Fat girls do yoga too | Life and style | The Guardian

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Fat girls do yoga too

Who says yoga is just for skinny people? The industry needs to shape up, says the new
(big) girl in class
Deborah Coughlin
Saturday 11 October 2014 07.00BST

ike a scene from Heathers (or Mean Girls, if youre under 30), they cocked their
heads to one side and gave me the smiley pity wince. Sorry, babe. I dont think
youll feel comfortable. Its full of skinny yoga bunnies. Even I feel fat in there. I
instantly regretted inquiring about hot yoga. For the next 20 minutes, as I ate my
roast dinner, they attempted to convince me to have a colonic, to boost me towards
slimness. After being told youre too fat for yoga, there is nothing quite like demolishing
a gravy-soaked yorkshire pud.
That was four years ago and Id just turned 30. Until this point, I had always been very
sneery about the health-conscious. Eye-rolling at decaf coee. Laughing out loud at
alcohol-free beer. Shaking my head at passing joggers. It wasnt until I hit my third
decade, with its robust facial hair and horric hangovers, that I realised there wasnt
anything funny about choosing not to be healthy. Just like a chubby kid who becomes
the bully, I had felt jealous. I had felt left out and as if I wouldnt t into being t. I
realised that its one thing being unt in your 20s but its way harder in your 30s.
Something had to be done. But how?
A graduate of the Oprah school of yo-yoing, at age 14 I was size 14, age 19 a size 20, age
22 a size 8. Over the past decade, Ive been an 18, 12, 22 and 14. Now, at 34, Im back up
there again at a mighty 18 (top) and 22 (bottom). I have never been eating-gateauxfor-breakfast fat, or Ill have a pizza with cheeseburgers in the crust fat I am not a
fool, and most fat people arent. Overweight people wear their issues on their arse and,
being easily spottable, are often treated like idiots with no willpower. And yet they are
invisible when it comes to images of sport, tness and health.
Nowhere more so than when it comes to yoga and its marketing. We found that yoga
users are more likely to be white, female, young and college educated, concluded a
2008 Characteristics of Yoga Users study. They are also above averagely wealthy and
healthy, another survey published in 2013 by Kantar Media found.
An image search for yoga conrms the stats: yoga is white, wealthy, female and really
skinny; the Goop-reading, Hilaria Baldwins of this world. I live in east London, which is
much more diverse than EastEnders would have you believe and yet the yoga studios
are vanilla: yummy mummies with plenty of money. But there is a revolution coming.
Weve had baby yoga, hot yoga, naked yoga and swinging yoga. Now, fat yoga is on its
way.

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Fat girls do yoga too | Life and style | The Guardian

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Dianne Bondy is the founder of yogasteya.com, an online studio for all sizes and
abilities, and a founding board member of the newly formed Yoga And Body Image
Coalition. I call myself the accidental activist, she tells me, over Skype from her home
in Canada. I went to a yoga teacher training class and I was the only brown person, the
only person past a size 14: I felt like this big brown spot in a sea of white faces. I thought,
theres got to be some other people who feel this way. So I got mad and wrote a blog:
Yoga: Not Just For Young, Skinny, White Girls. It had 10,000 reads and the movement
started from there.

Talking to Bondy is like getting a one-to-one with my hero. She is a natural-born

communicator, compassionate and inspirational. In just under an hour, I had multiple
aha moments. I started thinking, she said, if there are all these people who feel this
way, how can I change what I see? Can I post my own seles as a big girl doing yoga, to
counter the aesthetic of the skinny girls doing poses? Can I be the change?
It took two years after being threatened with a colon wash before I nally built up the
courage to go to a yoga class, at east Londons Stretch, and that was only because my
mate Aquila was the teacher. It was enlightening, in the most hippy mind, body and soul
way. She told all of us in the class to feel the possibility, and in just 60 minutes I
realised I could do things I genuinely thought I couldnt.
Bigger men and women get put o when they see half the class has an eating disorder,
and the rest are gymnasts, Aquila says. But I have seen bigger bodies do the most
incredible things, and we have seen a rise in the diversity of practitioners, from all sorts
of backgrounds, and all shapes and sizes.
Yoga is big business: last month, the lm director David Lynch created a line of yoga
wear for women called Live The Process. Now, I love Lynch, but yoga Lynch turns out to
be mean, with a fashion line that stops at a large equivalent to a UK size 12. Fitness
fashion is one of my great unrequited loves and yet I often end up looking like a
grown-up Little Miss Sunshine, wearing whatever I havent worn to bed the night before
(theres a crossover with my sleeping attire). Shouldnt fat people be the target market
for tness wear? Arent we the ones supposed to be doing all the exercise?
Kerensa Sheen set up State Of Mind, for sizes 14-28, in 2012, after a eureka moment. I
went to a boot camp and the shopping experience was horrendous, she says. I ended
up wearing mens walking trousers nothing stylish was available to me. I asked
everyone at the boot camp, and the stories were all depressingly the same. So she set up
her business, but we quickly discovered that plus-size women are reluctant to invest in
active wear, because they are always a day away from the life-changing diet. We had so
many comments about our pricing, people saying they didnt want to pay so much for
clothing they wouldnt be wearing next year.
I understand why: bigger women are in a strange psychological place, a place where we
are told we will not be attractive, we wont t into things, and we will die young yet
something holds us back from being ourselves right now, this size, doing exercise, in
clothes that t us. We are holding o on living; were waiting until weve already lost the
weight.

