growing up, because I was a plus-sized kid and a plus-sized teenager who grew into a plus-sized adult, that it didn't just come from the adults in my life, it also came from medical professionals. I can clearly remember the first time that I was body shamed by a doctor.

I know the amount of times a young person that I was told that I needed to focus on weight loss.

And so medical weight stigma plays a part in this.

They're also contributing towards this lack of trust.

When we have doctors and medical professionals who are approaching their care, their duty of care, from a biased place, it's going to consistently tell us again that we don't know our bodies. When we are not given the healthcare or medical care that we need, when we advocate ourselves and we're told, you just need to go and lose weight, this further stigmatises and further

creates this lack of trust.

You know, I think it's one of the reasons that we can become so detached from our bodies. And instead of looking at our bodies with the intention of curiosity and self-advocacy and actual health,

Most of us have been taught to check our bodies based on imperfections, based on flaws, based on whether or not our body is soft or is aging, rather than looking at it from a place of curiosity, a place of neutrality, a place of fact.

And I understand that navigating these medical spaces can be really scary. I talk about this a bit in the Autumn issue of Full Volume,

because of my family history, because of, you know, medical weight stigma, or my fear of what will happen, not only because of my body, but when my dad went to the doctors about a mole and was consistently told there was nothing wrong with it. Now, one of the things I worked through was that that was 30 years ago, which I think sometimes I forget, and ⁓ things are different now. But, okay, check, great, things have advanced. However,

weight stigma hasn't. So I made sure that I took

my mum with me because yes for moral support, yes because I wanted somebody else to be present if I was told no no go lose weight.

or some cra- like, I didn't know how we could get from, hey, can you check this mall to that place? But I assume we probably could. And I also wanted her to be there because she knows that history. She has that experience as well. And I'm really very lucky that I was able to have that relationship with her and that I can trust ⁓

I really encourage if you can take somebody with you because I know that we can get really overwhelmed and almost flustered in those moments. I like to make notes of what it is I want to discuss and talk about. ⁓ I know that here in the UK, doctor's appointments are very, short. So it's very hard to cover a lot of ground.

I try to make sure that I have my notes, that I know what I'm going for. I have to give myself some pep talk beforehand. And unfortunately this whole process went on for months And

eventually had this mole removed. And you'd think that that would help. But then I had to wait.

And fast forward to the point where I got an all-clear, it was harmless.

My skin in particular is something that I have kept an eye on for most of my life, most especially my adult life. But it, there is such a difference between self-awareness and health anxiety and I think what I've realized in more recent years is that diet culture

It feeds into health anxiety, especially if you're in a large body. Because again, the narrative is, well, if you cared about your health, right? I hadn't noticed until I stopped dieting that this was something that I had really held on to for so many years.

I had berated myself through the lens of diet culture, using this diet culture language to tell myself that if I really cared about my health...

then I would do all these other things. And so it almost took me away from the other things that I needed to be aware of. It takes you away from self-awareness and it pushes you into focusing on one thing and that is the pursuit of thinness.

Now, I'd like to wrap up this episode today with...

some reflection. I was thinking about some of the ways in which I worked through this myself, and if you don't know this about me, I love to journal. I take a while to process things, so I tend to journal, and I might journal on the same things repeatedly for quite some time, and I will talk about it with friends and people that I trust, but journaling is still a really important part of that process for me.

And I started to think about some of the questions that I've asked myself over the last few years. And I like to say that we should stay in a place of curiosity because if we're curious, we can't be judgmental.

And I think part of this process is exploring why we don't trust our body. You know, where does that belief come from?

as I've got a few questions that you can contemplate, take away, journal on them, think about them.

And I hope that these questions can offer some curiosity for yourself and help you wherever you're at with your body trust. So the first question is, what would it feel like to trust my body? What would it feel like to trust my body?

What would it feel like to make decisions from a place of deep trust instead of fear?

What would it feel like to make decisions from a place of deep trust instead of fear?

What is possible if I don't fear my body? What is possible if I don't fear my body?

In what ways can I practice body trust this week?

In what ways can I practice body trust this week?