Category: The Pressure to Fix Myself

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.

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.

Addicted to Life

On By MezzoSherriIn Fat is Just an Adjective, Health at Every Size, Self-Acceptance, Spirituality, The Pressure to Fix Myself, The Voices in My Head8 Comments

One of the topics that often circles through FA circles is a healthy skepticism about any dieting lifestyle change rhetoric that too strongly embraces that associates heaviness with addictive eating. Such skepticism is well-founded in part because fatness looks to be a way more complicated and individualized phenomenon than can be captured in a simple “calories in > calories exercised off” equation.

The other Very Good Reason to be skeptical is the cognitive dissonance around classifying a substance that is essential for the maintenance of life as an addiction — as if food is somehow like other addictive substances (like alcohol or drugs) that can be completely excised from life.*

This in large part is noodling around my brain again because of an insightful post over at Kataphatic.** It will be very hard for me not to quote the post in its entirety, but I’ll do what I can to pull out a passage or two that really started my wheels turning.

Katie was writing about the Candidacy Guidebook that lays out the steps on her path towards ordination as a deacon in her church, and specifically about a passage that discusses the need for substance abuse counseling for many individuals “who become dependent on alcohol or other drugs or food.”

Katie’s initial response is charming enough to warrant a healthy quote:

So here I am, reading along, thinking, “yep, I’m with you here, it’s not healthy for ministers to become dependent on alcohol or other drugs or… food?

Wait what? (cocking my head to the side and raising one eyebrow)

Does that really say FOOD?

Are they really saying that as a minister I am supposed to become super human and no longer be dependent on food??” [ . . . ]

Ooohhhh, okay.

So what they really mean is “emotional dependence.” Not just “dependence” period… because suggesting that we could become “dependent” or “addicted to” something that is actually necessary for our survival is just… silly, right? No one in their right mind would suggest otherwise! Right?

haha… hah… *sigh*

Katie goes on to thoughtfully examine notions about emotional dependence on food, suggesting that comfort food could perhaps more readily be classified amongst a whole host of self-soothing behaviors that are okay in moderation but could become problematic if taken too far. She also cautions about some of the dangers she sees that can stem from placing too much of an emphasis on “emotional eating” as something to self-monitor and judge oneself for.

It’s all very wise and heart-centered and I encourage you to read it all. But, in a narcissistic it’s-all-about-me moment, I’m going to riff off of her closing words:

But just because you’re fat, or just because you “emotionally eat” from time to time, doesn’t mean you have a disordered relationship with food! God has purposefully chosen to make this thing we need—food—bring us pleasure, draw us closer in community, and give us emotional comfort in addition to satisfying physical hunger. Let us be thankful for the good gift of food, and its ability to enhance our lives in such a complex and beautiful variety of ways!

I find real comfort here.

I’ve shared earlier about some of the ways it’s a tough summer for me. In addition to these upheavals (good and grief-laden) in my personal life, I’m still in my first 6 months at a new job which is rather demanding, and I’m starting coursework to begin the long road to an MBA. So in the midst of all of this, yes, I have been taking occasional refuge in the macaroni and cheese.

I know intellectually how FA activists work against the symbolic opposition of the “good fattie” (someone with pristine nutritional and exercise habits who remains fat) vs. the “bad fattie” (someone with imperfect eating and exercise habits). But as I’m trying to find my own voice in FA circles, I can feel the weight of internal pressure about how I’m not being a “good example” of Fat Acceptance, and I’m not being any sort of example for the idea of Health at Every Size. Talk about cognitive dissonance.

As I’m trying to find my own voice in FA circles, I can feel the weight of these internal pressures. But I can also tap into a growing sense of internal resource and acceptance that helps me resist such pressure. That helps me understand how turning to comfort food is an entirely natural way to respond to all the pressures and changes going on in my life. (One might even call it a healthy response, as compared to other self-soothing behaviors that got a little bit out of control in my life a decade or two ago.)

Perhaps best of all, as I continue to find my voice in FA circles, is the way that I don’t have to stand alone against the voices of internal pressure. Instead, I can be part of a community from which I can draw wisdom and support. Like I did from Katie’s post.

Blessed be.

* I do not mean to minimize how hard it can be for an addict to cut alcohol or drugs out of one’s life. I merely wish to make an obvious contrast between the theoretical possibility of letting go of a substance like alcohol — which has no inherent physical necessity for human life — versus the notion of giving up food — which is necessary for life.

** Allow me to pause for a brief squee over how terrifically inspired I am to know that there’s a blog out there writing about Fat Liberation Theology. Squeeeee!

Bridal Fatshion

On By MezzoSherriIn Don't you want to be thin?, Fat is Just an Adjective, The Pressure to Fix Myself4 Comments

Within the last week, the NYTimes had an article about the increasing sophistication and intrusiveness of Internet cookies for tracking a web surfer’s interests and demographic characteristics — thus resulting in that web-surfer receiving specially targeted offers when they visit a shopping site. (So, for example, someone with a “bargain shopper” profile might be offered discounts at a site that a “known full-price shopper” never ever even sees….)

However subtly Orwellian the scenario spelled out in this particular article, I find myself continually amused by the more ham-handed examples of that sort of “Internet profiling.”

Like the way Facebook has been pitching me “The Wedding Diet” ever since I changed my relationship status to read “Engaged.”

I don’t think the ad shows up every time I log into Facebook — even if it did, I’m not active enough over there to see the ad often enough to really piss me off.

It just amuses me. The headless picture of some bride with a deep v-neck dress,* a skinny little waist, and a hint of enough poufy skirt to fill a whole bakery with meringue. And then the usual ad copy:

Discover how brides to be everywhere fit into your dream dress with this amazing weightless solution!

Yes, it really says “weightless” solution. And I’m not really sure how I feel about brides everywhere fitting into my dream dress. If my wedding dress is supposed to be brand spanking new when I wear it for my ceremony, do I want it to have all the travel miles from these brides “everywhere” giving the dress a test run?

Then there’s the headless blond in a strapless dress (I know she’s blond ‘cos her long hair is still visible in the shot):

This weightloss program is helping engaged women everywhere lose weight for their weddings. Will you be next?

That’s an easy one. No, I will not.

I intend to buy a dress that fits me exactly as I am, and that makes me feel lovely exactly as I am. ‘Cos I’m lucky enough to have a fiancee who loves me exactly as I am — so no diet will be required for me to be “acceptable enough” to share vows with him.

If only I knew how to tell Facebook that so they could stop wasting their time advertising useless services to me.

* Halter, really, if my eyes do not deceive.