02.11.20 Anti-Diet and Rage
This book is amazing. It made me mad in the best possible way. Y’all, I have rage! So much rage. I have a transformative quantity of rage.
I have been out here for a minute talking about my experience in a large body. I have been devotionally compliant to laws of female embodiment by trying with unceasing effort to solve the problem of my body. I have had successes and failures, and ultimately the last decade has had me abandon all hope of wishing on the skinny star. I have not been sad about this at all, except for the little voice in my head suggesting that maybe I am a failure. I am excellent at silencing that little fucker, but its work, for sure.
For the most part, I have been on a quest to make peace with my body while exploring the question of my own health. I have brought the question “Am I healthy?” to support groups, yoga practices, counseling, and meditation. On one hand, what a powerful question. On the other hand, what a fucking waste of time. The answer is yes and no. I am mostly healthy. I am fat AND healthy. At least as healthy as everyone else in their 40’s with comparable habits.
If you have never been in a doctors office hearing the phrase “morbidly obese” in reference to yourself, while you feel healthy and are in fact a competitive athlete and yoga teacher, you may not have spent quite as much time obsessing over what that phrase means and how it actually relates to your health. Fun fact, it doesn’t fucking mean anything. It is a phrase that was invented by the same asshole who invented bariatric surgery. It is just another well crafted trigger to send us all into the arms of a solution provided to us by capitalism at extreme financial cost and danger to our health. Doctors, who I am with gritted teeth going to concede, care about their patients, are attuned to respond with urgency to the word “morbidly” and whatever words follow it. So, they get in line pretty quick with the anti-fat agenda.
A few years ago I decided to give up dieting due to the simple observable fact, that diets have never worked AND in actuality, have resulted in continued weight gain throughout my life. I have been dieting since I was about 10 years old. There isn’t a diet I have not poured my heart into. Still….every once in a while, I’m like “Keto sure sounds stupid, but it’s working for people, maybe I should try it.” Goddamnit.
A few years ago I decided to really track and measure all of my food. I worked with a doctor who claimed he wanted to help me. I was eating under 1200 calories on most days - if you don’t know, that’s not enough. This was not because I was trying to diet, it was just how I ate from years of dieting. He thought I was lying and offered to prescribe me diet pills. BTW, that guy, also told me that I was “pre-pre-diabetic” because my blood sugar was “almost on the high side of normal”. For those unfamiliar with garbage disguised as medical advice, that means my fucking blood sugar was normal.
The last doctor I went to bravely broached the topic of my weight. I could tell she didn’t want to have this conversation with me and was doing it because she really believed it was her responsibility. When I referred her to my gorgeous lab results and my healthy lifestyle, she responded with “Well, it’s your life”. Which I took to mean, “I guess if you are good with letting your fat ass kill you, there is nothing my respectable doctor self can do for you.”
RAGE!
There isn’t a workout I have not done. At the age of 39, I dragged my brave-af-300lb-ass into a crossfit gym and ended up having the time of my life. I did loose weight for a minute and then gained it back plus some, but I was strong as hell and had a resting heart rate of 50.
I taught myself to swim in my 20s and I used to swim a mile four times a week. I was still fat.
In my thirties, I took up spin. I loved it. I would ride a few times a week. On the last Saturday of the month, we would do a two-hour ride. I lived for it. I was still fat.
I had a baby in my late 30s. It wrecked my body. I dragged my beautiful, fat, brave-af-300lb-ass back into a yoga studio barely able to move and faced myself. I got yoga back. I rode that wave into a teacher training a few years later. I was easily twice the size of all but one other student.
I have fought through everything to stay connected to my body. I have faced unimaginable discouragement in every single fitness space and doctor’s office because I care so deeply about having a full and beautiful life. The problem with that is that I could have JUST BEEN HAVING A FULL AND BEAUTIFUL LIFE!!
Rage.
Sigh. You know, I think about 98% of the women I know are organizing their lives around being a good woman and eating in a virtuous way because wellness and lifestyle…blah blah. I guess that’s fine.
