Episode 194: In today's episode, Chris talks with Denarii Grace about weight stigma and disability, the reality of being poor and how it affects food choices, and white supremacy and fatphobia.
Denarii Grace is a Black, bisexual, non-binary, proudly fat, multiply disabled, poor, femme, witchy woman.
She’s a blues singer-songwriter, poet, freelance writer and nonfiction editor at The Deaf Poets Society, screenwriter, and public speaker/educator/activist. They coined the term “exogender,” a term for use by Black people only, to describe their (a)gender experience and founded Fat Acceptance Month in January 2019.
If you’re interested in being added to the mailing list for further info on Fat Acceptance Month, reach out to Denarii at denarii.grace.monroe@gmail.com.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 194 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which is seven-health.com/194.
Seven Health is currently taking on new clients, and there are a handful of reasons that clients commonly come and see us. The first is hypothalamic amenorrhea, which is the fancy name for not getting a period. This is often the result of undereating and over-exercising for what your body needs, irrespective of your actual weight, and it almost is always coupled with body dissatisfaction and a fear of gaining weight.
Disordered eating and eating disorders are another area. We work with clients along this spectrum. Sometimes clients wouldn’t think to use the term disordered eating to describe themselves, but they can see that they’re overly restrictive with their eating, they have a fear certain foods – so breads or carbs or processed foods – they feel compelled to exercise excessively, and/or they find themselves binging and feeling uncontrollable around food.
Dieting would be the next area. Clients have had years and decades of dieting and have realized it just doesn’t work for them, and they’re struggling now to figure out how to do food and how to eat without dieting. What should they eat? How do they listen to their body? What will become of their weight? They’re confused and overwhelmed and just wanting guidance.
Then body dissatisfaction and negative body image would be the last category. Many of our clients experience feelings of body shame and hatred, and they find themselves fixated on their weight, determined to be a particular size, and frustrated by what they see in the mirror. They may even avoid social events, they may opt out of photographs, they may put off appointments with the doctor as a result of these negative body thoughts.
In all of these areas, we’re able to help, and do so through a mix of understanding physiology and psychology, so understanding how to support the physical body and how the physical body works, but also being compassionate and uncovering the whys behind clients’ behavior and their thoughts and figuring out how to change this.
If any of these areas are areas that you want help with, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, and there you can read about how we work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I’ll include it again in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Today we have a guest interview. Before I get started with that, I want to just announce the winner for this week’s book giveaway – which if you’re a regular listener, you already know about, but we recently started giving away a book from our Resources page with every new episode of the podcast.
This week’s winner is Lori P. Thank you, Lori, for your kind words and your lovely review. We’ll be in contact shortly to send you a book of your choosing.
We spend a huge amount of time on this weekly podcast show and really do want to increase the listenership as much as we can. Reviews help this by increasing the visibility of our podcast and recommending it to listeners of other similar podcasts. If you want to help with that but you also want to go into the chance to win a book, all you need to do is leave a review on iTunes, take a screenshot of it, and then email info@seven-health.com, and then you’ll be permanently entered into the drawing.
We greatly appreciate everyone who’s already done this, and if you haven’t, then this is your gentle reminder.
This week on the show, it’s a guest interview, and my guest is Denarii Grace. Denarii is a Black, bisexual, nonbinary, proudly fat, multiply disabled, poor, femme, witchy woman. She’s a blues singer/songwriter, poet, freelance writer, and nonfiction editor at the Deaf Poets Society, a screenwriter, public speaker, editor, activist, and the founder of Fat Acceptance Month in January 2019.
I first became aware of Denarii through her writing on Everyday Feminism. Maybe that was about a year ago, and I enjoyed her style and what she had to say. They were also touching on subjects that I haven’t covered in much detail on the podcast, so I reached out to invite them on the show.
As part of this episode, we cover Denarii’s backstory, her history with dieting, finding Health at Every Size, and then exit out of dieting. We cover disability and how this has affected Denarii’s life. As part of this, we speak about the social model of disability and how this differs from the medical model of disability.
We talk about socioeconomics. As part of Denarii’s bio, she identifies as poor, and this comes up a lot in her writing. We talk about her experience with this and some of the misconceptions people have around this, especially as it pertains to health and wellness. We talk about Denarii setting up Fat Acceptance Month, why they saw this as important, and what changes they hope to see because of doing it.
We had some technical difficulties and some delays getting started, so we were a little pushed for time with this one, so it’s shorter than many of my more recent guest episodes, but sometimes that just is what happens. That is enough of an intro; here is my interview with Denarii Grace.
