Black, Fat Joy is a form of Resistance with Amanda Gilliam
(EPISODE 6)
Melissa Toler: Welcome to Hearing Our Own Voice, an anti-diet, weight inclusive podcast that centers Black stories and experiences,
I'm Melissa Toler. I'm sad because this is the final episode for season 1 of Hearing Our Own Voice. But I'm also thrilled because the conversation with today's guest, Amanda Gilliam, is one of my favorites. We talk about everything from the body positivity movement, to Amanda's love for traveling, to the connection between fat phobia and anti-Blackness.
We talk about a lot.
But before we get into it, let me tell you a little about her:
Amanda Gilliam is a super heavyweight Masters weightlifter and the creator of Big Girl Barbell, a fat-positive, body-positive community for athletes in strength sports. Her community-based work centers folk’s full humanity and is inspired by the vision that marginalized bodies can ultimately be tools of liberation. Outside the gym, she works full-time in higher education administration, volunteers with immigrant organizations in the New York City metro area, teaches outdoor education workshops, and plays the cello.
I learned so much from Amanda during this interview. And I hope you will too.
So Amanda, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.
Amanda Gilliam: Thank you!
Melissa Toler: So let's just get right into it. You know, I've been part of the health and wellness community for a long time. I was trained as a pharmacist and also as a health and wellness coach. And over the years, as I've become more educated and informed, I have realized how narrow the definition is for health and wellness and what it means to be healthy and well. And I think a lot of us are familiar with the messages and images that we've been exposed to, through mainstream media and how heavily those images and messages are focused on certain types of food and exercise. And there's a certain body type that is upheld as the pinnacle of health. And, you know, more often than not, it's a thin, young, white, able-bodied woman who's flexible enough to do all the advanced yoga poses. And so now, I'm very clear that that is all bullshit, for lack of a better term. So I want to know from you, how has your idea of health and wellness evolved over the years?
Amanda Gilliam: That's a great question. So, health and wellness is always held up to something that's aspirational, which means we'll never quite get it. Even if we get it we're always sort of reaching for that next thing. And I think, as a Black woman, but also as a fat Black woman, like I'm really never going to get to this mountain top that is health and wellness. So, you know, in order for my personal well being, I too had to realize, well, that's bullshit. Like, I'll never make it. So I have to create, you know, my own definition and experiences about about what those things meant to me.
Melissa Toler: Yeah, yeah. So how did you go about doing that?
Amanda Gilliam: You know, I was gonna say that, like it started with my time in CrossFit. But I really think it started much earlier back to when I was a kid. I remember every year at the end of school, we would have field day, and I would always win the sack race, like that was like, like, I was a sack race queen. And in theory, I shouldn't have been able to win the sack race, right? Like, I'm a chubby kid. I think everybody thought that I would be slow and I wouldn't be coordinated. But I just like always housed that competition. And also this other thing, we had to like, run around the blacktop, like, I always won that. So now now that I'm thinking about it, so like even as we think about health and wellness, I think part of it we have to recognize is ongoing.
And we always have to check ourselves about like what our personal scripts are about this thing. Because even I was about to tell you a story that's like five years old instead of a story that's 35 years old, which is actually the truth. Um, so I think like, even from being a young person, I realized that “No, I have an entryway into this thing”. Even if I don't look like everybody else and even if, based on who I am, it seems like I couldn't do the thing. Now also like to just plug myself because I also wanted the Presidential Sit and Reach, like I was the champion of Sit and Reach. So also some things that like, you might think I would not be able to do, like, couldn't do a pull-up, but I could do the Sit and Reach.
I think I just, I've always found an entryway into this thing, even if I didn't look like, but what the traditional image of, of it was. And as a kid, like young sprightly kid is the kid who can do all these things. But I guess in my adult life, it probably would have been CrossFit, which I started in 2013. Because CrossFit, you know, been through a lot of drama lately (well deserved), but the model, the model of CrossFit, being scalable, being modifiable, with all these different things that you do in the workouts, like there really is something for everybody there. And just realizing that and being able to not only do things in CrossFit, but excel at things in CrossFit, I think also, maybe kind of like, took me back to all those things that I could do as a kid, and allow me to re-unlock or reimagine potential as an athlete.
