Why are you telling me this?

All people are manipulators.  We all want different things, we all have different opinions, we all have different plans, so we manipulate people to try to get our way.  A lot of the time, it's harmless.  I had a friend in college who would simply tell us what we were going to do that day:  ie:  We're going to the zoo and then out to Chili's.  Most of the time, it was for our own good.  The things she told us to do were fun and we might never have thought of them if she hadn't carefully steered us in a certain direction.  Occasionally, there was a flop, but for the most part she wanted us (and herself) to be happy.

Some manipulation is used for evil, however.  I belonged to a horrible campus religious group where the pastor manipulated all of us to get information to use against us later.  If we went in to talk to her about having an eating disorder, she would tell us about the eating disorder she had had.  If we went to talk to her about what it was like being black with sickle cell anemia, she'd been black with sickle cell as well (Note: She was most decidedly white).  If we were a liberal Christian, so was she, or vis versa and so on and on.  She did this to pit us against each other and eventually caused a lot of the people she differed with to leave the group.

A lot of fat shaming is manipulation.  Here is an experience I've had with that.

X:  Y told me that you need to go on a diet or you're going to die at 30.

When you hear something like that, your first reaction might be to get angry at Y.  How dare they say something like that?  But before you start plotting the death of Y, take a minute and ask yourself this question: "Why are you telling me this?"

Probably they are telling you for one of three reasons:
1.  They may have that opinion themselves and are using Y as a scapegoat.  Clues for that one might include accidentally slipping into first person (I... I mean she thinks you will get diabetes, etc), defending this person or  using phrases like "I would never say that but..."
2.  It could be that person X wants you to be angry with Y.  Though you have a right to be angry with person Y, person X is manipulating you.  They are taking something that bothers you and either lying about what someone else said or telling you information that you don't need to know to intentionally hurt you.  Chances are if person Y really feels that way, they will let you know themselves and you will have the chance to defend yourself then.  Clues that this may be the reason include saying things like "doesn't that make you angry?", "that's so typical of Y", or "what are you going to do about it?"
3.  Person X might be telling you because they are proud of how they handled this behavior.  Clues might include saying "after Y said that, I told him to fuck off" or "I told him that your body is your business" or "I taught her about HAES."  While you probably didn't need to know how Y behaving, X may just be seeking your approval, which is mostly harmless.

I mentioned in Tuesday's post that a particular family member of my husbands kept mentioning to me about how many diets she had tried.  At first I just tried to watch the TV and ignore her, but then I started to wonder why she was telling me this.  When you bring up a diet in front of anyone, but especially in front of a fat person, you have to understand that what you are saying could be seen as a hint.  It is possible that Mr. Sprat's grandmother was trying to convince me that I should start thinking about a diet.  Or she may have figured that as a fat person I had been on them all myself and was simply trying to commiserate with me about how none of them work.  I didn't ask because I didn't think it was worth possible awkwardness during the holidays, but if you find yourself in a situation like that, it might be helpful to simply ask them "why are you telling me this?"

Sometimes people spread rumors or talk about personal experiences because they truly want to process them and have some strong feelings about what has happened.  And sometimes they are trying to manipulate you into feeling shame, anger or guilt.  Taking a moment to stop and ask yourself and/or the person you are talking to "why are you asking me this" can help you to avoid those negative feelings and understand people's true motivations.

Food Friday

I used to think that I didn't like butter.  We always had the fake-est of fake spreads in my house growing up.  And they tasted okay.  And whenever I was exposed to real butter at restaurants, it was so hard to spread and, I thought, it didn't really taste that good anyway.

I was never a huge dieter, but there were always certain things that I didn't like and I would argue to people who would try to convince me to like them, that they just added extra calories I didn't need anyway.  The best example is my distaste for condiments (ketchup, mayo, mustard, salad dressing).  My mom would tell me to "learn salad dressing" and I would ask her why she was trying to get me to eat more calories, when in general she would try to get me to diet.

Though no one was ever trying to get me to like real butter, I think I probably told myself the same thing.  "The fake spread is good enough and it doesn't have all those calories!"  But as I started reading more Fat Acceptance literature, it became clear to me that I might just be a hypocrite for using Benecol.  So I decided to try spreadable butter with canola oil.

I can't believe I ever thought I Can't Believe It's Not Butter was good.  This butter is so creamy and salty and delicious, it's like I've never had a slice of buttered bread before.  I literally close my eyes when I eat some on a roll, it's so good.  I think I used the spreading issue as an excuse not to "waste anymore calories," and I always preferred real butter, I just told myself I didn't.  I told myself that it was good enough.

