Episode 205: Lu chats with social worker and sex therapist Sonalee Rashatwar about non-consensual childhood dieting, fatphobia, touch deprivation, body image, sexual preference, and more.
Sonalee Rashatwar (she/they) LCSW MEd is an award-winning clinical social worker, sex therapist, adjunct lecturer, and grassroots organizer. Based in Philly (licensed in NJ and PA), she is a superfat queer bisexual non-binary therapist and co-owner of Radical Therapy Center, specialized in treating sexual trauma, body image issues, racial or immigrant identity issues, and South Asian family systems, while offering fat and body positive sexual healthcare.
Popularly known as TheFatSexTherapist on Instagram, their notoriety first peaked when they were featured on Breitbart in March 2018 for naming thinness as a white supremacist beauty ideal. And they continue to draw the ire of white supremacists everywhere with controversial statements on intersectional fat liberation since then. Sonalee is a sought-after speaker who travels internationally to curate custom visual workshops that whisper to our change-making spirit and nourish our vision for a more just future.
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Lu Uhrich: Welcome to Episode 205 of Real Health Radio. You can find the links talked about as part of this episode at the show notes, which you can find at seven-health.com/205.
Hi everyone, i’m your host, Lu Uhrich and this is Real Health Radio. If you’re new to the show, then it’s worth mentioning that Real Health Radio is presented by Seven Health.
Seven Health works with women who feel obsessed with and defined by their bodies. Using a non-diet, weight-neutral approach that combines science and compassion, we help you to transform your relationship with food, movement, your body, and yourself. You can check out seven-health.com to learn more.
Now, today i’ve got a shorter episode and I don’t have many announcements either. In fact, there’s only one, I’d like to say congratulations to Marianna M, you’re the winner of our book giveaway this week. Thanks so much for your kind review. We’ll be in touch soon to send you a book of your choosing from our resource list.
On today’s episode of Real Health Radio, I’m speaking with Sonalee Rashatwar. Sonalee, whose pronouns are she and they, is an award winning clinical social worker, sex therapist, adjunct lecturer, and grassroots organiser. Based in Philly, licensed in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, she’s a superfat queer bisexual non-binary therapist and co-owner of Radical Therapy Centre, specialised in treating sexual trauma, body image issues, racial or immigrant identity issues, and South Asian family systems, while offering fat and body positive sexual healthcare.
Popularly known as TheFatSexTherapist on Instagram, their notoriety first peaked when they were featured on Breitbart in March 2018 for naming thinness as a white supremacist beauty ideal. And they continue to draw the ire of white supremacists everywhere with controversial statements on intersectional fat liberation since then. Sonalee is a sought-after speaker who travels internationally to curate custom visual workshops that whisper to our change-making spirit and nourish our vision for a more just future.
Sonalee isn’t paid for her work as a community organiser, where she has fundraised and facilitated a free five-day political action summer camp for LGBT+ South Asian and Indo Caribbean youth. Sonalee received their Master of Social Work and Master of Education in Human Sexuality from Widener University in 2016 and have been working in the field of anti-violence for 8+ years.
Like I mentioned earlier, this a shorter conversation than most of our Real Health Radio interviews, but rest assured, it’s jam packed with intriguing dialogue and helpful information.
Sonalee and I discussed non-consensual childhood dieting, gender identity, fat phobia, sexual preference, touch hunger, body image and so much more. But why don’t I stop telling you about it and let you listen instead?
Lu Uhrich: Hi Sonalee and welcome to Real Health Radio.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Thank you so much for having me.
Lu Uhrich: It’s definitely an honour to have you here. We want to pack it with as much information and learning as we possibly can and let’s start with learning about you. If you wouldn’t mind telling the audience who you are and what you do in the world.
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Sonalee Rashatwar: I am a sex therapist, based in Philadelphia and I run the pretty popular Instagram account, TheFatSexTherapist. I co-own a radical therapy practice in Philadelphia, in West Philly, called Radical Therapy Centre. What we do there that’s a little bit different is we politicise therapy.
I am a sex therapist that specialises in working with queer and trans folks, around sexuality related issues but more specifically, the ways that we internalise fat phobia, while healing from sexual trauma, while healing from white supremacy, capitalism, anti-blackness, xenophobia, anti-semitism. That’s kind of the really, really niched down area of sex therapy that I do. So I look at the ways that sexuality gets impacted when we are struggling with systems of oppression.
