Holidays and Body Image

I just got back from visiting my parents for Christmas. It’s over seven hours’ drive between our place and theirs, so we don’t see them nearly as much as I’d like. I had a fantastic Christmas in pretty much every respect except the fact that I didn’t go to church. (Yes, I am a slacker. Yes, I have one excellent idea for a New Year’s Resolution, not that I ever actually keep those.)

My dad always makes a ton of food, because he loves feeding people. And there were no comments about this or that food being “bad” or judgment about who was eating what. Well, we did give my brother a little grief over his love of stuffing, but not in a “You shouldn’t eat that” kind of way. More in a “pass the stuffing to him *last* so the rest of us get some” way. And I ate what I wanted, not to the point of feeling gross or overfull afterwards.

And my mom, when she asked what size I wear for clothing gifts, didn’t say anything negative about the fact that I need a plus size. She just went out and bought me a gorgeous sweater (which I love).

I feel really blessed that my holidays weren’t a weight-related minefield, like so many people’s are.

It made me a little wistful to look at all the old family photos and see myself five, or ten, or twenty years ago. I thought of myself as a fat girl in high school, but when I look at my homecoming pictures, I see someone who’s a pretty average size. Kind of chubby arms, and a round face, but not what you would call fat. Probably wearing a size 14 at the time, so very average. And the pictures of me in college, I’d actually call thin, although I never felt that way at the time.

It’s strange to look at pictures that don’t reflect what felt like reality. But then, it’s not like I manufactured that feeling of “too fat” in my own head. That was what bullies said to me (among other insults, of course) all through later elementary and junior high school. I got called a whale, and all the usual insults. And my parents tried to help me with my “weight problem” and encouraged me when I dieted, and when I lost weight. So even when I wasn’t fat, I was viewed that way. But when I look back at actual pictures, I see a slender child become a chubby young teenager, then an average teen and a slender young woman (who then became an average, then chubby, then fat woman, helped by both regain after dieting and my thyroid throwing in the towel).

It seems like the negative messages are always louder and more prevalent than the positive ones. I’m sure I heard, implicitly or explicitly, that I was fat, or ugly, or weird, or gross, much more often than I heard that I was beautiful, or special, or loveable. Which is not to say that my parents messed up my self-esteem. Heck, my mom always had plenty of positive, encouraging things to say to me–they were just drowned out by the overwhelming onslaught of negative. The fact that I emphasized and magnified the negative and took it to heart, while discarding most of the positive, didn’t help.

I also think this ties into sexism. Our culture spends so much time teaching girls that their only value is a very narrow sort of beauty and that they can never be pretty enough, so of course when you’re told you don’t meet the standard, it hurts worse, and it sticks with you.

I didn’t mean for this to be such a depressing post, because I had a wonderful Christmas and am still having a fantastic vacation. But remembering how much I used to hate myself for not looking the way I thought I was supposed to look, well, it just seems sad. So much wasted time, so much needless pain. And I think that if we could figure out how to build a culture that doesn’t teach people, particularly girls, to hate themselves, that would be pretty awesome.

Restaurant Portions

Kate Harding wrote a post about restaurant portion sizes, and how you don’t get to go “OMG, that’s why ur all so fat hur hur” in the very same breath as you’re noticing that people take leftovers home. That is, they’re generally *not* finishing that ginormous portion. Though, to be fair to the person who posted it, lots of people *here* fail to grasp the same concept and go on and on about the evils of portion sizes–yes, you get a freaking boat ton of food at a lot of restaurants; that doesn’t mean you have to eat it all. Honestly, I’d rather get too much than not enough, because I can almost always take leftovers home–if I’m still hungry, I have to order (and pay for, and wait for) something else.

I know they’ve done studies where people’s sense of how much they’ve eaten varies dramatically based on things like plate size and whether you’re eating out of a big communal bowl (of chips or popcorn, say) or an individual bowl or plate. The thing I have to wonder is how such an experiment would turn out if you controlled for dieting behaviors or an eating competence score. My theory is that the more you focus on external cues, whether that’s a calorie count or the amount of food on your plate, the less attention you pay to your own satiety signals. So, I’m thinking that people who have been doing intuitive eating for a while would be less affected by things like plate size than someone who hasn’t.