Melissa Toler: Yes. So you know, your story about winning the sack race as a kid and having people think or maybe even say, I don't know, or expect for you to not have done that, like, these messages. That's an example of how the messages that we get happen so early on about what bodies are capable of what. And it can take a long time for folks to unlearn all of those lessons, unlearn who is the example of health, who is an athlete, who should be able to do things and who can't. So you know that unlearning can be a lifelong process. So, can you tell us how, how you have gone about unlearning cultural messages around fat phobia and healthism?
Amanda Gilliam: Sure, well, I just like to say that I'm still unlearning. And I saw something on Instagram, from one of the accounts I follow. And I think it was a fat athlete, maybe a hiker had said, "You can do hard things". And that's always something that I have to remind myself, because of this, like, sort of constant cultural programming, that "wait a minute, I can do hard things, I can stretch myself. Also, I can fail at hard things". I think, we need to, part of sort of reclaiming health and wellness is also about being able to, like, stand in the space of failure. Now my failure, I think, might be different than the health and wellness model, traditional model, which is premised around weight loss, and sort of bodily improvement. So that's not what failure means to me. But I think being able to stand in it and, you know, experience things that are difficult or things that you might not be able to do is part of the reprogramming for me. What's the second part of your question? I want to make sure I answered everything.
Melissa Toler: Oh, yeah, just how you gone about unlearning fatphobia and healthism.
Amanda Gilliam: Yeah, okay. Right. So I think a part of big part of it has been, again, CrossFit and weightlifting. So CrossFit is not exclusively weightlifting, there's some body weight stuff, there's a bunch of cardio..."functional fitness" is what they would call it. And I was good at a lot of this stuff. And I got better at things that I didn't think I could do like pull ups. So I was able to do very long dead hangs, which is basically just hanging by your arms on a pull up bar. So like, I can do hard things, right, like things I didn't think I would be able to do. And then just seeing the improvement in terms of skills, I think was really helpful in being able to overturn some of those messages. But then also just finding the things that I was good at, like weightlifting, now I exclusively weight lift, I don't do CrossFit, but just seeing that I can weight lift, and I can be a technician and be really good under the bar and lift a decent amount of weight, I think has also helped to overturn some of those messages. But like also, fat phobia is inextricable from white supremacy and anti black racism. So I think that once you realize that, then it's like, "I'm not here for fat phobia at all. I'm not here for internalized fat phobia. I know where these messages are coming from". So I think that lightbulb moment, also made it easier to reject those things. Like I don't have to lift weights to be able to say, this doesn't apply to me, I'm just gonna say that this is not valid to begin with, because this is nonsense, not because I can do something that challenges me.
Does that make sense?
Melissa Toler: Oh, my God. Yes, it does. However, there may be some of our listeners for whom that's a new and radical idea. So when you say that fat phobia is inextricable from white supremacy, what do you mean by that?
Amanda Gilliam: Okay, I always talk like an academic, I would live in school if I could. So part of this journey for me, has been about academics. So I was in a Ph. D program in cultural anthropology. But my project was literally exploring the linkages between anti-Blackness, and fatphobia. And what I was doing when I first started grad school, I was actually sort of looking at a lot of this rhetoric about the War on Terror that was in grad school, like early 2000. So that was a hot topic. And a lot of it was mimicking the rhetoric on the War on Obesity, and like, you know, finding internal enemies, and who are the insurgents and all this kind of talk like it was almost like a one to one, when you started to look at race, you started to look at fat phobia. And then once you put in these like elements of healthism, and who's deserving of care and who's not deserving, and who's the drain on the resources, and who's taking too much, and who shouldn't get any, and who's not being a good citizen, this is all coming back to very racist rhetoric, but also like distinctly anti-Black rhetoric. Who's diseased? Who's making us all sicker? You can trace that stuff all the way back through slavery, actually. So for me, those ideas aren't new. But I think fat phobia gets so much purchase, because of our ideas about race, racism, and anti-Blackness. It's easy to think that certain people don't deserve care, or taking resources, when we already have a group of people that we've been saying those things about. So that's that for me. So from the academic side, to use your term, I saw this as bullshit many years ago. And then from the personal experience that I've had in gyms, outside of gyms, just other lived experiences I've had, I've also seen that it's bullshit. So bringing those two things together is like combining superpowers.
