The following is a guest blog written by Deirdre, who has given us permission to use her real name.
All my life, I’ve been sick. I can remember being five years old and waking up in the morning sobbing because my eyes were swollen shut, I could not breathe, I was always tired, and had severe skin conditions and rashes all the time. I had to go on nasal sprays, steroids, oral allergy medicines, and eye drops almost year-round from that age. Around the age of 14, I started to present with vomiting up bile every single solitary morning before proceeding with my day. Despite complaining to doctors all my life about all these things, I was ALWAYS considered healthy. The number one indicator for doctors? I was thin. I always had a “healthy” BMI, and all my bloodwork looked good, so nobody ever took me seriously.
Fast forward another decade. At this point, my body was so inflamed from consuming gluten – a protein which I later found out I was severely allergic to all along – that I had gained a significant amount of weight. I was 24 years old at this point, vomiting and having diarrhea after every single meal, suffering with mental illness (depression and anxiety, some from trauma but also largely because I *never* felt well and had no choice but to press on), smoking cigarettes constantly to suppress my appetite, abusing Adderall to suppress my appetite, exercising excessively (3-5 mile runs, 10 on weekends, and 2-hour workouts daily). Doctors still would not listen to me.
When I was thin, my health complaints were ignored because I was thin. When I was big, my health complaints were ignored because I was big. This is how weight stigma harms people of all sizes. When doctors are trained to view the BMI as such a strong indicator of our health, they tend to miss out on treating the whole patient and the concerns they are actually presenting. In this way, fatphobia continues to dominate our medical fields in the most insidious ways, regardless of a patient’s size.
When I was younger, I felt like my only sustainable solution was to put restrictions on my eating. I felt like I needed to do everything in my power to just not really eat. The only thing that ever felt good to me was mint chocolate chip ice cream. It was the one food that never made me sick. I ate a pint of it nightly, then would feel guilty, throw up the next morning involuntarily, feel good about that because I was disordered in my eating habits by then, and the cycle of “weight management” continued to wreak havoc on my life and destroy my gut health, self-esteem, and brain chemistry.
At 25, I was accepted to my dream graduate school for my health degree, and thus I was always in Boston. This meant finally seeking out primary care at Fenway Health and getting a fat-positive, conscious, and compassionate doctor for the first time in my life. Dr. Karen Kelly literally saved my life, as I know I would have attempted suicide that year if I had not met her. I was at my wit’s end.
Karen’s team allowed me to face away from the scale when they took my weight. I told Karen all the symptoms I’ve always had. She referred me to an incredible gastroenterologist who finally listened to me and tested me for a bunch of autoimmune gastroenterological diseases.
Notice that only now, because I finally was seeing a fat-positive doctor, was my weight looked past in order for me to receive the care I truly needed. My current health care team, including Karen, is amazing. It is a shame that all the doctors I ever saw prior assumed that being thin meant I was healthy. That mentality destroys a doctor’s ability to see clearly, and my chronic autoimmune disease was completely missed for 25 years as a result. If my celiac disease had been caught sooner, it could have meant avoiding severe damage to my organs, and possibly even reduced my chances of long-term health implications. Now I have to live with whatever damage has been done.
More and more public health research is finally showing that fat people can be healthier than thin people. More and more people are catching on that the BMI as a marker of health is a limited, archaic, outdated, weak, inaccurate, and frankly incredibly lazy way to approach medicine. It is a way for doctors to not do their jobs. All doctors should first and foremost be researchers and scientists listening, looking, and hypothesizing with open minds. I am almost the heaviest I have ever been now, yet my cholesterol, blood pressure, oxygen, etc., are all fantastic.
The concept of weight management is a barbaric and inhumane way for any doctor to practice. One hundred years from now, we will look back at the ways we tried to force mutilation on humans through diets and bariatric surgeries and see the oppressive reality of that kind of hatred of fatness. Doctors that focus on “weight management” and miss what is really going on need to start being held accountable – sued and fired by their patients.
I think that numbers are detrimental, and so is excessive monitoring of size and shape. We came here to live in these sacks of skin as vessels for our non-physical selves, our souls, and nothing more. The BMI is bullshit and was invented by an astronomer in the 1800s who only used white Anglo-Saxon males in his sample size. BMI does not account for muscle mass, bone density, or genetics. It does not leave room for all the boobs and butts and hips our bodies create to cushion us or to grow or feed our babies.
Someday I will have chapters in a book titled “the BMI is racist,” and “the BMI is sexist.” Once I am a doctor or nurse practitioner, I will create a new tool for epidemiologists to test that will actually be inclusive of all sexes, genders, races, etc., without poisoning our minds with self-doubt and self-mutilation.
If I had unbiased doctors all my life, I may have been diagnosed with celiac disease much earlier on and could have potentially saved myself from having cancer or infertility someday. I hope to live a long life and to have children and grandchildren, and I hope to leave them in a world with less weight stigma and more active listening, especially in the field of medicine.