The Plight of ‘The Fat Yoga Teacher’

I think this was a very interesting, and not insulting!, thing to do. If you are offended by this.. then you need to look at why you feel that way? Where are those negative feelings coming from? Why does this upset you?

as a naturally thin yoga teacher, who has only been more than 125lbs twice, thats while pregnant. I struggle with knowing how it feels to have extra weight on. I wish i could know how it feels to do the poses for people who are much bigger than me. I have had open discussion with bigger students and they say its like doing it with a tire around their waist. something Ive only known when pregnant.
Maybe if i knew more of how it feels to be a bigger person, I would have more knowledge to teach bigger people. Same with people with injures.. I dont always know how it feels for them and I always wish i did.
I think it is a very interesting thing shes done. to see how it feels.
I dont know what it is like to have a lot of weight and being unable to lose it. I am on the other end, I cannot seem to gain weight, (and believe me! being as thin as i am, there are just as many or more! stigmas attached to being this thin!).. I would have to eat a lot of food everyday to gain 40lbs! I cant even imagine being able to!

I think if someone changes their eating habits and their exercise levels. then yes, they will either gain or lose weight. (im sure if I ate a lot of crap, and snuck in bars and fastfood everyday I would gian weight.)

I went on a few different tangents there lol

Wow. Is that woman really even serious? As “unyogic” as it sounds, I kind of want to smack the crap out of her for being such a condescending idiot. I’m a chubby yoga teacher who has NEVER ever worried about how my students perceive me, and in fact, my outward appearance (as well as my sassy personality and commitment to keepin’ it real, I’m sure) has actually drawn students to my classes who might not otherwise have tried (or stuck with) yoga because I look like them. Sure, I don’t fit the teacher “type”, but I don’t want to, either because that’s not me. I come from sturdy stock; I’ll always have some chub. And I’m so fine with it.

In the “made for TV movie” version of this story, she’d have found that people treated her badly and poked fun at her and she’d have found one guy who liked her just as she was and then she’d lose the weight and they’d live happily ever after. In the real version of the story, she found out that the only person treating her badly was herself. She said she did this “to prove to her friend that it’s not all about what you look like but what’s inside that counts” and what she found was that she had a lot of insecurities on the inside.

I think this shows that we all have the bad self talk within us. For some of us, it’s weight that gives it a voice (like with Hall) and others can be overweight and not have it.

I question her reasoning for doing something so drastic, but I’m not insulted by it (as an overweight person). I don’t think what she had to say means that all overweight people have this negative self-experience. It’s just what her experience was.

(From her blog) My most shocking discovery through the process is that I’m afraid of not being loved. I noticed the self-talk was that my beauty is only on the surface. I feared no man would want me this way and that I would die alone, probably from choking on a potato chip. There was a war going on inside of me and neither side was winning. Once I unraveled the fears and self-assaulting language as irrational, they no longer had power over me and I began to relax into my new found “goods”.

Her experience is hers alone and to say she is somehow less of a yoga teacher for truly walking in someone else’s shoes and owning her emotions is sad. How we each feel at whatever weight we are is perfectly okay. Saying that her feeling bad is somehow saying that all overweight people feel bad is just a poor argument to make. That would be like me saying I feel bad after I eat 2 slices of deep dish pizza knowing that it’s not healthy for me so everyone who eats deep dish pizza feels badly afterwards.

Let us all not forget the Yoga Sutra ‘Satya’ or non-judgement! Yoga is after all more than just a series of physical poses.

Most often times weight is a side effect of deeply seated emotional, environmental, and/or biochemical challenges, and so by looking solely at the weight as being “what makes someone fat,” so many dimensions are missing. Therefore, one cannot “know” what it’s like to be overweight just because they choose to take on extra weight as an experiment. Patterns that have been ingrained sometimes since birth and are continually conditioned by various often subconscious triggers, are what’s more likely to be at the root. If you want to truly understand a result, you have to understand it’s cause (which is not exclusive to a behavior of eating “bad” food). This “experiment” may have been approached with a true desire to learn and understand, but coming up with the same result leaves out an entire organic process that she can never know. For example, can a man who “dresses up” like a woman and takes on the socially approved norms and ideas for what a woman is supposed to look like and how a woman is supposed to behave, truly know what it is like to be a woman? Do outside appearances and assumed mannerisms make him really understand women?

I am 45 years old. I have a mostly negative relationship with food due to lifelong issues with digestive disorders that I still have no cause for. I am overweight. Twice and mostly by accident I lost 30 pounds, both times during difficult periods in my life. Ultimately, I gained some or most of it back.
How I wish I could simply gain or lose weight as “an experiment” or art project or whatever she’s calling it. I can’t. Not easily. Not like this.
While this young woman might think her foray into fatness will somehow help sort out some situation in the future, the only impact I see it having right now is to all but make fun of those of us who have difficulty where our weight is concerned. Where is her compassion for those struggling?
I was once a regular practitioner of Yoga and am missing it terribly. Ironically it was this article that made me realize I’m avoiding going to classes because I’m not whippet-thin. I feel like the elephant in the room when I go and the absence of my former teacher, a beautifully curvaceous woman who dubbed her technique “Yummy Yoga” hasn’t helped. I miss doing Yoga with someone who “gets it.”
This chick doesn’t.