Lu Uhrich: Wow, I really appreciate that line of work. So it’s all these marginalised identities and how they effect, then our sexuality, the way that we view ourselves, our genders, our experiences.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Yeah, like looking at the ways that we have a harder time experiencing pleasure, or giving ourselves permission to be joyful, the ways that we process or heal from pain or trauma, and the way that we build relationships. All of these things get impacted, if we are not thinking through and separating the ways that we are relating to our people, from the ways we have been taught to relate by systems of oppression.
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Lu Uhrich: I love it. So what got you into this line of work? Like you said, it’s really niched down, it’s very specific and I’m thinking about as children, when we grow up I don’t know of anyone who has ever said they want to do this exact thing when they grow up. So, I’m so curious to hear how you came to this line of work and what about your childhood, your youth and your young adult years led you here.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Yeah, I mean I definitely wasn’t that kid who was like “I want to be a sex therapist.” I had no idea that this kind of a career could’ve existed for me. It was one out of self construction, so I had to make a space for myself in the world for the kind of work that I wanted to do, that a little bit, I stumbled into. A lot of my work and what I put on instagram in understanding internalised fatphobia and the many ways that impacts our ability to consent to sex as pleasurable. Our ability to eat food that tastes good and feels good to us to eat and how internalised fatphobia kind of messes with that. Messes with our ability to give ourselves permission to just eat and to experience abundance.
A lot of those ideas actually come from me learning to grow and heal the ways that I was taught fatphobia as a child and the ways that my immigrant parents taught me restriction, and taught me that an obedient type of femininity was one that was petite and restrictive and really controlled and regulated.
It was in being taught that type of femininity that I experienced a lot of body image dis-satisfaction, a lot of diet trauma throughout my childhood, a lot of those non consensual diets that I was put on as a really young kid, I’m talking like pre-pubescent, 8, 9 and 10 years old encouraged to restrict food because I was a “fat kid”. Thats where a lot of this work comes from, it comes from my own lived experiences and trying to heal what went wrong. I am a survivor of sexual trauma, and that is why a lot of my work is infused with this really interesting trauma analysis. Even understanding diet culture as a form of trauma, even understanding forced or encouraged dieting on children’s bodies as a form of non-consent. Those ideas and understanding of those impacts come from my lived experience.
Lu Uhrich: Thanks for sharing that. I have so many questions relating to your lived experience now. We could go so many directions, but one of the questions I have is, you made the mention of, my parents raised me in this way, they were teaching me obedient femininity. So that makes me wonder, do you identify with femininity today? And if so has it shifted from the femininity you were taught growing up?
Sonalee Rashatwar: Yeah, it shifted really drastically from that obedient femininity, because what being fat did for me was forced failure into my life, in a really necessary, important way. I was put on diets, I was encouraged to diet, I was taken to all kinds of ayurvedic doctors, who were like shamans, he really shouldn’t have even been called a doctor, taken to different cleanse systems, Jenny Craig, all kinds of like weird weight loss schemes, because what my parents were teaching me was conformity and how to assimilate into white supremacist systems of beauty and success. And that if I was going to “make it” in western racialised capitalism, my parents were teaching me what I would have to look like in order for me to be successful, in order for me to conform and assimilate. And what they were teaching me was that femininity, a cisgender femininity is a delicate one, that looks thin, that is attracted, only to other straight cis-men and doesn’t really think about same gender attraction, or bisexual attraction, or pansexual attraction.
What being fat did and not being able to successfully lose weight did was force me to understand that my body didn’t want to lose weight. No matter how hard I tried would continue to regain the weight and wouldn’t keep it off in a way that felt successful to my parents. So my parents taught me at a really young age that if I was going to stay fat I would have a hard time marrying a cisgender heterosexual Hindu man. I might have a harder time having biological children, I might have a harder time getting paid well in my career because fat peoples bodies are seen as lazy and undisciplined and not smart. So they were giving me a really nuanced understanding of fatphobia actually, and that structural fatphobia would impact me, not just with my peers on the playground but in the bedroom and the boardroom.
That is why I am a non-binary person today, because my fatness has really queered my gender and my experience of femininity. So these days I use “she” and “they” pronouns, that’s exactly where your questions going, I identify as non-binary. I experienced a failed femininity which to me was very liberating, so I say that not to say that I experienced pain from that failure but its actually given me the opportunity to experience a more expansive gender where I get to accept and acknowledge that there are masculine parts to me. That feel masculine and are safe to acknowledge.