Here is an exception to that. My sister, genuinely just want’s to eat a tomato a day. People are mad at her because she is too fucking skinny and that is apparently not good either. The thing is she can’t smell, so she can’t really taste that much and she doesn’t give a shit. She is the only person I have ever met that truly wouldn’t mind gaining few pounds, but doesn’t actually care enough to think about it. Other than her, I am pretty sure that everyone else out there is just fucking terrified of being fat.
And, I hate to say it, but not wanting to be fat seems to be a totally valid fear. Who want’s to be targeted like this? Fat oppression is brutal. Those of us who are fat are constantly being treated like shit. Spaces are not made for us. We can’t expect health care. We are constantly being told that we should have more willpower and spend MORE of our time trying to achieve the right body. When we can’t we are shamed.
I sometimes think that fat-oppression reminds me of gay-oppression. It’s like fat people are doing it wrong, refusing to get with the program and we should make different choices AND the whole world would like us to be in conversion therapy (dieting) for life. While homophobia seeks to terrorize people more acutely, fat-fobia operates with a low-key and thick constancy. In both examples we are told that we can and should be different.
If you can believe it, diet-culture presents a bigger problem than being gas-lit and attacked all the time. Christy Harrison goes into some detail about how Fat Opression is actually harming to your health in the Anti-Diet book. To me, the biggest problem about the war on obesity and the broad acceptance of diet-culture is that we are separated very quickly in our lives (particularly as women - who get the worst of this opression) from being able to know what we want. This to me is a sin beyond absolution.
Y’all, I love women. I love all of them. I love the ones that nobody loves and the ones that everyone loves and the ones that nobody sees. I think women are fabulous and brave and they always do the best they can in any situation. I make it a point to be close to as many women as I can. I have met very few women that can easily say what they want…about anything.
“What kind of work do you want to do?”
”I don’t know.”
“What do you want to have for dinner?”
”I don’t know.”
“What would you like from your political leaders?”
”I don’t know.”
I am not by any stretch saying that women cannot find an answer to these or any questions, I am just saying that a great many of us need a minute to go through the filter of what answers could be acceptable. I believe strongly that this is a maleffect of diet culture.
I have a daughter. Obviously, she is a bad-bitch, totally amazing piece of awesome. I love everything about her. She is nine. I see her struggling with her body already. She has shame that she won’t name and I sometimes think it’s because she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings as a fat woman by showing anxiety about her own shape. I am certain that I have more slack around bodies and food than my own well-meaning mother, but I know my parenting has not escaped the scars of diet-culture but I try damn hard to keep it away from her. All of that being true, when she was six-years-old her pediatrician asked her what her favorite food was and she was like “Broccoli”. “Broccoli”? Da faq?
Think about that for a moment. A six-year-old who only wants to eat mac-n-cheese, did the quick math in her head to answer a question about her favorite food and came up with “Broccoli”. She knows she is not supposed to want what she wants.
Not being allowed to want what you want is a mind-fuck that is problematic beyond my understanding. That is why we cannot tolerate this any longer.
“We demanded to have our needs met (when we were born). We knew those needs were valid and didn’t second-guess them; we never asked ourselves whether or not we were ‘really’ hungry. We owned our hunger. No one had to teach us how to do that. It was programmed into our brains - the same way that baby sea turtles are programmed to skitter into the ocean right after they hatch on the beach.”
We have to put the diets down for everyone, but especially women. Can you imagine the amount of time we would have? Can you imagine what it would be like to wake up, listen to your body hear what it has to say, not spend time rearranging that, and just get moving. You would get moving in the direction of your heart, all the time.
If we didn’t learn to not want what we want right away, our hearts desire wouldn’t be sitting around like a loose tooth ready for someone to pull. It would be so difficult for the forces of domination to pull us away from our desires. We wouldn’t be as available for manipulation by capitalism, racism, sexism and all the rest of that crap. We would be running towards each other just looking for enjoyment and pleasure because we know that is what we all deserve.
Rage. A transformative amount of rage.