Fat is Not a Feeling: How to Identify What You’re Feeling in Eating Disorder Recovery
Written by ‘Ai Pono Hawaii Staff Writer
Many people, even those without eating disorders, will say: “I feel fat.” It’s usually uttered at times or events that involve food or body image - when someone may feel vulnerable. It’s sort of a catch-all for everything you’re really feeling at that moment, all wrapped up in a phrase that does not accurately describe what’s going on beneath the surface.
Let’s talk about how “feeling fat” developed and how to combat this inaccurate, harmful line of thinking. We’ll also talk about how to correctly identify your feelings. This will immensely help your recovery, because correctly identifying your emotions can help you to better react to them.
How “Fat” Became Associated with Emotions
It is absolutely no secret that “fat” has been both moralized and demonized in our diet-obsessed social climate. Nearly every interaction with the word is negative, “fat” being symbolic of lazy, disappointing, “out of control,” or “bad” in general. Being “thin,” however, is a positive, perceived as an amazing feat of “control” and “willpower.”
It’s natural, then, that the word “fat” is associated with negative feelings: Society is telling us that fat=bad. So, anytime you’re feeling “bad” in any way, it’s easy to replace it with “fat.” This is especially easy to do for people with bad body image or body dysmorphia.
Related: Learn what body dysmorphia is, and how to handle it, here.
This has been scientifically proven. In this study investigating the relation between fear of weight gain and emotions, it was found that anxiety and depression are strong predictors of “feeling fat.” Individuals of many sizes were included as subjects, and this result still held true. This supports the notion that “fat” is not about anything concrete. Rather, it’s about your perception of yourself and your underlying emotions whenever you claim to “feel fat.”
Thinking About Fat From a Common Sense Perspective
“Fat” as an adjective has been warped by society’s inherent fatphobia. But let’s discuss what fat actually is.
Fat is a specialized organ in the body known as adipose tissue, and is vital to human health and longevity. Fat cushions our organs and insulates us from the cold. It stores needed energy for our brains and bodies to function, and is relied upon when the body is low on carbohydrates. Fat also receives calories and releases them in a controlled fashion later on, according to what your body needs. Fat cells respond to and put out chemical signals and neural messages. This helps fine tune the body’s immune system and regulate metabolism.
Fat is literally just another part of your body. It’s the same as every other part. And no one ever says: “I feel hair today,” or, “I feel kidneys today.”
Why It’s Important to Correctly Identify Emotions
Emotions fuel everything we do and are very complex.
Emotions are defined as “an episode of interrelated, synchronized changes in the state of all or most of the five organismic subsystems in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event as relevant to major concerns of the organism” (Emotion Researcher, 2015). This means that an emotion stems is triggered by something that happens, either outwardly, or a thought inside your mind. They exist as a way to survive, to signal what’s going on and how to react to a trigger.
Correctly identifying emotions helps to uncover the root of an issue.
As an example, an individual in treatment for eating disordered behaviors, looks into the mirror and decidedly says: “I feel fat.” But after doing some emotional digging, she realizes that she doesn’t feel fat at the moment, she actually feels sad and anxious.
She can now ask why those emotions are coming up. She realizes that she feels this way because she thinks she is inadequate. She spends a lot of time comparing herself to others, and doesn’t feel she is as worthy as them. The emotions tied to these thoughts surface when she is looking in the mirror. But she, and her clinician, only learned this because they recognized that fat is not a feeling, and that there is something more going on beneath the surface.
Correctly identifying an emotion associated with a situation helps us to better react to it.
Emotions always come with reactions. Emotions are only there so that we can appropriately assess and react to situations, or triggers. At their roots, emotions are really just for survival. We feel fear, so we run. We feel happy, so we do our best to keep it that way.
We experience emotional reactions in five main ways:
Emotion component: We just recognize the emotion, monitoring our own internal experience of it.
Action tendency component: Once an emotion is identified, we may spring into action.
Appraisal component: We cognitively, intentionally analyze our emotions and the event (internal or external) that caused it. We notice how that event affects our well being.
Motor component: How we communicate with our bodies what we are experiencing (i.e. facial expression, body movement, etc.).
Physiological component: How our physical bodies react to emotions (i.e. a rush of adrenaline, sweating, crying, etc.).
Emotional reactions are, for the most part, very useful. For example, most people are a little afraid of walking alone at night. This causes a physiological reaction — adrenaline pumps through your body, your senses are heightened, and your body is prepared to react to danger.
But consider when you don’t properly assess a situation, when you feel emotions that don’t quite line up with what’s going on around you. If you felt like this during the day as well as at night, you’d never feel relaxed. This is largely what occurs with PTSD. You’d be constantly under stress, even when you don’t need to be, so the reaction in your body is no longer helpful.
The same thing happens when looking into a mirror and “feeling fat.” You feel a negative emotion, and instead of recognizing what you actually feel (and why), you associate the negative feeling with your body, and your reaction is focused on your body. In this instance, you might engage in eating disordered behaviors, such as restriction or exercise.
If you recognize your emotions, and you recognize that you’re not having them because of your body but because of other factors, you can learn to react differently to seeing yourself in the mirror. You can react to your emotions by assessing the situation, asking what it’s doing for you, and just sitting with the negative feelings without feeling the urge to engage in any behaviors.
How to Identify and Verbalize Your True Emotions
Did you know that you can experience 34,000 emotions? The idea of trying to pick a few out of that many seems daunting, but lucky for us, Dr. Robert Plutchik, an American psychologist, made it a little easier for us. He proposes that there are eight primary emotions, each polar opposites of each other.
These emotions are:
Joy and sadness
Acceptance and disgust
Fear and anger
Surprise and anticipation
From there, psychologists have created the emotion wheel. It shows these emotions to varying degrees. For example, anger is a primary emotion. Secondary emotions are annoyance and rage. Some secondary emotions are a blend of two primary ones.
It’s almost like a color wheel — it’s even color coded.
Clinicians often give patients an emotion wheel to better visualize and verbalize their emotions. Once you correctly identify your emotions associated with a trigger, you can start to ask yourself why you’re having those emotions at that time, to find the function of them.
Ask yourself questions relating to whatever emotions you’re feeling, such as:
Am I anxious about something right now?
Do I feel out of control in some aspect of my life right now?
Am I uncomfortable about something right now?
Answering these questions can help you work through and cope with those causes. It can also help you reframe your emotional reactions to triggers. You can learn to react by just sitting with uncomfortable emotions, and assessing why they’re there, instead of having a knee jerk reaction and engaging in disordered behaviors.
“Fat” is not a feeling, just a part of the body.
Practice mindfulness in moments when you think you “feel fat.” Uncovering your real feelings will help you along the way in the path to a full and lasting recovery.
If you or a loved one is suffering from an eating disorder, take the first step today and talk to someone about recovery or simply learn more about the holistic eating disorder recovery programs we offer.