Hey, Denarii. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
Denarii Grace: Thank you so much for having me. I was really excited. I was a little skeptical at first [laughs] but I was really excited when you reached out.
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Chris Sandel: I’m excited to be chatting with you, too. I know so much of the work you do in the social justice and activist space, and there’s many topic areas that you’re passionate about. I want to cover these with you today.
But just as a starting place, are you able to give listeners a bit of background on yourself? Like who you are, what you do, what are your areas of interest, that kind of thing?
Denarii Grace: Yes. My name is Denarii Grace. I am a born and raised New Yorker, and I started on this journey about 6-½ years ago. I was in grad school. I had a friend who basically had your typical history with family historically making comments and had her own issues with dieting and things like that. Up until that point, I had been very much into and wrapped up in diet culture and the belief that I needed to be thinner and equating it with health and all of that stuff.
My interactions with her started to make me really question all of that, because I would look at her – and she was smaller than me, and is still smaller than me, more like a “small fat,” as we would call it – and I would look at her and think, “You’re gorgeous.” I wouldn’t necessarily say it out loud, but “You’re gorgeous. There’s nothing wrong with you” and that kind of stuff. That line of thinking and being outside of it and hearing the hurtful things that family said to her and whatnot is what got those gears turning and making me think, “Maybe there’s something wrong with this whole rollercoaster. Let me get off of this ridiculous ride.”
So I started on the ever wonderful Google, just started searching, and that was how I discovered Health at Every Size. I think that year – it was 2013 – I joined the Facebook group, so obviously I met a lot of other people along different parts of their journey. I got a chance to post, and others would share stories and share links to articles. So I got really connected actually pretty quickly with the community.
Not necessarily actively, but in terms of learning. Learning terminology, learning folks that were already on the ground and had already been doing the work. Ragen Chastain’s blog and things like that. It’s just been a journey of unlearning from there.
At the time, I was working as a grad student at my school, as a graduate assistant. But since that time, I’ve been working as a freelancer. At first it was more a hobby sort of thing, but I now work full-time as a “self-employed” freelancer writer and editor. I’m a nonfiction editor over at the Deaf Poets Society, which is an online magazine by and for disabled folks, chronically ill folks, of literature and art. I’ve written a lot of articles, as you know, over the last 5 years or so.
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Denarii Grace: I also do workshops and teach, but not in the formal sense in a class, but speaking at conferences and things like that. And of course, this year, this past January 2019, I started Fat Acceptance Month. So that’s the work I do, more focused on activism and art.
I’m also a blues singer/songwriter and a poet. I’m also an aspiring screenwriter. I believe strongly in the power of words and the written word and the spoken word. I believe strongly in the necessity of art of all kinds as tools for activism and for liberation.
Like I said, over the years, as far as size is concerned, I’ve grown a lot in terms of how I view myself, how I view other people, my relationship to food and my body, the larger culture. But there’s always work to do inside of ourselves as well as out in the world. So I’m a work in progress, as we all are.
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Chris Sandel: There was loads you touched on there that I now want to go back through. You said 6-½ years ago was a real pivotal point and a real start of your journey, but if we go back further than that, what was your relationship with food like as a child?
Denarii Grace: As a kid, when I really think about it, it kind of just existed. I’ve been fortunate that my life story hasn’t been as gruesome or abusive as some people. Once I started on this journey and started listening to horror stories of people being put on diets when they were 6 years old and that sort of thing, that is thankfully not my story.
It’s almost like I had an understanding from a pretty early age – because I’ve always been fat, pretty much. I started really gaining weight, according to my mom and my grandmother, around 4 years old or so. I was clued in pretty early that there was something wrong with my body, my body size. And yet I think it took a while for me to really make the connection between my body size and food because I wasn’t, as a kid, being instructed, “You can’t eat that” or “Oh, that’s bad.” Or at least, if there was that sentiment, it wasn’t really a centerpiece of my life or my upbringing.
It probably wasn’t until middle school/high school-ish – which obviously I was still a minor, but it wasn’t until then that I really started making the connection between “my body looks like this because I eat that or this or I don’t eat that or this.” At the time, middle school/early high school – for me, I graduated high school in 2005. Around that time is when the Atkins diet was very much in the mainstream. No carbs, low carb diet.
Of course, no carbs/low carbs means sweets and potato chips and all that kind of stuff, soda. It’s not that I had a so-called junk food diet. I was eating spaghetti, and my mom was making whatever vegetables and things like that. I had a fairly typical diet. But I started to view those chips and that soda and the cakes and cookies and things as bad.
