Help me empathize more?

April 2, 2018 11:41 AM

I have a very good friend who is overweight and fighting an eating disorder. I want to support them as best I can, without suggesting fixes or minimizing their feelings. They've recently expressed that I don't really understand where their pain and feelings of isolation come from. Peeps of the Green, can you help me find some readable points of view that might shed some light?

I've been digging around both Amazon and the web in general. My Google-fu is usually very strong, but it's not helping here. Everything that I have found so far related to these issues are either 1) books written by people with eating disorders who started out very thin but felt they needed to be Even Thinner or 2) "fat acceptance" books (like things by the amazing Kate Harding) which are awesome, but don't seem to speak to things my friend talks about, like the 'invisibilty' they felt when they were at their heaviest versus the attention they got when they lost some weight.

Maybe I'm not reading enough of those things I'm finding to map them to my information needs, but any pointers to literature that speaks to the lived experience of being overweight in America would be super helpful.

posted by hanov3r to Human Relations (19 answers total)

Best answer: Roxane Gay's Hunger.
posted by FencingGal at 11:45 AM on April 2, 2018 [15 favorites]

Is your friend unwilling to tell you about their own experiences and feelings? It may be more helpful to respond with, "Tell me more," rather than trying to map someone else's experiences onto your friend, even if those experiences are more similar than your own.
posted by lazuli at 11:50 AM on April 2, 2018 [13 favorites]

Best answer: There's a social media account called "Your Fat Friend" which is good for understanding the lived experience.
posted by Chrysalis at 12:29 PM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Here is a good list of some of the ways people in larger bodies experience stigma in employment, medical settings, education etc.

Also worth reading this article about thin priveledge . And it's fine to acknowledge that we'll never completely understand another person's lived experience, but we can believe them and support them (you sound like a really good friend!)
posted by Chrysalis at 12:43 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Maybe The Weight of It, by Amy Wilensky (link is to excerpt), though it had mixed reviews.
posted by paduasoy at 12:44 PM on April 2, 2018

Best answer: Seconding Your Fat Friend, on twitter @yrfatfriend
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 12:47 PM on April 2, 2018

Response by poster: Not gonna threadsit, but I did want to address lazuli's question. I've talked to this friend many times about their own experience and feelings, but I still don't feel like I'm "getting" it. There's also a bit of guilt here, as this friend has taken great pains to research some of *my* emotional issues while talking to me about them to help gain greater understanding, and I want to do what I can to mirror that level of effort back to them as well.
posted by hanov3r at 12:48 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Would it be worth it to figure what behaviours you're exhibiting that give them the impression you're not understanding their pain? Because I can think of a lot of different ways that lack of understanding could happen, and having a better idea of what you're *doing* that hurts them might help focus answers.
posted by sagc at 12:51 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I hate to ask this, but how overweight is your friend, and have they ever been at a healthy weight? There's not a lot of writing about people who experience social and romantic exclusion when they're slightly yet persistently overweight rather than being significantly overweight or obese. Especially when that person has an eating disorder that gets in the way of weight management, they're at a weight where people expect that they can become thinner easily, but when they don't, it can be perceived as a lack of self-care or self-control. People in this situation have legitimate issues related to their weight, but are often discouraged from discussing them.
posted by blerghamot at 2:12 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Two authors to look into might be Shauna Reid and Wendy McClure. Both are writers who had diet blogs in the early-mid 200s and both got book deals to write about their weight loss. They are both feminists who now have really mixed feelings about the weight loss industry and their participation in it. Shauna Reid's book actually has a LOT about her experience as a very overweight teenager and college student. She has also written quite a bit on her new blog about her mixed feelings. She's an interesting case because the book did very well, and she did a very high-profile book tour for it (I think she was on the Today Show) but gained quite a bit of the weight back and is pretty critical of the whole diet-industrial complex. They are both great writers.

(sorry for the lack of links, writing this on a phone with a slow internet connection!)
posted by the sockening at 2:48 PM on April 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: blerghamot - I know BMI is an awful measure in general but, as an indicator, their BMI is currently 37; at their thinnest, they were around 26. They were overweight until a few years ago, when a strict paleo diet and a change in meds helped knock off about 50 lbs. In the last 18-24 months, they've put most of that back on (again, in part, due to a change in meds).
posted by hanov3r at 2:58 PM on April 2, 2018

Margaret Cho’s I’m the One That I Want really spoke to me when I went from being a chubby teen to skinny college freshman. Killing Us Softly is also a pretty decent primer to understand how hard it is to live healthier without falling back into cultural narratives that trigger disordered eating.

