float

*a bronze-cast floaty goose, part of a series called "Float" by Brandon Vickerd, 2023. Photographed at Halifax Common Pool, August 2024.*

Last week, a guy at the pool gave me what he likely thought was a compliment.

“You look like you lost weight,” he said (or some variation thereof).

The guy in question is very chatty, and so I’m not the only one who knows that he loves the outdoor pool, that he’s there to lose weight, that he comes every day, that he’s lost over 50 pounds since January and that he feels he has a long way to go, and and and…

And probably, he just wanted to compliment someone else who he perceived to be on a similar journey.

But here’s the thing.

I’ve imbibed diet and weight loss trash since I was a kid. I was force-fed that toxic stew by my parents, who among other things held weekly weigh-ins and posted the numbers on the calendar in the kitchen, the most public part of our house. I was taught to despise my body and as a straight-A student, I learned my lessons well.

But it wasn’t just my parents. Fatphobia runs rampant in our society. It’s in the photos that newspapers use to entice people into reading their articles (see: “Headless Fatties”), it’s in every fashion magazine, it comes out of elementary school teachers’ mouths, it’s in shame-based and incorrect public health messaging (read some work in critical obesity studies; it will be enlightening), it’s in tv shows and movies where fat characters are always trying to lose weight (don’t even get me started on the emotional manipulation that was This Is Us), or where they’re positioned as the stereotypical gag character (Bridesmaids, anyone?).

It's also rampant in politics. Consider, for example, how many critiques of politicians whose policies and views I abhor, like Doug Ford and the menace below the 49th parallel, end up being reduced to some variation of “He’s fat.” Fatness is used as shorthand for moral failure, sloth, and any number of ills. But all of this is lazy thinking: it doesn’t take much at all to realize that the focus shouldn’t be on how politicians look, but rather, on what they plan to do with the power they’ve been given.

*Another floaty creature by Brandon Vickerd. Halifax Common Pool, 2024.*

And yet.

Even the most progressive among us, even those who feel they can say confidently that they are all for equity, diversity, and inclusion and that they accept everyone as they are, fall easily into fatphobic tropes. It’s likely that you, dear reader, do too.

(and no, don’t even start on your concern trolling)

It’s taken me a long time to even begin to work through some of the crap I’ve been dished out over the decades, and even now, I can’t look in mirrors.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’ve only just returned to swimming after many, many, many years of almost never putting my body into a body of water. My goal has been to get to relearn a positive relationship with water, to feel water against my skin, outside, in spaces with others. You could say that I’ve been interested in buoyancy, that capacity for my body to float in — and to be carried by — water.

That relearning has never been about weight. Quite the opposite. I don’t even own a scale, and I want to live as long as I can without owning one. (actually, I lie. I do own one: a luggage scale)

But with one single comment likely meant as a compliment, one casual comment shared at 7 o’clock on a slightly overcast morning, I fell right back again into the toxic stew I grew up in.

So here’s some unsolicited but absolutely vital advice: Never comment on people’s bodies. Never. What bodies look like is none of your business. Your early morning “compliment” may end up being the most frustrating and soul-destroying thing someone hears that day.

fly

what lies beneath