Evette Dionne was 8 years old when she learned her body was something she could be faulted for, merely by existing in it. She was at the doctor’s office for a follow-up appointment after being hospitalized for a severe asthma attack. Dionne knew her body had changed — after three months of prednisone to reduce the swelling in her lungs, her body was bigger — she just didn’t know that bigger meant bad. Until hearing judgment in the hush-hush conversation her doctor had with her parents about her expanded size, her body was just a body. It wasn’t a number on a scale or the tag on the back of her jeans, something to be compressed, shrunken, or starved. It was simply what carried her little kid legs from point A to point B, something that shook with reckless abandon when she got a case of the giggles. Prior to that moment at the doctor’s office, Dionne’s body was weightless.

Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul is the title of Dionne’s new essay collection, a damning indictment of the fat-phobic world in which we live. A world where, in the midst of a mass-disabling plague, it’s acceptable to tell women to starve becauseheroin chic is now back on trend. Dionne — former editor in chief of Bitch Media and the current executive editor of Yes! Magazine, as well as author of Fat Girls Deserve Fairy Tales Too and Lifting as We Climb: Black Women’s Battle for the Ballot Box, which was longlisted for a National Book Award — tells Shondaland that fat phobia “is one of the last sustaining institutions. It’s not acceptable to be racist. It’s barely acceptable to be sexist.” And “if you’re a homophobe, unless you’re in a state legislature and you’re passing a bill, that’s unacceptable,” Dionne says. “But if you’re a fat-phobic person and you crack fat jokes, oh, then that’s fine. It’s still an acceptable way of being.”

Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul

Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul

Weightless: Making Space for My Resilient Body and Soul

$25 at Bookshop
Credit: Ecco Press

It’s so unobjectionable and pervasive that when Dionne went to the gynecologist after bleeding for 28 days straight, she was told to consider weight loss surgery, despite a history of fibroids, which disproportionately affect Black women like her. It took two years of pain, bleeding, and medical gaslighting for doctors to finally agree to surgically remove her fibroid that (unsurprisingly) was causing her symptoms — along with four other fibroids discovered in surgery. When Dionne presented with classic symptoms of heart failure at 26 years old, including dangerous edema and unrelenting weight gain, she was diagnosed with obesity and told to lose 100 pounds. Three years later, she found out her heart was working at a mere 16 percent of its capacity. “I am in heart failure,” Dionne writes in Weightless. “It’s a surreal sentence that still gets stuck in my mouth, coating my tongue like a dry scoop of peanut butter.” Her heart failure, in addition to a bonus chronic illness discovered — pulmonary hypertension — was not caused by being fat. But doctors’ fat phobia — in addition to rampant gender bias and racism in health care — almost cost Dionne her life.

Dionne talked to Shondaland about her refusal to let chronic illness steal her joy, what it’s like to feel that your own body has betrayed you, and why you should never compliment someone for losing weight.


BRIJANA PROOKER: First of all, thank you for writing this book! As someone who lives with an invisible chronic illness and was dismissed by doctors for a decade — and told my pain was all in my head — I related deeply to the medical misogyny and gaslighting you faced before finally being diagnosed with heart failure at age 29. Talk to me about this, as well as the additional marginalization you dealt with due to racism and fat phobia.

EVETTE DIONNE: I had been experiencing symptoms for at least three years before my diagnosis. I had aches and pains in my back, which is common with heart conditions. Fluid was pooling in my ankles and in my abdomen. I was beyond exhausted but could not even quantify how exhausted I was. And yet doctors kept saying to me, “Oh, if you lose weight, you’ll feel better.”

Any doctor looking at a person who was thin would have said, “Let’s run tests on you. Let’s figure out what is causing this.” But for me, it was just “You are fat.” When I started diving deeper into this, I realized that my story is not exceptional. It’s actually quite the norm. And that’s what really got me thinking about the ways in which doctors dismissing women, especially women of size, especially women of colorBlack women, even more specifically than that — leads to these missed diagnoses. Facing fat shaming at the doctor’s [office] sometimes prevents fat people from seeking treatment for symptoms, and it can literally cost them their lives.

BP: What does the title of your book, Weightless, as well as the general concept of weightlessness, mean to you? Is being weightless a step beyond the trendy “body positivity” movement?

ED: I think “body positivity” at this point is pretty toothless. And so when I think about the idea of being weightless, I am thinking about confronting and challenging these systems that are fat-phobic, while also preserving ourselves as people. I think so often, when you’re in the midst of a movement, and you’re trying to shift systems and make people treat you with dignity, it becomes really easy to forget that you need to take care of yourself. And Weightless for me is about, yeah, these systems are heavy, and being involved in this work is heavy, but I don’t have to be. I can preserve my dignity and my happiness while also doing this really important work.

BP: That’s something I loved about your book — that joy is always there. Weightless deals with traumatic topics like facing your own mortality, being bullied and sexually assaulted in school, and learning that getting pregnant could be fatal because of your pulmonary hypertension. Yet your book remains joyful in tone. What’s your best advice for finding joy while living in a chronically ill body?