Nowadays I’m exploring femininity in this non-binary way and a couple of months ago I would’ve said I was “bemme” which is a mix of butch and femme but these days I’m feeling a little more soft butch. Staying fat saved my life in that way, because it allowed me time and opportunity to not have to jump through those conformity hoops, and just take my time and realise that I was actually attracted to more than one gender of person and that I experienced a really complex gender as well.
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Lu Uhrich: Yeah and it also sounds like it gave you this space to let yourself evolve.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Exactly right, that’s exactly how it feels. It just bought me time.
Lu Uhrich: Thats really beautiful, the other thing that of course came up was your conversations around non-consensual diets for children, having experienced them yourself and it being something that you and I both know is happening regularly, all the time today, even at the recommendation of the public school systems. I have children myself and I always make a really big deal about them not being a part of the annual weigh-in at school, because I find it totally useless and also very harmful and fatphobic. So they don’t go through that because of my own convictions, both professionally and personally, around fatphobia and how we enforce that in public spaces. But I want to hear from you, and would love the audience to hear from you, about why non-consensual diets of children is so harmful, the sort of harm it causes and sort of what that looks like as children grow into adulthood.
Sonalee Rashatwar: It’s actually so moving to me to hear that you keep them from the weigh-in every year. I feel like there’s still this child part of me that needed protection from systems that were ready to teach me that my body was not good enough the way it was and that I would have to hustle as hard as I could to change that body and however it would have to be changed, no matter how painful that was or damaging to my body, that it would need to change, in order to fit in, into the box that society makes for us.
So that is so moving to me, it feels so protective as a parent to keep your kid from ingesting so young that their body isn’t good enough. Because that’s what I was taught really explicitly, not just from school weigh-ins, or BMI testing, or having my belly pinched with those really weird tweezers that measure body fat. We had one of those machines in school that you would hold with your hand and the electrical current would like move through your body fat and it would give you a percentage of your body fat, if it was over a certain number you would have to write it on an index card and hand it to the teacher.
It was so sad to not have a say in, or not even for me to have a say in whether or not my body was worthy of being accepted, but just that there wasn’t even one other person to acknowledge that my fat body was good as it was, or necessary, or cute, or worthy of existing. You providing that to your kids, reminds them that they have one person in the world who believes that they’re good enough and that’s something they can tether themselves to as adults.
I know that a lot of the work that I do in my own personal therapy, when I go to see my therapist, is re-parenting work and inner-child work, being able to tell myself the things that were not being told to me as a kid and still aren’t being told to me today as an adult child. Which is to not be convinced by the lie that capitalism will tell me until the day I die that my body isn’t good enough, that I need to buy this anti-aging serum, or something that will fill in my thinning hairline, or waist shapers to hide my body fat. I appreciate it.
Lu Uhrich: Of course and I do that to protect them and also to send a message and maybe create change overall. As our listeners might know and certainly my clients know that I can be a little wordy, so I’m always really good at writing a letter with all my explanations as to why this I so problematic in schools. But it was really moving to hear you say as an adult, how that would’ve made you feel as a child to have a parent advocate for you in that way and I appreciate that.
I’d love to hear, in your personal and professional experience what that trauma looks like as you transition from childhood into adulthood, why these non-consensual diets, why the weigh-ins, why the concern over body fat and getting those big tweezers, those callipers out. What harm does that cause? Cause I think people are like no, we can get into this conversation too around healthism and concern trolling and this idea like “no I just want the best for them” and I truly believe that a lot of parents and maybe yours, if you’ve had those conversations with them, but certainly several that I’ve known and worked with. I believe that they think they’re doing the best that they can, because they too are victims of diet culture and they too have acquired this fatphobia from all the places and spaces that we exist in our world.
But it’s causing harm, they think they’re doing good but its causing harm and I think that if we can shine the spotlight on the harm it’s causing we might be able to get some of our listeners to think twice.
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Sonalee Rashatwar: Yeah, and this is where my work around sexual trauma and diet trauma overlap because what essentially was being taught to us as kids if we were put on non-consensual diets was, we were being taught before we even were given opportunities to have sex and learn about consent. We were taught that we couldn’t trust our bodies and that we have to listen to someone outside of our body to tell us what to do about our body. This is exactly what happens when we are taken advantage of and sexual violence occurs, we go off of someone else’s external understanding of what should be happening with our bodies instead of listening intuitively to what our body is feeling and telling us.
So this is the larger harm that comes from diet culture, is that dieting untethers us from our own bodies and that it forces us to listen to and place our perspective in this ideal image of ourselves and detach from what our body is saying. Whether our body is hungry, whether our body needs to go to the bathroom, whether our body is sad and needs us to connect with it, because it’s grieving.
