Category: Don't you want to be thin?

justice scales

Leaving on a Jet Plane

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Don't you want to be thin?, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

So I’m heading back down to the detox center tomorrow morning for a mid-HCG check-in. I’ll have a chance to do some physical care & detox methods that either aren’t available to me at home (oxygen chamber, magnesium wrap), or that I just plain haven’t been taking the time to do (the perennially popular foot bath).

justice scalesWe’ll also consult to determine whether I’ll stay on HCG for a 4-week or a 6-week course.

Either length of time is customary for an HCG experience, so at that level, it’s a free choice. I started out assuming that I’d go the full six weeks, but now I’m not sure what I want.

Reasons to go the distance. If I set myself a task, I might as well go full out. The desire to feel as if I fully committed to the process rather than doing it half-assed. The mathematical expectation that staying longer on HCG will give my body more of a chance to burn off more old toxins. The worry that folks will be disappointed in me if I “chicken out early.”

Reasons to stop at four weeks. Part of me is getting tired of the dietary restrictions. HCG comes packaged in vials that contain four weeks’ dose and it expires, so if I go six full weeks, I’ll be letting a half a vial “go to waste,” when instead I could take a couple months off and then do four more weeks later. I’m already feeling a little weird in a smaller body, so the idea of pausing and acclimating before proceeding feels kind of tempting.

I’ll be curious to see how this all shakes out. What my advisors will hear and recommend to me, whether I’ll hear a clearer piece of guidance within myself. If nothing else, I’m glad I heard the question clearly within myself, so even if I stay with the original pan of six weeks, I’ll be doing it from a place of conscious choice and awake-ness.

———-

Image credit: http://robertjustinronald.edublogs.org/2013/05/17/chapter-5/justice-scales/

Some Fat Acceptance/HAES Basics

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size6 Comments

(Apologies to anyone who’s a Facebook friend — some of this will be a re-hash of the links I’ve been posting there today.)

It’s occurred to me today that because I’ve been thinking about fat acceptance & health at every size concepts for a few years now, I sometimes talk about these concepts in a very “I hold these truths to be self-evident” way. And maybe, instead, it’s worth unpacking just a little bit about my perspective on questions of fatness and health.

Now to be sure, plenty of bloggers have already dropped the mic on this again and again and again, which may be part of my reticence tonight. After all, why cover ground that has really truly been covered with great insight before?

ANGRY!
ANGRY!

Maybe because the things things these writers have said are worth saying again. And again and again and again, until people finally stop all the fat-shaming and masking their superiority in concern trolling and their obesity panic and bleeping get it.

So here’s my own little piece of the mythbusting puzzle.

Most of what “everyone knows” about fat is pretty much wrong.

To start off, being fat is not automatically unhealthy. Fat people actually tend to live a bit longer, and are more likely to survive cardiac events. There’s also a fair bit of evidence that a lot of health problems supposedly “caused” by fatness might instead be a result of dieting and weight cycling. There is some evidence that certain health risks are tied to having a very specific type of adipose tissue in your body (visceral fat), but guess what? Thin people AND fat people can have too much visceral fat hurting their organs, and unless you’re Superman, I defy you to tell me you have the kind of x-ray vision to know who’s packing VF and who isn’t.

Warning: that last article I linked may give you stabby pains behind the eyes because after reporting on a study that pretty clearly states that the important factors are metabolic health and visceral fat, the author still ends with the concluding thought that these results should not be taken as “an excuse to remain overweight or obese.” Because even though the study shows obesity as a non-factor in measuring health, it’s still somehow a health risk. (Just because?) Ah, rumor-mongering science journalism at its finest.

And while the illustrious staff writers at Time have left such tempting fruit, let’s take on this whole balderdash that implies one’s body shape and size are completely under one’s Ayn Rand-ian will. Because, statistically speaking, diets don’t work. Sorry Not-sorry to burst your bubble on this one: they don’t. And they do incredible harm along the way. The weight loss industry, has a catastrophic “success rate” and an evil jiu jitsu way of transfering its own failings out onto the customer so they feel guilty about it all. Well, to quote Golda Poretsky at Body Love Wellness: “It’s bullshit and it’s bad for ya.”