Granted, distraction plays a role too. One of the things that I’ve been working on lately is trying to take time at work to just sit and eat, rather than multitasking, especially if I’m eating something particularly filling. Because if I’m just eating and not paying attention, I go past comfortable and straight over to stuffed before I even notice. Though I will say that on the occasions when I do that, it’s a relief to think of it as a learning experience, rather than an “I’ve wrecked my diet and I’m a horrible person” experience. And it doesn’t happen often.

A Medical Rant

A friend of mine has a medical problem that has nothing to do with her weight, but her weight means doctors refuse to treat her. She was in a car accident and had her knee replaced years ago. the replacement is now shot, though it lasted much longer than it was expected to.

The orthopedic surgeon she sees wants her to lose *130* pounds before they’ll replace her knee. Not just come down under 250 pounds or out of the “obese” BMI category. They want her to drop more than half her body weight and get into the middle of the “normal” category.

Keep in mind that she can’t fricking exercise because her knee is shot. She’s doing good to walk around a mall or amusement park for an afternoon without needing a scooter.

The kicker, though, is the reason they give for not doing the surgery. It isn’t that she’s at a higher risk of complications or anything like that. No, it’s that the replacement will wear out a little faster. Really? Seriously? So you guys are okay with having her in continuous pain for the next couple *years* (assuming she can maintain what’s considered a healthy rate of weight loss, a pound or two a week) because otherwise she might need another new knee in twenty years rather than twenty five?

Not to mention how they can really think someone who can’t exercise is going to lose weight without pretty much starving.

It just boggles the mind that doctors can see someone in pain and instead of helping, basically go “Oh well, sucks to be you.”

Reasons Aren’t Excuses

A trolly comment that crops up pretty much any time the difficulty of losing weight, or impediments to eating healthy, or fat acceptance as a whole is discussed–”But you’re just making excuses!” To which my most coherent response is usually “Thbbbbbbbbbbbbpt!” (that is, a big old raspberry)

Sure, I could explain and give evidence and cite studies and provide counter-examples, but they’re never going to be good enough. If someone is sincerely curious about my individual situation and how I ended up the weight I am without stuffing my face with donuts at every conceivable opportunity, maybe I’ll share. But not only are trolls not worth my–or anybody’s–time, I think trying to explain is conceding and doing ourselves a disservice.

To me, an “excuse” is an explanation for not doing something you’re obligated and expected to do. The note from home explaining that you were too busy puking your guts out to come to school, that’s an excuse. Because you’re supposed to show up.

I don’t need an excuse for not dieting. I looked at my available options and made the decision, as a grown-up, that dieting was a bad choice for me.

I don’t need an excuse if I don’t exercise on a given day, or if I eat a cookie, because I’m not obligated to meet someone else’s unreasonable standard. I’m not even obligated to defend my view of the standard as unreasonable.

I don’t have excuses for being fat, I just am. The days I exercise, I don’t need an excuse for not running instead of walking, or not going three miles instead of one, or not getting up to a higher speed on the bike. The days I decide I don’t feel like it, I also don’t need an excuse. As the person who lives in my body, I’m the one who gets to decide how to meet its needs.

Every day, people make decisions. They weigh the pros and cons and they do what works for them at the time. Other people are entitled to their opinions on those decisions, but they’re not entitled to expect anyone to actually *care* about those opinions. You’re entitled to your opinion; I’m entitled to ignore it. Just as you’re entitled to ignore my opinion about your life and your decisions.

When you try to defend your life and your choices, you’re ceding the other person authority that they don’t really have. You’re implicitly saying that they do get to tell you what to do. There might be times when explaining your reasons is useful, but I think it’s important not to let jerks and fat-haters set the tone by trying to prove that our reasons and choices are valid when we’re accused us of “making excuses.” The answer to that accusation is, “I don’t answer to you.” It should probably be phrased more politely than that to family members and friends than to random buttheads who troll FA blogs, but the point is the same: This is my life, not yours, and I have to choose how to live it.

A Little Is Never Enough

Lonie McMichael over at BFB has a good post up about how the odds of diet success don’t change because you’re doing it for your health. Regardless of your reasons, you’ve got a 5% chance, if that. And as she points out, a lot of those 5% gained weight due to pregnancy (or illness, or meds, or a number of temporary causes). These aren’t people who’ve always been heavy, for the most part. They’re people who dieted once, and probably stopped when they came back to their natural set point.

She also touches on the addictiveness of weight loss.