What about you guys?  What foods did you convince yourself you liked in the name of dieting?  What did you tell yourself, wasn't good, but good enough?  What foods have you discovered since?

Commercial

Just a quick post today to say that I saw a commercial I never thought I would last night.  I  was half-asleep so I didn't catch all of it, but it was definitely a commercial for the HCG diet.  For those who don't know/don't remember the Fat-o-Sphere's uproar about it, that's the diet where you eat 500 calories a day (well below the World Health Organization's level of starvation) and you take in pregnant woman pee in order to get HCG which serves as an appetite suppressant.  The diet is extremely dangerous and causes you to lose weight rapidly, sometimes more than one pound a day.  The commercial also seemed pretty shady because it was describing some way to get around getting a prescription.  The cost?  Three payments of 300 bucks.

Like the $60 billion-dollar-a-year diet industry needed more help!   It makes me sick that these companies can take advantage of poor, desperate people who are willing to do anything to stop the hate.  Why can't those companies try to fix the hate in people, instead of the fat?

Why I Stopped Watching my Soap Opera

Yes, I can admit it.  Until a few months ago, I watched... Days of Our Lives.  I can feel you all judging me.  A little back story:

My mother used to watch Days of Our Lives with her mother and then she started watching it with me when I was a kid.  Not the best family legacy ever, but I felt there was a sense of tradition.  I never knew my maternal grandmother, so I felt it connected me to the women of my family.  I've watched it on and off since I was a kid.

Days of Our Lives used to have a few fat characters.  One of them was the always-scheming Sami Brady, played by Alison Sweeney.  That name might sound familiar to you as the host of Biggest Loser.  Once upon a time, Alison Sweeney was a fat teenager.  And then she wasn't.  Now she's dedicated to "helping" people become like her.  I used to love Sami, because she had been fat.  She was fat and on TV.  If she could do it, I could too.  My mom used to use her as an example.  "She used to be chubby, you could be like her."

When she started doing Biggest Loser, I just ignored it.  She also briefly did Fear Factor, if memory serves, and I paid that little mind as well, I wrote them both off as part of the reality craze.  However, during Days of Our Lives, a show filled with thin people to begin with (The only fat woman character currently on is a black nurse who is desexualized and portrayed as a buttinsky, mothering kind of character.  Offensive on so many levels.)  they started showing more and more ads for Biggest Loser.  And I kept getting more and more fed up.

The last straw, however, came not from a Biggest Loser ad, but from a PSA by, you guessed it, Alison Sweeney.  In it she reads parodies Little Miss Muffet:

"What if Little Miss Muffet had been sitting on her tuffet eating fried foods?!  Then she would have been too unhealthy to run away from that spider"

I am not making this up.  Oh no!  Not fried foods!  THE DEVIL INCARNATE!  Guess what Ms. Sweeney?  Fried foods, are still--gasp-- foods.  Fried chicken still has protein and carbs and vitamins and all kinds of good things.  Mozzarella sticks, a personal favorite of mine still have calcium.  Oh and by the way, one meal of fried foods does not an unhealty person make.  The PSA is a "The More You Know" and it goes on to tell parents that they can teach their kids to eat healthy and be active.  Sure, villifying food, that's a great way to start.

I'm reminded of an article that bounced around the Fat-o-Sphere recently about how children as young as ten are vomiting to lose weight. .  The article presents the horrifying facts and then suggests the answers include making sure your kids get enough sleep and don't let them eat fried foods.  Nowhere does it suggest loving your child, telling them that they are beautiful no matter what or encouraging them to eat a variety of foods intuitively.  I mean unless they are just worried that fried foods are harder to throw up, since they seem to be encouraging this behavior, not trying to stop it.

Food is not the enemy here.  The diet industry is the enemy, the advertising industry is the enemy, Alison Sweeney is the enemy.  It took me a long time to realize it, but she had a choice, she could have chosen not to diet and been a role model for fat girls like me everywhere.  Hell, she could even have still dieted and been a role model to fat kids everywhere.  Instead, she chose to help add to the disordered eating and bullying of fat people everywhere.  The saddest part is, she didn't need to become famous on the backs of fat people, she was talented enough to do it on her own.  I wish someone would have told her.

Disordered Eating: No one is safe!

