Finding the Right Fit:
A Journey to Self-Acceptance
by Tiina Veer
Yoga has been one of the greatest gifts in my life. Coming to it in an abundant body and with invisible disabilities did, however, present unique challenges. Those challenges ended up being what inspired me to become a yoga teacher and, to this day, they continue to shape my practice and my teaching methodology and philosophy, and they continue to fuel my passion to help effect individual and social transformation through yoga.
No Fat Chicks? Know Fat Chicks!
I’d been a massage therapist for several years by the time I decided I needed something to counterpoise the physical, repetitive nature of my work, to stay as pain free and functional as possible, and to have career longevity. I thought yoga would be perfect, offering more than an intelligent physical practice: there was meditation, philosophy, “spirituality”—one-stop shopping!
Assumptions about yoga being “all-embracing” were quickly dismantled. It was everything I thought it was not going to be. Judgy. Competitive. Inaccessible. Sometimes teachers completely ignored me, sometimes they inappropriately highlighted me, sometimes well-meaning teachers didn’t have the skill or training to work effectively with my body (be it my size, my physical limitations, or both), sometimes it was how other students treated me, and there were entire studios that may as well have had “No Fat Chicks” signs hanging on their doors.
Many yoga texts say “yoga is a mirror to the Self.” I came to realize that yoga is actually a mirror for anything it reflects—including our culture. Which is why many are now asking “Why is there so little diversity in yoga spaces?” It turns out the marginalization occurring in greater culture is mirrored in modern yoga culture as well—sizeism, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, healthism, all of it and more. Many of us are now attempting to dismantle this in our own worlds and collectively through organizations like the Yoga and Body Image Coalition.
Mixed Feelings
My early yoga journey was tarnished by poor experiences, and I may very well have given up after a few classes if I hadn’t fallen so deeply in love with the beauty and utility of the practice itself. In a city the size of Toronto, I knew I had to be able to find a space where I could feel comfortable and well met—little did I know that would take well over a year.
I was grateful to eventually find a couple of spaces where I felt comfortable (and one that used lots of props, a much rarer find back then), and it wasn’t very long before I wanted to become a yoga teacher myself, specifically to fill the gap that I had experienced. I chose a lengthy teacher training not only because of the quality of the program, but because I wanted time to further develop my own practice before embarking on teaching. It was more than 700 hours held weekly over two years, which I completed and was then fortunate enough to attend again fully when I became anatomy faculty for the subsequent two-year group. It was an amazing four years of deepening into practice and self-inquiry. In the middle of it all, I founded Yoga for Round Bodies, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Back to the Beginning
As a person of size, I am definitely affected in daily life by our strong cultural obsession with thinness and the implications of living large in a fat-hating society. Despite this, I have (miraculously) been able not to internalize these messages so deeply nor allow them a primary role in shaping my body or self-image. Yoga and, particularly, meditation have helped me to continually reinforce and refine this ongoing journey.
Despite being the lifetime owner/operator of a fat body, I grew up with pretty decent body image, in spite of the odds. Sometimes this alone has had me feel like a total and utter aberration. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I managed to grow up fat (and female), and become a fat woman, and still have a relatively intact body image. A number of people, events, and even flukes stand out in forming an early base to a healthy body image, but perhaps none so much as something with roots in my ethnic heritage.
Gettin’ Naked
I was born in Canada but with parents and family from Estonia (a tiny northern Baltic nation). Being war survivors meant inherited trauma for me that would strongly affect self-image and mental health in other ways (depression, anxiety, irrational fear to name a few—all thankfully aided by yoga and therapy). But my body image was very positively underpinned by a specific aspect of Estonian culture—the communal sauna, a traditional bathing and social ritual.
Childhood to early adulthood, I spent oodles of time in saunas with my mother and many female family members and friends. From young to old; from thin to average to fat; short to tall; athletic to non-athletic; breasts low, breasts high; thin limbs, thick limbs; wrinkled skin, tight skin; round bellies, flat bellies; everything in between. Naked bodies as natural and normal as the sky and the earth. Unabashed. Unapologetic. Unflinching. Neither the topic of conversation nor the focus. An incredibly supportive beginning toward accepting my body as it was despite opposing external messages. From a young age, I got the idea that it was just normal to have a body! Which helped set the stage for a healthy body image. This points to a desperate need in our culture to normalize bodies—all bodies—so we can all heal from our collective body preoccupation.
Mishaps, Mistreatment, then Massage Therapy
My inspiration to become a massage therapist was how it helped me to cope with chronic pain and injury. By nineteen, I’d been in four car accidents. First, at twelve. We were stopped when we were rear-ended at full speed by a driver who’d fallen asleep at the wheel, still drunk from the night before. I was in the front and the impact was so potent it broke my seat back. The first in a string of accidents leading to an altered body.
Then three more, one year after another, from seventeen to nineteen. Each with progressively worse tissue damage, each compounding injuries from the one before without ample time for healing in between. Especially after the third accident, I was experiencing chronic pain and occasionally “low back bouts” that would leave me on my back for weeks at a time, in severe pain, afraid to move.
