Living without shame: how we can empower ourselves | Whitney Thore | TEDxGreensboro

How do we handle self-perception when our bodies don't match the ideal social image? The answer is to find a way to live without shame.

Whitney is a Greensboro native and a dancer whose viral video, "A Fat Girl Dancing," sparked a national conversation about body image. She has launched the No Body Shame Campaign - a national effort to help men and women of every variety live and love their lives without shame. She now has her own reality show, "My Big Fat Fabulous Life," (broadcast by the TLC network) that demonstrates her success in her own personal journey toward a positive self-image.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

You may have noticed by now

that I'm really fat.

And that's okay;

you wouldn't be the first.

Back in 1997, when I was in seventh grade,

I heard a question posed about me
in the locker room of my middle school.

I sat hidden in a bathroom stall,

hunched over, not wanting
to give myself away,

when I heard a girl ask,

"When was the last time
Whitney saw 90210?"

I was like more of
a Saved by the Bell girl myself,

and I'd actually never seen
an episode of 90210.

So I clenched my muscles and held my pee

and waited with bated breath
for the answer.

And when it came -

"When she stepped on the scale" -

the girls erupted into laughter,

and I felt the familiar sting
of embarrassment seeping into my cheeks.

It took me back to my fifth-grade year,
on the soccer field,

where the boys had taken to singing
a song about me called "Baby Beluga"

that ended with
"She's got a whale of a tail."

You might be picturing now
how fat I probably was.

It's easy to conjure up a mental image

of an awkward girl
spilling out of her shorts,

running up and down the sidelines
like, "Hey, I'm open!"

But if you have that mental image,

you would be wrong.

Because in 1995, when I was 10 years old,

I looked like this.

When I look at that picture now,

my heart aches

because when I was just
becoming aware that I had a body

and that other people
had opinions about my body,

I became a statistic

like eight out of ten 10-year-olds
who, today, are afraid of being fat.

10-year-olds!

That's a real statistic.

I bought the lie that diet culture
sold me when I was 10 years old

that told me if I am thin,
thinner, thin enough,

then I will be happy.

But at 10 years old,
I felt the furthest thing from happy.

And so the emotion that I most connected
with my body was shame.

After that,

shame followed me like a shadow.

And after the 90210 incident,

I knew I had to take action.

So I grabbed the handle
of my father's toothbrush

and shoved it down my throat
until I vomited.

And thus began my nearly lifelong battle
with eating disorders.

I continued to excel in school,
to play sports, to dance.

Shame and I won
lots of awards and trophies.

Sometimes, shame was like
a really overbearing adult

begging for a piggyback ride.

And other times,

shame trailed a few feet behind me,
dragging its leash

like a faithful dog
never leaving my sight.

By the time I was 18 years old, in 2002,
and becoming a young woman,

shame had solidified itself
as my most faithful friend.

It accompanied me
to every dance performance,

to every soccer tournament;

it was even there in the bathroom
with me at my prom

as I hunched over a toilet
and threw up my dinner

just minutes before being
crowned prom princess.

When I moved to college that fall,

I brought shame along into my dorm room,

and I noticed that my body was changing.

By the time I went home
for Christmas break,

I'd gained 50 pounds.

And I'm thinking, like,

"Okay, I'm an overachiever,

so clearly the "freshman 15"
is just not enough.

(Laughter)

I was getting mysterious bruises
all over my body, and I was like,

"Why am I bumping
into doorways and furniture?

When did I get so clumsy?"

But then I realized I wasn't clumsy:

my body was expanding so quickly

that I had lost all
kinesthetic awareness of it.

My body literally didn't know
how to fit in its physical space anymore,

and similarly, I didn't know
where I fit in the world.

To say that my weight gain was difficult
would be an understatement.

By the time the second
semester was finished,

I'd gained nearly 100 pounds.

There was the sympathy
from the pretty girls

who asked me if I'd, like,
ever had a boyfriend.

And there was that one frat boy

who'd taken me
on a dinner date in August -

granted, it was to Ruby Tuesday,
but it was a dinner date.