As for healthy diet and exercise choices, yes they do indeed matter and they can make a big difference in reducing the effect of various “fat-related” conditions like cholesterol levels or blood pressure. But here’s the funny thing: those conditions get reversed independent of any actual weight loss being caused by diet and exercise choices. And considering the negative health effects of being fat-shamed and stigmatized, and considering the fact that fat people have a dramatically lower chance of even getting decent health care on account of the prejudicial attitudes of medical professionals, it’s probably best to steer clear of claiming that a fat person’s health challenges are being caused by weight. ‘Cos I’m seeing a lot of confounding causality here.

I need to get to bed at a reasonable hour, so I’m pulling the cart to a stop here. With one final thought.

Even if fat were unhealthy and if being fat were entirely under an individual’s control, every fat person on this planet would be deserving of fundamental human respect, acceptance and compassion. Just because of their humanity.

The heart-breaking thing is how little respect, acceptance, or compassion fat people get in this culture today —  even though fat isn’t unhealthy and it can’t reliably be controlled.

Data Points

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance1 Comment

The doctor’s office that prescribed my HCG gave me a booklet to help me track all kinds of things. Portions of food, my water intake, supplements, ketosis level — and, yes, a daily weigh-in.

I’ll admit, I toyed with the notion of skipping that last piece. Ultimately I decided I wanted to respect the protocol in every possible detail. Including weigh-ins: even if I have all kinds of associations between morning weigh-ins and the evils of the diet industry, I’m willing to take on this task in the context of tracking my weight as one among a set of data points.

02.scale_So I dragged the scale out of the basement* and threw it into the bathroom, where it and I have been having a daily, emotionally-guarded, one-on-one.

As I expected, this detox process has meant that my numbers on the scale have been going down, a little bit each day. And, as uncomfortable as it is to admit, there’s been part of me enjoying that trajectory. I spent so many years being brainwashed around the value of skinny** that I know there’s part of me that can still fall into that old model of thinking.

Aside from that, there’s been some concrete benefits. Some of my slacks had started getting a bit tight in the past few months, and even though I would have been 100% willing and unashamed to buy a larger size if need be, I can’t deny that I’m glad not to have to spend the money and to instead be feeling more physically comfortable in my current wardrobe.

I was having a similar issue with my wedding rings feeling a tiny bit tight and uncomfortable, and it’s especially nice for those to be back to fitting better.

Anyhow, today, I had my morning date with the scale and the numbers were exactly the same as they were yesterday.

This is entirely unsurprising. All the information about HCG — even from a weight-loss perspective — talks about the inevitability that some days your weight will “plateau” instead of being lower than the day before. I kinda think the diet guides make a really big deal out of this possibility just so someone doing HCG for the purpose of weight loss won’t freak out when this occurs.

But it was fascinating to witness myself when this moment occurred. In an instant, I could recall all the old tricks I would have used, back in the obsessive-dieting days, to make the scale move in a good direction. Maybe I should weigh myself starkers, or try again after another trip to the toilet.

Or maybe not.

For all that I was able to recall the ways a “plateau day” would have thrown the old diet-obsessed Sherri for a loop, perhaps the most surprising thing about this morning was really how little emotional charge today’s date with the scale held for me. I saw the numbers, saw all the possibilities for being negatively impacted emotionally, and just felt fine.

Almost like my weight is just another data point for me.

* And why did I even still have a scale? For the always-important job of checking to make sure my luggage is under the airplane weight limit.

** Oh who am I kidding? From a cultural messages standpoint, I’m still being brainwashed about the value of skinny. We all are.

———-

Image credit: http://simplykierste.com/2013/01/fit-friday-with-erica-the-scale-friend-or-foe.html (And yes, this was a very deliberate choice…)

Back in My Yoga Pants

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Don't you want to be thin?, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My Head1 Comment

Today’s schedule is entirely in the care of my detox/consciousness center. Since I’m with family today, I am garbed in my usual course weekend ensemble of yoga pants, layers and a light sweatshirt. Very different from yesterday’s ensemble.

The doctors’ office down here we used to get my HCG prescription markets HCG through the weight loss lens. Despite that, I give them much honor for being energetically cleaner about it than the places I researched in Boston. To my perception, the tone on the Boston places was all about glamour and enhancing women’s attractiveness to the patriarchy — which is why HCG was bundled in with Botox and laser peels. The doctor here in Atlanta seems more to speaking from a place of saying “this is really good for your body and it’ll help you lose weight!”