I think that’s around the age that I started to really internalize food moralizing, where some things are good and some things are bad and there’s no in between or anything like that. High school is when I actually started attempting dieting. That’s why I say my story isn’t typical; I was a late bloomer in terms of wrapping myself up in diet culture, so to speak.
Chris Sandel: Was your mum dieting, or were there others in your household who were dieting that brought you into the fray with that?
Denarii Grace: I was raised by my mom, and then I had – well, I still have – a younger brother who did not have so-called weight issues. My mom – who, for the record, can probably hear me right now; I live with her – has done the historical yo-yo dieting history. She actually was not always plus size. At least from what I remember, because I was younger, I think she started really gaining weight after she quit smoking cigarettes.
Obviously that was a big (no pun intended) adjustment. That was around the time that I started high school. So between her and we were going to a church at the time, there was always this encouragement, to put it lightly, to lose weight. Of course, it was never about aesthetics; it was always this idea that it was about my health and wanting to prolong my life and “feel good” about myself.
The first lady of the church that we were attending at the time was also heavy. I don’t know when her journey started or if she had always been heavy or anything like that, but she became one of those – I don’t know if they call it ambassadors or whatever they are; I don’t pay attention to them, so I don’t know. [laughs] For Herbalife.
I remember distinctly – I don’t remember how old I was. It was probably my freshman or sophomore year of high school that she got me connected to that, so I started that. They have those nasty shakes and the pills that you’re supposed to take and things like that. I don’t remember how long it lasted, but I was very much invested in it every time. That’s when, for me, the yo-yo dieting started into undergraduate school.
For me, it was always once you go onto the diet and you’re on it for a while, when you’re exercising and doing all that, and then it inevitably fails, the feeling of failure and feeling like a failure. And when you start back up again, its’ like, “This time I’m going to do it. I’m going to be successful.” Still even as I’m talking about it, I remember that feeling of this renewed energy or this second wind every time you start up again, like “This time is going to be different. I’m going to stick to it. It’s going to be awesome. Then I’m going to be thin.”
Not white people thin, of course, because there’s also the racial component of body size and body image. I didn’t want to be “white people thin.” I wanted to be what we call “thick,” and “If I finally stick to this, I can do this and be thick and be gorgeous and attractive and desirable.” Of course, that never happened.
But that was how it all started. Once I made that connection between what my body looked like and how other people perceived it, and then connecting that with the food that I was or wasn’t eating – and not just what I talked a little bit earlier about the kinds of foods, potato chips and soda and all of that, but also how much and this idea that I was eating too much, and of course, that must be why I was the way that I was.
In hindsight, even in this moment as I’m talking and I think about it, I’ve never really been a big eater, really. Sometimes. Sometimes I don’t eat enough. [laughs] So there’s this irony, and of course, it’s rooted in all the stereotypes about fat people and what we must be doing in order to be the way that we are, because of course there are no other explanations.
I got that messaging loud and clear, and I think that’s when I really started to realize, “Oh, I have to change myself. The way that I am is unacceptable.”
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Chris Sandel: When you found Health at Every Size, how did it look exiting out of dieting and that process for you?
Denarii Grace: It’s really funny; I don’t know if it’s because of my experience with that friend and seeing things from the outside, so to speak, but it was actually really easy. I remember it was like, “This makes a lot of sense. Why are we not doing this?” It just clicked.
I know for some people, they get introduced to it and there’s that resistance because we’re surrounded by diet and weight loss cultures and it’s ingrained that sugar and carbs are bad for you, and fat is bad for you unless it’s the unsaturated kind, and sweets and all that kind of stuff. It’s so ingrained, and of course, “fat people are going to die” is also ingrained in us. Obviously things like government initiatives and whatnot that validate those beliefs don’t help. So I know that for a lot of people, there’s this resistance, like, “Hmm, doesn’t seem right or doesn’t feel right” or “I know my experience has sucked, but what if they’re right? What if I’m going to die?”
But that was not my experience. I think I looked back on my own experiences of yo-yo dieting and with food moralizing – which, for the record, college did not help – I looked back on those things and I thought, “This makes a lot of sense. This is actually a ridiculous way to live.”
I think, too, it was easy for me to transition, so to speak, because of the sense of freedom I felt, the personal liberation where when you’re no longer beholden to that type of thinking and you’re like, “Oh, I can eat this cookie without stressing about how many calories are in it or what kind of exercise I have to do to burn it off,” there was this freedom versus obviously the restriction of diet culture and food moralizing. Once you’re free, you don’t want to go back.
