Filed Under: fat

My body, myself

February 27, 2007 at 9:51 am

I don’t feel like a fat girl anymore.

When I walk into the grocery store and see myself on the closed circuit security monitor hanging above the welcome mat, I know that average-sized girl in the black coat is me and I’m not surprised. I am surprised that I feel this way. Back when I started this journey, I was concerned a part of me would always think of myself as the fat girl.

I’ve read other weight-loss blogs where the authors have lost lots of weight and still have trouble thinking of themselves as a thin person. They are constantly surprised that they don’t have trouble fitting in chairs or cars. This weekend I attended a play and didn’t even think about the fact that I wasn’t spilling out of the seat or banging my knees into the head of the person in front of me, not until a larger man sat down two seats next to me and experienced all those problems. I feel very comfortable in my body and I believe my self-image pretty closely matches my actual image.

I have some guesses as to why this is. First, I’ve lost the weight slowly so my mind has had time to adjust to the changes. There were certainly days when I wanted to lose 3 or 4 pounds a week, but the slow and steady way worked pretty good for the tortoise and it seems to have worked pretty well for me. If I’d gone to bed weighing 372 and woken up weighing 186, not even Freud or Jung could have been able to help me with my body issues. Another advantage is that even though I was overweight and obese for most of my life, I was only morbidly obese for maybe 3 or 4 years. Perhaps if I’d spent a decade or more at over 300 pounds it would be more difficult to make this adjustment. But I’m not sure if my mind every fully accepted the fact that I weighed 372 back when I still did.

I also look in mirrors constantly. Last year the mirror in the ladies room at work went missing for two days and I nearly threw a tantrum in front of the paper towel dispenser. How was I supposed to check out how cute I am? Take a look in the toilet bowl reflection? My apartment’s dressing area has a huge mirror that I adore, though I might feel differently if a tornado were ever to blow through town. It’s positioned so I can see it when I’m cooking in the kitchen, so I frequently check out my ass while I’m sautéing chicken or chopping up red onion. Maybe I just like to check to make sure I’m still thin. I’m starting to feel compassion for Narcissus because it’s becoming quite clear how you could fall in love with your own reflection.

Lastly, exercising has made me very familiar with my body. I know what it’s capable of. I know I can run 3 miles. I know I can bend my leg up at a right angle to my body. I know I can squat and stand up without pushing off of the floor. Me and my body used to be estranged, like I was a brain squatting in a run down tenement, but now we’re best buddies working in synch. I know it very well and that includes knowing what size it is.

So, you can count me down as a total freak because not only am I comfortable in my body, I love my body too. I should probably check down below and make sure I’m still female. Such a state of existence doesn’t seem possible for a woman in today’s world. Just admitting that I love my body seems rather bold. It’s a bit frightening too because I don’t know if people will actually believe me or understand how I could love such an imperfect object. But you can see it’s true when you look at my smile in my fat pants photo. I wish I could tell everyone how to get here, but the location doesn’t seem to show up on Google maps. I guess you’ll have to find it yourself.

An end to euphemisms

February 23, 2007 at 9:38 am

As much as I enjoy writing, I must admit the English language has many failings. For instance, why isn’t there a gender neutral pronoun besides “it”? Calling someone “it” is either derogatory or means he/she (see my problem here?) is an insane clown that lives in the sewers. You’ve got “he” and “she,” but no word to refer to someone when you don’t know his/her gender. Typically you end up pluralizing the entire sentence so you can use “they” which can be awkward and sometimes sounds stupid.

I also propose that we need a new word to describe someone who is not fat, but isn’t thin either. There are already words that have submitted their resumes for fulfilling this role in the English language, like “curvy” or “full-figured” or “healthy.” But they come off sounding like euphemisms for “fat” which in our culture is pretty much a euphemism for “ugly.” When I wrote about Tyra Banks a couple weeks ago I said she had “some meat on [her] bones” which sound like I’m comparing her to a slab of T-Bone steak at the butcher’s before deciding which one to take home for dinner. Hmmm, nicely sliced beef or supermodel tenderloin? Which will go better with a nice chardonnay?

