You Can Choke on My Size

I have what I jokingly refer to as an ‘addiction’ to plush toys. By referring to it as such, it allows me to forget that that ‘addiction’ may be widely considered excessive, regressive, or faintly embarrassing. On my bedside table sits the evidence: a grumpy turtle dressed as a gnome, a Totoro plush flattened by years of use, a green, unidentified kawaii creature with a watermelon balanced on its head, and a kiwi bird I made at Build-a-Bear (which is named Lily after my favourite flower). In front of them, arranged with some care, are the smaller ones: a highland cow and a rainbow rabbit.

The most important one does not sit with the others. Zippo, a tattered hippo with purple zebra stripes, has been with me since infancy and lives on my bed. What comforts me about him has little to do with his softness. Instead, it is the weight of the beans sewn into his stomach that anchor me to my body, pressing gently against me at night like a warm stone.

This kind of pressure is widely understood to be reassuring. Weighted blankets and heavy plush toys are marketed as therapeutic tools for anxiety and other mental health conditions. The explanation is neurological. Deep pressure stimulation activates the parasympathetic nervous system, relaxing the muscles, slowing the breath and quieting the mind. The body responds to weight by feeling calm, as if it recognises it’s being held.

And yet, culturally, weight itself is something we are taught to fear. It is framed as something to be disciplined away. The same society that warns us against heaviness sells it back to us as wellness, provided it remains something that is external, easily removed at will. Weight is acceptable only when it does not settle permanently on the body.

This contradiction is not new. Humanity has long been fascinated with controlling itself, particularly through food. Starvation has repeatedly been interpreted as virtue. In medieval Europe, prolonged fasting was revered as a form of devotion, especially among women, whose bodies were already understood as sites of moral weakness that required discipline. Catherine of Siena, perhaps the most famous example of this behaviour, fasted for extended periods in pursuit of spiritual purity. She eventually died at the age of 33 after suffering a stroke. Her starvation was evidence of her holiness as she was canonised as a saint 81 years later. 

When anorexia nervosa entered medical literature in the late nineteenth century, it did so uneasily. William Gull’s clinical descriptions helped to frame the condition as an illness rather than a moral failure. However, his description, “Anorexia Hysterica,” showed that initial attempts to explain the condition emerged from a culture that had already associated femininity with emotional volatility and fragility. Despite his patients being emaciated and hypothermic, Gull notes that he was surprised by their restlessness, which “seemed agreeable”, reflecting the ambiguous space anorexia occupies as an enviable disease. 

As the twentieth century progressed, those ideals were secularised. Religious fasting gave way to calorie counting. Thinness became medicalised, commercialised, and moralised all at once. 

Throughout this time, eating disorders were typically stereotyped as an illness reserved for affluent, Caucasian women. This false conclusion has been drawn as a result of studies showing that, on average, women of other ethnicities report having a greater body mass in comparison to Caucasian women. Additionally, people of colour are presumed to have lower rates of eating disorders due to their cultural perspectives that deviate from Western ideals. This expectation only ostracises communities from diverse racial backgrounds by seeing them as the ‘other,’ even in their time of need. 

In fact, participants in a study from 2002 were asked to read a passage about an adolescent girl experiencing symptoms of disordered eating. There were three passages that varied only in the young girl’s ethnicity. When the girl was Caucasian, 93% of participants recognised her symptoms as pathological compared to 79% when she was presented as African American or Hispanic. 

The lack of research into the experience of eating disorders within minority groups is appalling, particularly when considering its enduring relevance. During the Hindu festival Karva Chauth, wives fast to pray for the longevity of their marriages. During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslim communities abstain from food during daylight hours. In Jainism, forms of self-denial and fasting can be framed as spiritually virtuous. Although Western society has seemingly deemed religious notions of fasting as archaic and backwards (reflecting another way in which we continue to demean minority communities), religious and cultural eating practices remain deeply ingrained in many people's lived experiences.

At the same time, colonialism, globalisation, and industrialisation have drastically reshaped the cultural landscape of the diaspora. South Asian women are pulled towards Western beauty ideals, adopting lighter skin, hairless bodies (though not our heads) and smaller frames. 

For many children of migrants, food is never just food. We are taught to be grateful for whatever is placed before us and reminded constantly of the scarcity endured by relatives back home. What we internalise is not gratitude but guilt, yet this narrative often goes unquestioned. Migration programs are selective. Families who are able to immigrate from overseas typically possess the financial resources, education, or professional capital required to do so. They are not, in most cases, the most economically deprived. Therefore, the rhetoric of inherited scarcity becomes less about material reality and more about moral discipline. 