So I think that feeling was also a huge (no pun intended) help in terms of the transitioning and learning and unlearning that I did at the time
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Chris Sandel: One of the other areas I want to talk about is that in your writing, you talk about being disabled and the challenges this brings. Were you disabled from birth, or is this something that happened later as you grew up?
Denarii Grace: No, I was not disabled from birth. About 15 years ago, it was my senior year of high school. I sprained my ankle playing volleyball during gym class, and it never healed properly, so I always had had this bum ankle that didn’t really bother me that much. Between that and not being connected to any sort of community, I didn’t think of it as a disability at the time.
But I started college, undergraduate school, and I think it was around my sophomore year that I started to show symptoms of what ultimately, a few years down the line, would be diagnosed as seasonal affective disorder, or seasonal depression. I didn’t really have any experience with – for one, I was in college, so navigating things on my own for the first time, and I didn’t have any experience navigating the American healthcare system at all, but specifically navigating mental health stuff.
So I just languished on my own. I remember once going to the mental health services that they offered to students and seeing a therapist once, but that was literally it until a few years later. I left college without graduating and entered the workforce in retail for a few years before finishing up my last couple of credits and starting grad school.
As I prepared – and it all happened really fast, because I did one of those things where you apply literally right before the semester starts, like a month or so before the semester starts. So in terms of getting loans and financial aid and all that stuff sorted, it all happened really fast in grad school once I was accepted. I went into it aware of those patterns that I had as an undergrad student, so I knew that I didn’t want to repeat that. I wanted to really get a handle on what I knew was going on.
At the time I had a feeling that it was either regular depression or seasonal depression or bipolar disorder, but I knew it was something. I had made up my mind that once I started grad school, I would take advantage of those same services for students – which I did. I had my therapist for a couple of years even after I left grad school.
It was at that time, during grad school, starting therapy, getting diagnosed, that I started to become exposed to disability as a social justice issue. As an undergrad student, I was a queer student leader. I came out as bi as an undergrad student and was very active on campus. I went to Rutgers University in New Jersey. So obviously I was aware of social justice things. Anti-war stuff was very much the scene in 2005, 2006, 2007 as an American college student.
So I was aware of those things and aware of social justice movements in general, but it wasn’t until I got to grad school that I started interacting with students and professors who were talking about disability. Like I said, I had very recently been diagnosed with seasonal depression while I was in grad school, and I was also studying at the time as a grad student to be an adolescent educator, a high school or middle school English teacher.
Of course, as a part of my studies, we had to learn about disability from various perspectives – obviously in terms of teaching different students with different needs, but also learning about the history behind a lot of the activism that resulted in the ADA and other laws in the U.S. that were crafted in order to support disabled folks, and for some laws disabled students specifically, and mitigate ableism in various institutions.
Between my coursework and learning about disability from a social justice perspective from the students that I was working with – because I was a graduate assistant at my school’s LGBT center at the time, and I worked with a lot of the undergrad students who were taking these courses and learning from them and learning from my own coursework as a grad student – it started to really help me to better understand my own experiences.
At that time, it was mores o understanding my experiences from a mental health perspective, but I started to see myself and understand myself as disabled and that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of. Then about a year later, after I left grad school – once again, without graduating – I woke up one day with really excruciating pain in my lower back. I had just gotten health insurance through the state at the time, like literally that month, so I went to the doctor and my PCP at the time, primary care physician, referred me to a pain management/physical therapy type place.
They did a little testing and sent me for an MRI and discovered herniated discs and inflamed joints in my lower spine. From that point, I started using a cane because I can’t stand long and I can’t sit long, but I rely on public transportation. I don’t drive. Traveling on public transit is a journey. [laughs] Without that cane, people would just assume that if there was no room, I could stand, which I can’t. So I started using a cane.
Even though I had already started coming to understand myself as disabled, it was this other turning point in my life where I really started talking about disability and started really connecting to a community of activists and things like that.
Of course, because it’s something that’s about the body, it’s so connected also to fatness and fat liberation. I don’t think I truly made the connection at the time; I was just trying to live my life and not be in pain. But definitely as the years have passed – it’s been 5 years now since that fateful day – to really reflect on the way in society that we treat bodies that are different or perceived as different.
When it comes especially to disability and fatness, they’re so intertwined, whether it’s a fat person who needs to use an assistive device and they’re assumed to just be a lazy fat person or disability is blamed on your fatness and so many other ways that they intersect in terms of seeking adequate healthcare and so many other issues. Those two things have definitely been a large part of the work that I do in the last few years.