Hunger and Shrill are also good books to understand what it’s like to live as a fat woman. But neither of them really reckon with the harm they likely did to themselves by trying to restrict their food or workout obsessively. Instead they just realize it was never enough and will never be enough for our culture.
posted by politikitty at 3:25 PM on April 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Here's something that I have found important to say OR hear in situations like this: You're right. I can't understand how you feel. I can read about it and hear about it and imagine it, and none of that is the same as experiencing it, and I'm sorry that's so lonely.
posted by spindrifter at 6:23 PM on April 2, 2018 [4 favorites]

Melissa McEwan has written quite a bit about both fat acceptance and fat hatred at Shakesville.
posted by dizziest at 7:29 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm a fat woman but this isn't about how fatness affects me. In my experience, a feeling of being understood can come from a friend's willingness to accept how I feel and to empathize. That is, even if there's no way they can imagine what's happening for me, it's still possible for them to be caring and supportive. Even another heavy woman in similar circumstances might go through very different emotions daily.

I think there's a lot of benefit in doing some reading because that effort would make a difference to your friend. Also, like trying to understand anyone's gender or race or relative poverty or early sexual molestation (or thousands of other things), you can find out about how enormous is the range of life aspects that can be touched by one's weight and attitude about weight, and other peoples attitudes and actions. But I don't care how much research you do...even if you shared the same weight, height, age, background, and mental bent, you would never fully"get" it.

I suggest that when you're done researching, you do the thing that will help most: what they call "active listing." I'm sorry, you seem like a sensitive person who probably already knows this, but: Besides listening, but it's good to say the things that indicate that you're listening and that you've heard. When she talks about an incident or a pattern, nod your head. Draw her out. Don't ask questions about facts...but it's great to say, "That must have been frustrating," or, "I think I would feel discouraged and helpless if I went through something like that." Don't try to help by pointing out contradictions or points that seem very logical from the outside. Don't suggest solutions to any of the aspects.

And when your friend says she feels lonely because you don't understand, just keep saying that you want to understand.
posted by wryly at 8:40 PM on April 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yes yes yes. Don't rely on a book or an article. Just ask your friend what you can do to help them and support them. If they say "you don't understand," your answer is "tell me what I can do/what you need to tell me so that I can understand."

It's most likely that they're seeking empathy - a person who can listen, who can draw them out and be trustworthy to them personally. Ask questions, be an active listener and try to hear your friend's story. That will be way more relevant than a book.
posted by bendy at 12:50 AM on April 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

YouTube might be another resource to investigate if you're interested in video. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Jordan Shrinks channel. She's a "weight loss success story" so her videos (which are a little longer than average) tend to center around the theme of her 130lbs weight loss, but a lot of them also detail her thought patterns, lifestyle, and habits when she was heavier, other people's reactions to her before and after the weight loss, etc. She is very open and shares a lot of things I haven't ever really heard talked about before.

There are probably other channels as well that may be even more specific, but I am also in favor of the suggestion of asking your friend what they need from you and in what ways you can show your support and understanding while they're going through a tough time.
posted by helloimjennsco at 6:22 AM on April 3, 2018

Here is another thing that might help: keeping in mind that this is super complicated. If you need to, pick something that you are passionate and reasonably knowledgable about (say, a religion, feminism, politics etc), and then imagine someone trying to reduce it to one simple concept in order to try and understand. When someone does this to me about feminism, I often find myself wanting to say "it's more complex than that", and it might be useful to try and actually do that to yourself here.

For example, some people like to try and reduce someone's weight down to "life choices". But hormones may come into it, eating patterns established in childhood may come into it, trauma may come into it, and more besides. Even without all that, "life choices" themselves get more complex - they can be linked to a bazillion other complicating factors. And some people like to play the "I don't care how they look I care about their health" card, but do they say that regularly to people who choose to drink or smoke? Who choose to have kids? Or anything else that's been indicated in having a long-term impact on people's health? There's so much going on, it's no wonder so much has been written about it.

My point is, it's hard to understand because it's complicated, and realising that can be a useful tool. It can especially head off the likelihood of falling into the "why don't they just ..." trap.
posted by greenish at 9:24 AM on April 3, 2018 [3 favorites]

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but it is a way of giving your friend a sense that you are listening to them. Ask them what they would like from you. "Would you like me to just listen? Or would you like me to also respond. Or, would you like me to also tell you things from my own experience that might help." When I was in a difficult situation, a friend said that to me and I was blown away at his sensitivity.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 11:08 AM on April 5, 2018 [1 favorite]