Episode 8: What is Fat Positive Fertility?
Episode Summary
In this episode of "Fat and Fertile," we explore the concept of fat positive fertility and discuss the importance of moving away from restrictive diets and weight loss, advocating for fertility care without BMI limitations, and creating a nurturing environment for individuals in bigger bodies who want to navigate getting pregnant.
What to Expect from the Podcast
We look at the concept of fat-positive fertility and how it reshapes the way fat individuals navigate their journey to parenthood.
Highlights
Defining Fat-Positive Fertility
The Fat-Positive Fertility Framework
The Impact of Fat-Positive Care
Links and Resources
Nicola’s book, Fat and Fertile
Get Involved
Nicola would love to hear from you! If this episode resonates, share your story, ask a question, or leave a review.
Support the Podcast
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Hey, my lovely Welcome to fat and fertile the podcast. I'm Nicola salmon, fat positive fertility coach and author of the book fat and fertile. I'm obsessed with helping folks navigate getting pregnant in an anti fat world on this podcast, we'll explore the complexities that fat folks face when you want to grow your family. If you want to support this podcast, I would love for you to share it on social media or leave me a review on your podcast app. Are you ready?
Let's dive in. You. Music.
Hello, my lovelies. Welcome back to fat and fertile. Today, I am starting a new little mini series on the podcast called fat fertility. 101 where I'm going to be going back to some basics around the work that I do around some terms that you might hear me use, and I thought it was really important to go into some of these really mind new details, so that you better understand where I'm coming from, and hopefully it will help you really reframe your own journey To getting pregnant and demanding the care that you absolutely deserve. So today we are going right back to the beginning, and I am going to explain what is fat positive fertility. If you have not been in my world a long time, this might be a really weird concept. You might never have heard the word fat positive before fat, the word might make you feel a bit uncomfortable, and we're going to be talking about that next week, but I thought it would be a really nice episode to talk a bit about what fat positive facility means to me, where it came from, and how it's useful for you, as somebody who is learning information about this and is in a bigger body and wants to navigate getting pregnant. So I'm going to share a little bit of background. I started introducing myself and using the title fat positive fertility coach around 2018 I want to say I'd never heard anybody talk about that positive fertility before that, and it was really, really helpful for me to use these words for myself. I started off as a regular fertility coach. Again, fertility coach is still quite a new job, a new role. I initially started working with folks who wanted to get pregnant as an acupuncturist. So I trained as an acupuncturist just over 10 years ago now, and started working with people who wanted to get pregnant, mainly because of my own PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome that I've diagnosed with. If you don't know about more of my story, listen to episode one. I go into it in a lot more detail then. But I started as an acupuncturist, and I realized that I really wanted to offer people more skills, more things that they could do between acupuncture sessions, which is why I trained the integrative fertility coach. Then when I was going through my own getting pregnant in a bigger body, I realized that once my first son was here that I did not want to pass on all the stuff that I thought about my body and about food. So I did not want him to hear me talking about my body the way that I did, or about food the way that I did. And I was so hyper aware of everything that I said to him around him, you know, he was a baby at this time, so I wasn't talking to him much about food in my body, but it was the stuff that I was seeing around him, about my body and about food that made me so hyper aware. And that was then I still kind of remember that moment of like, you know, I've just had enough of this crap. I do not want to die anymore. I do not have the capacity to go through shrinking my body and what that entails anymore. I am sick of it, so I made myself two promises. I said I was never going to weigh myself anymore, and I was never going to die again. And that is, gosh, he's nine now, so nine years ago, and I have not done either of those things since. That's not to say I haven't thought about them. That's not to say I haven't been like tempted, because the journey to like, body acceptance and body neutrality is completely not linear. It's not like you just get there and it's a magic destination that you've reached. Like, this is work that I do on the daily, because we live in a society where we are throwing this stuff every single day. So the weighing thing, I think I want to do eventually from a more neutral place, but it's just I don't have scales anymore because I threw them and smashed my patio in the garden. So I don't really want to buy anymore, which is why I haven't gone down that route, but, but yeah, so that's where I was, and it was then that I found the health every size movement. I found other people who were in the fat liberation movement doing all this work. And when I first found it, I felt totally robbed. I felt so angry that I had been told that weight loss would work, that it's just my fault that I haven't lost weight that all of these you know, if I'd have just done it this way, then it would have magically happened. And then I found all this research that other folks had done for years about how diets don't work, about how any form of intentional weight loss has just short lived. And I was so fucking angry. It was Yeah. I was raging because I was like, I can't believe I've wasted all this money, all this