At eighteen, another life-changing injury—downhill skiing, an activity I’d done with my family every winter weekend since I was six. I fell and my ski didn’t release. My body went one way, my ski the other. I tore my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
The orthopaedic surgeon who attended me said I “was not an athlete, so wouldn’t need the reparative surgery,” and I was sent away with a script for physiotherapy. Months later, I was experiencing knee-locking. When I went back to the same doctor, he scoped my knee and found I’d also torn my medial meniscus. He removed the loose bodies, again sending me away with a script for physiotherapy.
I didn’t know better then. He was a highly acclaimed expert, I had no reason to doubt his authority, or so I thought. I wouldn’t become aware of the depth of weight stigma in medicine (and everywhere else) until later in life. On scoping my knee, he would have seen clearly how damaged my ACL actually was and a much later MRI with a different doctor revealed it was nearly severed. By then my knee was full of arthritis, too late for the reparative surgery that should have happened in the first place.
Regrettably, before that injury, even after the first two accidents, I was strong as an ox. But after years of having an unstable knee joint that affected my biomechanics, there are now multiple issues affecting my freedom of movement.
I’m left with an injured body that requires frequent micromanagement and can, at times, be a house of cards. Sometimes even small triggers can set me way back. I joke that massage therapy school was the best and most expensive “rehab” I did—it taught me how to manage my body issues, which gave me more freedom from pain (and allowed me to function at such a physical job).
I have to be careful trying new activities for fear of hurting myself and possibly creating yet another recovery period (not to mention potentially lost income). I even have to be careful about how long I walk, as hard flat surfaces like concrete do me in (which is why I adore hiking in the forest, it gives me more walking freedom plus the healing of nature). I go through periods of being able to exercise and move more assertively, but most of the time I need to stick with gentle and conservative practice to ensure I don’t risk reinjury.
Possibly one of the most healing things I learned through yoga was to never overpower my body, even though this can unfortunately be a common theme in mainstream yoga—not necessarily with explicit instructions to “overpower” the body, but definitely with the common coachy direction or insinuation to go beyond one’s perceived limits. Because of underlying fragility, I learned right from the get-go to look past this often regurgitated and unquestioned instruction and follow the wisdom of my body instead. What it asked for and needed was a gentle, moderate practice. Not ninja or Cirque du Soleil training. Perhaps some wish to explore “going beyond their limits” physically, but for me (and loads of others) this can be downright debilitating.
Looking at me, besides seeing a fat body—which some would consider a disability (I don’t, I consider it a body size)—one would likely never know I suffer chronic pain and invisible disabilities that affect my life experience. I am under no illusions: I fully recognize that even with my invisible disabilities I still experience boatloads of able-bodied privilege (not to mention white privilege and other privileges) that allow me to move quite freely in the world. But it’s yoga that helped me to accept my body’s limitations and work with them, not against them. It has helped me accept the changeability of my body and not despair or grieve when “ground is lost,” as inevitably happens from time to time. With a practice, there is hope that ground can be regained and tranquil acceptance when it cannot. This freedom from the expectation of any kind of “ideal body” is extremely liberating.
Vector for Social Change
When I embark on telling my story of how yoga shifted my body acceptance, because of my size, it’s often assumed that the story I will tell is one of coming to accept and love my abundance. Of course my roundness is a huge part of how I practice and experience yoga (and yoga culture), even how I offer my teaching—the truth is, though, the biggest impact of yoga on my body image was accepting my injuries and the reality of the limitations they created. It was liberating to let go of grieving the strong body I’d once had, and peacefully accept the body I did have, exactly as it was, limitations and all.
I started working on my body image relative to my size in my late twenties, on the back of the early experiences that helped me forge a positive relationship with my “flawed” body, as society viewed it. And that was the point. I realized then and before that I was not the problem. It was society that was seriously messed up, not me. If I hadn’t already been working on that, I may never have had the courage to enter the healing field, become a massage therapist, and eventually end up here.
In a way, it was precisely from always having a very fat body that such acceptance could arise—I was so far outside the realm of society’s take on an acceptable body, I had no choice but to love it (or at least accept it) or otherwise face a life of utter desperation and anguish. I decided I was not going to live my life like that.
This size acceptance is probably what saved me from chronic dieting too. I had come to accept my body as it was, so I could simply go about enjoying life the best I could, without feeling like I had to live on a perpetual diet to be “worthy.” Ironically, ten years ago and well into my thirties, for the first time I started to feel pulled toward losing weight. Not so ironically, it was around the time that “obesity epidemic” rhetoric started really heating up in the media.
I tried three “healthy” attempts, each time losing weight, each time gaining it back and then some. I ended up forty pounds heavier than when I started dieting, with a loose and wobbly fat body in place of the taut fat body I previously occupied. And the worst outcome—slightly elevated blood pressure after a lifetime of running steady at the same numbers at the low end of healthy range. Fortunately, still within healthy range, but elevated nonetheless. It was obvious I needed to investigate what was going on before trying again and ending up gaining more weight.