Now, there are lots of problematics with any line of discourse that draws a strong connective line between “healthy behaviors” and “weight loss.”  This was pretty brilliantly deconstructed over at Dances With Fat back in January, so rather than rehashing the subject tonight, I’ll content myself to providing a link and a brief quote from Ragen’s insightful analysis:

There is so much confusion about weight and health.  That causes people to confuse weight loss behaviors with healthy behaviors and that, in turn,  causes people to do unhealthy things under the false belief that they will be healthier when they get thinner no matter what they have to do to make it happen.  The next thing you know someone’s doctor has convinced them that the healthiest thing that they can do is have their stomach amputated.

Still, the cultural delusion equating healthy behavior with weight loss is really strong, and there’s a deep deep assumption that almost any woman in this culture wants to lose weight — and, statistically speaking, that assumption isn’t all that far off. So, given the desire of the doctor’s office to stay in business, I get why their marketing plays into the weight loss thing. Honestly, it would be naive of me to expect anything else.

Coming straight out of that cultural construct, it’s not real surprising that my intake form asked various questions about my history as a fatty: highest weight, lowest weight, past techniques attempted  in the inevitable quest to be skinny*, when and how my “weight problems” began, and what my current weight loss goal is for the HCG.

When I got my intake form on Wednesday to fill out, I wasn’t especially surprised to see this line of questioning. Okay, let’s be blunter: I wasn’t surprised one iota.

Despite my utter lack of surprise, it was fascinating to watch how hair-trigger my defensiveness and anger was around that section of the form. There’s the one in me that bitterly knows the pain of being fat-shamed and all the subtle destructiveness of fat microagressions. As my eyes took in the start of these questions and as my mind processed the reality that yes, we were coming up against THAT section, I could literally feel that one armoring up. “Here it comes,” she said, steeling herself. Steeling myself.

I left most of that section blank when I filled out the form Wednesday night.

So yesterday morning, as I was getting dressed, I was super conscious of how I was deliberately costuming or armoring myself for the doctor’s visit. Great sweater, skinny jeans, rockin’ boots. A indisputably Good Look for me.

Nope, my clothes were saying. I am not your self-hating fatty caricature. I am a woman learning to love herself who knows exactly how to dress so I feel confident and centered in my skin.

And with that extra bit of protection, I was able to be calm and matter-of-fact when the doctor and I went over my intake form with all its lacuna in my “history of fatness.” I was absolutely plain-spoken and honest about having a focus on health and detoxing, and not caring what my number on the scale is (or what it’ll be 4 weeks from now). And the medical staff acknowledged that they have clients before coming from a similar place.

I’m doing a lot in this journey to let connection and care in, to practice where and how I can be vulnerable, rather than staying perpetually turtled up in the psychic armor I so often try to wear.

Yesterday was an fascinating reminder that sometimes a little bit of protection is the perfect dose of self-care: something that allowed me to face an unfamiliar and somewhat triggering circumstance for the purpose of starting this detox movement. In other words: allowing myself the armoring movement around the little thing (my distaste for the culture’s weight loss obsession) gave me the space to remain open to the BIG thing (the HCG journey and the larger detox exploration).

That’s a tradeoff I’m entirely at peace with.

* Because as I’ve observed before, to not want to be skinny is pretty damned inconceivable.

Not Trying To vs. Trying Not To

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Don't you want to be thin?, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My HeadLeave a comment

I have an incredible addiction to the idea of fitting in. Of looking normal, not seeming too crazy or “woo-woo” or “out there” — whatever punitive descriptions the cult of rationality use to condemn someone who believes in Spirit, the energetic system, and so on. The idea of being judged negatively carries way more import to me than is healthy, as does my level of upset around the possibility of having people make false assumptions about me and my life choices.

Given those emotional addictions, this next series of posts feels very scary to write.

———-

In my first couple posts back here, I alluded vaguely to some self-care and detox “projects” I had coming up in the near future. The most significant of those is that I’ll be starting a round of the HCG detox program near the end of the week.

Anyone googling “HCG” is not going to find much of anything that’s discussed through the lens of detoxing — it’s all been subsumed under the cultural obsession with weight loss. This source at least calls it a detox program, but pretty much the rest of the text is an ad for HCG as a weight loss tool. And this article in Slate, plus this blog (and the two she links to) are pretty typical of everything else I’ve found online about HCG: something worth doing all because it makes the numbers on the scale go down. Because the numbers on the scale are quite possibly the most important detail for measuring* a woman’s value as a human being.