And when he saw me in March,

he looked right through me
like I didn't even exist.

It was like I'd been forced into
some social experiment against my will,

to put on a fat suit
and parade about in public.

The differences in the way

that people treated "average Whitney"
and "fat Whitney" were striking.

Suddenly, I was assumed to be lazy,
desperate, sloppy, stupid.

And with every single pound that I gained,

my self-worth continued
to shrink further and further.

So I became a different person after that.

I quit my dance classes;

I failed a lot of my academic classes;

and in a world where it felt like
being a fat woman was the biggest taboo,

I didn't have anyone to talk to.

Sure, there were times
where I pulled myself up by the bootstraps

and I said, "I'm going to go to the gym

or I'm going to venture
out to this party."

But there was always a whisper,
a dirty look, an insult

to remind me why I didn't deserve
to be in those spaces.

So I would come back home to my apartment

to the only friend
that had never deserted me:

shame.

We would stay up late
into the night commiserating,

getting drunk to numb our pain.

I'd order takeout for us both

and do anything to avoid going out
in a world that didn't want me.

And of course, all the things
that I had done to cope

only compounded the problem,

and I continued gaining weight.

In 2005, I weighed 280 pounds.

And my nurse practitioner
swiveled her stool

from in between my legs in the stirrups,

checking her chart

and announcing a little too cheerfully

that she thought I had PCOS.

Well!

My mind started reeling

because I did not remember
learning about this STD

in my seventh-grade sex ed class.

(Laughter)

But the more I learned

as I pored over the brochures
and the pamphlets -

PCOS wasn't an STD.

It was a syndrome,

a grouping of symptoms with no cure

that affects one out of every ten
women in America

and is the leading cause of infertility.

And then, like putting together a puzzle,
other stuff started to make sense.

The handfuls of hair
that had come out in the shower,

the coarse dark hairs all over my face,

my period that had visited me only twice
when I was 15 and never again,

and, of course,

my sudden and severe weight gain
in my freshman year of college.

I didn't have an explanation for it then,
but I had an explanation for it now:

I was insulin resistant.

So would life with PCOS
make it impossible to lose weight?

Absolutely not.

Would it be even harder?

Absolutely yes.

And for a woman who wanted
anything but to be fat,

this felt like a death sentence.

And then I got pissed off.

I wondered,

"Why have I never heard of this thing?"

I wanted to know

why I'd always been dismissed
when I went to the doctors,

told that I was "young and irregular"
or I was drinking or I was on Prozac.

But out of all those emotions that I felt,

the one I felt the most of was shame.

So after college,

I packed two suitcases -

my clothes and shame -

and I set off for Korea to teach English.

I got promotion after promotion,

and I traveled the world.

Shame and I made it all the way
to the top of the Great Wall of China;

we ate sushi together in Tokyo;

we vacationed in Malaysia and Vietnam;

we even sunbathed in Bali.

But all of these experiences
that should have been so wonderful

were tinged with that
disgusting, insidious shame

that sucked the life and the color
out of my memories

and left me nothing but black and white

and a never-ending wish to be thin
so that I could really start my life.

Now, living abroad wasn't all bad -

I had some of the best experiences there.

But the discrimination I faced

was so much more overt
than anything I'd had at home.

I got laughed at, pointed at,
and called a pig every single day

in the street, in the store,
in the nightclub.

I'll never forget when I got in a taxi

and the driver snorted
at me for every mile

until we reached our destination.

There was the guy that swerved his bicycle
dangerously close to me on the street,

stopped pedaling,

looked at me, said "pig,"

and then spit.

I chased him,

which was a futile effort
because he was on a bike,

and I hurled every Korean insult
that I could remember

until I saw him vanish in the dark.

And then I headed back
to my apartment to cry.

But it wasn't until ...

I was assaulted in a bar -

a man raced up behind me

to start punching me
in the back of the head -

that I realized,

"Hold up.

I don't deserve this."

It took such an aggressive, abusive action

to jolt me into the realization
that I was a fat human,

but I was human.

