Living without shame: How we can empower ourselves | Whitney Thore | TEDxGreensboro

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you may have noticed by now that I'm really fat and that's okay you wouldn't be the first back in 1997 when I was in seventh grade I heard a question posed about me in the locker room of my middle school i sat hidden in a bathroom stall hunched over not wanting to give myself away when I heard a girl ask when was the last time Whitney saw nine oh two one oh I was like more of a Saved by the Bell girl myself and I'd actually never seen an episode of 90210 so i clenched my muscles and held my pee and waited with bated breath for the answer and when it came when she stepped on the scale the girls are up today laughter and I felt the familiar sting of embarrassment seeping into my cheeks it took me back to my fifth grade year on the soccer field where the boys had taken to singing a song about me called baby Beluga that ended with she's got a whale of a tale you might be picturing now how fat I probably was it's easy to conjure up a mental image of an awkward girl spilling out of her shorts running up and on the sidelines like hey I'm open but if you have that mental image you would be wrong because in 1995 when I was 10 years old I looked like this and when I look at that picture now my heart aches because when I was just becoming aware that I had a body and that other people had opinions about my body I became a statistic like 8 out of 10 10 year-olds who today are afraid of being fat 10 year olds that's a real statistic I bought the lie that diet culture sold me when I was 10 years old that told me if I am thin thinner thin enough then I will be happy but at 10 years old I felt the furthest thing from happy and so the emotion that I'm most connected with my body was shame after that shame followed me like a shadow and after the head otua no incident I knew I had to take action so I grabbed the handle of my father's toothbrush and shoved it down my throat until I vomited and thus began my nearly lifelong battle with eating disorders I continued to excel in school to play sports to dance shame and I won lots of awards and trophies sometimes shame was like a really overbearing adult begging for a piggyback ride and other times shame trailed a few feet behind me dragging its leash like a faithful dog never leaving my sight by the time I was 18 years old in 2002 and becoming a young woman shame had solidified itself as my most faithful friend it accompanied me to every dance performance to every soccer tournament it was even there in the bathroom with me at my prom as I hunched over a toilet and threw up my dinner just minutes before being crowned prom princess when I moved to college that fall I brought shame along into my dorm room and I noticed that my body was changing by the time I went home for Christmas break I'd gained fifty pounds and I'm thinking like okay I'm an overachiever so clearly the freshman 15 is just not enough I was getting mysterious bruises all over my body and I was like why am i bumping into doorways and furniture when did I get so clumsy but then I realized I wasn't clumsy my body was expanding so quickly that I had lost all kinesthetic awareness of it my body literally didn't know how to fit in its physical space anymore and similarly I didn't know where I fit in the world to say that my weight gain was difficult would be an understatement by the time the second semester was finished I gained nearly a hundred pounds and there was the sympathy from like the pretty girls who asked me if I'd like ever had a boyfriend and then there was that one frat boy who had taken me on a dinner date in August granted it was to Ruby Tuesday but it was a dinner date and when he saw me in March he looked right through me like I didn't even exist it was like I'd been forced into some social experiment again my will to put on a fat suit and parade about in public the difference is in the way that people treated average Whitney and fat Whitney were striking suddenly I was assumed to be lazy desperate sloppy stupid and with every single pound that I gained my self-worth continued to shrink further and further so I became a different person after that I quit my dance classes I failed a lot of my academic classes and in a world where it felt like being a fat woman was the biggest taboo I didn't have anyone to talk to sure there were times where I pulled myself up by the bootstraps and I said I'm going to go to the gym or I'm going to venture out to this party but there was always a whisper a dirty look and insult to remind me why I didn't deserve to be in those spaces so I would come back home to my apartment to the only friend that had never deserted me shame we would stay up late into the night commiserating getting drunk to numb our pain I'd order takeout for us both and to anything to avoid going out in a world that didn't want me and of course all the things that I had done to cope only compounded the problem and I continued gaining weight in 2005 I weighed 280 pounds and my nurse practitioner swiveled her stool from in between my legs in the stirrups checking her chart and announcing a little too cheerfully that she thought I had PCOS well my mind started reeling because I did not remember learning about this STD in my seventh grade sex ed class but the more I learned as I pored over the brochures in the pamphlets and PCOS wasn't an STD it was a syndrome a grouping of symptoms with no cure that affects one out of every ten women in America and is the leading cause of infertility and then like putting together a puzzle other stuff started to make sense the handfuls of hair