Yoga teacher Diana Skalkos: “It’s assumed that if you’re fat, you’re lazy or greedy”

She remembers her grandmothers as “exceptionally elegant women” while her grandmother lived on soup and Complan. Her mother was also concerned about her weight. “She lived on boiled eggs and salad. Fitting my 15-year-old sister’s jeans after she had her seventh child was her proudest moment.”

We meet in the lobby of the Metropole Hotel in Cork, mid-morning on a Monday. Diana is engaged and generous, happy to let the conversation take us where it will.

She remembers visiting a favorite aunt and being fed potatoes and scrambled eggs. “She said, ‘I thought it was better than bread.’ And I thought oh, for God’s sake, go out and buy a sliced ​​pan.

She knows that the women in her family “ate for health and not for love” of food. “You were almost blamed for being a little bent. I’m not saying it’s their fault – I’m a big girl – but it was the culture we all grew up in. There was so much pressure – if I lost weight it was ‘you look so lovely’ and if I didn’t it was disappointing.

“And coming from a very middle-class family, the rules were ‘you have to look pretty and don’t be touched’.” I found it difficult to navigate.”

Dealing with prejudice

When Diana was 18, she had her first boyfriend, went on the pill and put on three stone. In her twenties she became very tired and sick and lost weight again. She was found to have Crohn’s disease. “I had the usual symptoms: constant stomach discomfort, having to be near the toilet, red sores on my legs, tired all the time.

“I was full of steroids. It changes your ability to control what you want to eat – you crave fat. I put on six stone because of the steroids.” After coming off them, Diana spent a period in India where she found the heat, along with a “very healthy” vegetarian diet of herbs and spices, really helped her Crohn’s. She lost weight. caused by steroids.

She and her Greek husband, Sackies, eventually returned to Ireland – the couple have a son, Senan, 20 this year – and Diana endured the harrowing experience of being stalked. “I was afraid to leave the house. I was diagnosed with depression – it was a very difficult time in my life. At that, I gained weight again. Psychologically, it was comfort food – trying to keep body and soul together, my family safe. Fat became a protective layer — ‘if I’m unattractive, I might not get this attention’.”

As a child, Diana had struggled with social anxiety. It followed her into her twenties and she used alcohol to cope. “When I got bigger, I often didn’t go to events. It took the pressure off me of having to be attractive, of finding something acceptable to wear.”

For Diana, the very visibility of carrying excess weight becomes a magnet for all kinds of unkind, intrusive and judgmental comments. “It’s like every sin you committed is tattooed on your body. If you have eaten too much cheesecake, or you have a diet that others may not approve of is there for all to see – and them [feel] they have the right to judge.

“If you’re big in this country, it’s like you’ve committed the worst sin ever — ‘you’ve let yourself go, you’ve got to attack yourself’.” It is assumed that if you are fat, you are lazy or greedy. I don’t think I’ve ever met a lazy, greedy fat person.

“I’m a good mother, a fair business woman, I have a reasonably clean house, I’m a good neighbor, a good friend – none of that matters if I’m walking down the street. I would challenge anyone who says ‘this is not true’ to put on a fat suit and walk down the street.”

Basic value

Diana is a clay artist and also trained in yoga. “I did it for my pleasure and joy [rather than] for health. I originally learned it from my mother, yoga poses she had recorded in a book. In my early twenties I got back into it and in India I got even more into it.”

Diana met sports scientist Sackies – a professional swimmer during her youth in Greece – through mutual friends at London’s Notting Hill Carnival. “It was a blast,” she recalls. “He got interested in yoga – I taught him.

Sackies runs Yoga Republic based in Cork and has been teaching there for 20 years. When Diana has attended events with him over the years, she has done as well as she could with the general expectation “that I would be this light, perfect yoga person with all the yoga clothes”. She recalls someone telling her ‘very good pose for your core’, followed by the question ‘do you know where your core is?'” “The idea was that I wouldn’t know where my core was because I was so fat.

She describes how supported she felt by Sackies through it all. “He would say ‘You are 10 times more flexible than this person, you are yoga incarnate — you have to stop being afraid’.”

“I would share information with larger-bodied women, say ‘yoga made me feel better, try this pose or go learn from that person.’ And Sackies was keen to point out that while she was sending people to help elsewhere, she actually had “all the answers”. She knew this was true. “But I didn’t want to put myself in front of a class.”

At the same time – while attending various yoga or fitness classes – she found little understanding among teachers about what it’s like to be in a larger body. “They couldn’t physically grasp it, no matter how well they could, I couldn’t keep my legs together and touch my toes – my stomach would be in the way.”

Finally, she took the plunge and completed her studies as a yoga teacher. For years, she has also valued mindfulness, but came to it more deeply after she trained to teach it to children. She did that after her son was bullied. “I didn’t want him to grow up believing what other kids said they heard from older people.” And as I taught him “it’s not your problem, it’s the other person’s faults and not your burden to bear”, as I taught him to forgive because he deserved to let go of what had happened to him, I left to go back to me own breath.

“Because the most important thing about mindfulness is not ‘living in the moment’, but being kind to yourself so that when you come in as a fat person, you can take your mind off the self-talk – ‘I’m fat’, I wish I was not here, who’s judging me because I’m fat’. You can take yourself out of this constant self-attack and say “I’m going to catch my breath. And no one at this moment is unkind to me, I feel judged by no one but myself.

“So with mindfulness I can look and say ‘my fear is irrational’ and it happens in a split second.”

Diana now teaches yoga for larger women. She says it requires an inner understanding of the yoga pose—and the desired results of that particular pose. And a woman with a larger body can still achieve the same results with a regular yoga class, but she has to do it differently than a thin man. “Because her breasts and stomach are not the same size as the skinny person. It’s about making small changes to your posture that acknowledge your challenges as a bigger person.”

Diana says that to achieve this one needs to experience firsthand what it’s like to “live in a fat body, to carry extra weight, to be a bigger person”.

She teaches larger women and gives three or four different options for poses. “It’s a general invitation to the room, not the ‘fat person in the corner.’ And I’m also lifting my own stomach, getting my breasts out of the way.”

Her classes for everyone are about finding joyful movement in your body – with a teacher who understands your limitations, who isn’t going to put you down or laugh because your stomach is in the way, or your back is fat or your breasts are too big.

“And if you want to laugh at it, I can laugh with you, sympathetically.” It’s a safe place where it’s okay to be a fat person in yoga pants.

“I don’t care if you leave your yoga class and buy a packet of Maltesers or an apple – I’m not going to weigh you.”