time, all this energy, so much of my life, being obsessed with food, obsessed with losing weight, obsessed with making my body smaller. And I was just like, No, you're Ah. So after, after a few months, I'd come down. But the more I learned, the more those two worlds of my professional life as being like a coach and an acupuncturist, and my personal life of like rejecting diet culture and learning more about the research, the more that they collided, because all of the normative information and advice about getting pregnant is lose weight, is restrict your diet, regardless of your body size. We're told to restrict gluten, dairy, you know, every food group, and it just made no sense. And paired that with my own personal experience about the things that I knew impacted my menstrual cycle, you know, stress, movement, it wasn't food, it was. It just made no sense, and it it just led me down this rabbit hole of being like, Okay, well, I can't, I can't go on talking about the normal way that folks talk about fertility, for folks in bigger bodies like that, just it felt so wrong. It just did not sit with me. So I had to start doing something different, and that is when I decided to be the fat positive fertility coach. And I had to sit with it for a while because, because I thought, Okay, well, if I label myself as this, for want of a better word, then that was almost acknowledging that I was going to be fat for the rest of my life. And I don't have to tell you this as someone who is living as in a fat body in this world, that felt like a very, very big thing, because there are so many external pressures to be thin, and once I'd given myself that permission to be like, you know, that's okay, I doesn't mean I'm not going to be happy. Doesn't mean I'm not going to be successful, then I could settle in, because it was too important not to talk about. And it's yeah, the more I saw, the more how, the more I realized how much harm was being done by the diets, by the BMI restrictions. And it led me down this very big rabbit hole of research about, how about what was really going on? What was really happening? Because we are told there is so much research around getting pregnant in a bigger body and how harmful that is. Like, it didn't line up with my lived experience. It didn't line up with all this other research. So I had to dig deep to figure out what was going on, and the more that I've done since 2018, so like five years ago, the more I've learned and the more I've been able to piece together this like massive jigsaw puzzle of different research with different bias by different people, and often research is paid for by big pharma companies, who often have their own biases and reasons why they do this research, which is often to promote weight loss drugs and weight loss medications. So there is lots of layers and lots of things that have to be uncurled and pieced together. But the more I do this work, the more it
drives me to do more, because I want to figure it out. I want to get to the bottom of it, and I want to help folks who are navigating this, who are navigating the result of this bias within our healthcare and our fertility systems, to get pregnant. So that was just a long ramble to get us to like how I got to hear how I was using those words. Because for me, I'm here for the fat folks. I am here to support fat. Folks who want to get pregnant, and it was really important that I embrace the word fat. I talk about the word fat, and we're going to talk about that more next week. But for me, fat positive, what it actually means is it's the idea that fat people should be able to access all the fertility care that they need, and it's not limited by their BMI. So you should be able to access anything and everything that you need in order to get pregnant. It also means that you should be treated with respect and given patient centered care that honors your lived experience. And what I mean by that is that the care that you receive from your doctors, from your healthcare providers, from nurses, from Fertility Centers, it means that it should be personalized to you, and you should be treated with the utmost respect and care, and should be evidence based that so much of it isn't when you look at what the research actually says. And the most important thing is that you should be able to make your own decisions around your body and your health, which includes not being forced to lose weight and diet, which is the option, not option, that so many folks are given, is that the only way that they can access that care is through jumping through this completely arbitrary weight loss hoop. So what that means, practically for me as a fat positive fertility coach, is that I help people get pregnant without weight loss and dieting if that's the thing that they choose. Instead of that, we look at health promoting behaviors if people want to access those and again, accessing this care is not based on any performance of health. You shouldn't have to do anything in order to access care that should be available to you, regardless of what you choose and the decisions you make in your life, I'm supporting you by not saying that you have to change. I don't want you to change your body, to change anything. What I want to do is I want to eliminate the stigma, the anti fat bias that you might face like that is the goal of this work is to eliminate that, because that is responsible for all the issues, not your body, and it's so much more than body positivity. It is around really eliminating the systems and the structures that are set up to stop you through access and care. This episode of fat and fertile is proudly sponsored by supported the 12 month community program that offers the support you truly deserve, compassionate, respectful, evidence based and above all, led by you. It provides a safe haven where you can feel validated and acknowledged amidst the prevailing inequality and anti fat bias that often accompanies fertility. Care. To learn more, visit the link in our show notes, or send me a message