I Hate People Who Take the Elevator

A friend of mine made an off handed comment the other day. “I’m sick of lazy people taking the elevator!” To say that I was taken aback would be an understatement. I pushed him a bit, and he simply said he hated that everyone did it, that it was an engrained social structure, that obesity was an epidemic, and that it was a waste of energy.

I think it’s time to review both fatphobia and ableism 101, as well as how they’re intertwined. The first thing to note about something like whether other people take the elevator or not is that it’s none of your damned business because you know nothing about this random other person and their behavior isn’t hurting you (we’ll get to questions of obesity soon). There is nothing morally wrong about not wanting to be active right this instant. And in many cases, someone might be incapable of taking the stairs: some people have invisible diseases, and your assumption that everyone should take the stairs is part of the underlying cultural norm that other people’s bodies belong to us and they all have to be able and thin or they are doing something wrong. They are causing harm.

There are a lot of things wrong with the assumption that you should be able to tell someone else what to do with their body or that it’s any of your business what someone else does with their body, whether that’s how/when they have sex or their choice of diet and exercise. The moment we start deciding what the correct way for another person to treat their body is, the moment we’ve decided to try to take away their basic autonomy.  Everyone has the right to decide what to eat, how to move, where to go, and when you assume that their actions are fair game for your shame and criticism because you don’t like what someone else is doing, you’re implying that someone else’s body is public property. And that’s just really uncool.

There is nothing wrong with being fat. Spoiler alert: it is entirely possible to be healthy, happy, and active while being fat. The Health at Every Size movement has a great deal of information on this, but suffice it to say that genetics plays a huge role in your size, and that body composition makes a large difference. The “obesity epidemic” is based on the BMI scale, which does not take body composition into account at all and reduces many complex health problems down to “you’re a fatty, lose some weight,”. As this article points out, fat people often have to fight for the right to be able to eat food. Relatedly, they also often have to fight for the right to be inactive or rest. Any time we see an overweight person sitting down or watching TV or taking the elevator, we assume they’re lazy. We don’t do that with thin people, even though there’s not any law that says the thin person is more active than the fat person.

We tend to only accept a fat person as a “good fatty” if we see that they only eat salad or take the stairs every time. Fat people are by default considered unhealthy and lazy until they have proven that they do all the correct healthy behaviors and are still fat. Many people assume that if a fat person is engaging in any “unhealthy” behaviors, those behaviors are what has caused them to be fat (and thus a drain on society because all fat people are the worst ya know). Never mind that some people are fat because of disabilities.  Never mind that you literally have no idea whether or not that individual just came from the gym or not. Never mind that you have literally no evidence that taking the elevator is what caused this person to be overweight or whether or not this overweight person is unhealthy. Never mind that some people physically can’t take the stairs, even if they look able bodied.

It’s none of your damned business what anyone does with their body, what food they eat, and how they exercise. Bodies are complicated, and unless you’re someone’s doctor or intimately close to them, you don’t know even close to enough to make a judgment about whether or not they’re lazy. A lot of this is straight out concern trolling, and there’s good evidence that it’s not really about health in the fact that I don’t see any of these concern trolls telling me that they have a right to tell me to eat more and deal with my eating disorder because insurance! Public health! You need to be able to work! They’re not concerned with the state of my health and body because I am thin and able bodied and sometimes I rock climb and swing dance for hours. You cannot read someone’s health off of their body.

Maybe taking the elevator is an engrained social structure, and maybe we could do more to promote exercise. But any fat person or depressed person or sick person can tell you that they’ve heard it. They’ve heard it a thousand times. One more piece of shame is not going to help (it may actually make people fatter). There are more positive and more helpful ways to promote movement. I take the elevator because the stairs take longer and are boring. I’d rather exercise in a more fun fashion. So maybe that “just take the stairs” approach is alienating some people, and is actually an excuse to complain about fat, lazy people.

Yes, maybe it is more energy efficient to take the stairs. But we all make trade offs in our lives in terms of values and priorities, and how we treat our bodies is incredibly personal. If it’s so important to you, then take the stairs yourself, but stop haranguing others when you have no idea what their lives are like.

 

DSM V and Diagnostic Woes

THE NEW DSM IS OUT AND I HAVE A COPY OF IT! For those who don’t know, the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, essentially the bible of Psychology. It’s what’s most often used to diagnose someone, and if you want insurance to cover treatment you generally need a DSM diagnosis. They’ve been in the midst of some pretty contentious updates for a long time, but I now have my hands on the brand new copy of the DSM-V.  Mmmm, tasty.

 

Of course when I got ahold of it I spent a good half an hour paging through and self-diagnosing, but after that diversion, I moved over to the eating disorder section to see what updates had actually gotten through and how they had phrased them. I was happy to see the inclusion of Binge Eating Disorder, as well as Night Eating Disorder and Purging Disorder as new categories in the manual, but when I looked back at our old favorite anorexia I was…annoyed.

 

One of the most contentious points in the DSM IV was the weight criterion for anorexia. While this has been removed from the current version and replaced with the following: “a significantly low body weight in the context of age, sex, developmental trajectory and physical health. Significantly low weight is defined as a weight that is less than minimally normal, or, for children and adolescents, less than that minimally expected,” there is a scale to determine the severity of the disorder. This scale is entirely based on BMI, with the caveat that a psychologist can make adjustments if necessary. And I must say that the numbers listed on that scale are INSANE. To be considered a moderate case, your BMI needs to be between 16 and 17.  My BMI has never been even close to that. While I generally dislike numbers, and I am going to insert a HUGE TRIGGER WARNING right here, when I was at my worst I literally would go for a week without eating at times. I never ate two days in a row. I was seriously ill. However my body weight never dropped into what would be considered technically underweight by the BMI scale. I would have been considered a mild case, even if I had gained the diagnosis at all (as it stands I was diagnosed with EDNOS because of the weight criterion in the DSM IV).

 

We have gone over and over the harms that come from including weight as a criterion of an eating disorder. First and foremost, it keeps people from getting treatment until they’re already too sick, which is unhelpful to everyone involved. It ignores how different bodies react to starvation. It ignores that people’s weight can fluctuate throughout the disorder or treatment. It’s simply unrealistic. But more than anything, I feel like it shames those people who never get that diagnosis. It tells them that their pain and suffering wasn’t real unless they hit the magical BMI of 17 marker. And I am so disappointed in the writers of the DSM that they would ignore all of the feedback they’ve received from the eating disorder community and still include BMI criteria for anorexia. I’m so disappointed that after all the research and stories and experiences that people have shared that illustrate that an eating disorder is not about weight, we still have to reduce to such. And most of all I’m disappointed that until the next rewrite, more individuals will be stuck trying to navigate a system that reduces them to their weight, even as it’s trying to convince them that they should stop doing that.