that had come out in the shower the coarse dark hairs all over my face my period that had visited me only twice when I was 15 and never again and of course my and severe weight gain my freshman year of college I didn't have an explanation for it then but I had an explanation for it now I was insulin resistant so would life with PCOS make it impossible to lose weight absolutely not would it be even harder absolutely yes and for a woman who wanted anything but to be fat this felt like a death sentence and then I got pissed off I wondered why have I never heard of this thing I wanted to know why I'd always been dismissed when I went to the doctors told that I was young and irregular I was drinking or I was on Prozac but out of all those emotions that I felt the one I felt the most of was shame so after college I packed two suitcases my clothes and shame and I set off for Korea to teach English I got promotion after promotion and I traveled the world shame and I made it all the way to the top of the Great Wall of China we ate sushi together in Tokyo we vacationed in Malaysia and Vietnam we even sunbathe in Bali but all of these experiences that should have it's so wonderful were tinged with that disgusting insidious shame that sucked the life and the color out of my memories and left me nothing but black and white and a never ending wish to be thin so that I could really start my life now living abroad wasn't all bad I had some of the best experiences there but the discrimination I faced was so much more overt than anything I'd had at home I got laughed at pointed at and called a pig every single day in the street in the store in the nightclub I'll never forget the first time I got in a taxi and the driver snorted at me for every mile until we reached our destination then there was the guy that swerved his bicycle dangerously close to where I was walking on the street stopped pedaling looked at me said Pig and then spit I chased him which was a futile effort especially because he was in a bike and I hurled every Korean insult that I could remember until I saw him vanish in the dark and then I headed back to my apartment to cry but it wasn't until I was assaulted in a bar a man raced up behind me to start punching me in the back of the head that I realized hold up I don't deserve this it took such an aggressive abusive action to jolt me into the realization that I was a fat human but I was human and I told myself I'm going to go back home to the states and I'm going to prevent this from ever happening to me again I'm going to lose weight so I moved back home in 2011 in 2011 I weighed 329 pounds and I lost a hundred pounds in eight months I worked out for 12 to 15 hours every week I counted my calories I obsessed and I hid my shame from my personal trainer and from my family and from my friends even from strangers who said you're remarkable this is the hardest thing that anybody could ever do and look at you doing it I've never been more proud of you since the day you were born pretty soon I was eating five hundred to a thousand calories a day and I was throwing up everything I ate on Friday which was my cheat day and my eating disorder had returned in full force one day I walked out of the gym having just run a few miles on the treadmill and a car drove by slowly and lowered the windows and they yelled at me fat ass when I climbed into my own car dripping with sweat what happened next was nothing short of a nervous breakdown I had literally been working my ass off to do the one thing that everybody told me would fix it the one thing that everybody told me would make me worthy but that guy in the parking lot didn't care he didn't know who why where I was or what I had done to change and I fantasized about losing the rest of my hundred pounds and thinking about my goal weight but then all I could see was sagging breasts and loose skin and crows feet around my eyes and I knew intellectually that as long as I let my self-worth be determined in the eyes of others I would never be content but I could not disengage from the belief that I had to be thin to be happy and so in that moment all of my hope was extinguished I had grown tired of the calorie counting of the weight loss of the obsession with everything food and exercise I wanted something more to live for so naturally I got a job in radio where I had to wake up at 4:00 in the morning every day for minimum wage and like the vast majority of people who lose a substantial amount of weight in their life I started to gain it back and within a year and a half I was the heaviest I'd ever been I was 350 pounds and in the deepest place of depression I'd ever known I didn't have any money to pay my own rent so I'd moved back in with my parents and on my 29th birthday I found myself sobbing in my mother's lap lamenting about the dismal direction of both my professional and personal life and I asked her mom how can anything ever change and my mother produced a pendant and on it were the words something good is going to happen but in my misery I was hyper focused on one detail and one detail only when so I started to reevaluate my life I thought back to when I was 10 years old in 90 pounds and now I'm almost 30 and over 300 and it hasn't mattered I've never been happy I never loved myself I'd always carried the weight of shame so I decided to try an experiment and I made a promise I said Whitney if there is something that you get asked to do and your only reason for declining is to say because I'm fat then you are going to do that thing anyway the universe was listening because you better believe three days later I got a message from a local photographer who told me she wanted to