Descent. January 29, 2008

Begin with a body that varies from the Ideal.  Nevermind the origins or validity of the Ideal, even if you had heard of such concepts or could comprehend the forces behind them, they would not matter to you, so powerful is the Ideal in your mind, and in the mind of the people around you, and the people around them, so powerful indeed that the Ideal is like a hurricane in its strength and mercilessness.

Strive to meet the Ideal.  Refuse to give in to your body’s resistance.  Discipline is virtuous, pain is weakness, and hunger is an illusion.  When reason fails, abandon it in favor of madness, the madness of pills and fads and desperation.  Self-flagellate.  Count everything, even the sugar-free gum that you hope will somehow relieve your body’s desperate cries for nourishment.  You don’t really need nourishment, after all, you only need to be healthy.

Hide.  Be desperately ashamed of your body’s failure to comply with their your wishes.  Cover it up.  Stay at home.  Sublimate your dreams and goals into yet more discipline.  Your dreams and wants and goals vanish in the face of the Ideal.

As your desperation rises, your body becomes more and more damaged.  Ignore it.  Ignore that annoying voice in your mind that suggests that  maybe you are making  things needlessly harder for yourself.  When you travel farther from the Ideal, blame no one but yourself.  The Ideal is all that matters, and if you had just worked harder, been better, denied self a little more you could have reached it.  Resolve to work harder.  Resolve, again and again until any other resolution seems ludicrous.

Wake up one day to discover your body is a stranger.   Stop yourself mid-flagellation to wonder if maybe the problem isn’t you after all.  Look closely at that ideal, the one you have been chasing for so long.  See its cracks and faults.  Touch it, and realize that it is useless.  Throw it away, cry, and then revel in the relief.

Begin again to discover the you that once was.  And smile.

The cowardly clothes lion. January 25, 2008

 

Fashion magazines are my kryptonite, particularly In Style. I usually avoid them in the grocery store Target (let’s be realistic, I hardly ever buy groceries), but sometimes they are just too tempting. I love clothes, and I am constantly looking for new ways to put them together, or fun ways to accessorize. My brain occasionally becomes a random outfit generator, and often I will wake up in the middle of the night with some magnificent idea about how I could put clothes together.

Were you to consult with me in real life, this particular interest would not be readily apparent, since on an average day I wear jeans or corduroys and a plain shirt or sweater. I love sleep, I hate to get up in the morning, and I have to be at work veryveryvery early every day and putting anything creative together is more effort than I am into at 6 am. There’s another reason though, a much more insidious reason that I have recently started to recognize and acknowledge.

There is a poster on my classroom wall that says “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” I could add a statement to that: Courage is what it takes to be a size 26 woman wearing a short skirt (or sleeveless top or big flashy jewelry) in a world that thinks she should hide. Looking at a fashion magazine, it is easy to picture fun, creative outfits, but it is less easy to face the inevitable scrutiny and judgment that one is bound to face when you are twice or thrice the size of a fashion model. It takes courage to face the internal dialogue experienced in front of the mirror, the one that tells you that some other pants would be more slimming and that your arms are too jiggly and that your face is too round to wear earrings like that. It all comes back to shame: as fat women, we are supposed to be ashamed of our bodies. We are supposed to hide, so that no one is subjected to seeing something as offensive as big calves or upper arm fat. We are supposed to hide, because we are supposed to be ashamed to even exist. It takes courage to rebel against all the supposed tos and be a beautiful fat woman. Some days I don’t have the courage.

Today I wore a short skirt and a black sweater with tweed Chuck Taylors and earrings that dangle to my shoulders, and I have felt the difference all day. I am better person when I get up with my alarm and find the strength to wear the clothes I want to instead of the ones I am supposed to, and that might actually be worth getting up 15 minutes earlier.

My people will never be put to shame. January 24, 2008

When I was about 12 I went on vacation with my mother and sister and another family. The other family had a son, the son brought a friend, and both boys discovered a fun game that week: torment the fat girl. I don’t need to explain the game, every person who didn’t grow up on a deserted island has either played or been a victim, or maybe both. That week they were vicious, and the message was obvious; that I was not worthy of even basic human dignity or respect because I was fat.

I have a very distinct memory from that trip of sitting in a restaurant shortly before we were supposed to go home. I am sure it was a good restaurant — it was Hilton Head, after all, and the people we were with had expensive tastes — but I don’t remember what I ordered. All I remember is sitting at the end of the table trying desperately to look like I was eating so no one would pay any attention to me, possessed of the absolute certainty that if I put so much as one bite of that salad in my mouth that I would throw up. I remember being beyond tears at that point. I remember shame. Worst of all, I remember thinking that I deserved it.