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Chris Sandel: In one of the articles I was reading, you made reference to the social model of disability. Are you able to speak a little about that?
Denarii Grace: I obviously did not create these models, so I’m not the expert, but essentially within the disability community, or especially disability justice and disability activism, there is the medical model of disability, which is what society at large tends to subscribe to, and there is the social model of disability, which is a concept that was created by disability activists.
The idea behind the difference between the two is that essentially, the medical model of disability views disability as a defect, as something that is meant to be cured, or at least mitigated as much as possible, but definitely cured – that’s important – and it’s meant to be dealt with by doctors and other health professionals.
The social model of disability understands disability essentially as an experience of access. The reason why so many of us call ourselves disabled as opposed to people with disabilities is because the idea is that we are disabled by society. We are disabled by a society that routinely denies us access in various ways, whether it’s an elevator that doesn’t work at a subway station, or a teacher that refuses to accommodate a student with ADHD, or a political system that can’t even imagine or fathom politicians with disabilities because, especially the higher up in government you go, it’s seen as a weakness.
This is something that society does to us. If we had all the accommodations we needed, we’d be able to move through society just as able-bodied and able-minded people do. So that’s the gist of it. Obviously, you can google the terms and get a little more information.
There’s certainly – I don’t want to say contention, but a diversity of opinions within the community about those models. Certainly there are aspects of various disabilities which require the healthcare industry, obviously, so there are some criticisms of the concept. But generally speaking, it’s understood that a lot of the hardship that we experience is because of what’s done to us and how we’re treated and how we’re perceived versus any inherent qualities of our differences.
Chris Sandel: You personally finding about this model, did that help with the adjustment process? As you say, this wasn’t something that you were born with and it happened later in life, so there is then, I imagine, a coming to terms with this. Learning about this model, did that help you?
Denarii Grace: I think so. I think it was a combination of things. I honestly don’t recall exactly when I encountered the concept of the social model of disability, but I think it was a combination of the fact that when I started grad school and started working there and working with the undergrad students and getting into my coursework and things like that, before that point, disability as a concept wasn’t even really on my radar at all.
So I think once I got into grad school and started working with the undergrad students and all that’s sort of stuff, I was automatically put into a space of the students talking about accommodations and ableism and all of these different concepts that I had never heard of before or wasn’t familiar with. I think that was actually the foundation, where once I started to understand myself as disabled, due to my coursework and due to what I was learning from the undergrads and their professors, there was already a foundation laid for understanding disability as a social model, without even knowing the concept of the social model of disability.
The way that a lot of them talked about it was I think already with the social model in mind. There was disability pride and there was fighting for rights and dignity and things like that. I think that was actually the foundation, and whenever I found the social model versus the medical model of disability, I already had that foundation. But I think it really made things concrete and solidified things for me. But that foundation was already there thanks to the people I had connected with.
And then I also started to become connected, in real life and also online, with some other younger disabled folks and folks doing activism of various kinds, so I think all of that combined really helped immensely with that transition and understanding of myself and figuring out how to navigate.
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Chris Sandel: Something else that you write about a lot, and you also included this as part of the bio, is that you identify as poor, and that so much of the health space is very middle class or higher socioeconomics. I feel like so much of the advice and the recommendations that are given in this space really lacks true understanding of what it’s like to be poor and all that that can bring. I just want to get your take on this. Talk from your perspective – what’s it been like for you, and what do you think people just don’t understand?
Denarii Grace: I think there are a lot of things people don’t understand about being poor, including poor people, honestly. I am very openly anti-capitalist. I hate it with every fiber of my being. A lot of us, including poor folks, are very much wrapped up in the idea of capitalism and of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and “everyone can make it” and those kind of ideas and belief systems.
When you’re outside of that mindset – that was something that actually started for me having a class lens as an undergrad student. I was a queer student activist, but I was also meeting folks who were doing anti-war stuff and other things like that. Many of those friends of mine were socialists and communists, and I know those are dirty words, but that was what started me on my journey of understanding class from a systemic point on a larger scale.
One of the things – well, there are a lot of things, but one of the things that a lot of people don’t understand about being poor is that there’s this idea – I don’t know if this is the same in the UK, although I imagine it is, but even when election times come around, politicians are catering to various demographics. A lot of times it’s about the middle class. It’s about saving the middle class. There’s actually very little discussion about poor folks.
What I find is the reason, or at least part of the reason for that, other than just plain old classism, is because people have this understanding that poor folks have a lot of resources – which is kind of ironic. We’re poor. But in terms of things like, in the U.S., Medicaid, disability benefits, food stamps, the SNAP program here, and of course, things like various charities and the Salvation Army and things like that, people think that we essentially have it made, that there’s somewhere that we can go for help.