I personally wouldn’t try to gain weight on purpose….unless I was Robert DeNiro trying to method act Al Capone….At 43, it is difficult enough to maintain weight, fitness, etc. That is the luxury of the naturally slim and those of high metabolism.

It seems a flighty thing to do, though she might have thought her intentions were deep. It is somewhat condescending. Perhaps, she learned something from it.

We all have different bodies and body types and many are in between the “skinny” and the “fat” types or variations on them both. The paradigms our society and culture present can be oppressive, whether one is a yoga teacher or not.

I practiced yoga for 10 years, while I was not stick-thin by any stretch of the imagination and would never have the body of a swimsuit model, I was strong and healthy and at peace with what I looked like.
I attended a regular yoga studio for 3 years and developed close, platonic friendships with some of the instructors there and even went on a few yoga retreats with one of them. They never commented on my looks or body type and always helped me with adjustments when I needed it without making me feel any less capable or able bodied.

All that came to a grinding halt one day when one of those instructors, while drunk, assaulted me in a foreign country. I let them know that whatever friendship there may have been was now over and I looked for ways to go to another yoga studio so that I did not have to see this person again. I guess that instructor also ticked off other patrons because a few months later, someone broke into their email (and his ex-girlfriend’s) and posted their emails on an anonymous blog and it came out that he referred to me as a “pudgy little troll” and some other girl as a “despicable bitch”.
This was a yoga instructor with over 10 years experience, quoted the Gitas, was super-vegan, who until then I thought was a pretty good instructor and was supposed to be living his life according to the rules of ahimsa. Well the blinders came off, that’s for sure. Being publicly called a pudgy troll publicly with nary a defensive response from anyone else in the “yoga community” was a serious blow to me and my self-confidence to say the least. I realized that there really is no real “yoga community” at all but rather a bunch of people who are all trying to further their own interests and lifestyles. I got depressed and stopped going to yoga classes. No one chastised that yoga instructor and in fact he now instructs at high end spas and hangs out with socialites and media personalities.
So for all this talk about fat-shaming, body acceptance, yoga community, and ethics, I know from first-hand experience how shallow and empty and morally vacuous the group really is, despite all the talk.

I can not believe so many people are criticizing this lady. I think it is a great thing she did. Aside from actors/actresses who get paid millions to gain weight for roles, very few thin people would do this. It’s brave and compassionate.
I am disgusted at the commenters comparing this to race. No one can change their race or ethnicity or gender, but we are all capable of changing our bodies on some level and feeling what is it like to be thinner or thicker. I am currently 120 pounds. However, from 18-24 I was bulimic and my weight ranged from 130-155. Even 25-30 pounds on a person of small stature is enough to have made me feel like I was ‘heavy’. It didn’t feel natural on me, and obviously I had a lot of internal turmoil aside from my weight.
Having finally found a balance and found a place where I can love myself, my weight never fluctuates and I eat what I want, when I want.
You don’t have to be a heavy person your entire life to understand the pain of weight issues. When that weight is on it feels like it will be there forever. It may not be the same level of pain, but who honestly cares? That’s like telling me that my friend dying isn’t as important as your friend dying. Instead of being so cruel to one another can’t we applaud and be thankful for each others attempts to understand one another?
She probably had a lot of internal issues come up, not necessarily because it was specifically weight change, but more so, because it was change. Period. Humans, by nature, do not like change. 40 pounds in 4 months is quite significant and hard on the body and mind.

I’m a large lady currently around size 18 (Aussie sizing) and one of the reasons why I stopped going to yoga classes (besides the cost factor) was that I was getting too uncomfortable with being in a class full of skinny ladies talking about how you should love you for you.
I would really love the chance to go to a yoga class with a teacher who is larger simply because the level of understanding is a little better. I’m very flexible and have been for pretty much my whole life but I can’t lay my head on my knees in a seated forward bend because my stomach gets in the way, so teachers pass this off as me being inflexible and they seem unable to grasp the concept that my body is actually preventing me from getting deeper in the pose.
I have to say that I find this sort of ‘experimenting’ extremely condescending, for most of my life I’ve been a vegetarian and roughly 3 years ago I had to stop eating lactose and other high fat foods but despite this even more healthy diet I’ve not lost any weight. It ticks me off that these people who have been naturally skinny for most of their lives think that if they gain a bit of weight and shed it again they’ll be able to connect with larger people but it doesn’t work like that. It’s easy for them to go back to their skinny body because that’s what their body is use to, whereas people like me who’ve been large for most of their life really struggle to get rid of weight even when eating right and exercising. I often think of this sort of thing as a pathetic publicity stunt and I can find it quite insulting.