This is the thing: we have a tendency to fool ourselves. We tell ourselves it’s for our health. However, if that were true, then HAES would actually be a better option. We tell ourselves we only want to lose 10%. I have found (a phenomena noted in Hirshmann and Munter’s When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies) that I don’t want to stop until I’m what society thinks is perfect. A little weight loss almost always leads to the desire for more.

I’ve been there. I occasionally want to smack the Kelly of 10 years ago upside the head for thinking I was still “a little fat” or “had 5-10 more pounds to lose” when I was average, not even overweight by body fat percentage. (I don’t know about BMI, but that’s a crock anyway, so who cares?) And while I’m okay with my body just as it is most days, I do wonder if I might be less fat now if I hadn’t dieted so much before my immune system decided to start picking on my thyroid.

But if I’m smacking past Kelly upside the head, I can also smack the folks at the gym, who even as they were telling me I was in the “normal” range for body fat percentage, continued to encourage me to lose.

Skinny People Who Need to Shush*

So, I mentioned Debra’s Just Maintaining to someone I know, talking about the intense exercise regiment she goes through every day to maintain her weight. She gets up at 4:30 in the morning to work out hard and fast, doing almost an hour of aerobics with 20-30 pounds of weight. (I think I actually misquoted how much she works out.) He said, “You know how else she could keep weight off? Stop eating so much.” I think my jaw may actually have dropped. If you read the blog, you know she eats 1600-2000 calories a day, carefully portioned out and strictly measured. This is the number she’s tweaked deliberately to make sure she doesn’t get so hungry that she feels the need to binge, or so full that her body has a chance to create fat stores. She describes it as “spend[ing] the day ice skating on a single blade at the edge of hunger.” Stop eating “so much” indeed.

But this guy is naturally very thin. He’s one of those people that it’s easy to be jealous of if you’re not happy with your own body, because he’s built like a runner and yet seems to eat everything in sight. It’s easy to assume sometimes that your body works the way everyone else’s does, that if you can eat 2500 or 2800 calories in a day and be skinny, that a fat person must eat much more than that. If he spends an afternoon at my house and drinks two full-sugar sodas, he probably thinks I drink four or five a day. (I might drink one in a day, and only if I’ve run out of diet, or at least caffeine-free diet like Sierra Mist or Slice.)

This is why when people honestly describe what they eat, they aren’t believed. The doctor or nutritionist or random internet know-it-all may be judging based on their own body, not realizing or accepting that bodies are different. The people preaching “calories in, calories out” ignore a zillion variables to make that seem like a simple equation. How many calories does your body actually wring out of the food it takes in? What’s your body temperature and energy level? And at what point does your body go into a panicked starvation state and start burning muscle for energy? It’s not anywhere near as simple as it looks.

*This is not in any way meant to rag on skinny people in general, just on a particular behavior I’ve seen from some people.

Home again, Home again

So, I’m home after a week of work travel. Spending the week in a much more urban environment than I’m used to was nice, because there were a zillion good places to eat, all within walking distance. It’s fabulous when you’re traveling to not have any food decision more complicated than “Which of the nearby places do I want to eat tonight?” or “What should I order off this menu that’s being passed around?”

I had sushi, Thai food, Lebanese food (stuffed grape leaves and a lamb wrap sandwich in pita), and a fantastic bacon cheeseburger. I was particularly psyched about the cheeseburger because the restaurant, Busboys and Poets, is big on local produce and free range meats. I’m a confirmed meat eater, but I like to know that the meat I’m eating led a decent life. I’ve actually avoided watching Food, Inc. because I know that factory farming is cruel, but I also don’t think I can commit to free range, well-treated everything all the time. Or to never eating at restaurants other than that one and, when I’m not in DC, Chipotle. So, the critters would be no better off for my having seen it, and I would be worse off by virtue of being run over by the guilt bus.

Anyway, I’ve actually missed cooking. So, today I’m taking advantage of the federal holiday to make lasagna and a chocolate cream pie. There will also be garlic bread and a nice salad to go with it.

I also missed being totally in charge of my eating schedule. We had fruit and granola bars in the meeting room, so I managed to get in my normal morning snack, but it’s not quite comfortable to have other team members talking about their various diets while I’m walking to the back of the room for a banana and a piece of chocolate. I also like to eat lunch way earlier than most people, so even with a snack, my stomach would be growling pretty impressively by the time we took our lunch break.