People don’t realize, one, that those are the programs that are constantly being cut off. If folks have been paying attention and able to pay attention, there’s been a lot of things in the news lately – I mean, not recently recently, but within the last few months or so – about Trump’s administration cutting food stamps and things like that for literally hundreds of thousands of people. This is something that is a constant threat and happens regularly and affects so many people, yet there’s this belief that there’s abundance for us, that we’re already so supported.
Actually, I’m in the process of it now. A lot of people think that getting disability benefits is just so easy; “Why don’t you just go and fill out the form and get your disability benefits?” [laughs] It doesn’t work like that, and even if it did, there’s the SSDI program and there’s the SSI program. Because I haven’t worked enough – irony – I am not eligible for SSDI. I’m only eligible for disability benefits through SSI, which is Social Security Income.
The maximum amount that you can get per month through SSI, starting in 2020, will be $783. Sounds like a lot of money, and it’s certainly better than the lack of steady income that I have now, but when you consider the cost of living, when you consider the reality that, despite what a classist society says, poor folks are also deserving of good things and of self-care, of being able to enjoy life – when you factor all of that in, $783 a month for most people isn’t even enough for rent. Of course, there’s subsidized housing, which I currently live in with my mom, but not everyone has access to that.
Again, there’s this idea that there is access, that it’s so easy to get these things, and that they’re in abundance and that they’re adequate for the cost of living and they’re adequate for the dignity that people deserve, and they are not. Like I said, I imagine that it’s the same or similar in the UK.
I actually read an article recently – and I read it because based on the headline, I thought that it was U.S. based, and then as I was reading it, I realized the subjects of the article were actually in the UK. The article was about disability benefits, people on benefits, and the struggles that they were experiencing and the indignities that they were experiencing.
Of course, I’m reading it and I’m like, “This is literally what it’s like here.” Assumptions about our needs and about what we can handle and about how we must have some ulterior motives and trying to game the system and all these stereotypes and myths that affected the subjects of the interview. It really is astounding, the way that classism and ableism – because it’s all intertwined – reaches across the pond and across cultures and across governments to where so many of us have similar experiences.
But people don’t realize that that’s really how it is, which is why stories like that are so important. Yeah, that’s a pretty major one for me. It’s really frustrating; because of this idea that we have what we need, that we’re just not going out and getting it because we’re lazy or whatever, it means that we’re constantly bombarded with people – sometimes well-meaning – just trying to give advice. “You should do this and you should go here and you should call these people.” It’s like, “Yeah, that’s not a thing that’s possible. That doesn’t exist. That’s not really what I need.” It’s annoying, quite frankly. [laughs]
But until you’re in those shoes – and sometimes even a while after you’re in those shoes, it takes a while to really realize what the reality is of what we’re actually dealing with and what we actually have to navigate on a regular basis.
00:45:05
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think the trickledown effect then on health is huge, whether that be the ability for people to make choices or whether that be the ability for someone to get the level of treatment that they really need, or the level of support. It just creates such a disparity.
Denarii Grace: Yes, for sure. I don’t know if luck is the right word, but I’m lucky enough – and I don’t know if this is a phenomenon there, but I’m lucky enough that I do not live in a food desert. The grocery store that I go to is about a 10 minute walk or so from where we live.
Unfortunately, it’s a phenomenon that is rampant here in the U.S. where people lack real access to real – I don’t want to say real food, but to more whole foods and things like that. Of course, most of these communities are Black and brown, and pretty much all of them are poor. But that experience is real. It makes it hard – even with the grocery store that we have, it’s what I would consider one of the better quality grocery stores, but it’s also more expensive.
For me, I posted something on Facebook – this was maybe earlier in the year; I don’t remember exactly when – it was a public post. I asked, “Hey, fellow poor folks, what do you prioritize in your life?” There’s the essentials, there’s paying rent or whatever your living situation is, there’s transportation – do you rely on public transit like I do or do you have some kind of vehicle? There’s paying for your cellphone bill. Some people have to pay various utilities like electricity and water and gas, and obviously food, groceries. All these different bills and obligations that we have. What are the things that you prioritize in your life?
I never actually responded myself, but I got a lot of different, really insightful responses. But for me, I tend to prioritize food. I do grocery shopping most of the time, and I do the cooking for the most part, living with my mom. It’s something that is really important to me, but it’s hard.