In differing degrees, shame is a part of every fat person’s experience. There are messages everywhere screaming OMG TEH FATZ IS EEEEEEEEEVIIIIIIIILLLLLL and it is impossible to screen out every one of those messages, particularly when you are a child. When no one ever tells you those messages are bad, or worse, when the people you most love and trust reinforce those messages, they become internalized to the point where they become personal truth, and it is nearly impossible to conceptualize of anything else.

I am currently wrestling with a pursuit of truth, not just in the arena of body acceptance, but in many other areas of my life, and in that pursuit I discovered something yesterday. It’s in the book of Joel, one of those minor prophets that most people, even those of us who went to Christian college, forget even exist. Joel 2:26 says

“You will have plenty to eat and be satisfied
And praise the name of the LORD your God,
Who has dealt wondrously with you;
Then My people will never be put to shame.”

Maybe this is a radical interpretation of the text, or maybe this is just what the verse says to me right this minute, but it seems to me that God is not so much a fan of starvation OR shame, and is pretty much about eradicating both.

Today I wanted hot fries. I rarely eat them, but for some reason they looked really good to me today. I started to do the rationalizing mental dance in front of the vending machine, thinking how I didn’t really need hot fries, maybe some nice fruit would be better, how bad I would feel if I ate them, what if someone found out I ate them, blah blah blah, all those old lies that come along with the shame of being a fat person in a thin obsessed Calvinist food-as-sin culture. But then I realized, if I want hot fries, I can eat hot fries.

I am not ashamed to say they were delicious.

Et tu Queen Latifah? January 21, 2008

I would like to go on record as saying I LOVE Queen Latifah. I love her body confidence, I love her acting, I love her voice, I think she is amazingly gorgeous, and I want every single item of clothing she wore in Beauty Shop.

You can imagine my dismay when I saw an ad this afternoon with Queen Latifah schlepping for a diet company, quite possibly the most evil one out there, the one that until recently ran ads featuring a certain 1970’s teen star turned lifetime movie queen. I refuse to type the name of the company, I don’t want to give them any publicity, but I think we all know of whom I speak.

Why oh why? I think I may go cry now.

Horse, here’s the water. January 17, 2008

Up until sometime last year, fat acceptance was a completely foreign concept to me. I thought just like popular culture taught me to; fat is bad, thin is good, must lose weight at any cost, my fat is all and entirely my fault regardless of any mitigating factors, and no matter what I did, I would never be attractive as long as I was fat. I questioned those beliefs, they felt wrong to me, but I figured I was crazy. Oh, and I was ridiculously miserable.

FA is by no means entirely responsible for my transformation from ridiculously miserable to ridiculously contented (that’s a God thing), but discovering and embracing the concepts of the fat acceptance movement have definitely helped. Just learning that there were other people in the world like me was a delight, and once I started to research and discover that I wasn’t crazy to question that cultural dogma, that maybe the world was wrong about fat and fat people, that discovery went from thrill to full-on world shifting revelation.

I must confess, I have become a bit of an FA evangelist (years in a Baptist church are good training) and despite my best efforts to not turn every conversation into a fat discussion, I may actually drive some people a little batty about it. For the most part though, the people in my life are happy enough that I no longer hate myself that they manage to put up with my zealotry, and so many of them struggle with body issues themselves that some are intrigued to hear a different point of view about the whole issue.  The vast majority of people I talk to about FA are positive and accepting.

There are those people, however, so entrenched in body hatred and so enamored with the idea that thin=beautiful and fat=baddy baddy bad bad bad that they reject the idea of fat acceptance outright and are actually hostile about it, as if me accepting my body and encouraging others to do the same somehow hurts them. I would understand if these people were drug manufacturers or Jenny Craig franchise owners whose livelihood depends on keeping the fat woman down, but they are normal women who ostensibly would have no vested interest in keeping fat hatred alive.

I have been trying to understand that reaction — the thinly veiled or not veiled at all hostility, being called crazy or delusional or stupid or told that I am lying about being happy with my life or I would surely be happier if I were thinner or I am just trying to justify my own sloth by insisting fat is OK (since I am fat, I MUST be lazy, right?). I have decided that in most cases, that reaction comes out of either fear or willful ignorance. It’s hard to change a belief system you have embraced your entire life, and body hatred can, like any other destructive behavior, become such a comfortable state that it is hard to imagine life without it. One imagines herself suddenly without guilt about diet and without pressure to stay thin descending into a food madness wherein one exists exclusively on twix and ice cream and calls it healthy. To someone in bondage, the idea of freedom can be very frightening. I understand that fear, and I can respect it.