take some boudoir photographs of me for free I wrote back to her immediately sister I would never in a million years take my clothes off in front of a camera so when should I meet you a bottle of wine and a designated driver later I got an unexpected result when I looked at this picture for the first time in my entire life I didn't dissect every flaw I didn't cringe and in fact I thought I was beautiful so I decided to keep the experiment going my co-workers at the radio station were trying to ask me to do a dance video and call it a fat girl dancing and put it on YouTube and at first my reaction was absolutely not because no one has seen me dance since I was 18 fat girls don't get to do that and I'm still bulking at the word fat and I had to ask myself Whitney of anyone on the planet don't you know that being fat isn't synonymous with worthless lazy stupid undeserving I wasn't sure that I knew but I wanted to find out if I did so I said yes and I posted this video onto the Internet and a few days later I started getting a lot of phone calls but they weren't the normal phone calls like from my dad asking me if I toilet paper and stuff it was like Steve Harvey and CNN Good Morning America and the Today Show and they all told me they wanted me to come on their programs talk about my dance video and explain this new lifestyle this new body positive lifestyle that I was leading and I couldn't understand like what is so special or subversive about a fat woman dancing but I went on the shows and I did my little dance and then the letter started coming in I got an email from a boy a teenage boy in Lebanon and he said Whitney it's illegal to be gay here and I'm gay but when I watch your videos I feel like my life is going to be okay and I said okay and then after that some more letters started pouring in this one was from TLC and they asked me if I would consider doing a reality show and I molded over and I thought about all the ways it could like ruin my life and my reputation and all the ways it still might but then I thought about that boy and Lebanon and for every other person who had never turn on a TV and seen someone who looked like them who struggled like them and so I said yes it wasn't before long that even more letters started pouring in and many of them were from fat women but just as many of them weren't I was talking to little girls anorexic women people with different abilities grandfathers that had always hated their noses and then I realized like it's not about the fact that I'm fat it's about the fact that I am living a shame free life in spite of a society that tells me I don't deserve to we all have something that society tells us we should feel shame about for me it's visible in a world where thinness is championed above all else where we tell women in no uncertain terms if you are not young enough thin enough and pretty enough you're indisposed you're disposable living in that world deciding to love my body had become a radical act and doing what I loved in that body had become powerful and then became the inevitable questions from everybody how is this doable and I never used to know how to answer this question because I didn't know how to tell someone to be like me but now I think I know how to tell people to be more like them we think that we have to magically have confidence before we do something but this is backwards confidence is a product of action not the other way around if I had to wait to have the confidence I'd never get out of bed to do anything I had to do the hard stuff in my case posing half-naked and dancing and then the confidence came as a reward and the confidence came as a building block but living authentically shame free is not sunshine and roses every day on the internet and in my real life I'm told that I am disgusting delusional and I should probably hurry up and have that heart attack I'm bound to have so the world will be rid of me but living shame free has also brought more joy into my life and I ever could believe existed it has connected me with millions of people I would have never met face to face and injected the color and happiness back into my life now I often think of one of my favorite quotes from my favorite feminist Audrey Lorde she said I am deliberate and afraid of nothing and then I think back to this picture 1989 five years old before my first dance recital this little girl was deliberate and afraid of nothing serving up all the face and sass in the world completely unapologetic about what she knew she was put on this earth to do and I think we get discouraged because we've all been that little girl but then the world beats and breaks us down we think that being confident being happy should be as easy as putting on a light switch right just do it just be happy just love yourself but it isn't that easy and I know that it's not like a light switch living authentically free of shame is more like stumbling toward a motion sensor light in the dark you have to advance forward to a target that you can't see but trust that you'll ultimately get there and the universe is funny because the only thing that will turn that light on is your movement and your action and if you live this way if you know that every time you're stumbling and spinning and scrambling you are actually doing the hard part you are actually doing the work even if you can't pinpoint your progress if you make a commitment to live a shame free life and know that it's an undertaking that you have to do every single day day in and day out and you are deliberate about choosing that life you will find yourself illuminated and if you're like me it'll probably be when you least expect it thank you you