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Fat girls do yoga too | Life and style | The Guardian

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Michele Pernetta taught Bikram yoga for 15 years before setting up her own hot yoga
school, Fierce Grace. People tell me all the time at dinner parties, when they nd out
what I do, Im too old, Im not t enough, to do yoga. I want really unt people with
injuries, people who have given up on their backs. People with diculty. Its advertisers
who think its aspirational. But I dont think it should be. Yoga should be about who you
are now.
So now, years after being ambushed by my friends, I nd myself on a sweat-sodden
towel in a warehouse basement, bent over and pulling on my toes, head dangling into
my boobs, a sea of sweaty crotches in my eyeline. Id nally come to hot yoga with my
mate Marianne. (This after completing a six-week beginners course at the Yoga Place in
Bethnal Green, east London.) Unlike the Heathers, Marianne had assured me I could do
hot yoga. All I needed was some water and a towel. Plus, she promised that if I hated it,
we could both leave and go to the pub. A clever ploy, but not quite enough.
The tipping point was that Fierce Graces yers were dierent. They featured people who
looked like the sort with whom Id quite happily go for several drinks. They werent
skinny, werent all doing it perfectly; it looked dirty, even a bit punk. The teacher, Nina,
is warm and compassionate. This wasnt what the Heathers had described. And I could
do it, really well.
Pernetta is just like Bondy. She may be skinny, but the energy is the same. I didnt make
a conscious decision to be dierent, she says. Ive never tried to show yoga as yin, as
ethereal, because its not. This is blood, sweat and guts here. We meet in a coee shop,
and she berates herself for not having brought along a copy of one of the UKs biggest
yoga magazines. I went through and counted how many photographs there were of
skinny blond girls it was something like 40, all of them sitting in the lotus position that
has nothing to do with yoga. And this is Yoga Magazine! A) its boring, B) its not what
yogas about, and C) thats, like, 1% of who goes to yoga. They are just models.
Rather than aha moments, with Pernetta I have a series of WTF moments. If the
overweight person can build some muscle, then they will nd it much easier to lose
weight, because theyve got this muscle that is then burning calories. Whereas someone
like me, if I could relax a bit and loosen up, be a little less intense, I could gain more.
People with less muscle tone can gain weight more easily, but they are more exible.
I cant believe what Im hearing. This goes against received wisdom: by this logic, fat
people should be awesome at yoga. But what about moves that seem impossible with
massive boobs and a big arse? It doesnt matter if youre skinny, big, perfect, or if youve
had two hip replacements: everyone is going to come up against something. If someone
feels suocated by their boobs in the forward she bends over to illustrate they are
actually compressing their stomach, detoxifying their internal organs, massaging. Day by
day, theyll go an inch farther.
If obesity is the disease of the poor, are the big yoga studios guilty of not reaching out?
Maybe, Pernetta says. A lot of people are [priced out]. Yoga has got to change, start
attracting a whole new level of people who dont dare go now. Young, t people need it,
but they probably dont need it as much as someone whos just had a knee replacement.
Our culture stigmatises fat people. They are made to look stupid on TV diet shows,
forced to dance in nude underwear with camera angles the equivalent of a booming
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Lancashire brass band. The only psychological tool employed on these shows is the
shock tactic of having all the fat you eat in a year presented to you in the form of a lard
pig sculpture while a doctor repeats how horribly youre going to die. Its all stick and no
carrot. If Im going to be a yoga bunny, I need some carrots, please.
Stigma breeds fear, and now young girls are more fearful of being fat than of getting
cancer, nuclear war or losing their parents. Its a culture of fear that only creates more fat
people. People who dont need to panic, who go from a 12 to a 14, feel scared that they
wont t in, that they will look wrong doing yoga. So they wait in the margins and, as
they wait, they put on more weight. Society makes people so anxious that they avoid the
very things that will help them.
Fat yoga could change this. But rst we need to get the people who will benet most
through the door, by showing dynamic, fun and smart fat people doing life-fullling
stu. We need people like Bondy, helping us to see the possibilities. We exclude people
and judge people, and they dont feel great about themselves and start behaving in ways
that are harmful. Bondy looks at me over the Skype feed as if this is obvious.
Stigmatising fat people is the last prejudice were allowed.
Make no mistake, Bondy says: Yoga is not for weight loss. Its great for strengthconditioning, bone density and lowering blood pressure. It gets results for both mind
and body. If people come to the practice, learn to love themselves, and develop coping
strategies for dealing with a very stressful, fast-paced life, I think theyll gure out that
they are worth looking after.
She is right. I am no longer intimidated by all those t mean girls. With yoga in my life I
have nally found my balance, somewhere between the downward dog and a yorkshire
pudding.
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Yoga Fitness Obesity
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