ED: That’s a beautiful question. I will say that it took me a long time to be in a place where joy is really the [only] motivation for me. Like, I don’t do anything that doesn’t make me happy. I say no all the time to all sorts of things that just don’t fit the lifestyle that I want for myself. Because there’s so much about being chronically ill that you can’t control. I can’t control whether or not I wake up in the morning with energy. I’m pretty much dictated in terms of health by medication. But the thing I can control is how good I feel emotionally, the people I surround myself with, the pop culture I consume, the music I listen to, the books I read. Everything in my life outside of [chronic illness] is about preserving happiness.

And so for other people who are chronically ill and are in a place where — which I completely understand — you’re angry, or you’re bitter, or you’re upset about the condition of your body, think about the things that make you smile. How do you center those things? How do you make them a non-negotiable part of your life?

..The thing I can control is how good I feel emotionally, the people I surround myself with, the pop culture I consume, the music I listen to, the books I read.

BP: You mention in your book that sometimes you feel like your body has betrayed you. As the counterpoint to remaining positive while living in a body you don’t have full control over, can you talk to me about being angry with your own body?

ED: I literally at a point was on my deathbed at 29. And so for a long time, I did feel like my body had betrayed me, that my body couldn’t hold up like other people’s bodies. And I used to ask all the time, “Why me?” I imagine that’s a common experience for people who have chronic illnesses. I won’t say that I’ve gotten past it. But what has really helped me put it into perspective is [knowing] my body and I are in a relationship — we work in tandem to keep me alive. I remember one time my heart was beating so fast that it was beating through my neck — for 14 hours. And I went to the doctor, and they were like, “Oh, you just have anxiety.” No, my body’s alerting me — “Something is wrong; I’m in distress.” I just have to listen really closely to pick up on what [is wrong] so I can get the proper help.

BP: In your book, you rage against diet culture and placing moral values on thinness and fatness. You mention losing weight because of being sick, and the gut-wrenching praise you received. Tell me why complimenting someone for losing weight can be just as infuriating as being overlooked for being fat.

ED: You should never compliment someone for weight loss. It’s just not a polite thing to do. You never know the reasons why somebody’s body is smaller. In my case, I was smaller because I had heart failure and pulmonary hypertension, which requires me to be on a very strict diet in terms of how much sodium I can consume and how much liquid I can consume. My body naturally shrank as a result of that, combined with the medications I take. That’s not something you compliment. Because basically what you’re saying actually is “It’s great you got heart failure because you lost weight. It’s great that Adele got divorced, because she lost weight” — because she was having panic attacks and needed to go to a personal trainer to calm down her nervous system. It just reinforces this idea that the goal is to assimilate and conform to this thin ideal, no matter what it takes.

BP: You also mention the feeling that your plus-size body doesn’t belong to you, that as soon as you developed breasts and hips, your body was no longer your own. You talk about being harassed and assaulted by boys who felt your body was — quite literally — up for grabs, and then later being “fat fetishized” by men who felt entitled to pleasure at the expense of your own. Can you talk about the role misogyny and patriarchy play in creating a culture where girls’ and women’s bodies aren’t really their own, particularly in a post-Roe world?

ED: In a post-Roe world, you’re absolutely correct. Women and femme [presenting] people’s bodies are treated like a public spectacle. I think the perfect ground zero for that is watching the way people interact with someone who is visibly pregnant. The amount of touching that happens and invasive questions — you could zero in on that as the problem. This is someone’s body. Their personal body. But because they are carrying a fetus, that means that suddenly their body is subjected to state intervention, invasive questions, unwanted and unconsented touch. So, if you couple that with being fat, you’re constantly surveilled. You can’t walk into a room without people looking to see “Oh, are you gonna fall down? Oh, can you sit in a chair? Oh, what are you eating?”

It just makes the fat person’s world so much smaller. Where leaving the house feels like a triumph every time because it’s so hard to do knowing that people might poke fun at you, might stare, might say something untoward, might try to hit on you, and then hit you with “fat bitch” if you don’t respond well to their aggressive approach. It just creates a hostile world in which women — and if you combine that with women of color — are constantly under surveillance. And that’s just straight-up misogyny. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think that’s our society working as intended.

BP: What advice would you give someone who wants to stop apologizing for taking up space?

ED: Ooh! [Pauses to think about it.] Literally stop apologizing! Women are notorious for over-apologizing. We feel like we need to offer context for every single thing that we do. And sometimes that’s appropriate, but most of the time, it’s not. It’s okay to just say, “I’m late today,” and not apologize for that. It’s okay to say, “I can’t make it” or “No, I can’t do that.”

It’s okay to just show up in the world as a bright light and just exist that way. And what I say is: People deal, or they don’t deal. If I worried all the time about how other people perceive me, I would never get any work done.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.


Brijana Prooker is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and mama to two peanut butter-colored rescue girls (a pit bull named Ivy and a kitty named Doosis). In addition to Shondaland, her byline has appeared in Elle, The Washington Post’s The Lily, Good Housekeeping, Newsday, Bitch Media, and Observer. Find her on Twitter @BriProoker.

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