Especially right now, I don’t know when this is going to air but right now the Minneapolis uprising is happening and a lot of us are untethering from our bodies because of how sad it is to be surviving white supremacy at this time, all while a global pandemic is happening. You and I are based in the Northeast and we’re very close to New York where it’s just pure devastation. What we have to do in growing into and healing that childhood harm and growing into our integrated adult selves, where we integrate our harmed child and hopefully our adult parts that want to heal and take care of and protect those child parts.
When we’re doing that integrative work, it does require us to be able to reconnect to our bodies and reattach and hear what our body is telling us. So when our body feels like full and heavy and sad, letting ourselves have those moments to cry and be in the body. When our body is saying we haven’t had sex in a while and I need some sexual pleasure, I need some tension release, I need to experience the happy hormones that come from an orgasm. That requires a reattachment to the body and to be able to listen and hear it.
The same thing comes from hunger, we think about intuitive eating. We don’t deny ourselves, many of us don’t deny ourselves to go to the bathroom when we have to go use the restroom, but some folks who are more detached from their bodies actually do experience this unnecessary delay. I know I do it, where I’m like “Just one more email, I’ll respond to one more email, then I’ll go to the bathroom.” But why do we do that? Why do we not listen to the body when it needs something? It’s an interesting conversation to have even as adults.
Lu Uhrich: It really is. It’s honestly a conversation I just had last night with a client around the same thing. Recovering from an eating disorder and also seeing how it shows up in other spaces in life, and going to the bathroom was one of them. “I will finish this project, I will go to the bathroom later no matter what my body is saying.” Now inevitably eventually I always like to say you know eventually you’re going to get wet pants, if you do that for long enough. The same is true when your withholding food, we know how that experience goes eventually we’re going to have reactionary eating experiences or binges because of withholding and not listening to the sensations and responding lovingly to the sensations of our bodies, so I’m so glad that you brought that up.
I love, too, how you brought up this idea of pleasure and how necessary it is to embodiment, to being in our bodies. I often will recommend to my clients to have sensual experiences, and it doesn’t necessarily mean sexual – it can, that’s great. But anything where our senses are coming alive, so touch, sight, smell, sound. Where we’re really able to engage with the way that our body works and speaks to us and through us, and the way that we get to take in our environment and our relationships through it, can reconnect us with our bodies. So I love that you brought that up.
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Lu Uhrich: I do want to speak about, if you have anything to offer about the idea that because of this detachment from bodies that often happens to people who were put on diets as children or have otherwise learned that their body is wrong, because of fatphobia and shame. How that translates into sexual experiences in the bedroom, with things like consent, or contraception.
Sonalee Rashatwar: We actually see it globally, if someone is stuck in a restrictive mindset, and they are restricting, if a client of mine is restricting food and whether or not they are allowing themselves to have access to delicious food whenever they want. What they are often also experiencing is restriction in other areas too, so sometimes we’ll see it around other types of pleasure, such as sexual pleasure.
When someone internalises the system of fatphobia, which is sometimes the cause of this restrictive mindset, sometimes the origins is that I have ingested fatphobia into my body and I believe that the system to be true. I have been hypnotised by this lie that my body is somehow less worthy than a body that is thinner than my current body. So if I get stuck in this hypnosis, where I believe that my current body is not worthy then I will actually experience body shame. I’ll experience this like cognitive dysfunction that my body is somehow not worth the care and attention that it deserves if it were a thinner body.
What we have to do in that case is remember that we have to externalise the system of oppression that we have ingested and remember that fatphobia is a lie and we have to notice the ways that we restrict sexual pleasure. So if I have internalised that my body has less value, because I have internalised fatphobia and I experience body shame because I understand that my body intellectually, is not worth as much as a body that was thinner than it is right now.
I might actually have sex that I don’t really want to be having, or I might have sex that I want to have stopped because I’ll believe in scarcity and I’ll believe that there really is a dearth of people who would be attracted to my body because it has less worth. So any attraction that comes my way, I might assume that because it’s so scarce, I’ll have to hold it with two hands and grasp it as tightly as I can. I might put up with relationships that are not actually fulfilling because I won’t understand that I deserve better, that my body deserves better, that my body has an inherent value of worth.
I might have sex that isn’t as good enough because I’m afraid to take up space in the bedroom, I’m afraid to let my body have needs and to ask and advocate for those needs. So I might be less likely to ask for oral sex if I’m not getting it or I might be less likely to ask for, to try pegging, if that’s something that I’m interested in, or I might be less likely to even explore my sexual orientation, if I don’t believe that my body has inherent value.