I cannot, however, respect the willfully ignorant. When the evidence is right in front of your face in clear language and you choose not to even read it before rejecting it and mocking it, that isn’t fear, that’s stupidity, like someone who still insists the world is flat. Perhaps I should pity those people, for choosing to live not only in bondage to body hatred but in ignorance too, but I don’t. If you want to live the unexamined life, that is your prerogative, but stay the heck out of mine, and for grief’s sake, don’t talk about things you choose not to understand.

Hi-larious January 16, 2008

Want to know why I’m rated PG? I said pain twice and hell once.

I might laugh at that all day.

The root of all evil January 15, 2008

Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, it’s not money. The real root of all evil is advertising.

I have never been a fan of commercials and ad campaigns, since their basic purpose is to make you dissatisfied with your life so that you buy crap you don’t really need. I am thankful every day for my DVR with it’s magical ability to fast forward past them, but it is impossible to avoid them all, and there are three playing constantly at the moment that make my blood boil.

First came the ads with that overly perky I-had-a-hit-show-in-the-seventies-and-now-I-am-the-star-of-many-many-Lifetime-movies has-been starlet schlepping a diet plan based on eating entirely manufactured foods (Chicken Carbonara!) in precisely the amounts your personal diet nazi nutrition counselor tells you to, thereby ensuring that the very minute you go back to eating your own food or God forbid, go to a birthday party and eat an oreo in a moment of absolute rebellion (the horror!), you will immediately gain back every ounce you lost plus 10 pounds more. The plan is brilliant — if it doesn’t work, the company can just insist that you must have cheated, plus they already have your money, so why should they care? If it does work, they have made a customer for life, since the minute you leave the fold, the weight will come back at the speed of light. You can almost hear the diabolical laughter behind said starlet’s preening.

You know that skeezy guy in bars who uses the non-pickup pickup approach? The one who talks about how much he hates the whole bar scene, how everyone is so shallow, how much he wants to find something “real” and wouldn’t you rather go someplace more private to hook up talk? Apparently that guy is doing the ad campaigns for Weight Watchers now, because that is their whole approach. Don’t you hate the way diets don’t work? *wink* Diets are so mean. *strokes hand* It’s a good thing you met me, I’m different. Really. Want to come back to my place and see how different I am?

As if those weren’t enough, tonight I saw a new one that blew my mind. It’s for Alli, the re-invented used to be prescription now over the counter diet drug that makes you crap your pants. The format of the commercial is a few women IMing and discussing Alli. OK concept, hilarious (in an ironic sort of way) conversation, all about how fabulous Alli is and glossing right over those pesky side effects. I have spent way more than my fair share of time on IM, and I can tell you exact how that conversation would really go…

Me: What’s up?

Chick taking Alli: I started taking Alli.

Me: How’s that going?

CTA: I bought new pants.

Me: Oh, you lost that much weight already?

CTA: Nope, I crapped all my pants, and that oily stuff doesn’t come out.

Me: Oh. That sucks.

CTA: Yep. I’m a dumbass, plus I am out $50 for the pills and I spent $150 on new pants.

Me: Dude, that REALLY sucks.

CTA: Oh well, I should be getting a tax refund soon.

Pretty Hypocritical January 10, 2008

I have a confession, lest anyone out there on the internets has the mistaken impression that I have this whole body-acceptance-love-yourself-damn-the-culture thing down.

At least once a day, I think about how I would be prettier if I were thinner.

I squelch it, sometimes immediately, sometimes not so quickly, depending on that day’s particular frame of mind. Some days I fight a constant battle against it.  The thoughts range in intensity from the vague “these pants would look better if my stomach were flatter” to the full-blown “I am a hideous giant monstrous blob and no one will ever love me”.

I sincerely believe that beauty does not have to fit the narrow definition that we hold as a culture. I sincerely believe that all of the messages I received about size and beauty while I was a a child and an adolescent are lies and don’t deserve a passing thought. I sincerely believe that my size is not a determining factor of my worth as a human being or my aesthetic value. But despite all those beliefs, still, at least once every day, that thought springs unbidden and unwelcome into my mind.

I’m not proud that I still think this way, but I’m not beating myself up over it either.  That would be pretty ironic; to beat myself up over failing to adequately stop beating myself up.  After spending the better part of the last twenty years consumed with the conviction that I was hideous and flagellating myself over my weight and my appearance in general, I am actually pretty proud of the actual scarcity of those thoughts now.