on Instagram at Fat positive fertility. Now let's get back to the show. So that is what fat positive fertility is for me, and that feeds nicely into a framework that I created. So it's called the fat positive framework. And it did take me a while to, like ease it into this beautiful framework that I've created. So I'm going to explain a little bit about what that means. So it's got four little parts to it so that the F in fat positive is for formulating your health plan. And what that means is that we're building an action plan of steps that support your health and well being if you choose to do so that doesn't involve dieting. It doesn't involve weight loss, and it's very small, actionable, tiny steps every week that move towards what your version of health looks like, and that means that it could look like anything, whatever your version of health looks like, Whatever feels supportive and useful to you. That is what we are working on. We are looking at what the evidence base says, but we are also taking into account your lived experience and what it looks like for you. So that is the F in fact positive. The A is for advocacy. So advocating for your fertility, what we do with a lot of people is we teach folks how to advocate for themselves. That could be with healthcare providers, that could be with your work colleagues and with your friends, because we are conditioned, especially as folks who are assigned female at birth, to be the good girls, to do as we're told, to bow down to the people who are in power, normally, the doctors, the healthcare providers, who have this like overarching power over us and just do as we're told, and to just nod along and agree. We are not told how to advocate for ourselves. We are not taught this skill, so that is what we do. We learn those skills, we practice those skills. We look at how we can care for ourselves as we are navigating that skill, and what it means is that we come to a place where we're able to influence the care that we receive and create strong boundaries around others. Us and get our needs met through that advocacy. So that is what the A stands for, advocacy, the T in that positive is about trusting yourself, trusting your body and trusting your lived experience. So we look at tools and techniques that support you in relearning how to trust your body. You already know this stuff. You were inherently born with the skills to be able to trust your body and what your body is telling you, but we're conditioned to ignore all that, to ignore our hunger cues, to ignore our needs. So it's about coming back to ourselves and coming back to our bodies so that we can listen to what our bodies are telling us, and we can take steps based on the information that our body is giving us. And then the final bit the positive of fat positive is around building positive beliefs in our capacity to get pregnant. And that is not toxic positivity, not like light and love and good vibes only. This is around building a toolbox of ways that you can support your mental health, and building up these beliefs that you are worthy of support, that you are going to be a phenomenal parent, and that your body is capable of this. These are beliefs that we are trained not to believe. We are trained to believe the entire opposite of that, and that is not serving us, and it is not based on the truth. So it's around building this belief, this condition, unconditional belief in our capacity to get pregnant and to maintain a healthy pregnancy. So that is what the fat positive fertility framework is. And I love this framework. It informs all of my work. It informs everything I do with folks, because it's really built on what we need as fat people who are navigating these biases within healthcare. So why might you want to work with a fat positive fertility coach? There are a few reasons why you might want to work together, or you might want to learn more about this approach to fertility, if you want to give up dieting and weight loss, if you know that that inherently isn't helpful to you, if you know that it's just given you disordered eating in the past, if you want to try a different way that moves away from weight loss and dieting, fat positive fertility is for you. If you want to work with someone who deeply understands the challenges that fat folks face when navigating fertility, then fat positive fertility is for you, because this work is solely geared towards the unique challenges that fat folks face through this. And if you want to work with someone and trust that there is a better way to care for yourself than hating your body into submission, then that positive fertility is for you. We put the blame and the shame solely where it belongs on the systems and structures that are getting in the way of you accessing support. It does not belong with you. That responsibility does not belong with your body, and you should not be made to feel ashamed and guilty because of your size. So what's the impact of working in a fat positive way? Well, the reason that it's really beneficial is not only the evidence based tools that we use, but the environment and the safety that we create when we're working in a fat, positive way. And obviously safety means different things to different people. I'm not automatically assuming that what you're going to feel safe working together, because that is so dependent on so many things outside of both of our control. But what doing this work together can mean is that it reduces your stress load. Stress is a really interesting one, and I need to do a whole podcast about stress. Just writing that down
