Stacy Bias speaks about comfort, shame and the roots of compulsion.

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Passions and Interests…Wow, that is an open-ended question, isn’t it? I’m passionate about people, like, my friends, my family, myself — like, life lessons. I’m really passionate about learning. Not necessarily academic learning, but spiritual learning; self-betterment. Music, art, the Internet (I’m such a geek.) Comfort. Making a more comfortable world, like, comfortable for me — in nesting in my home, or comfortable in the world. I feel like without comfort, people can’t be…it’s like Maslow’s Pyramid. The levels of need, of basic need — the basic needs are security, food, shelter, love…and I think that a lot of people are missing that basic thing, which means that nobody can advance because you’re just too busy surviving. So, comfort is definitely a big passion of mine. And activism. Making the world, at least my little corner of it, as much improved as I can.

interviewer: I haven’t heard you talk about comfort before. That’s interesting. What is the relationship between comfort and your fat activism?

Stacy Bias: Well, I feel like there’s a basic level of comfort in our skins that we are not allowed to have, or that we have been taught not to have. Our bodies are tools, right? They’re tools for pleasure, they’re tools for function, they’re tools for…anything we need to do in the world, we do in the company of our bodies. And if we have been taught to disconnect from that, if we’ve been taught to be so uncomfortable about the things that we experience aesthetically about our bodies, or even in terms of mobility - then we lose out on significant experiences. Either we do them, but we’re kind of checked out while we do them, so we’re not present for them, or we just miss doing them at all. So I feel like comfort is a huge — it’s absolutely the root, I feel, of this kind of deprivation model that I’ve seen in all the interviews. I feel like discomfort comes — it’s hard to explain;

When people have talked about eating, they’ve been talking about comfort. When people talk about sneaking off and those kind of moments of zen that they get, you know, just being blank, or just consumed by flavor, or whatever, I feel like comfort is what that’s about. And that means that it’s missing.

Interviewer: How does that work with people finding that, and then not feeling comfortable in their bodies?

Stacy Bias: Well, it’s kind of a catch-22. You’re missing that kind of basic level of comfort and security, safety, love, whatever it is that’s kind of pulling at your rickety foundation. And this obviously is not true of everybody who is fat - I’m just talking about the people who have a common experience to mine; So you go out and you do this comfort-seeking in the form of eating and while it’s actually a truly loving thing for a child who doesn’t necessarily have tools at his or her disposal to create that sort of higher level of comfort for themselves, like, they don’t really have the autonomous control as a child to say “Hey, you’re not making me feel secure, Mom. You’re not making me feel secure, Dad.” Who has the words for that, or even the understanding of that as a kid, so the accessible things become that; TV, friends, food, whatever. We seek comfort. And then there’s the shame that follows immediately, because you’ve done something wrong, because you’re sick to your stomach. Because you weren’t, even though you were, it felt like you weren’t in control in that moment. You weren’t strong enough to stop it, you knew the consequences in that you would be fatter, or you would be sick or whatever - and so it becomes this kind of spiral of self-loathing that leads to more and more acting out, and more comfort-seeking because you’re just furthering that lack of comfort for yourself, and it’s a vicious cycle that is un-fulfilling.

I keep coming back to the fact that, as children, it’s actually a truly loving thing to do for yourself; to provide for yourself. I mean, you’re caring for yourself in that way. ::pause for emotional overwhelm:: But you know, as adults, we grow and we have more autonomous control over our lives, and that habit doesn’t necessarily serve anymore. But it’s really hard to un-do and there’s a lifetime of shame behind that behavior. You’re ashamed of yourself for doing it, other people are ashamed of you based on the proof of having done so, unless you’re bulimic or anorexic, and then you get shamed for a whole other reason — and it’s this incredible circle of shame and self-loathing that’s just simply rooted in wanting to be comforted. It’s such a natural, basic thing, but so frequently missing.