I find myself grasping for these idioms all the time when I write about normal-sized or only slightly overweight women like Kelly Clarkson or America Ferrera or Kate Winslet, all members of the just-because-you-can’t-count-our-ribs-doesn’t-mean-we’re-fat brigade. Perhaps if we had a word for this state of being, we could all feel a little more uncomfortable about it. I had a friend who experienced pain and exhaustion for many years of her life until she was finally diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. She felt a great sense of relief when she finally had a name for what was happening to her. It was reassuring to know that it was real enough that someone had bothered assigning a name to it, even if there was no cure and doctors didn’t understand what caused it. Maybe if we had a word for not being thin, but not being fat either, we could all be a little less worried about being considered “fat.” It’d be like the neutral zone in Star Trek, not Federation territory but not Romulan territory either, just a nowhere type of purgatory between two states of being.

Hope in the check-out lane

January 29, 2007 at 10:18 am

I lost a round of grocery store Russian roulette this Saturday and ended up in the slowest of four open lines. The women two spots in front of me was having some sort of problem which required the general manager to descend from her high counter of postage stamps and money orders to swipe her magic pass card over the bar code scanner. I imagine her magic card allows her to do all sorts of forbidden things, like run the conveyor belt backwards and play solitaire on the register’s computer screen, or maybe it just lets her issue refunds.

You call this fat? While I was trying not to watch the man who had been behind me check out in the next lane over, I picked up the latest issue of People magazine featuring Tyra Banks, who weighs 161 pounds. How do I know Tyra Banks weighs 161 pounds? Because it’s right there on the cover in all caps, 72pt bold font, you fool! An excerpt of the article is here.

Previously I didn’t have much of an opinion about Tyra. I don’t watch her reality show America’s Next Top Model or her daytime talk show. I know she did an episode for the latter where she wore a fat suit, but I never saw the episode so I can’t comment on it. However, after this story the woman has scored major Brownie points with me, enough for a new patch on her sash. She’s going to have to strangle some puppies or drown a kitten with three legs before I think ill of her.

It’s nice to see someone fighting back against the prevailing idea that you have to be super skinny to be pretty, or that having some meat on your bones automatically qualifies you as “fat.” As you can see in my sidebar, I’m an inch shorter than Tyra and 160 is my goal weight. Basically, I’ve been working for the past two years to be about the same size as she is. I understand that if you are a model, this size would be too large to get you booked in any shows. But as she points out in the article, she’s not a model anymore. She doesn’t have to maintain a smaller size. Just like a retired athlete doesn’t have to bench press 200 pounds three times a week, a former model doesn’t have to fit into a size 0 unless she wants to.

I also liked that she admitted that the tabloid stories do bother her. I’ve seen celebrities go on talk shows and say they just ignore that stuff, but it must hurt a little when someone says something nasty about you. In the article, she endorses a healthy relationship with food and seems to have good self-esteem. I also admire that she has taken charge of her career and developed it into something more, like Heidi Klum did with Project Runway. To post her weight on newsstands and grocery store aisles across America is gutsy. Even though I agree that she’s not fat, you know there are going to be assholes out there declaring she’s Porky Pig’s lost cousin. Tyra Banks is fearless.

Eventually the check-out line issues were resolved and I started loading my groceries onto the conveyor belt. I tossed a copy of People magazine on there too. If sales for this issue are good, maybe it will encourage magazines to feature more body positive stories. That’s four bucks I’m willing to spend.

Do we choose to be fat?

November 22, 2006 at 1:43 pm

One of the things I like about the online community is that no one knows if you’re fat or thin, male or female, black or white or purple with pink polka dots, unless you tell them. And even then you could be lying, unless you took a nap in the same room as a toddler with magic markers. However, if you’re an asshole it becomes apparent pretty quickly, which it did when I was reading a TV blog many weeks ago.

On this blog there was a post about an actress donning a fat suit for a made-for-TV movie and one of the first comments was that fat people were outcasts by choice. The argument was that fat people choose not to exercise, choose to eat large portions, and choose to eat unhealthy foods. Thus they choose to be fat and are personally responsible for becoming the type of person that the world generally discriminates against.

Is being fat a choice? I’d have to say yes and no. But reflecting on my own period of being overweight, obese, morbidly obese and then super morbidly obese, I’d say my fatness was more a result of the choices I wasn’t making.

To say that you chose a certain outcome, you need at least three things:

1) A moment where you actually consider several different options

2) Knowledge of the possible repercussions of these options

3) The means to actually pursue these options.