Melissa Toler: Oh, that's awesome. So I wanted to ask you a little bit more that, first of all, I didn't realize that that was your graduate work. So I think, the idea that certain bodies and certain people are diseased or more prone to disease, and, and therefore are more expendable, which is a dangerous rhetoric that we hear all the time, I think that has become even more prominent recently with the COVID- 19 pandemic, right? Where, you know, initially, it was thought that older people were the ones who got it. So everybody was like, "Oh, I'm young! So who cares?", or people who have these pre existing conditions, and I'm using air quotes here. And then we started to learn how Black and Brown communities were disproportionately affected. And consistent with how we've talked about health and wellness, the reasoning behind that was always because we had these underlying conditions, and somehow we were either inherently defective, or we made bad decisions, or a combination of the two. And so I think that conversation is really important to be able to highlight the long standing rhetoric, which a lot of folks including Black folks, have internalized as, as problems with us. And I think that, you know, in my experience, it has brought up some resistance in certain circles around weight-inclusive wellness, or Health at Every Size, because, you know, some of us have internalized that belief that, well, we're at a higher risk for diabetes, and quote unquote, obesity, and all of these things, and it's just such a harmful narrative. And so I'm happy that you started to sort of challenge that here. Because I think it's a real, it's a really difficult thing for people to question and believe something else.
Amanda Gilliam: I mean, it's almost like, you know, these kinds of conversations, intentional or not, we've sort of re-inscribed a biological difference when it comes to race. And when I when I was in graduate school and doing this kind of work, these same kinds of conversations, like you have this sort of medical biology of the "thing", right? So, a good example was tuberculosis in Baltimore, turn of the century, in Black communities. So you have the thing, the thing is real, right? Tuberculosis is real. But then you have this whole conversation about the social pathology of disease. And it's like, well, "How are Black people living? What kinds of decisions are they making?". And if you're not careful, those two things become one in the same, and ends up being exactly what you're talking about, like, Oh, well, this happens to Black people, because Black people are XYZ. You start to believe this sort of biological difference. And it's not, right. We're talking about systemic, institutional, racist difference. That's what we're talking about. We're not talking about something that's inherently problematic with Black folks, but I agree with you. These are conversations that we've internalized in a lot of ways and when I when I was doing my fieldwork, I, you know, I was, I was attending hospital, like, I would just call them pre sales conventions, right? So it lets people who wanted to, we're thinking about having bariatric surgery, and it was really like a sales pitch. And so listening to Black doctors talk to, like, complete Black audiences: "Well, you know, just means no more Sunday dinner at big momma's house", and I'm just like, like, is this real? Like, you do not know these people in this audience. So why are you assuming that this is a shared experience? Why are you assuming that you know, what people eat, like, it seems weird kind of tropes that like, ride in line between like a shared Black cultural experience, which, you know, has some realness to it. But also like, this is a caricature of what you think Black life is and how you can relate to folks in the audience. So there is a way like it's real, these dialogues have become internalized. And I think acceptance is real, not only by like medical and health and wellness authorities, but also by the very people that they're aimed at, and it's sad.
Melissa Toler: Yes, the big the Sunday dinner and big momma trope is familiar, just because I think the Surgeon General of the of the United States pulled that out when he was in managing black and brown communities about why COVID-19 was affecting us disproportionately. So...
Amanda Gilliam: There's also a layer of misogynoir in it, right? Like, ah, let's talk about that. Why are you always blaming black women for x, y, z? So yeah, so we know what that's about. But you also see that in the rhetoric of fat phobia. There's this layer of misogyny, that just runs so deep. And once you start parsing for race, like they're talking about the black woman, they're talking about the Mexican mothers like, the race thing is there and really stark ways.
Melissa Toler: Yeah, yeah. So you describe yourself as fat positive. So what does that mean to you? And how is it different from or how would you describe it as different from body positive?
Amanda Gilliam: I actually think body positivity and fat positivity are connected. I know that there is a very salient critique right now around body positivity in the way that has been corporatized. And I don't understand how places like Special K, which, by the way, was a diet food that my mother, I love her to death, but had me on when I was young, I don't see how like, Special K and those types of brands can be claiming in any sort of space, in body positivity. So I agree with the critique that it's been used by businesses cynically to sell products, yes. But I also think that body positivity is really about standing in yourself and standing in the place of others. And it's very much about anti-racism, and anti fat phobia and anti-classism, and then, you know, queer liberation and trans liberation. A good body positivity to me is very much about those things. So I recognize the critique, but let's just take the word back. Do we gotta throw it away?