Info

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,728,189

Rating: 4.2451138 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Beauty, Body, Compassion, Culture, Depression, Emotions, Happiness, Life Development, Obesity, Personal growth

Id: aaXBYcfVYZM

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2016

Reddit Comments

She says she thought being thin would make her happy. To me, this is the obvious problem. Being thin/average makes you healthy. I hate my body. It's too tall, it's plain, it's ungainly and too long. It has PCOS. But it's my container and I had better take care of it. I feel for her because I too have a lot of fucked-up emotional issues regarding my body. But I had to learn, eventually, that abusing my body, despite how I despise it, is Not Helping. I think she'd do much better to deal with emotions as a separate issue. Feelings are valid. The idea that weighing 350 is okay because of feelings is not valid. At least that's my take on it. Tackle feelings and facts as separate challenges. Sorry this is so rambly, but this just blew me away.

👍︎︎ 88 👤︎︎ u/_SadWalrus_ 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

That's a lot of bitching for someone who literally got offered a TV show and made a living off of being fat.

👍︎︎ 51 👤︎︎ u/rabbidcolossus 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

Holy shit she's gotten bigger than I remember!

👍︎︎ 27 👤︎︎ u/onederful 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

All of that and no explanation for why she can't just eat less food.

50Lbs in a year. I don't even know how that's possible. She must have been eating the most unhealthy food and eating them constantly, it's almost unbelievable.

👍︎︎ 26 👤︎︎ u/smellyegg 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

This is such all-or-nothing thinking, and it all centers around appearance. It really infuriates me.

As of this morning I weigh 310 lbs. I've been heavier, and I've been lighter. I have PCOS. I'm 37 years old, and I haven't been a healthy weight since I was about 10. But I've realized that I physically feel healtheir when my body is less fat, and when I'm caring enough about it to not stuff it with garbage disguised as food products and made to be as appetizing as possible.

Do I wish the weight was gone now? Fuck yes! If I could wave some magic wand and get rid of all my excess fat instantaneously, I sure as hell would! Do I sometimes get overly anxious about my calorie counting? Yes again. I used to think I had to decide between losing weight and being tolerable to be around because I would get so stressed out and obsessive about making sure I knew EXACTLY the calorie counts of what I was eating. I still have days like that, but the more I communicate with others who are or have lost weight, the more I realize being absolutely precise with calorie counting is not really even possible. So I give my best guess when I don't know the actual figures and try to leave myself a cushion for fuckups. This isn't a race. This is my life.

Granted, I've never gotten obsessive enough to delve into ED territory, and I have a great deal of sympathy for those who have. I'm glad that isn't my struggle. But it's still no reason to go running the opposite direction and stuff yourself to capacity until you weigh nearly 400 lbs.

And I also look at myself in the mirror and cry sometimes at the damage I've done to my body. I know I will have loose skin. I lost my chance to be an Insta-famous fitness model (lol). It's depressing. It's terrifying.

You know what was more terrifying? Waking up in the ICU 5 days after what was supposed to be a routine gallbladder removal with tubes in me because I stopped breathing when the doctors put me under. If I had reached a healthy weight 15 years ago and maintained it, I likely would not have even had gallbladder or pancreas problems. I would not have needed the surgery. And if I had needed surgery, my body would have been able to handle the anesthesia. I was a hair away from dying BECAUSE I AM FAT! I'd much rather live to 70, 80, 90 with skin hanging off me like hand-me-down clothes than to have another experience like that.

Fuck looks. I agree with "no body shame" in that looks should not matter as to whether or not people treat others with respect. But not being 300+ lbs IS NOT ABOUT LOOKS! It's about wanting to live to see my child graduate high school and fall in love and get married and raise children of their own. It's about not being done yet. It's 100% crystal clear to me now that if I don't love myself enough to take care of myself, I'm committing suicide in the slowest and most painful and most humiliating way possible. And I refuse to do that anymore.

👍︎︎ 22 👤︎︎ u/washuuuu 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

I feel for my friends who have PCOS and bust their asses to be in shape despite their condition only to have people like Whitney use it as an excuse to be fat. Yeah, it's harder, but also with symptoms being less when being at a lower weight why WOULDN'T you want to lose weight on PCOS?

👍︎︎ 18 👤︎︎ u/exphryl 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

Boy, they'll allow anybody do one of these things, won't they?

👍︎︎ 18 👤︎︎ u/sagitta_luminus 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

Damn 1995 was a long time ago.

Jokes aside, in case if you want to see a REAL Ted talk about empowerment and not some person preaching you HAES, I encourage you listen to this. Feels trip alert.

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/miloy_iannopoulos 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies

Shes describing it as if the weight just magically kept piling on without her even noticing or having any control over it

👍︎︎ 10 👤︎︎ u/hazarada 📅︎︎ Jul 18 2016 🗫︎ replies