A couple quickies

First off, my little ego is doing a happy dance that I’m being quoted all over Tumblr. I know, of course, that this is purely due to my own awesomeness and not the fact that I’m on the Fatosphere feed. Or, for that matter, Lesley’s fricking brilliant post on the urge to control our bodies at all costs that got me thinking in that direction. [/sarcasm] The particular quoted bit is:

“In our culture, we have the idea that health is controllable. If you eat the right foods, do the right exercises, live “virtuously,” you will be thin and healthy for 80 or 90 years. And if you’re unhealthy, you must have done something to deserve it, and if you start doing the right things, you can fix it. Again, at its heart, it’s about control. We don’t have near as much control over our health as we’d like to, and we can’t get around the fact that everybody gets sick and everybody dies.”

Second, the search engine terms by which people find their way to my blog are a never-ending source of entertainment for me. My two current favorites:

• “feminazi” (yeah, once I get people to stop using sexist language and quit paying women less than men for the same work, I’m totally taking over Poland)
• “kelly divine” To whoever came here with that term, I’m not the porn star you’re looking for. Move along. (And no, for anyone wondering, I didn’t know that off the top of my head. I had to look it up. Also, Google safe search…isn’t, necessarily.)

Third, it would make my week if people would stop talking incessantly about their diets, oh, excuse me, their lifestyle changes, around me. I accept that it’s a hugely important thing to some people, and that people who are hungry and miserable need an outlet for venting. But after you’ve gone on about points and calories and the things you’re allowed to eat for fifteen minutes, I want to jump out a window. Or vindictively eat ice cream at you. The diet talk isn’t what I’d call triggering per se…just annoying. Nails on a chalkboard, kind of. And it’s so often people I don’t know well enough to mention my own thoughts on diets, particularly when they’re coworkers.

Speaking of ice cream, vindictive or otherwise, Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey is the bomb. Banana and walnut with chocolate pieces. The combination of textures with the subtle banana flavor, and the creaminess of good ice cream. Aw, man. I bought a pint of it, enjoyed some tonight, and will probably be having ice cream as a bed time snack for the next day or two. (I will resist the urge to eat it in front of the dieters, hoping that they give me lip about it so that I can reply, in perfect honesty, “Sorry, just following my nutritionist’s instructions.”)

Controlling Our Bodies

Lesley over at Two Whole Cakes wrote a brilliant piece on fat, eating disorders, and the desire to control our bodies.

A culture that supports weight loss by any means necessary is a culture that supports eating disorders. It is a culture that supports the sickening and weakening of us all, in the name of improving our health, the very thing that we sacrifice. It instructs us either to succeed or be destroyed by the effort.

To some extent, eating disorders are a compulsive urge to control the uncontrollable — one might as well try to lasso the ocean. At a certain point, past denying, past deprivation, we don’t have intellectual control over our bodies any longer. No matter how hard we try, no matter how fierce our conviction. We don’t have control. The only way to win the fight with our bodies is to die. The winners are the ones who are dead. They are the ones who have triumphed, decisively, over the needs of their bodies, forever.

Every diet I’ve ever been on has had that same motivation at its heart, that desire for control. This is not to say that everyone who diets has an eating disorder (though I think deliberately eating less than your body needs is disordered eating). It’s just that they’re manifestations of the same thing.

It also doesn’t matter whether it’s about beauty, health, or some of both. It still comes down to what Lesley said about controlling the uncontrollable. In our culture, we have the idea that health is controllable. If you eat the right foods, do the right exercises, live “virtuously,” you will be thin and healthy for 80 or 90 years. And if you’re unhealthy, you must have done something to deserve it, and if you start doing the right things, you can fix it. Again, at its heart, it’s about control. We don’t have near as much control over our health as we’d like to, and we can’t get around the fact that everybody gets sick and everybody dies.

Part of me feels like faith, or more faith, would correct that. “Let go and let God” is the common saying in a lot of Christian circles. Relax, trust, and accept that you don’t control the universe, you were never meant to, and that’s okay. And maybe on an individual level, for people with that particular sort of faith, that’s part of it. But the focus on control–particularly on controlling the body and ignoring its desires–is deeply intertwined with Judeo-Christian religious ideas. Half our focus on controlling our bodies so strictly is because we think they’re sinful. I talked about it a couple days ago, about a devotional urging Christians to quit being fat.