Melissa Toler: You know, I like that. So yes, I think it has been co-opted, tragically, right. It is, and whitewashed and mainstreamed and taken away, like all of the work and liberation work and activism work that has gone into it initially has been extracted from it to be more palatable for the masses. So I like the idea of reclaiming it.
Amanda Gilliam: Um, but fat liberation, fat positivity is a bit different for me. I'm fat. Like, I don't know, like, that's just who I am, but I'm going to live my best life in this body that I have. I'm going to uplift other fat people. I'm going to believe other fat people. When they share their experience with me, and I'm going to do the best with what I've got that, to me is fat positivity. We don't need to hide. We don't need to shrink. We have a voice, our existence is resistance and all those wonderful things. That to me is about fat positivity. I think there's also this thing with body positivity. Like, it's all good until you overstep this line. And the line is always changing, right? But fat positive to me is about here's the line, I'm over it. I'm twerking on it, I'm doing splits on it, it is what it is. Like that. That's that's fat positivity to me.
Melissa Toler: Twerking on the line. Um, so have you encountered in your personal life or even just in your fitness life. Or your athlete life, I should say, have you encountered resistance or pushback to being fat positive?
Amanda Gilliam: I'm going to say, No. And I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking about this. Okay, here's what I'm gonna say about this. For me personally, maybe not. But I am recognizing who I am in a space. So I'm big. I'm Black. I usually have some sort of quirky hair color or hairstyle. You know, I've been trained in the academy, got a couple dollars in my wallet. There's all kinds of things that allowed me to skirt some of these more flagrant experiences that other people might have had. And I've been doing a lot of thinking about how much my academic training, what kinds of doors it opens in places that it might not for other people. So I do think there's a way in which the air that is Amanda is tolerated and embraced in ways that it might not be for other people. And I'm especially finding that now that everybody wants to, like, grab a Black friend. But but that's that. So I don't think that I have experienced it in the way that I might have expected to. But then there's also like, it goes back to this idea of good fatties and bad fatties. Yeah, I'm also almost always using my fat in ways that people can agree with, right? So like, I'm in the gym, I'm lifting weights. I'm up on top of mountains hiking, I'm like doing things and sometimes when people, fat phobic people want to critique fat folks. It's the NOT doing things that they find acceptable. That like gets them that in that I feel like as long as I'm doing something productive with my fat body, it kind of insulates me from a lot of the criticism. But that in itself, right is fat phobic violence. Yeah, so…
Melissa Toler: Absolutely.
Amanda Gilliam: I recognize what that is. So back to your original question. Yes, I have experienced it. But it might look positive instead of the negative that it actually is.
Melissa Toler: Yeah, got it. Yeah. So you refer to yourself as an athlete, and you know, a big part of the harmful narrative around health and wellness. And what it means to be healthy is also a harmful narrative of what it means to be fit. And you know, most things go hand in hand, and we typically ascribe fitness or athleticism to certain body types. But you challenge that idea with Big Girl Barbell, and you spoke about how you exclusively lift weights. So what prompted the creation of Big Girl Barbell?
Amanda Gilliam: Um, so I was the biggest person in my CrossFit gym, which I mean, it was what it was, but I was like, okay, that's interesting. But in CrossFit, CrossFit is CrossFit. But once you switch over to weightlifting, everything is delineated by gender, problematic. Yeah, it is what it is, but also by weight class. So you become sort of hyper visibly invisible in a way because now you're marked by your weight class. Um, so you can always just see who the big girls are. At the time I started weightlifting, it was 75 kilos, and above, then it became 90 kilos and above, which is like, the dreaded 200 pound marker that I don't know what happened that 200 pounds, but, you know, ancient societies like Oh, she's 200 pounds. So that was like riding that line. And now, now it's back to like, I think plus 87 kilos. But my point is, once you're separated by weight categories, you know who the people are, like can't "hide" in quotes. So I was at a competition, a woman comes up to me, she's like, Hey, you must be in one of the other 90s, like 90 kilos. And I'm just like, it just caught me off guard. So I'm like, here I am trying to get in my zone. Like, am I thinking about things. Here she comes. It has to do like, Hey, you fat girl. You're one of the other fat girls like me. I was just like, ah. Then I had a lightbulb moment like, it wasn't anything of shame? I was just like, oh my gosh. And I, of course, I'm hyper visible in the space. So I was just like, what if we could create a community where there's other fat girls. And I'm gonna use girls lightly because Big Girl Barbell is not just for girls. I said, What if we could create a space where it's just for the big people in strength sports. And so that's what I did. I was like, let me just create this Instagram community, don't get all commune together and share our experiences and also just uplift each other. At a time Sarah Robles was a medal winning Olympian, who was a super heavyweight weightlifter, but still not getting the shine that some of the other smaller athletes were. I said, "We need space to be able to do that". And so that's why I created Big Girl Barbell.