stress isn't a bad thing that we're told it is like when, when we use the word stress, it kind of brings up this image of someone like bright red face with like steam coming out. There he is. And that is not what stress is. Stress is an essential physiological response that our body does when we're in a situation that activates our nervous system, when we're in a potentially dangerous situation, for example, or something that needs our vigilance, then our body gets sent into this stress state, which is great, because this keeps us alive. This keeps us alert. It is a really useful state to our body to be in. The problem that we have is that often we are alerted into that state and we don't know how to get back out of it again. So we can spend length and times in the stress state, which means that our body isn't given the opportunity to replenish its resources, to absorb its food more efficiently, to heal and repair the cells in our body. And being a fat person is inherently stressful within our culture, within our society, not because we're fat, but because of the environment that we live. In and the way that we are treated by our society, by doctors, the thoughts that we're conditioned to think about ourselves internally, these will things add up to our stress load. So working in a positive way, re imagining how you see yourself as a fat person, this can really reduce the amount of stress that is on your body, and that has a very physiological impact in that it reduces the stress hormones in your body. It can allow your body that time to repair, to heal and to rest, which is so important, working in a fat positive way, also reduces feelings of isolation. So I know so many folks have shared with me that when they're going through this experience of wanting to get pregnant in a bigger body, they don't want to share that with anybody either, because they've already shared it before, and the person has made them feel guilty, made them feel shame, told them that they need to go on a weight loss diet, all of these things, so they Don't want to share that, or they know that if they do share that, that that is going to happen to them. So they keep it to themselves. They don't talk about it. And it's so isolating to feel like you can't talk about these things with people. It makes you feel like you're the only one navigating this, and that is far from the truth. So working in a fat positive way, so much of the work that I do, I try and involve community groups so that you have that feeling of community. You have that sense of you are not going through this alone, and there are other people who have shared similar experiences and that you can talk to about this stuff. And the impact of working in a fat positive way, also increases fertility. When we move away from dieting and weight loss, we are able to feed our bodies, both physically and emotionally and spiritually and all the different ways, like we are able to nourish our bodies on so many levels. And what that means from a very basic level, is that when you move away from dieting and restriction, you can feed your body what it needs, so it increases the nutritional load that you have. And when your body has got enough resources, it knows that it feels safe to get pregnant. And so much of this idea of dieting for so long as so many fat folks have in their history, is that we don't know what fuel our body needs anymore. We've been trained to have less and less and less so that we are existing on the bare minimum that we need, and what our bodies need is fuel to know that it is safe, consistently being fueled, so that it knows that there is always more coming, so that when it does get pregnant, it's going to have that continual fuel to grow another human life. So let's increase that fuel. Let's increase that safety that that brings for our bodies when we move away from dieting and restriction. So that is why working in a fat positive way, is so powerful on so many different levels. So let me recap that we've talked through so many different things today. I just want to give you a quick recap of what that is so fat positive fertility means that you should be able to access all the care that you need, not limited by your BMI, and you should have body autonomy to make all of those decisions without being forced into weight loss and dieting. The Fat positivity, the fat positive fertility framework, is around getting your needs met as a fat person navigating fertility so that it's formulating a health plan that doesn't involve weight loss and dieting. That is advocating for your fertility with healthcare professionals, trusting that your body is capable of this, and building positive beliefs in your capacity to get pregnant. You would love to work with a fat positive fertility coach if you want to give up dieting, if you want to work with someone who understands what it's like to do this as a fat person, and you know that there is a better way to care for yourself than hating yourself into submission. And finally, we know that working in a fat positive way reduces your stress load, reduces those feelings of isolation, and increases your capacity to get pregnant through nutritional load, through fueling your body, through increasing the safety you experience and making life feel a little bit easier. I hope that has been really helpful. I hope that's given you a better understanding of what that positive fertility means, both for me and to the folks that I work with, and I can't wait to see you next week. Take care. Thanks so much for joining me today. For fat and fertile. If you want to learn more about how to have a fat positive facility journey, then I'd love for you to check out my book fat and fertile, how to get pregnant in a bigger body. It's available. Everywhere via Amazon, so just search in your Amazon store for fat and fertile, or click in the link in the show notes See you next time you.
Get Involved: Nicola would love to hear from you! If this episode resonates, share your story, ask a question, or leave a review. You can also join the Fat and Fertile Alliance - a friendly space to connect with others on similar paths.
Support the Podcast: If you’re enjoying Fat and Fertile, please share this episode on social or leave a review! Every share helps make this info more accessible to everyone who needs it.
Apologies for any typos - transcribed by https://otter.ai - it can make mistakes! If you need clarification on anything - please get in touch!