Are You In Or Are You Out?

On By MezzoSherriIn Detox Journey, Health at Every Size, Meta-Blogging1 Comment

With the demise of Google Reader (my long-ago link into the blogosphere), I’ve been trying to work out whether the Fatosphere blog feed is still operational, and whether “Just Another Lifestyle Change” is still in the club.

As best as I can make out, the answer to the first question is a double “yes” (double on account of availability in both feedly and blogspot flavors), while the answer to question #2 is, I think, a “no.” Evidence for that latter theory: my “I’m back” post from last night hasn’t hit the feed, leading me to guess that years of silence led to my blog being culled from the feed on account of appalling inactivity. (It is also possible that new posts are now manually moderated for inclusion into the feed resulting in an inevitable time lag, but I think that’s less likely.)

In all honestly, I think I’m more relieved than disappointed at the notion of having been edited out of the feed. There’s certainly part of me that would have liked to still be there, cos hey! more potential readers. But I’m also aware that during the past week, as I was actively contemplating starting writing here again, that I delayed and procrastinated a tiny bit for fear that I was still in the feed.

Don’t get me wrong: I am still very committed to the ideals of fat acceptance/size acceptance as I understand them, and I expect that as the weeks and months go on that I’ll have opportunities to explore those topics.

But — even though all the conventional wisdom is about finding your bloggy niche and sticking to it — I don’t want to just be writing about fat acceptance topics here.

For example, if I’m reading a really interesting book that’s marking a distinction between “happiness” and “pleasure,” and I want to contemplate the overlaps with my own noodlings about living on mission, I don’t want to censor that line of exploration simply because it’s not a “fatosphere” kind of post.

More pressingly, I’m about to spend some time actively learning about and exploring different methods for physical detox. And this is going to include some serious work on the huge percentage of processed food and sugar in my diet.

I know to my core that my detox journey is not for the purpose of losing weight. But I know it is possible that my weight may fluctuate or drop in this experiment, and I also know that the dominant discourse around detoxing in the U.S. culture is all about weight loss. So I imagine that me describing my detox journey on the Fatosphere feed might be a very tricky thing to do — no matter how strong my intention to present the journey through the lens of size acceptance.

So, everything in its rightful place. Including “JALC,” twinkling on its own in the bloggy firmament.

——

PS, and apropos of nothing aside from a coincidental overlap with my post title: Swedish pop never gets old. Oh ABBA Museum, someday I shall make thee a pilgrimage….

Counting in Glacial Time

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging, The Voices in My Head6 Comments

Okay, that was one hell of a hiatus.

I am somewhat comforted to see that the Merriam-Webster definition of the word uses an author’s and a (rock?) band’s five-year hiatus as examples in the usage notes. You see, I only took 4-and-a-half years off,* so I’m ahead of the game, right?

Something like that.

Anyhow, it’d be redonkulous to try and summarize all that time in a post, so here’s just a couple random highlights:

  • Our New England wedding (3 years ago) was (mostly) delightful, with me in all my Spanx-less glory, and our New England road trip honeymoon was sufficiently inspiring that we ended up moving up to the Boston area within the last year
  • In between those two life transitions I started a different blog,** and spent lots of time and energy on work and my TV addiction. (And iPad games.)

Throughout this time, I have also (especially?) been continuing my consciousness study. Something I’ve been looking at during the last six months especially is the sense of wanting to write about what matters to me, but not really knowing what it is that I have to say or to write about.***

And then, as I was thinking over some self-care projects that I have coming up, I remembered this blog and re-read the posts from all those years ago.

Maybe I’ve known what it is I have to write about for a while now. Maybe I just set it aside till I was in a better place to take it on.

* Well, 4 years and 7 months, but who’s counting?

** Which also got mostly abandoned. Evidently, I have been better for the starting of things than the sustaining of them.

*** Doesn’t that sound kind of hilariously familiar? (The more things change…)

Hiatus to Be Human

On By MezzoSherriIn Meta-Blogging3 Comments

Remember 2 weeks ago when I was predicting I’d be all quiet and non-bloggy on account of Dad’s New England memorial and whatever next step of grieving that might kick off? And then how I got all kinds of talkative?

Now I think I’m in that spot of sadness.

I don’t really know why — well, I “know why” in the big picture, of course. I just don’t quite know why the feelings are so much stronger during these past couple days.

But they are. That’s all there is to it.

So if I’m disengaged from commenting or posting or other email/internet communication, please bear with me. I’ll resurface when I can.

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.

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!

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.

The Selfishness of Body Dysmorphia

On By MezzoSherriIn Fat is Just an Adjective, Self-Acceptance, The Voices in My Head7 Comments

So we fly north tomorrow for the family/funereal weekend. My suitcase is mostly packed: I’m sure I have way too many clothes for the length of trip, but there’s a lot of different elements to plan for.

One major element is simply the way I inevitably begin to have an internal freak out whenever I’m about to see my family.

However much of a grownup I am in my day-to-day life, however much progress I’ve made in bringing fat acceptance into my life and growing my sense of self-acceptance, I still revert back to all sorts of self-judging habits when I go back into the family environment in which I spent all those awful awkward school years.

So instead of finishing my packing, instead of journaling, or showering, or doing any other thing that might better prepare me to take care of myself and support my family and honor my father — instead of any of that, I am feeling down on myself because when I am up in New England, I am “going to look like  whale” next to my older sister who got the athletic/skinny genes.

I was speaking to one of my spiritual teachers last night, looking ahead to this trip, and discussing the ways I fear it will be a more sorrowful experience for me than even the original funeral was. (His death was so sudden, I really truly think I was in shock for the funeral and a couple weeks after.) We also talked about this slide into the old “unhappy adolescent” headspace I could feel coming in, and the way that my current 40-year-old fatness has just been completely co-opted into the narrative of nasty self-talk this voice in my head spews out.

Not one to mince words, my teacher encouraged me to fight this voice. “You’ve got so many great things going on, and this is the voice that keeps you from enjoying any of it. This is the voice that shits on your life.”

And I am really angry about this internal pattern of mine tonight. So many things it’s keeping me from. I’ve listed some of those thing above, and I could sit and type and list more things for quite a while. Like the fact that I haven’t seen my niece and nephew since Christmas, and I could treasure another chance to see them, and also open my heart to be ready to support them as they face the first significant loss of their young lives. Like the fact that Matt has been so supportive of me in my grief, and how grateful I am to have him to lean on during the next few days. Like…. Like…..   Like…..

Or, to boil this down to its most essential feature: when I let myself fall into this space of dysmorphia and self-hatred, it keeps me from my life.