So it’s feeling a little weird as I’m moving towards this experience. I know my focus and intention are on detoxing a life’s worth of accumulated poisons (dietary, environmental, emotional). I know it to my bones.

Point of fact: I’m flying some few hundreds of miles away from Boston so I can start this journey in partnership with a detox center that is coming from that same place of intention, rather than going to the Boston-area places that are all about offering HCG on a menu with lipo, botox and laser peels… If I was in a weight loss frame of mind, there’s options just around the corner that don’t rack up the frequent flyer miles.

My goal in this is not about losing weight. But my research makes me pretty sure that I will lose some weight in the weeks ahead. And I have a lot of complicated feelings about that.

I worry about being seen as someone betraying the ideals of fat acceptance/fat activism by making this choice.

I worry about the likelihood that members of the “general” fat-shaming public will likely applaud me for losing weight, and the ways that false assumption will tempt me towards violent angry outbursts.

I worry that no matter how frequently or clearly I am able to articulate my intention for the HCG to be about detoxing, I worry that the experience will still be co-opted into weight-loss discourse — because that discourse is just so fucking strong in this culture. (After all, even the most outspoken fat activist really secretly just wants to be thin, right?) Something about this possibility of co-option fills me with the fiery rage of a thousand suns. Like by losing weight, I’ll be letting “them” (the fat-shamers) win — and oh! I don’t want to let them win.

And yet. In a place of deep to my core unflinching honesty, I also need to own that I worry about the possibility that some small part of me is going to be happy about losing weight. ‘Cos no matter how strongly I try to speak and live from an FA perspective, I’ve had the same share of fat-shaming brainwashing that you’d expect any middle age, middle class heterosexual American white woman to have had. And even though my internal fat-shamer doesn’t come out a lot, she’s still in my system, just a little bit. And I don’t want to let her win, either.

———-

A week or two ago, I read a post on Fierce, Freethinking Fatties that has given me a tiny bit of a lifeline for at least some of these complicated feelings. The post looks at the possibility of weight loss occurring as a result of someone adopting HAES (health at any every size) principles, and marks the distinction memorialized in my post title:

There is a difference between not trying to lose weight and trying not to lose weight. One means that your focus is elsewhere. . . . The other means that you are actively attempting to either stay the same weight or gain weight. . . . [M]ost people I come across who are fat and follow a HAES lifestyle fall into the first category. The act of practicing HAES usually means that they are interested in increasing their health. They are not trying to lose weight, because they are using other means to measure their success. . . . You might lose weight. And that’s okay. You aren’t going to have to turn in your Body Acceptance club card if you do. It just means that your body is changing because you’re adopting different habits.

(There’s a lot more good stuff where these words came from. Seriously, if you haven’t already followed the link up above, this one will take you there, too.)

I’m not trying to lose weight. But if I do lose weight as a side effect of choices I make for their detox and energetic benefits, that’s okay. In a complicated “mostly-okay-but-also-kinda-anxious” sort of way. But it’s what I’ve got for now.

* “Measuring.” Like weight. See what I did there? *grin*

———-

Edit: Because “any” and “every” start with different vowels and create different acronyms when used in phrases, and because it is a nice show of respect to get people and organizations’ names correct…

Spheres of Influence

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance, The Pressure to Fix Myself4 Comments

As I have posted before, my fiancee and I are beginning to plan our wedding. The process — since we are now verging on creating our guest list — has me pondering my past patterns of making and losing close friends.

This was initially a function of how often we moved when I was a kid. I’d settle into the new environs, make some good friends, and then we’d move again and I would be building a brand new social network somewhere else.  At the risk of making excuses for myself, I kind of think those experiences left me without the habits and skills most useful to sustain long-term and long-distance friendships. And that patterning continued with my college friends and then with the close friendships I developed during graduate school — though now I’m the one staying geographically put while my friends moved to new homes and new lives.

So I look back on my life’s path and it seems to be littered with memories of close friends from whom I’ve drifted away. Some of use have reconnected so far as to Facebook-friend one another, but that’s about as far as it’s gone. And I’ve begun thinking about making more of an effort to reconnect with these friends at a deeper level. I’m not sure if it makes actual sense to invite them to the wedding after these years of separation, but I can’t deny that it’s a wonderful fantasy to imagine these men and women sharing my wedding day.

I even started thinking most especially about a friend of mine who’s now an ordained minister. Wouldn’t it be kinda cool, I wondered, if she were to be the officiant at our ceremony?