At this time, already practicing yoga (and meditation since studying zen shiatsu), I was able to more readily come to terms with my new “less optimal” version 2.0 fat(ter) post-diet body. And zen and yoga philosophy had also been teaching me discernment: there is the illusion of truth and then there is truth.
So I started looking for answers and stumbled across information that shocked me so much it was like going down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland or taking the red pill in The Matrix. I learned that much of what we think we know about weight and health is not actually evidence-based and rests tottering above an abyss of weight stigma. I was surprised to learn that 80 to 97 percent of intentional weight loss efforts fail long-term—within two to five years of starting a diet, the average dieter has regained all but about two pounds of the weight they lost, with anywhere from one- to two-thirds gaining more than was lost, leading to dangerous successions of loss and gain (“weight cycling”), correlated with all the things fatness is correlated with, and worse.
Wait a minute, what?? So I wasn’t an outlier? Regaining my weight and then some could have been pretty much predicted? On one hand, good news because it made me feel less like a failure, but it was enraging! To find out this information is known, even diet companies know (it’s why they are mandated to put “results not typical” in all their advertising), and yet it’s a failing and health-risking intervention still pushed like it’s the Holy Grail, the answer to all ills.
Amid the depressing truth about weight loss, I thankfully stumbled upon the Health at Every Size® (HAES) paradigm, which is an evidence-based look at the conflation between weight and health and advocates a weight-neutral approach to individual health. It’s often described as “the new peace movement for our bodies,” and dovetailed beautifully with yoga philosophy and my practice.
By this point, I was also finding myself perpetually pissed for having gone down the weight loss path, and for all who have, are, and will inevitably go down it. Yoga and meditation not only gave me tools for staying even-keeled in the face of that anger but it also gave me a vector for creating social change, and it motivated me to advocate to end the “yoga for weight loss” trend, not only because it’s unsubstantiated, but because it saddens me to see yoga used as a mule for the 60 billion dollar per year diet industrial complex.
I was just embarking on offering Yoga for Round Bodies training to teachers when I discovered both HAES and the size acceptance movement, immediately realizing the training wouldn’t be complete without them. It was synchronicity. And now most of my offerings for teachers incorporate information on HAES, sizeism, and healthism (as well as exploring other types of marginalization and oppression—they all intersect).
I constantly encourage teachers to examine their own internalized weight stigma (almost impossible not to have in our size-obsessed culture), so they can do their best not to repeat stereotypes and micro-aggressions in class that larger-bodied people have to endure in almost every aspect of daily life. There is also self-healing that comes with ridding ourselves of internalized weight stigma—what do you think fuels our collective body-preoccupation, leading to a litany of problems not the least of which being life-threatening eating disorders?
Yoga’s Ultimate Gift
I entered yoga in an injured body looking to heal it, so I’ve always had to be moderate and careful when approaching asana. I was never particularly interested in practicing like a ninja, acrobat, nor dancer, nor having yet another new thing at which to excel. I just wanted to function and heal and have a practice that supported peacefulness and more comfortable everyday living.
Like most everyone else, my challenge was to accept my body and myself exactly as they were, messiness included. For me, this meant fully accepting my so-called flaws, especially my limitations. I often had to fight that opposing message so common in yoga classes about not accepting our “perceived limitations.” I had to carefully discern the difference. And though I was savvy enough not to try to constantly push through my limitations, I still had loads to learn about quieting my constant desire for them to be different—such an unnecessary mental and emotional strain.
Yoga asana gives me a physical practice that is truly therapeutic and can meet my constantly-changing body. It challenges me to fully accept my body, especially when I’m feeling down on function and what’s possible (for example, there have been periods of time where all that was doable was Restorative practice, and instead of lamenting that I couldn’t do more, I appreciated that I still had a practice). This ever-shifting practice allows me to focus on (and appreciate) what my body does for me, what it can do instead of what it can’t, and above all, that it still functions as the awe-inspiring spaceship that allows me to have this earthly experience. Everything else is window dressing.
Asana and meditation have taught me so much about comparative mind consistently undermining our potential to experience contentment, which I believe rests at the heart of experiencing true happiness. It has given me tools to use for personal transformation and daily self-care, and even to effect social change. Yoga has truly come to perfume every corner of my life, and is slowly but surely working to help me attain a lofty goal: finding contentment and becoming unflappable.
Tiina Veer founded Yoga for Round Bodies™ in 2004. A pioneer in the accessible yoga movement, she has trained teachers all over the world how to sensitively teach bigger-bodied yogis, apprehensive beginners, and those with chronic pain or injury. She is a veteran manual therapist, founder of Halcyon Health Wellness Centre in Toronto, Canada, and an avid advocate of the Size Acceptance movement and Health at Every Size® paradigm. Veer is most passionate about simple self-care and empowering people to become the source of their own guidance and inspiration. www.tiinaveer.com. Author photo by Donna Santos.