Coming right up is the one day a year when even people who usually have lots of judgment about other people’s bodies and diets gather to eat more food than they need. So if you’re somebody who worries about people judging you anytime you are seen eating more than a small portion of salad, you may dread this holiday. Here are our thoughts on avoiding Thanksgiving fat shaming.
If you indulge just like everyone else does, you worry you will be judged. If you sit there and nibble on the relish tray while everyone else loads up on mashed potatoes, you worry, you will also be judged. There is no correct way to eat Thanksgiving dinner that will guarantee that your brother’s skinny new girlfriend will not be silently judging you.
You can find families that serve things like steamed green vegetables and plain baked sweet potatoes. You can find other families that add cream of mushroom soup and french-fried potatoes to the green beans and bury the sweet potatoes under a thick blanket of marshmallows. Some people make an effort to serve a healthy version of Thanksgiving and others see it as a day to go all out with the butter and sugar. Whichever way your family does it is the right way.
Ideally We’d Be Thankful, Not Judgmental
Ideally, none of us would give any of this a thought. We’d get together, express our thankfulness and enjoy ourselves over a great meal without ever stopping to consider whether anyone around the table might be questioning any of our food or life choices. Each and every person there would be filled with joy at the prospect of feasting with the family. (We’re kidding, of course. No such family exists.)
Feasting means something quite different today than it did to the Pilgrims. Just to back up a bit, every bit of food they ate had to be hunted down and killed or at least coaxed out of the earth. Think of the work involved in growing your own potatoes and pumpkins and wheat and everything else, to say nothing of the pressure of being sent off into the woods with a musket and orders to bring back a turkey.
Would Pilgrims Judge Us? You Bet.
Romanticize the good old days all you want, but if you magically brought some Pilgrims to present day and showed them how you use your phone to order a pizza, they’d beat the crap out of you the first time you had the nerve to complain about anything in your life. Anything.
“Prithee, what is it that vexes thee?” a Pilgrim would ask. “For I just saw you pick up a curious object, speak the food you desire, and before I could even build up the fire on the hearth, the food you desired was brought unto you. Also, you have hot water whenever you want it without having to fetch pails of water from yon creek? Verily, thou art a biotch. Shut thy mouth.”
So, yeah, be thankful.
Ultimately, you’ll have to decide whether you want to let fear of judgment affect your celebration of this day, but we hope you won’t, because like we said, if you’re in the company of judgy people, nothing you do will be right anyway.
So we say, eat as you wish — just as you do every other day. Only you get to decide what and how much you eat.
Pass the potatoes, please!
Sophia Sinclair is Curvicality’s sex and relationships writer and the author of the Small-Town Secrets romance series, available on Amazon. Reach Sophia at sophia@curvicality.com.
