A curious ‘side-effect’ of creating ‘A Life in a Day’ experiences, is that we sometimes recognise something of ourselves in the stories we hear from people living with the featured condition.
During the development of our new Living with obesity experience, the intimate interviews we conducted to better understand lives we have not lived, described many of the physical impacts and barriers that people who live in larger bodies face every day.
Such as being refused emergency treatment by a dentist because they feared the patient’s weight might break their expensive chair. Or being left bruised for weeks after squeezing between the armrests of the only seat available for a lengthy meeting. Or needing treatment for a flaccid skin fold infection following bariatric surgery.
But the most compelling testimony from all of our contributors described how living with obesity made them feel. Each explaining how continual microaggressions and bias against how they look impacts their emotional wellbeing…
This “big injury” was identified by all those interviewed as a persistent feeling of shame. Of living with the constant expectation of being instantly judged whenever they board a bus or an airplane, take a seat in a meeting room, order food in a restaurant, or go out for groceries.
It was this universal experience of self-blame and erosion of self-worth that sparked the aforementioned self-reflection.
I, like many of the interviewees, grew from being a chubby kid into a body-conscious teen, who navigated an adulthood spent on the ‘wrong’ side of a BMI chart with smile-my-way-through-it faux-positivity and self-deprecation.
Being overweight rather than clinically obese, I have never experienced the more severe and challenging impacts our collaborators have faced, but by recognising some of the body-image related self-doubt in myself, it was possible to begin to understand the true weight of the psychological impact people living with obesity experience for most of their lives.
The aim of A Life in a Day experiences is to change the conversation around the experience of living with a particular condition. And maybe, just maybe, by walking in the shoes of a person living with obesity we can learn to be less judgemental of people living in larger bodies as a result of see a reflection of them in ourselves.
If you would like to experience some of the true impacts of living with obesity please contact us.