Like I said earlier, I’m in the process of trying to get disability benefits. I applied. Like 90-something percent of people, I was denied benefits, so I had to appeal. I’m currently waiting on the response for my appeal, so I am not receiving disability benefits ad I don’t have a steady income. Actually, my mom had a fall about 3-½ months ago, so she’s been out of work as well the last 3-½ months.
It’s hard financially, but I continue to prioritize food. We almost never eat out. Obviously, there’s so many reasons regarding access to why some people do eat out a lot, so I’m not making a judgment on it. But speaking from my own experience, we rarely eat out, and I make a lot of things from scratch, like whatever sauces or dessert that we eat, puddings and pies and things like that because, like I said, that’s what I prioritize.
But it’s hard to do that, even when you aren’t in a food desert. First of all, food prices vary based on where you live. A lot of people, poor folks specifically, talk about the ridiculous price differences between the things that are supposed to be good for you and bad for you – which brings us back to food moralizing.
So for me, there’s this really hard balance, because on the one hand I’m trying as best as I can to feed myself what feels good. I’m still eating my cookies and my cakes, but I’m also trying to drink water regularly and trying to get enough fiber and all these sorts of things, knowing what my body likes and what it needs.
But it’s really hard to balance that with we also need to pay the light bill, and we’re also behind on the rent, and I also need to be able to get to my various doctor appointments and physical therapy and all that as a disabled person. And then of course, also, I want to be able to watch something on Netflix and unwind, like anyone else. So that has to get paid.
Like I mentioned, I think before you started recording, I also like pets. I have a dog and a cat, and then we’re also long-term babysitting this other dog, who is my dog’s older sister. So we have to pay for their food and cat litter and things like that. That stuff adds up. It’s a struggle, it’s hard every day. The last 3-½ months since my mom’s fall, we’ve mostly just been depending on crowdfunding, which I’m a big believer in as an anti-capitalist. [laughs]
I’m a strong believer in its power and in the need for it in order to survive capitalism. It’s important. That really is an extension of my belief in community care in general. Crowdfunding is a part of community care, and I believe that that is how we survive and thrive. But unfortunately, it’s not sexy. The current paradigm, it’s not how society operates, so it’s hard to articulate. It’s hard to emphasize the importance of it because, like so many other things in life, people are wrapped up in the way things are and wrapped up in how things are currently done.
So when you have these radical ideas, it takes a lot of time and work to unravel what’s already been done.
00:51:45
Chris Sandel: I want to make sure we get a chance to properly talk about Fat Acceptance Month, which is something you started last January, 2019. Talk a little bit about this. How long were you thinking about setting it up before it actually happened?
Denarii Grace: Honestly, I don’t remember exactly. I didn’t really start thinking about it until last year, somewhere in the middle or so of last year. That’s when I started an email list, like a Listserv of people who might be interested in knowing about it and following it, getting involved.
I took it upon myself because I realized there was a need for it. It was kind of like, “Why not me?” as opposed to waiting for someone else to do it. So I did. [laughs]
I think part of why I started it, why I took up that charge, was because I realized the importance of the visibility that awareness months create. But my concern was having some sort of a platform to advocate for legal protections and more formal issues. As I’m sure you know, there’s no federal protections in the U.S. for weight discrimination, and most states don’t have any state level protections for weight discrimination and weight bias in work and school and all that kind of stuff.
It’s a real issue, obviously. The messages that I received in middle and high school, and even before that, about my body and its wrongness obviously translates into how students are treated in school, fat students, and how people move up in the work world, if they move up in the work world, and how folks are paid and the opportunities that we’re given.
So it’s really important that we’re talking about fatness and fat liberation, not just as about aesthetics and who’s considered attractive or beautiful or desirable, and not just about self-esteem, even, self-love and self-care, but also about the real, tangible, systemic effects of living in a larger body in a society that hates those bodies.
I wanted to have a space where we could talk about the love and the hate and the aesthetics and desirability and fashion, of course, and all of those important things that affect us day to day, affect our ability to move through the world, have clothes that come in your size or that you can easily access, and how you go on job interviews – it’s all intertwined.
But I really wanted it to also be able to focus on the legal obstacles. I don’t want to use the word tangible – a lot of the more concrete issues that we’re also dealing with on a day to day basis.
00:55:10
Chris Sandel: I know obviously for a lot of people within this space, it skews very white. So I’m just wondering, from your perspective as a person of color, how do you think weight stigma maybe affects you differently? Or eating disorders, which again skew very white, even though – I know you’ve talked about this – eating disorders are roughly the same for people of color as for whites. I just want to get your thoughts on how that is experienced differently or what could be done better in this space.