Layered upon this is the ‘model minority’ myth. ‘Model minority’ is a social construction that stereotypes certain ethnic groups as more educated and successful than other minority groups. It represents a narrative first constructed within colonial hierarchies, which saw these marginalised communities as primitive. It now asks minority groups to utilise the same thinking that was once used to conquer us to conquer the Western world and carve out a place of belonging. Perfectionism is marketed as a way of ensuring survival, as protection against disposability and as a repayment for sacrifice. And perfectionist tendencies, as the research and my psychiatrist says, are one of the hallmarks of disordered eating. 

In this intersection of piety, migration, beauty politics, and racialised expectation, the absence of culturally nuanced research is not simply an academic oversight. It is a structural failure.

In a recent interview, I was fortunate enough to speak with Kacey Martin, whose postgraduate doctoral research at UNSW centres on Māori experiences of eating disorders in Australia, examining the disparities and inequities in eating disorder treatment for Māori people.

During the early stages of her research, Kacey admitted she had initially been anxious about recruiting participants the traditional way, as Māori individuals are underrepresented in traditional treatment programs. Instead, she chose to recruit participants through Facebook and was shocked that there was “a surprising amount of interest” from the community. Kacey spoke about how this was the first time many of the participants had spoken about their experiences. To increase participation in her study, Kacey did not require a formal diagnosis to take part, revealing the ingrained stereotyping of eating disorders.  

“The topic of eating disorders just isn’t on the radar for a lot of people,” she said. “You can’t even be highly stigmatised because people just aren’t thinking about it.” She suggested that by seeing eating disorders only through a Western lens,  Māori experiences are clinically and socially overlooked. Strict diagnostic frameworks and narrow research samples have historically centred Caucasian women, rendering other presentations less legitimate to health professionals.

Kacey also noted the impact of colonialism on notions of beauty within the Māori community. “Pre-colonisation, they were just less beauty-oriented in the first place. It was more about what your body could do to benefit your community,” she explained. The intense bodily preoccupation with thinness, she argued, reflects colonial beauty standards layered onto Indigenous communities. Kacey also described how racist assumptions about Māori bodies, which position Māori people as more likely to be overweight or obese, can result in the dismissal of disordered eating altogether. She noted that several participants only received a diagnosis after undergoing bariatric surgery, which raises uncomfortable questions about whether eating behaviours were screened before intensive surgery or explained away as the norm. 

But beauty ideals alone do not tell the full story, as the brutality of colonialism also brought disruption through food insecurity.  “You have to look beyond that and consider the disruption of traditional food systems,” she said. “The removal of Māori from their land disrupts their ability to produce food.” In this context, behaviours that are pathologised in Western clinical settings must also be considered within the contexts of structural deprivation and historical trauma in order to gain a holistic picture. 

When I asked what culturally competent care might look like moving forward, Kacey pointed to the Te Whare Tapa Whā model. This model frames wellbeing as an interconnected structure encompassing physical health (taha tinana), mental and emotional health (taha hinengaro), spiritual health (taha wairua), and family and social relationships (taha whānau). By grounding treatment in this framework, clinicians aim to prevent purely pathologising eating disorders. Instead, it invites clinicians to use the community, land, history, and identity as a part of the healing process. 

Listening to Kacey, it became clear to me that minority communities are demanding change. In line with the theme for National Eating Disorder Awareness Month ‘Fighting for Change, Committed to Change – Every Body Belongs’, we need to recognise that not only does every body belong, but that anyone can be susceptible to an eating disorder.

But recognition alone is a limited gesture. It is not enough to circulate helplines while continuing to praise weight loss, or to promote self-care while rewarding bodily disappearance. The contradiction remains intact.

It is also important to remember that anorexia nervosa is only one manifestation of disordered eating. Conditions such as bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder and other specified feeding or eating disorders do not always present with visible thinness, nor are they driven by identical motivations. Eating disorders are not illnesses experienced exclusively by women. Men, gender non-conforming people and individuals across diverse cultural backgrounds can be affected, often with even less recognition and greater stigma.

To say, “You can choke on my size,” is therefore not an act of hostility so much as a refusal to comply. It rejects a lineage of praise disguised as concern. It questions why comfort is acceptable only when outsourced to objects, and why weight upon the body is feared while weight upon the self is welcomed. If Zippo teaches me anything, it is that heaviness is not inherently harmful. Sometimes it is precisely what keeps us here. National Eating Disorder Awareness Month offers a moment to reckon with that. To not only name anorexia as an illness, but to examine the values that continue to make it praised.

This article has been edited to remove Kacey Martin's research as being in Aotearoa and Australia. Her research is about Māori experiences of eating disorders in Australia only.