And I told myself,

"I'm going to go back home to the States,

and I'm going to prevent this
from ever happening to me again.

I'm going to lose weight."

So I moved back home in 2011.

In 2011,

I weighed 329 pounds.

And I lost 100 pounds in eight months.

I worked out for 12
to 15 hours every week;

I counted my calories;

I obsessed;

and I hid my shame
from my personal trainer

and from my family and from my friends,

even from strangers who said,

"You're remarkable.

This is the hardest thing
that anybody could ever do,

and look at you doing it.

I've never been more proud of you
since the day you were born!"

Pretty soon, I was eating
500 to 1,000 calories a day,

and I was throwing up everything
I ate on Friday, which was my "cheat day,"

and my eating disorder
had returned in full force.

One day, I walked out of the gym,
having run a few miles on the treadmill,

and a car drove by slowly
and lowered the windows,

and they yelled at me,

"Fat ass!"

When I climbed into my own car,
dripping with sweat,

what happened next was nothing
short of a nervous breakdown.

I had literally been working my ass off

to do the one thing
that everybody told me would fix it,

the one thing that everybody told me
would make me worthy.

But that guy in
the parking lot didn't care;

he didn't know who, why, where I was
or what I had done to change.

And I fantasized about losing
the rest of my hundred pounds

and thinking about my goal weight.

But then all I could see
were sagging breasts and loose skin

and crow's feet around my eyes.

And I knew, intellectually,

that as long as I let my self-worth
be determined in the eyes of others,

I would never be content.

But I could not disengage from the belief
that I had to be thin to be happy.

And so in that moment,
all of my hope was extinguished.

I had grown tired of the calorie counting,

of the weight loss,

of the obsession with everything
food and exercise.

I wanted something more to live for.

So, naturally, I got a job in radio

where I had to wake up at four
in the morning every day for minimum wage.

(Laughter)

And like the vast majority of people

who lose a substantial amount
of weight in their life,

I started to gain it back.

And within a year and a half,
I was the heaviest I'd ever been.

I was 350 pounds

and in the deepest place
of depression I'd ever known.

I didn't have any money
to pay my own rent,

so I'd moved back in with my parents.

And on my 29th birthday,
I found myself sobbing in my mother's lap,

lamenting about the dismal direction
of both my professional and personal life.

And I asked her,

"Mom, how can anything ever change?"

And my mother produced a pendant,

and on it were the words

"Something good is going to happen."

But in my misery, I was hyperfocused
on one detail and one detail only:

when?

So I started to reevaluate my life.

I thought back to when I was
10 years old and 90 pounds,

and now I'm almost 30 and over 300,

and it hadn't mattered.

I'd never been happy;

I'd never loved myself;

I'd always carry the weight of shame.

So I decided to try an experiment,
and I made a promise.

I said, "Whitney, if there is something
that you get asked to do

and your only reason
for declining is to say,

'because I'm fat,'

then you are going to do
that thing anyway."

The universe was listening

because you'd better believe -

three days later,

I got a message from a local photographer

who told me she wanted to take
some boudoir photographs of me for free.

I wrote back to her immediately:

"Sister, I would never in a million years
take my clothes off in front of a camera.

So when should I meet you?"

(Laughter)

A bottle of wine
and a designated driver later,

(Laughter)

I got an unexpected result.

When I looked at this picture,

for the first time in my entire life,

I didn't dissect every flaw,

I didn't cringe,

and in fact, I thought I was beautiful.

So I decided to keep the experiment going.

My co-workers at the radio station
were trying to ask me to do a dance video

and call it "A Fat Girl Dancing"

and put it on YouTube.

And at first, my reaction
was "absolutely not"

because no one has seen me
dance since I was 18 -

fat girls don't get to do that -

and I'm still balking at the word "fat."

And I had to ask myself,

"Whitney, of anyone on the planet,

don't you know that being fat

isn't synonymous with worthless,
lazy, stupid, undeserving?"

I wasn't sure that I knew,

but I wanted to find out if I did,

so I said yes.