Denarii Grace: First, I just want to correct you. I am a Black person specifically and not a person of color. That really matters in terms of how I’m perceived in combination with my size and disability and everything else.
But yeah, there are a lot of great writers and thinkers out there who are Black, who are folks of color, in the U.S. context who are indigenous, who are writing about the whiteness of diet and weight loss cultures. I talked earlier about how intertwined fatness is with disability, as I and other people have written. So intertwined with white supremacy as well. The connection between all of these things, of course, is about bodies, physical bodies that are different or perceived as different in some cases.
When it comes to white supremacy and the connection between white supremacy and colonialism and body size and shape and presentation, you don’t have to really look far to see historically, and presently, the way that the two intersect. There’s a long history of bodies that are different being maligned, being targeted for interpersonal violence as well as state violence – and of course, across countries and cultures.
Obviously, I’m based in the U.S., born and raised; my family is African American. Both sides of my family are from North Carolina, and from there, obviously our ancestors were transported via the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the U.S. We’ve been here a long time, so obviously that’s my context. But the reality is that white supremacy and colonialism are global.
My experience has been that my fatness, combined with my blackness, especially as someone who isn’t light-skinned, those things strongly have influenced everything from the way that people perceive my gender to the way that I’m perceived as a threat or automatically hostile or what have you. It seems benign, but being perceived as a threat or being perceived as hostile or what have you literally gets black folks and brown folks killed – across the world, for sure, but particularly policing in the U.S. is the real issue. Vigilante violence against people whose bodies are perceived as different is a real issue.
The idea that only certain bodies are right – the right color, the right size, the right shape, the right strength, so to speak – is steeped in white supremacy. The idea that there is one group or one demographic that is the right way, and everything else is a failure, is really endemic to the history and the present of white supremacy.
Any type of way of being that is perceived as outside of that, whether it’s Judaism or Islam or Blackness or witchcraft, various forms of indigenous belief systems and religions, whether it’s needing a cane or a wheelchair in order to move in the world, whether it’s not relating to people or understanding social cues the same way – whatever those differences are, they’re all automatically deemed as lesser.
Obviously it’s painful to someone who is queer, bi, someone who’s Black, not light-skinned, multiply disabled, nonbinary, poor, and so many other different things – it’s painful, obviously, but it’s also really fascinating at the same time, thanks to colonialism, the way that so many of these ideas are literally on a global scale.
The spread of colonialism, the spread of capitalist globalization has allowed these ideas to continue to fester and grow and become so ingrained into so many societies where we don’t even question – maybe it isn’t right to categorize people a certain way. Maybe it isn’t right to make assumptions about people’s bodies or put value judgment on people’s bodies based just on what color they are or their phenotype or their size or their body shape or their height or whatever perceived religious faith they might have, or lack thereof. It’s really amazing. And I don’t mean that in a good way. [laughs]
01:01:15
Chris Sandel: I’m conscious of time, so I just want to find out from you where people can find out more about you.
Denarii Grace: I’m on Twitter a lot. My handle is @writersdelite. That’s also my Instagram handle, although honestly I haven’t really been on Instagram that much. It’s kind of fallen by the wayside. I used to post a lot more there. But you can still follow me. I do still update it.
On Facebook, my professional page is Facebook.com/writersdelite. It’ll pop up and it says Denarii Grace. You can also follow my personal page. My personal Facebook page is just Facebook.com/denariimonroe. I have a few hundred followers on there, as well as folks on my professional page. So you can follow both or follow either one.
Then I also have a Patreon, which needs to be updated. It’s been a rough year. But you can also support me there, Patreon.com/writersdelite, just like everything else. I think that’s it. I’m not on Tumblr or Snapchat or anything, so those are the places where you can find me if you are inclined to do so.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. I will put all of those links in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time and for coming on the show. This has been great.
Denarii Grace: Thank you so much. Thank you for thinking of me.
Chris Sandel: That is it for this week’s show. Thank you so much, Denarii, for coming on the show. There was lots we didn’t get to cover due to being pressed for time, but it was great to be able to speak about topics and ideas around disability and socioeconomics that I haven’t covered enough on the show.
As I mentioned at the top, Seven Health is currently taking on clients. If you’re struggling with dieting, disordered eating, recovery, body image issues, or any of the topics we cover as part of the show, then please get in contact. You can go to seven-health.com/help. I’ll be back with another episode shortly, so until then, take care, stay safe, and I will catch you soon.
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[…] Denarii Grace talks about weight stigma and disability, the reality of being poor and how it affects food choices, and white supremacy and fatphobia. […]