Until the day I saw a random Facebook status message from her. It began with a witty observation on one of the banalities of life — how jump ropes are no longer in the “toys” aisle of the store but have moved to the “exercise equipment” section. And then she added the observation:

No wonder so many of today’s kids are overweight.

And there it was, staring me right in the face: the kind of statement that completely buys into the myth of the obesity epidemic BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA.

Took the winds right out of my little fantasy-having sails.  The (terrific!) Fat Bride Survival Guide recently posted over on Axis of Fat talked about the importance of having everyone around you (bridal party, vendors, etc.) lay off diet talk, because you should not have to bear up under regular pressure to lose weight. I’d assume choosing an officiant who will stay away from diet talk would also be important. So even if the bridges of time and distance were crossable at this moment — and I have no way of knowing if those bridges are crossable at this moment — the ideological chasm between talk of “the obesity epidemic” and my choice of self-acceptance and fat acceptance is one that I cannot see crossing. Because it’s important to me to have a wedding that is based in celebrating Matt and I exactly as we are today, and that does not imply in the slightest that our commitment to one another is conditional and carries demands that either of us “change” or “improve” — including through weight loss.

And yet I feel tremendously awkward telling this story. I don’t want to paint this woman, this woman who was such a good friend to me during some very important years of my maturation, as a villain. And I don’t want to become such a vigilant FA activist that I react confrontationally to every instance that fat myths come into my sphere of awareness.

But I also don’t want to let too much of that talk into my sphere of influence. As much as I know the truth and the logic of my fat acceptance stance, it can sometimes be hard to stand in that truth against all the other messages society carries about thinness and health, and all the stereotypes about fat woman and lazy, undisciplined, ugly, etc.

So I’m not sure how best to comport myself. Either in choosing the individuals to play important roles in our wedding, or in rekindling friendships with men and women who knew me during the years I was lost in body hatred and weight cycling. How am I going to talk about these new insights into genetics and society’s messages? How will I choose to set a respectful boundary around my own choices and perspectives around body size, intuitive eating, self-acceptance and the like — all while maintaining respect for friends who see these matters differently than I do?

This last question is, of course, relevant to matters far beyond fat acceptance. It’s kind of at the heart of maintaining friendships — standing in full self-respect for one’s own perspective, and also standing to honor, love and respect your friends and their perspectives. Even when — especially when? — those perspectives don’t align.

Showing Up

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Meta-Blogging, Self-Acceptance, Spirituality, The Subtle Body1 Comment

It was a kinesiology training weekend, so my hours have been very full and I am now exhausted. I can’t believe I’ve made it through 8 of the 10 training retreats. It seems like only yesterday I was just starting to learn the ReUnion Process. Conversely, it seems like I have undergone lifetimes since the first training session.

There’s a lot of new (and renewed) material from this weekend that I have to integrate around the deep potential this work carries for me to reach new layers of self-acceptance. But one of the big messages form the weekend was about the simply — and simply powerful — importance of continuing to do the work. In doubt, in confidence, when you’re feeling triggered, when you’re in the flow, when the work is challenging. Show up. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work.

Strikes me that it’s not a bad mantra to hang onto in the more focused project of growing into fat acceptance, or to the even more focused project of maintaining a blog. So it’s a shorter entry tonight. Nevertheless, I showed up.

==========

In other news, there’s a new MTT (“Meridian Tapping Technique,” formerly known as EFT) resource I’m thinking of tapping into.* But, like every other MTT resource package I’ve ever seen, this one has the evidently-obligatory materials about “Tapping for Weight Loss.”

So, do I get the package because I want to learn better ways to use MTT for other health and mental health issues (anxiety, insomnia, cramps, headaches, chronic pain), and just accept that the inclusion of weight loss materials is just another symptom of the deep cultural assumption about how thin=healthy? Or do I skip the resource package as a one-woman protest against the mindless perpetuation of that cultural assumption?

* Tap into. Get it? Get it? (I slay me.)

Of Lunchtime and Lingering Habits

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head17 Comments

This week at work has been on the crazed side, but I’ve been trying to carve out enough time to lunch with colleagues in the cafeteria — just for the sake of some conversation and to get a bit of a break. Yesterday, however, that streak ended and I found myself eating at my desk. My traditional bring-from-home lunch: a Lean Cuisine frozen entree.

Let me say that again: Lean effing Cuisine. Food designed and marketed to help one lose weight.