Someday, God willing, I might have a daughter, and I would rather her not have to fight this battle.  I want her to live in a world where she can feel beautiful no matter what the shape of her body, the color of her hair or skin, or the trendiness of her clothes.  Ideally, I want her to live in a world where her appearance is only a tiny part if her, where she is valued for her talents, her mind, and her spirit far more than her body.  I will keep fighting those thoughts and telling anyone who will listen about body acceptance so that in her world, the thought “I would be prettier if I were thinner” is as fictional as Spongebob Squarepants.

Your logic does not resemble our Earth logic. January 8, 2008

Health at Every Size is really not that complex a concept. Eat a variety of nutritious foods. Listen to your body’s cues for hunger and satiety, eat when you are hungry, stop when you are satisfied. Exercise regularly in ways you enjoy, whether that be bellydancing, swimming, walking, rock climbing, or all of the above. If those activities result in a change in weight, great. If not, great. Either way, weight is not the focus, because eating good foods and regular exercise are the keys to combating the health problems often associated with obesity, not weight loss for it’s own sake. In this framework, thin and fat become strictly cosmetic, like putting on earrings or getting a tattoo; if that’s what you are into, go for it, but if not, it’s ok, because either way you are taking care of yourself.

It’s a nice, calm, logical way to live. When I returned to work after the holidays I heard the normal groaning about holiday weight, pigging out, too many cookies, eating until they couldn’t move, blah blah ad nauseum (pun intended). I wasn’t surprised to hear it, but I was startled at how different my reaction was this year. Instead of joining in, I smiled and nodded and thought about how I couldn’t join even if I wanted to, because it wasn’t the case. I ate what I wanted to eat, when I wanted to eat it. I ate until I was satisfied, not until I was sick. Instead of eating 15 cookies and rationalizing with “the diet starts tomorrow,” I ate 2, because the diet starts never and I can eat cookies any time I want one. I didn’t have to save room for dessert, because if I was still hungry, I could eat dessert at the end of the meal, and if I wasn’t I could eat it later, or not at all if I didn’t want it. I wasn’t “bad”, because there is no “bad” or “good”. I have spent a lot of time on the diet deathmarch, and I have been a lot thinner than I am right now, and I must say, these past holidays were the best I have ever experienced. No guilt, no nausea, and the remarkable thing is, I probably ate better than I ever did in all my 20+ years of dieting.

So if it is such a nice, calm, logical way to live, then why are so many people in such screaming opposition to it? Why do I get in constant arguments with women in real life and on the internets over it? It all sounds great to most people until you get to the part where you say weight doesn’t matter, and then a normal conversation turns into “OMG like, what do you mean weight doesn’t matter? You can’t be healthy if you are FAT!”

Let’s go back to logic:

Exercise and eating a variety of good, nutritious food combat health problems. You will be healthier if you do those things.

OK.

Sometimes those behaviors will lead to weight loss.

OK

Sometimes they don’t.

OK

Therefore, one can be healthy without losing weight.

OMG! No! Like, you HAVE to lose weight because fat is gross and you have to be HEALTHY!

I give up. But at least I got to use a Buffy quote for my title.

Resolved January 3, 2008

There’s a commercial that has been running for the past few weeks that makes me furious and sad, in equal measure. It is a woman who, with perfectly timed tears, explains how the upcoming year will be different for her. She tells how something that has plagued her for years will no longer be a problem, how happy she will be now that the problem is solved, and how much she hopes other people like her can find the same relief and hope she has.

It sounds like a great ad. It would be, except for what it is selling.

It’s selling The Fantasy of Being Thin.  It’s selling the idea that someone must of course be  unhappy  if she’s fat, and that we should all “call Jenny” in order to make our lives better by, of course, being thinner.

This New Year’s day, when I woke up, I didn’t think about my weight either, and not because I’m thin.  I didn’t think about my weight because I have learned three important things over the past year — how to stop hating my body, how many more important things there are to think about besides weight, and just how much time and energy is spent by people trying to sell us all on the erroneous idea that thin=good and fat=bad so that we will buy their products.

I’m new to body acceptance and health at every size, and I will confess, some days are better than others.  There are still moments when I  look at my size 26 body in the mirror and am tempted to think that surely my life would be better/easier/happier if I were thinner.  Thankfully I have to the truth, specifically that my happiness and my quality of life are more about how I choose to live and think about the world than the shape of my belly and thighs, and beauty comes in many forms besides the ones in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue.

I suppose I have something in common with that buy-a-diet spokesperson — this year there will be no resolution to lose weight.  I resolve to live a good life.  I resolve to fight bigotry and hatred and ignorance and evil with every tool and skill and resource I have.  I resolve to do everything I can, every moment I can, to make an impact on my world.  Fortunately, none of those involve a call to Jenny.