Melissa Toler: Hmm, awesome. And you also mentioned that you love to travel and I know you love to travel, I know you've been to some really cool places like Norway and Colombia. And recently on one of your posts when you were on a hiking trip, you said that black fat joy is a form of resistance. So what do you mean by that?
Amanda Gilliam: So that that was actually inspired by the fact that my birthday was May 29. So I was just feeling like really beat down by racism. And just in just a way I was turning 40. Now just like, I am 40 years old, and dealing with this stuff, same stuff my mom was dealing with when she was 40. And her mom was dealing with she was 40. And her mom was dealing with when she was 40. So I was just beat down and bedraggled by it all. And I said, I'm just I can't, I didn't want to participate in the same way that I might participated 5 years ago, I was just like, what, what, who am I in this moment, right now, I just studied what? No, I'm going away. And me and my husband went to upstate New York, not far from us here in New Jersey, and just kind of like lived our lives for 36 hours. And that's all it was a day and a half. But I was just out in the woods and just feeling great about life and felt like I had, you know, amidst this nonsense I had just carved a space where I could just go off and be happy and sort of celebrate that I was still here after four decades and just have the space to myself to reflect. And when I travel, whether it's upstate New York, or Norway, or Dubai, or other places I've been to, it's also about sort of finding that freedom. And also just traveling as a Black woman outside of the country, I literally find that freedom, because I'm not worried the police are going to shoot me. I'm not worried about lots of things. And part of that is like, you know, now if you ask the Africans in some of these places, they might have a different experience, right. And so part of it is about having this American US passport privilege, but there is just a part where I feel like I can leave this country and go somewhere else and experience something close to what I imagined freedom must feel like for other people. And so to be able to, like, go different places and try new things and, you know, have a different social meaning. And, and in another context, I just think feels absolutely amazing. And part of my travels is about showing people that 1) you don't have to sit in this country and take this nonsense, like you do not have to sit here and take this. And I something I tell myself every day as I think of my exit strategy. I do not have to sit here and take this. But then also, there are other places to live. And there are other ways to be joyful, happy, exploratory, thriving Black people. So that's what travel means to me.
Melissa Toler: Hmmm, that's beautiful. Black fat joy is a form of resistance. I love it. And I think that's a great place to bring the show to a close and So Amanda, I just wanted to say thank you for sharing your story with us and taking time today. So why don't you tell the listeners where they can find you and connect with you?
Amanda Gilliam: Great, so I'm probably most active on Instagram. If you want to see body positive, fat positive athleticism, follow me at Big Girl Barbell on Insta. If you want to see me posting memes, posting about Oreos because that was my love ,travel and hiking, you can follow my personal account, which is Uncle Jemima 99. We'd have another podcast for why I chose that name. But for now, that's where you can follow me online.
Melissa Toler: All right. Thank you so much, Amanda, it was wonderful to talk to you.
Amanda Gilliam: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Melissa Toler: All right, you're welcome.
Amanda Gilliam: Bye.
Melissa Toler: I really hope that you enjoyed this interview with Amanda. And that there is something that you can take away and use in your own life, and your own journey to healing and making peace with your body. This brings us to the close of Season 1 of Hearing Our Own Voice It has been an absolute privilege to be able to speak to some really smart, compassionate and wise people who are making huge contributions to the world. I want to sincerely thank you for being here today and for supporting the podcast. I appreciate the time that you've taken to listen to this conversation I had with Amanda as well as the other conversations that I had this season. And if you've enjoyed this episode or other episodes, please let me know by rating following and reviewing wherever you listen to podcast. Also, if you want to support this podcast to keep it going possibly to a season two please go to melissatoler dot com forward slash podcast and click on the link to donate contributions as little as $1 are greatly appreciated. As always, I thank you for listening to Hearing Our Own Voice.