For instance, I woke up this morning and went to work. I did not go to Bermuda. Can we say I chose not to go to Bermuda? In all the time I spent picking out camouflage socks that matched my green top, measuring the proper amount of milk into my instant oatmeal, and locking the door as I left, not once did a thought bubble appear over my head saying “Hey, I could go to Bermuda!” This is partly because I am not a cartoon character and partly because the thought never occurred to me. If I never even saw this as an option, it’s not fair to say I made a decision not to go to Bermuda.

Similarly, I doubt most fat people hit a situation in their daily routine where they have to consider “Do I get fat or do I stay thin?” We don’t live on the Let’s Make a Deal set with curtain number 1 or 2 to choose from. At the most, you hit situations where you have to consider options that will lead you to the two possible end points of thinness and fatness, which is where number 2 on the list comes in.

Knowledge of the possible repercussions of these options

To convincingly argue that fat people choose to be fat, you have to prove that fat people are aware that their obesity-causing behaviors make them fat. If there had been a moment this morning when I had considered going to Bermuda instead of to the office, I would have also had to consider that such a choice would probably get me fired and drain my savings account. If I had made this choice anyway and then discovered I’d pissed off my family by missing Thanksgiving dinner, could we say I chose to alienate my family? If I honestly didn’t think my family would mind that I ditched their cranberry sauce for cranberry margaritas, did I choose to piss them off? I chose to do the thing that would ultimately irritate them, but I didn’t consciously choose that end result.

Similarly, if someone knows little about nutrition and exercise, has no concept of how many calories they are taking in every day or doesn’t even know how many calories they should be taking in, I wouldn’t say they are consciously choosing to be fat. They are still personally responsible for their actions, actions that are leading them to obesity, but if they are ignorant or at least partially ignorant, I don’t view it as a choice to be fat.

I spent one summer in high school at an academic camp where I ate pizza almost every day for lunch. I also had a not-so-secret affair with the soft-serve ice cream affair, and I wasn’t the only one, that whore! While I knew the ice cream was a bad idea, it never occurred to me that eating that much pizza was going to keep me fat too, even with all the walking around campus I did. I don’t know how I made it past admissions with this blatant stupidity. I was personally responsible for my food choices, but I wouldn’t say I was choosing to be fat when I chose pizza. I was just being a nutritional idiot who didn’t realize the full repercussions of my actions. When I chose the ice cream though, I knew what I was doing, and that was certainly a choice to be fat.

If the dozens of people I see in the McDonald drive-thru every evening truly knew how much a Big Mac costs them in terms of energy input and output, half of them would probably squeal their tires for the closest Subway shop for a salad. They might even get out and jog there to burn off the extra calories from that morning’s Egg McMuffin, assuming that a salad shop was nearby, which leads me to number 3:

The means to actually pursue these options.

If I had decided to chuck work this morning and run off for a tropical island paradise, would it actually have been an option? What if I didn’t have my passport? When’s the next flight to Bermuda and do I have enough money to pay for it? Who would feed my cat? I don’t even own a swimsuit that fits! Some people have lives where they could fly to Bermuda on a moment’s notice, but I am not one of them.

Some people have lives that are more predisposed to make them fat. If you have decided to eat healthy, what do you do when the cafeteria only has donuts or danishes left for breakfast? How easy is it for you to exercise if you live in an urban environment? Is it really a choice not to go to the gym if you can’t afford a membership?

Saying that fat people choose to be fat is at the least oversimplifying matters, and at the most it implies we have more control over our lives than we actually do. Not everything that happens to you is directly because of a choice you made. If it were, we’d all be all powerful and all knowing. If an idiot rear-ends your car, it’s not your fault simply because you chose to go for a drive. Sometimes things happen to us that we have no control over. Choices we make sometimes have consequences we were unaware of when we made our decisions.

That’s not to say we have no control either. Fat people can get thinner. I’m obviously an example of that and I’ve got the fat pants to prove it. You can start making different choices and altering your behavior. But a lot of my success came from awakening to the fact that I hadn’t been making choices. I wasn’t debating “Should I run tonight or not?” The thought never occurred to me. I didn’t know that eating a big bowl of macaroni and cheese would cause my blood sugar to rise and crash and leave me tired. Considering eating something better for me never came up. However, I did know that eating a jar of frosting with a spoon wasn’t making me the next Kate Bosworth either. That one’s all on me.

So did I choose to be fat? Yes and no. I chose the actions that ultimately made me fat. But I wasn’t always aware that the food I was eating had so many calories and I didn’t always have a treadmill in my bedroom.

I was responsible for being fat, but it wasn’t always a choice.

Filed Under: fat

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