And I posted this video onto the internet,

and a few days later,
I started getting a lot of phone calls.

But they weren't normal calls

like from my dad asking me
if I had toilet paper and stuff.

It was like Steve Harvey and CNN,
Good Morning America, and the Today Show,

and they all told me they wanted me
to come on their programs,

talk about my dance video,

and explain this new lifestyle,

this new "body positive" lifestyle
that I was leading.

And I couldn't understand -

like what is so special or subversive
about a fat woman dancing?

But I went on the shows,

and I did my little dance.

And then the letters started coming in.

I got an email from a boy,
a teenage boy in Lebanon, and he said,

"Whitney, it's illegal to be gay here,

and I'm gay.

But when I watch your videos,
I feel like my life is going to be okay."

And I said,

"Okay."

(Laughs)

Then after that, some more letters
started pouring in.

This one was from TLC, and they asked me
if I would consider doing a reality show.

I mulled it over and thought about how
it could ruin my life and reputation

and all the ways it still might.

But then I thought
about that boy in Lebanon,

and for every other person

who had never turned on a TV
and seen someone who looked like them,

who struggled like them,

and so I said yes.

It wasn't before long
that even more letters started pouring in.

And many of them were from fat women,
but just as many of them weren't.

I was talking to little girls,

anorexic women,

people with different abilities,

grandfathers that had always
hated their noses.

And then I realized, like,
it's not about the fact that I'm fat;

it's about the fact
that I am living a shame-free life

in spite of a society
that tells me I don't deserve to.

We all have something that society
tells us we should feel shame about.

For me, it's visible

in a world where thinness
is championed above all else,

where we tell women in no uncertain terms,

"If you are not young enough,
thin enough, and pretty enough,

you're disposable"

Living in that world,

deciding to love my body
had become a radical act.

And doing what I loved in that body
had become powerful.

And then came the inevitable
questions from everybody:

"How is this doable?"

I never used to know
how to answer this question,

because I didn't know
how to tell someone to be like me.

But now I think I know how to tell people
to be more like them.

We think that we have to magically
have confidence before we do something,

but this is backwards.

Confidence is a product of action,
not the other way around.

If I had to wait to have the confidence,
I'd never get out of bed to do anything.

I had to do the hard stuff -

in my case, posing
half-naked and dancing -

and then the confidence came as a reward,

and the confidence
came as a building block.

But living authentically shame-free
is not sunshine and roses.

Every day on the internet
and in my real life,

I'm told that I am disgusting, delusional,

and should hurry up and have
that heart attack I'm bound to have

so the world will be rid of me.

But living shame-free

has also brought more joy into my life
than I ever could believe existed.

It has connected me

with millions of people
I'd have never met face-to-face

and injected the color
and happiness back into my life.

Now, I often think
of one of my favorite quotes

from my favorite feminist, Audre Lorde.

She said, "I am deliberate
and afraid of nothing."

And then I think
back to this picture - 1989.

Five years old,
before my first dance recital,

this little girl was deliberate
and afraid of nothing,

serving up all the face
and sass in the world,

completely unapologetic about what
she knew she was put on this earth to do.

I think we get discouraged
because we've all been that little girl

but then the world
beats and breaks us down.

We think that being confident, being happy

should be as easy as putting
on a light switch, right?

Just do it, just be happy,
just love yourself.

But it isn't that easy, and I know that.

It's not like a light switch.

Living authentically free of shame

is more like stumbling toward
a motion sensor light in the dark.

You have to advance forward
to a target that you can't see

but trust that you'll
ultimately get there.

And the universe is funny

because the only thing
that will turn that light on

is your movement and your action.

And if you live this way -

if you know that every time you're
stumbling and spinning and scrambling,

you are actually doing the hard part,

you are actually doing the work
even if you can't pinpoint your progress -

if you make a commitment
to live a shame-free life

and know that it's an undertaking
that you have to do every single day,

day in and day out,

and you are deliberate
about choosing that life -

you will find yourself illuminated.

And if you're like me,

it'll probably be
when you least expect it.

Thank you.

(Applause)