Wow, this is so interesting to me. I conducted a similar “experiment” completely involuntarily. Several years ago I became very very ill with an autoimmune disease and like this woman, gained 40 pounds in the case of 4 months. I had to wear that weight around for another 6 months until I found a doctor who put me on the correct medication and the weight came off as mysteriously as it appeared. Like her, I was doing yoga the entire time– unlike her, I was *not* eating candy bars. In fact, I was so sick I could barely eat at all. My body had gone completely haywire. While I have “traveled” back to the land of size 6 privilege, the experience left me with a constant awareness that if I go off my medication or become more severely ill again, anything could happen with my weight. I am now a guest in my old home country, subject to deportation at any time. 😉 It is NOT in my control even with all the fancy diets in the world.

Even before this happened to me, I tried my best not to make assumptions about people’s weight– a fat person might overeat, or they might be perfectly healthy and happy, or they might be terribly ill as I was. A thin person might be naturally thin, or anorexic, or they might be undergoing chemotherapy. You simply have no idea what they are doing or feeling. Now I know it on the deepest possible level. I was amazed by how people treated me — doctors now listen to me politely again (since I am thin, I guess) but when I was heavy, they assumed I was lying about my eating and exercise- I have the medical records to prove it! Most men ignored me of course. People criticized what I ate, which was amazing when I could barely eat anything– the worst was someone who asked if I was going to “eat myself to death.” Yes, people say things like that! And I remember the struggles of finding clothes or bruising my hips on airplane armrests, etc., aching feet and ankles. All that with only 40 lbs! I never got bigger than a (badly distributed) size 12 and it was a misery, although of course I was ill as well. I wish she had simply focused on gaining grace and compassion from this and perhaps physical tips for her practice. But perhaps this could have been achieved simply by learning from heavier people and listening to them with empathy?

So making an attempt to understand what it’s like for overweight people is worse than making no attempt to (viscerally) understand that situation at all???

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with many posters who have said that she is a “fat tourist” and that she cannot possibly understand the plight of fat people in yoga because she is “privileged” enough to go back.

You’re right. She couldn’t.

However, gaining weight, along with open dialogue with overweight practitioners gives her SOME insight—at least more than she’d have by ONLY talking to other “fat” yogis. In fact, she says so herself, that she was surprised at how it affected her.

I know, I know, of course she felt like shit eating shitty food. As has been mentioned, that’s NOT the only way to being overweight, and commonly is not the primary factor (if it is a factor at all, which often it’s not)—but for someone who is genetically thinner, that’s how she had to do it. I did not at all get the impression that she’s suggesting that fat people are fat because they eat crap food. Maybe that’s because most people I’ve known who struggle with weight eat quite healthily. But clearly, aside from genetic or hormonal modification, eating crap foods was the way for her to get there.

HOW she did it aside, she gained further insight into HERSELF. That’s one of the ultimate goals of yoga, and we can all say, “oh, it doesn’t matter what size you are or how you look” but until we experience something different, we can never know how we really will feel.

True, as a “fat tourist” she cannot possibly know what it’s like to be you… or me… or anyone else. Can a privileged person understand the poverty of India, where people live in roadside shacks no higher than my knees? No. Will they have a better understanding of that reality, and therefore more compassion for it by being a tourist in India, rather just being told about it by people who have seen or lived it? Or more frivolously, can you appreciate the Majesty of the Grand Canyon from pictures and friends’ testimony, or going and seeing it yourself, even if only for a day? The latter, obviously. Will you understand the FULL majesty of the Grand Canyon from having visited it for a day? Well, no.

Ultimately, NOBODY can HAVE ANYBODY else’s experience. We all suffer. Some more than others. Some suffer physically, some mentally, some emotionally, some financially, some socially, some intellectually. Some suffer little in their lives, while others suffer from birth to death. It’s not a competition to crown the One Who Suffers Most.

Her ability to do a yo-yo experiment may be a problem of privilege, but how dare you try to take away someone’s attempt to step out of that reality to at least marginally experience another’s—especially with the intent of improving her teaching and ultimately furthering her practice in understanding herself?

on the fat/thin privilege thing:

I’ve been on both sides of this one, and neither are good. if one is too thin, then one is accused of eating disorders, if one is too fat, one still comes under a lot of scrutiny, is fat-shamed, and so forth.

what I want to know is why it is anyone’s effing business what we weigh. because whenever I’ve gained or lost weight, someone in my life has had something to say about it. they care more than I do, and I don’t know why. for me, my weight gain or loss has always been due to health issues, and I could really give a flip whether I’m “hot” or “anorexic” or “heavy” because I just want to feel okay. it’s not a cosmetic thing, and I sure as hell don’t give an flying eff whether some dude thinks I’m hot or not.

as to the chubby ladies on this board, I feel your pain, because I have been there, and done that; my mom would literally starve me growing up so that I would have a more “acceptable” weight; I got exercise equipment for my birthday, and then, when I began to waste away due to an autoimmune disease, crappy, fattening foods so that she wouldn’t have to feel threatened by me being “hotter” than her.

I want to know why the people in my life are so stupid and shallow that they are only concerned with how fat or thin I am at any given moment. we ladies are judged almost solely on how physically attractive we are, and this is so damaging. why are we hating on some woman because she is thin? let’s turn our focus to the oppressive patriarchal system which dictates that we are only so valuable as our “fuckability”.