I’ve been eating these for lunch at work for years. I can’t recall what I did during the grad school/teaching years, but by the time I was in the office environment with lunchrooms and microwaves, my transition from skinny kid to fat adult had commenced and I started buying the frozen entrees as something quick and convenient and that also would help me “get thin again.”

Now, I consciously decided to stop dieting somewhere in 2008, when I chose to embrace the ideals of FA for myself. And yet I’ve been buying diet meals for office lunches for all of those intervening months.

And I didn’t even really notice that weird contradiction until yesterday.

I’m trying to imagine what rationales have been going on in my head for me to simultaneously eschew dieting and to buy diet lunches for myself. Is it another twist on the good fattie/bad fattie pressure I talked about two days ago? My symbolic gesture that yes, I am eating healthy so if I’m fat then it truly is about genetics and not about me eating “too much” or “the wrong things”? Is it that notion of “this fat but no fatter” that was so insightfully discussed* on Shapely Prose recently? My way of trying to “hold the line” so my body stays at this current weight?

Either of those possibilities seem reasonable — and by that I mean “reasonably likely,” not really reasonable.

But I can’t help wondering if there’s something both more innocent and sinister at work here.

On the one side, there’s the innocence of it being an unconscious choice. In a life that can sometimes feel over-full, I find comfort in having some routines. And this choice for bring-from-home lunches is such an easy choice for me to make. (Which definitely says a lot about my class privilege and the fact that I can be so cavalier about the cost factor.) There’s a narrow little shelf in the freezer that perfectly holds 6 Lean Cuisines, and Matt and I know exactly which are my favorite flavors, so we can easily restock that shelf on each trip to the grocery store.

On the sinister side, is the way that this is such an easy choice to make. The miasma of body-shaming in society kind of makes it easier to be on a diet than not to be. Lo-fat, no-fat — and Lean Cuisines — are practically configured to be the default food choice for a woman to make. I think it’s the power of that miasma that helped me not only to continue the Lean Cuisine habit, but to do it so very unconsciously. To not even notice that I was buying diet food. I was just buying my “normal lunch.”

Powerful messages to try and resist. And I’m feeling tonight that I’ve got a long way to go in that.

Especially because when I did the grocery shopping today, I bought 3 more Lean Cuisines to restock the freezer shelf. I just didn’t have the mental energy to figure out how to reinvent my lunch habit, or to reinvent my mornings to make time for more preparation-intensive lunch choices.

At least this time it was a conscious choice. That at least gives me more of an option to choose differently, once I have the energy to do so.

* Too tired to find link; will do so tomorrow.

Strangers with Expertise

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Meta-Blogging3 Comments

My most recent post was the first one to appear on the Fatosphere and Fat Chat feeds. (Thank you again to Bri for doing the work to maintain them!) If I hadn’t seen that with my own eyes — I happily subscribe to both feeds in google reader — I might have figured it out anyhow on account of some new commenters who stopped by with encouraging words as I faced off against body dysmorphia and some family baggage.

More puzzling to me was the drive-by “just lose the weight” comment that I deleted before it saw the light of day.

The wording itself wasn’t especially interesting (even though I’m kicking myself for having deleted it, thus lessening the accuracy of my reportage these days later). Certainly not as abusive or insulting as I’ve seen hurled at other fatosphere authors. A statement as mild in tone as “just cut the excuses and lose weight,” authored by someone identifying zirself as “fitnessguru.”

All of which is to say: I am emphatically not whining ‘cos someone said something mean to wittle old me. Instead, I am just truly and sincerely puzzled about what reasoning exists behind this gesture. Would someone really follow the FA blog-feed and assume that all the authors there aren’t sincerely FA but are instead simply putting on a brave front until they find the way to become thin again? Would that someone then be so lost in the “thin is the only way!” headspace that they’d then make a habit of targeting FA writers with renewed exhortations to just lose weight?

Here’s where I’m kicking myself that little bit for deleting the comment rather than saving it as blog-fodder. I don’t recall seeing a really blatant push for nutritional or fitness counseling, but with a comment-name like “fitnessguru,” I can’t help wondering at what point the conversation that began with “Cut the excuses!” was going to devolve into the bingo-card entry “I have the answer to being thin: eat less and exercise more!”

Strangers with expertise, wandering by and telling me how I should live my life, since my own priority towards fat acceptance and self-acceptance is totally silly and fucked up.

Frankly, I think I’d rather have the candy.