We see that across the board within sex and we’ll see it within, whether someone gives themselves access to buy bigger clothes. Do you allow yourself the space that your body needs in order to live as fat a life as was meant for your body, as sexual a life as was meant for your happiness, not everyone enjoys sex, but those of us that do, it requires some practice and being able to take up the space that you need in order to ask for the kind of sex we want to have and ask for the kind of sex we don’t want to have to stop. It takes practice.
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Lu Uhrich: That’s such good stuff there, I appreciate you sharing all of this, so much. So then do you have any advice, I know this is like a long, probably much longer, people sit in sessions with you for therapy for this, but what is the advice on how to actually start allowing ourselves to have pleasure, actually start stepping into the fullness of a life when we felt like we couldn’t take up space and had to be smaller. What do you recommend to your clients or other individuals who may be listening who are identifying with this idea of not deserving pleasure, not deserving the clothes, not deserving to actually be who they are.
Sonalee Rashatwar: I feel like it requires that integration, right? We have to be able to integrate our wounded child, who is still stuck believing that they do not have inherent worth. There needs to be a parenting part of ourselves step in and affirm and say those things, literally out loud, like I will say out loud so that my subconscious, my child-self can hear, that I believe I need to take a break.
So I will say “Sonalee your tummy is rumbling because you are very hungry and it has been a few hours since you’ve eaten, so you need to take a break, step away from the computer and go make some lunch.” So I will gently re-parent myself, I will gently offer myself the space, that I’ll need to put myself to bed on time. I know my sleep schedule is completely messed up because of the pandemic, on a good week I’m putting myself to bed at like 1o, 11 o’clock so that I can gently lull to sleep by midnight. I’m a night-owl so that’s pretty good for me.
That re-parenting work really does require us to become the older sibling, the care giver, the parent that we didn’t really have, just to fill in those gaps. It comes with when people ask me “how do I even unlearn internalised fatphobia?” I tell them that there’s no quick fix to it, it literally requires you to read literature from fat activists and to notice the small places throughout our lives where we idealise thinness and demonise fatness, and then interrogate those moments. When we notice “Oh I really only follow celebrities who are really muscular and masculine and conventionally attractive, I wonder why that is? They’re usually light skinned, that feels significant for me to analyse.”
We only will notice, as we’re unlearning fatphobia, where we demonise fatness, if we’re looking at it critically, it requires some introspection.
Lu Uhrich: The truth is it’s not so much an unlearning as learning something else, because if we try to unlearn something and put nothing in it’s place that’s really hard. But if we begin like you said to learn more, to create a visual space where we’re looking at a range of bodies and races and ability statuses and health statuses. If we’re learning something new, over time it can push out as we’re doing the work what else we’ve learned, but unlearning on its own is kind of useless.
Sonalee Rashatwar: You’re so right, you have to replace it was something, so what I’m going to replace it with is the vast body of knowledge that was created by fat activists and folks who intersect their conversations around social justice with body liberation and black liberation and Palestinian liberation, and those are the ways that I’m re-learning. By deleting the malware and inserting the better knowledge that I want to understand my body within.
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Lu Uhrich: That’s so good, I want to flip the conversation a little bit.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Let’s do it.
Lu Uhrich: We’re still going to talk about sex, because you have a video that we’re going to link in the show notes because I thought it was just, I needed that wisdom. It was very educating for me and I’m sure it will be for so many of our guests. It was around the idea of sexual preference as a form of fatphobia, so this idea to just say, and the reason I say we’re flipping the script a little bit is that now that instead of talking about as an individual in a larger body, let’s talk about individuals that aren’t in larger bodies and maybe some who are, who just say they are not attracted to people who are fat. What does that actually really mean? Because you say in this video, and I’d love if maybe we could get a small download or a preview for the people who are listening to us hear on Real Health Radio, you say its actually not just a preference, its fatphobic. I’d love to talk about that a little bit more because I find it such a fascinating topic.
Sonalee Rashatwar: I think its so interesting, that somehow, you know if the majority of the population of the US is fat, and you’re somehow not attracted to the majority of people. It makes me wonder what’s really being fetishised here, it really sounds like thinness is being fetishised, because what we have is a conditioned understanding of what is attractive and then, not really looking at it critically and understanding how over decades of time our attraction has been moulded and influenced by media, by fatphobic weight science, by bullying if we experienced bullying as chubby or fat kids.