DRST expanded on Lesley’s post, talking about the role of religion in the cultural push to beat our bodies ruthlessly into submission.

There’s a whole thread deeply involved in body policing that stretches back to Judeo-Christian religious philosophy and sin and how we must control ourselves at all times and resist all temptations – this mindset that hails a God that supposedly created us in His image, which means we are like God in all ways, but simultaneously put in us urges to do all sorts of things that are inherently ungodly (like stuff our faces and have lots of sex) and the way we prove our devotion to that God is to deny the most basic urges He supposedly put into us. It sets everyone up to fail from the start, basically, because what we’re programmed (by God) to want to do is somehow sinful and the only way to be really faithful is not do things we want to do. This is, IMNSHO, a really sadistic view of God. I mean, what kind of person/being/whatever would do that to anyone?

This is a hugely important point. We fear our bodies, we fear our desires, we think they are sinful, and we think God wants us to live in a constant state of denial and deprivation. And that has so thoroughly soaked into our cultural consciousness that we still talk about this denial in religious terms. Chocolate is described as sinful and sex as impure and salad as virtuous in completely secular contexts.

I wish we didn’t have this focus on control and rigid discipline. I wish that my first church had had two or three God loves you, warts and alls for every Thou shalt nots.

Religion and health are alike in that we pursue them in ways that are drudgery, when they should be joyful.

Thinness Is Not a Religious Duty

Kataphatic’s post about dieting as an anti-gospel really resonated with me.

And then I read this, a devotional about how taking care of your body (by which the author mostly means losing weight) is a spiritual discipline. The author starts with a statistic about how many people are “obese” and how many people will die of chronic diseases “due to being overweight.”

First off, there is not a single disease that fat people get that thin people don’t. Not heart disease, not diabetes, not anything. Weight is a risk factor, not a 100% certain cause. And for things like thyroid issues, PCOS, and other diseases, it’s neither a cause nor a risk–it’s a symptom. But we assume, automatically, that if Person X is fat and Person X died from Disease Y, fat caused disease Y.

“Your body is God’s temple. If you were walking down the street and saw some gang vandalizing a church, you’d do something about it, right? When you don’t take care of your body, you are vandalizing God’s temple.”

Wow. Just wow. The body as a temple, sure, I won’t argue with that. But we’re equating eating a donut or failing to go for a jog with throwing a rock through a stained glass window. Seriously. Not. On. The. Same. Level.

You want to talk about vandalizing God’s temple? How about skipping lunch day in and day out? How about walking a mile or three in dress shoes, wrecking your heels and ankles? How about gall stones, or ruining your metabolism?

Also, the idea of a religious duty to be healthy is all kinds of problematic, because it creates the idea that if you’re sick, it’s your fault. Oh, and not only did you fail yourself, you failed God. That attitude reminds me of nothing so much as Job’s so-called friends telling him how his troubles are his own fault, and he must have offended God in some way. This article seems to imply the same of people with diabetes or heart disease, that they’ve offended God, and ill health is some kind of divine punishment for eating “sinful” foods.

What makes conflating religion and the pressure to be thin so dangerous is that believing that God wants you to do something can thoroughly side-track your common sense. That’s not a bad thing, in and of itself. Common sense helps you interact with the here-and-now physical world, and faith goes beyond that. I mean, it wouldn’t have gone real well for Noah’s family if he’d been focused on the likelihood of that amount of rain falling, instead of getting his tail in gear on the construction and rounding up critters.

But when the message isn’t actually from God, that same derailing of logic can have awful consequences. Even without religious reasons, people do really dumb things to try to be thin. Make it a religious duty, and the potential for self-harm just increases.

One other thing about the “body as a temple” metaphor. I’m not finding the reference right now (it’s somewhere in 1 Kings, I think), but if I recall correctly, God was supposed to have told Solomon what the dimensions were supposed to be, what the building materials were supposed to be, and how it was to be laid out. To me, there’s a huge parallel there with the fact that body size is largely genetic. God sets the size and composition for each human temple too. And if the body is a temple, is it respectful to the builder to try to force it into another shape from what he created? Sure, we try to change our bodies in all kinds of ways, to fight nature for all sorts of reasons. Some good, some bad, some pretty much neutral. But I don’t think you can use “your body is a temple” to argue that everyone should view thinness as a religious discipline without addressing the issue of whether God *wants* his temples remodeled to human specifications, and probably damaged in the process.