Christina Fleetwood, Sweden

Hello, my name is Kristina Flitgud and I’m from Stockholm, Sweden. I’m very much interested in the concept of stigma, and not only stigma as it exists but actually how it functions. Stigma originally, the name comes from Greece, when what they did to people was brand them or mark them physically, saying you’re a slave or you’re a crime person or something.

You can see it. I mean, you can compare it to branding the animals today. You belong to.

It was also something that don’t go away, doesn’t go away. So what happens is that you get this stigma and we take it over today and see what happens. And the one thing that’s obvious is you can never get away from it because you’re seen as something.

You have a definition immediately when you walk into a room like somebody with a different color or any other object, even just being man, woman, any kind of difference. And you seem immediately and you define immediately. This process then goes through and it has a very intricate way of changing a human being.

First, you get through the description, you are described as a person who is fat. Then, there are certain classifications around this thing, you’re this, that fat, you’re you know, whatever. And then you define the individual based on these characteristics.

The chapter, the character then is transferred from an individual to a group. You don’t, you’re not any longer individual, you’re belonging to this group and lose your own identity to some extent. And then the individual of or the group is made responsible for these characteristics and the social situation.

In other words, you all know the concept of you have to blame yourself. It’s all your own fault. You have to take charge of this all by yourself.

And then you create kind of special institutions. You put people in this particular room in one way or the other. And the individual of the group is defined out.

You don’t have your own individuality. So then you’re trying to change it all over. So you’re trying to lose weight, but you still have the identity inside you.

You’re still the fat person. It doesn’t matter. Weight on, weight off.

You still are there and you still have a thing of not getting out of something. Then everybody says, all right, lose weight. Yes, everything will be fine, which is a pure myth.

And one of them is because you have lost your social world. So you lose your lose weight. And then comes another one.

Then all of a sudden, you’re coming out of the tradition before. And all of a sudden, our family relationships and balance changes. You’re not any longer the kid that you kicked on.

And members of former social circles feels actually threatened, believe it or not. And it’s a confusion of size. You don’t know what size of clothes, shoes, anything.

You don’t know how to behave. You don’t know what to do when you come out in social circles. And your self-confidence is still very, very low.

You’re still a fat person on the inside. And this might stay with you for the rest of your life, actually. So it’s really necessary to start in that end.

Start, change your psychological identity as well as your body identity. And that is psychological identity first. When you’re strong enough that you have that, then you can start talking about losing weight.