We learn over time that who we are attracted to, who we parent with, should we ever pair up and partner up, or get married as we grow into adulthood, our partner and who we choose says a lot about our desirability and we choose partners based on their sexual desirability within the larger society and there are some people who are considered more desirable because they look like they pass as upperclass. They look lighter in skin colour, they have less textured hair, they have clearer and “good” skin, they look like someone who is thinner or has “fat in the right places”. It’s actually our desirability that determines whether or not someone is going to be sexually attracted to us and our desirability is informed by how well you conform to mainstream, stereotypical, often white supremacist and European beauty standards. And thinness is one of them.
Lu Uhrich: Right, and it’s sort of this idea, I like to explain it to clients when we’re doing this work as think about how we view fashion over the years, it’s very much dictated by culture. At one time a certain type of fashion is in, a certain type of jean, bellbottoms were in at one time, then bootcut. Now it’s, I don’t even know what it is anymore, high waisted? I’ve been wearing leggings a lot, we’re still in coronavirus quarantine here.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Leggings is better than me. I’m no pants, team no pants over here.
Lu Uhrich: Sometimes I’m no pants yeah, but you and I are both still sheltering in place, so all I’m saying is jeans are not happening and that’s fine by me. So Im not really sure what’s in right now but I know that jean styles as well as shoe styles and hair styles and so many other fashion ideas shift over time because we’re told what to like, what’s good, what’s desirable.
That’s exactly what you’re saying here, this idea that culturally we’re told whats desirable and that is in enough itself, these fatphobic ideals then trickling into our sexual preferences and our romantic preferences for the partners that we choose, which can be an assault to people when they think about it but its worth analysing within ourselves, so I definitely am going to link to that YouTube video because I think there’s a lot for the audience to listen to that we may not be able to hit on today. I do appreciate you giving us a little preview.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Thank you. Desire mapping is that concept that if someone were to want to analyse who’s in our lives and why they’re in our life and how desirability politics play into that. Desire mapping is what we would do if we were to look at our dating records and say “hmm I really haven’t dated anyone who is fat and so what does that say about my dating preferences, are they informed by fatphobia?” And if we haven’t dated anyone fat or we haven’t been attracted to anyone fat there is a high chance that our dating preferences have been influenced by fatphobia.
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Lu Uhrich: That isn’t just happening in sexual spaces, so it’s also happening in spaces where maybe if you are a hairdresser or somebody who does manicures, then the amount of the time you’re touching your clientele based on how desirable they are according to beauty standards, right?
Sonalee Rashatwar: Ah yes, so fat folks also experience a very high experience of touch deprivation, and sometimes this is self inflicted. So if I internalised fatphobia, I might believe that people are repulsed by my body, not just by the way it looks but also how it might feel. Which is actually quite sad because fat is so enjoyable to squeeze and touch. It is incredibly soft and that’s why we give such excellent hugs, and why children want to rest and nap on our bodies. We are very comfortable fat bodies.
When I internalise fatphobia, I might be less likely to ask for the touch that I need from friends, whether that’s cuddling or hugs or face caresses, or putting oil in each others hair, of course these are pre-pandemic examples. A lot of times for me as a touch deprived fat person. I know folks can’t see me but I’m a super fat person, on the fat spectrum, that means that I’m on the farther end of the fat spectrum, I’m closer to infinifat.
For a really long time what I’ve had to do is pay for the kind of touch that I’ve needed and that really rehabilitated my touch starvation because it moved me out of a place, I really need to be to have to pay for that touch, in order to learn how to receive touch.
Because I was so not in practice, my family is not a touchy feely family. That doesn’t mean I don’t love hugs, I’ve always loved and needed touch, but my family doesn’t really give touch in that way that I needed. So I’ve had to ask for that touch from my siblings and my cousins especially, or my parents. Receiving massages, paying for therapeutic massage, paying for reiki, paying for chiropractic care has been exceptional in me practicing, not convulsing or like recoiling at someone touching, lovingly and gently at my body. That took practice to get there.
Lu Uhrich: Because the idea is that your body isn’t worthy of touch based on your history?
Sonalee Rashatwar: Right, just even that I displace my own perspective into the touchers body and that I imagine my body as so repulsive that the person touching my body, doesn’t even want to be doing it. It took a lot of practice to be able to quiet those really judgmental fatphobic inner thoughts. To be able believe that after the 30th massage that, no, this is person is not repulsed by my body, that they are massaging so tenderly and gently and they are talking to me while the massage is happening and they are talking to me in a tender, gentle voice, that maybe I do deserve this and that maybe those thoughts are not true. So it took time to have those thoughts quiet.
