Fat 101: Massage & Body Fat
Body fat. We love it to hate it.
Well, we hope your massage therapist loves it. It’s not only an essential human body tissue, but it influences every single massage stroke.
We’re so excited that our very own Nicole Trombley wrote the cover article for the July/August 2024 Massage & Bodywork magazine. Nicole writes on the anatomy and physiology of human fat and why it’s essential that massage therapists don’t overlook this critical tissue.
While body positivity is quickly gaining traction in the massage progression, we can’t get to the heart of weight bias and fat shaming if we don’t know how to massage fat tissue — regardless of an individual’s body size.
Below is a snippet from the article and you can read the article online for free at the link below.
Fat 101: Must-Know Anatomy for Massage Therapists
Our culture’s got a big “fat problem” (and it’s not the global obesity epidemic). Fat is among the body’s most vilified and ignored tissues. Yet, as bodyworkers, it’s one of the tissues we manipulate the most in all our clients, regardless of body size. Whether you use more superficial modalities or your intentions run to deeper tissues, fat is right under your hands in every single massage. But how much have you been taught about fat as a tissue? Probably not a lot, which is understandable because a lot is still being discovered. Research from the past few decades is rewriting the story of fat tissue as a major endocrine organ, essential to human health, and a fascinating part of the fascial system that we massage every day. It’s time for a re-introduction to fat: Fat 101.
THE BIG “FAT PROBLEM”
When fat is given attention, its importance is summarily reduced to this question: “How much fat is there?” (frequently followed up with: “How do we get rid of it?”). This disavowal permeates every level of our culture and has dangerously made its way into healthcare. While weight bias among medical professionals is starting to get some long-overdue attention, the problem runs deeper than clinical interactions — so deep that it’s embedded in our understanding of fat tissue itself in human anatomy and physiology.
A recent study on weight stigma in medical training offers a glimpse into how this is playing out in medical school anatomy labs. In one setting, medical students routinely complained about “difficult” larger-sized donor bodies (cadavers). The students resented dealing with all the fat before, in their words, “getting to the real anatomy.” It's tempting to shake our heads at the weight bias running rampant in these anatomy classes, but the reports reveal another bias that goes beyond size. An accompanying fat bias shaped their views about what tissues count as "real" anatomy. What does that even mean: real anatomy? Clearly, fat didn't make their list.
What happens, though, if we shift the focus and put aside our culture’s insidious obsession with “how much fat” and instead get curious about fat as normal and essential anatomy in all bodies? As it turns out, fat is fascinating, dynamic, and complex.
Read the full article HERE and read more about Equilibrio’s commitment to all human bodies and body positivity HERE.