Lu Uhrich: So I hear you recommending those sorts of experiences for people who do have that skin hunger.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Absolutely. Pedicures, manicures, massages, yes. We need touch and if you’ve got to pay for it, there’s no shame in it. Sex workers, sex surrogates, absolutely, no shame in it at all. If we’ve got to pay for it, we still need it.
Lu Uhrich: That’s true. What about the people who are doing that work. I’m sure not all are created equal, right? So there’s some people who are going to give you the full experience, and there are people, practitioners, people in these work spaces who wouldn’t. How do you determine that you’re safe?
Sonalee Rashatwar: I am always listening to my body and because I experienced my first incidences of sexual trauma really early, as a young kid, and so that caused me for a long time to dislodge my awareness away from my body and detach. So coming back to my body required a lot of realigning with my intuition and so as an adult, I really listened to what my gut was saying. So even when doing consults with potential clients, I really listen to my body. If my body is getting an idea that I don’t know if we’re a great fit, or i don’t know if we’re a perfect fit, I listen to that gut signal. So even when I’m picking practitioners, whether they’re massage therapists, or I’m going to a nail salon, if i’m not having a good pedicure, if it’s not enjoyable, if i’m not getting tender touch, I’m not going to go back. Or I’m going to ask for a different tech, or i’m going to ask my massage therapist questions before I get there, I’m going to ask them whether they have practised working on fat bodies, whether they have the kind of equipment that I would need, because massage tables are also a little small for fat bodies and so what I’ve experienced are my arms rolling off the table and having to hang off the edge of the massage bed, which isn’t very comfortable if I’m going to have an hour and a half massage and my fingertips are losing circulation. So i’ll ask in advance and I’ll ask if they’ve got an extra wide massage table. And i’ll ask “what are your practices around body positivity”? If i’m getting good answers then that’s someone I’m going to go and seek services from.
Lu Uhrich: Thanks for sharing that.
00:42:02
Lu Uhrich: Sonalee, I know we are skimming the surface of all the many things we want to talk about but I want to be conscious of time, so the one thing that I really want to touch on because I’m a super huge fan of analogies and you have this beautiful analogy of the body being an heirloom, so maybe we wrap up this conversation and hopefully can have another conversation soon where we can continue, but could you explain to the listeners, this idea of the body being an heirloom and what that means and how that can be a powerful idea in their life?
Sonalee Rashatwar: It is one of my favourite analogies, I especially use it in my work with colonised people, folks who have experienced racialisation, who moved to the world as immigrants, especially in places like the US where we’ve been taught that through the BMI that there’s one standard body type. And any body type that exists that is larger than that, doesn’t fit the standard and is by definition obese and again, that’s not a word that I use, but I use it here only educationally here to point out that it is used to harm the body and frame the fat body as abnormal or inhuman. The BMI was created by a white man in Belgium and it was never created in order to be used as a universalised metric in order to measure the healthiness of bodies. But somehow today, especially today in places like the US it’s used universally in medical systems to tell us whether our bodies are too big. And it’s especially uncomfortable for folks who come from different places in the world. My family is from India and when I think about intergenerational trauma you know, I remember that I was a little egg in my Mum’s body when my Mum was a little egg in my Grandmother. And so that means I spent some time in my Grandmothers body while she was surviving partition and while she was surviving British colonialism and she was surviving migration to the US in the 60’s and 70’s in the South on very little money on my Grandfathers professor salary with 4 children and my Grandfather would have to sell bibles door to door. And so when I look at my body, my fat body, my super duper fat body, I have to imagine that there might be good reasons why it exists, exactly as fat as it is. Because if genocide were to happen again, if colonialism were to happen in the way that it did in India, again, in South Asia, that maybe my fatness would be a protective factor. That maybe I could survive famine. Because both sides of my family, my Mum and Dad’s side, experienced food scarcity in really different ways, because of their different cast lineages. My Dad was one of ten children.
So when I think about food scarcity, I imagine that also my body is this fat because it also looks like other fat bodies in my family. I was taught about structural fatphobia by my fat parents, who knew that being fat was going to be harder. So when I look at my fat body with the kind of tender, protective nurturing eyes, that I wish an adult did when I was a kid, when I become that adult now, as an adult child looking at my own body with tender eyes, I have to remind myself that my body is an heirloom. My fat body is something that I’ve inherited. Even though I am the fattest person in my family. This is something that I tell myself. I tell myself that my body belongs, that if we were a collection of heirloom tomatoes, that my body would be fat like some of the other heirloom tomatoes in my family. I would never ever criticise any other heirloom that I inherited from my Mum.
My Mum’s got this 90’s Americana painted paper towel holder that you tack into the wall and it is so nostalgic of my childhood home that I told her “Mum that’s an heirloom and I want that heirloom”. She’s like “what, you want this dusty old thing?” and I’m like “yes, please put that in your will, I want that paper towel holder”. That paper towel holder when I look at it, I have such fond memories of my childhood, it’s really delicately painted light blue and there are a couple of scratches and dings in the paint, but never would I criticise those flaws, never would I look at a dent or a ding and say that those don’t belong there because that scarring is proof of resilience. So when I look at my fat body, I do not judge the ways that it grows. I see my body as something that is proof that my ancestral lineage survived and I would never criticise my body for how it looks in surviving this heinous, painful, traumatic, racist world. And I thank my body for having survived it and looking the way it does, because it is so beautiful to witness.
Lu Uhrich: Yes! This was the right way to end and this wonderful interview. I hope everyone listening can stop and think about their own bodies and the bodies of the people around them and go, you know what, there is a reason, there is a story, for this body being the way it is and can we give gratitude and appreciation for that? Not saying it’s easy, not saying it’s going to come swiftly, but if we can tell that story more and more, the easier and easier it’ll become to just really respect and give honour to our bodies.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Our body will take time to believe it. It needs to hear a new story, like you said, about relearning. It has to relearn a new narrative.
00:48:00
Lu Uhrich: What a beautiful way to end. Sonalee thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us on Real Health Radio.
Would you mind just letting the listeners know where they can find you if they want to hear more, because I know that I do.
Sonalee Rashatwar: Yes, absolutely. I also want to thank you, your questions are so thoughtful. You really took time to interview and do some background research and I really appreciate that and that’s why you have this beautiful interview. I had a great time on your show.
For folks that are interested in finding out more about that radical political educational content that I put out to the world, you can find me on Instagram and if you’d like to reach out to me for any other reason, you can always reach me at my website.
Lu Uhrich: Great. We’ll make sure all those links are in the show notes so listeners you can find them and reach Sonalee that way.
Sonalee thank you again for being here and I hope we can reconnect soon and hey, once this is all over, we don’t live so far apart, so hopefully one day we could even meet in person.
Sonalee Rashatwar: That would be lovely. Thank you so much for having me, I’ve had a really wonderful time.
Lu Uhrich: Me too, have a really great day.
That’s it for this weeks episode, I hope you enjoyed hearing from Sonalee as much as I did. Remember to check out the show notes if you want more of their words and wisdom in your life.
00:49:21
Lu Uhrich: Now before I say goodbye, I’ve got another personal recommendation to share. In keeping with the way we’ve been closing out all of our episodes, this time i’d like to recommend a book called Unashamed Musings of a Fat Black Muslim Woman by Leah Vernon.
I highly recommend you find this book and get it in your own hands, in whatever medium you prefer; audiobook, hardback, paperback (I don’t even know if she has a paperback to be honest). I have the hardback copy, it is so good. Leah is honest and refreshing and open and I think that she challenges all of us to be that way as well.
She has several intersections of oppression, as the title of her book conveys, she is fat, she is black, and she is a Muslim woman living in America. Her book almost reads as short stories, snippets of her life, chapter for chapter but it all comes together to tell this beautiful evolution of the author, of Leah, and I can’t recommend the book enough.
There’s this part in the book in the preface, so it totally reeled me in, I was sold, I wanted to read the rest. Leah talks about the first thing people see of her is her hijab and then her black face and then her obese body. Through all of her ups and downs in life, through everything she’s gone through, people have reduced her to one of those things. Being Muslim, being fat, being black. And she said she felt like she had almost two choices; to allow the world to dictate who she was, or to be herself.
And so the book is really this beautiful glimpse at Leah Vernon being and becoming herself and what that means and looks like and all of the victory and all of the mess and all of the highs and lows and everything in between that allowed her to fully show up as who she is. I’m a sucker for a good memoir, so I loved the book. I hope that you do too. But if you’re not into reading if you just want more of an introduction to Leah before diving into her book, you can find her on Instagram and follow her at lvernon2000. I always love her posts, her pictures are just magnificent and vibrant and beautiful and I think you’ll have a lot to learn there on Instagram.
That’s all for episode 205. Thank you for joining me today on Real Health Radio. Chris will be back next week with another great episode, until then, you can find us at Seven-health.com and the show notes for this episode can be found at seven-health.com/205
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