*Trigger warning for disordered eating*

I never really considered myself to have disordered eating habits.  I had been on several diets in elementary, middle and high school and once in college but they never lasted long and I went right back to eating the way I always had after they ran their course.  Occasionally, I ate out of boredom, I always liked to eat even numbers of things like cookies and I usually have to have something salty or savory after I eat something sweet.  But that's about it.  Or so I thought.

I've been trying intuitive eating a little bit since reading Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby's book.  Mostly I've been trying to really be present for what I eat and think about what I'm having before I eat it. I already feel that what I eat is very different from what I used to eat.

Lunch is a great example.  My lunch rule (if I was home, if I have work I bring leftovers or a sandwich) was two things.  I had to eat two things.  So if I had Hot Pockets, I also had to have a can of Spaghettios.  I had discovered that one thing (be it TV dinner or whatnot) would not fill me up.  So I would heat up one thing in the microwave and the other on the stove and then eat them together.  Often, I would get frustrated because what I had in the house didn't "match."  Soup doesn't really go with a TV dinner.  Hot pockets and a ham sandwich are basically the same thing, etc.  I would end up feeling over-full and sometimes a little sick.  But I had to make myself full, so I ate them anyway.

Now I think about what I really want.  If I want a sandwich, I'll make it and eat it and then think about if I'm still hungry.  If I want a TV dinner (which isn't happening all that much anymore for other reasons) I'll eat it and then check in.  I feel much better after lunch and I eat a wider variety of things.  I'm learning to truly enjoy sandwiches, which I have never really liked.  And I've started actually cooking my lunch instead of taking lunch as an opportunity to reheat instead.  I love to cook, why not do it more?

I know this doesn't sound like much, but a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Sprat and I weren't very hungry at dinner time.  It was really hot out, which tends to zap my appetite and we probably had a late lunch or something.  So instead of cooking dinner, we had sandwiches and pasta salad.  I would never have eaten that for dinner before FA.  Sandwiches aren't dinner food, I would only get hungry later!  Now I listen to my body and a sandwich sounded perfect:  Cold, easy to prepare and not too big.  Amazing!  I felt full when I finished but not sick and when we got hungry later we had some ice cream for dessert.

It was interesting for me to really see just how disordered some aspects of my eating were, considering the fact that I haven't been on a diet in a really long time or all that concerned with fat or calories, etc.  Some things are little personal quirks I guess (my rigid definitions of breakfast, lunch and dinner are my own) and some are the way I was raised or taught to eat.  But if I'm noticing these things about me, who has been pretty secure about what I eat for a long time, I can only imagine what goes through the minds of some people who have serious disorders.

Too often, we taking eating for granted, we fall into eating ruts, and allow ourselves to do some pretty serious damage to our bodies and our minds because we think we shouldn't "waste time on food."   Don't we owe it to ourselves to be present for our food and enjoy it?  Maybe we owe it to the food.  After all, it helps us do everything else.

Book Review: Shadow on a Tightrope

As part of my summer of freedom, I have decided to try to read as many books as I possibly can, probably a book a week until September.  I have a list started that includes my favorite authors (Paul Auster and Margaret Atwood), works of feminism, works about fat acceptance/liberation and maybe a few sex books, classics and new authors to consider.  I'm really looking forward to reading some of the literature about Fat Acceptance, since so far, all of my knowledge comes from blogs.

In terms of FA, I decided to start with a book called Shadow on a Tightrope.  I chose the book because it included both factual information and stories of fat women, so it seemed like a good way to ease myself into more heady, intellectual books.  As it turns out, it was a great place to start because it seems that it may the first Fat Liberation book published, or it is often where people start reading.

The book is organized into several different parts which cover:  Exposing fat myths, memories of fat women, the struggle to exercise or participate in sports because of ridicule, living with embarrassment and isolation, medical crimes, and fat women as survivors.  I thought it was well organized because it built some factual basis in the first chapter and then showed the grave injustices that fat women face and go more for the emotional from there, and then bring it back to more intellectual prose by talking about politics towards the end.

It was a very intense read for me, especially because it is an outdated book (1983).  I know that seems counter-intuitive, but I guess I had just imagined that FA was relatively new and that was the reason why I had just discovered it recently.  To find out that people have known about the dangers of diets since the 80's and maybe earlier and still all we see on TV is Jenny Craig ads and Michelle Obama's bullying is horrifying.

It was also really grueling to read about the many accounts of intestinal bypass, which for those who don't know, was done before gastric bypass and involved removing most of the intestine so that food passed through people without it ever being digested.  To read about what so many women went through, and what was considered to be "normal" healing from the procedure-- painful diarrhea, hair lost, pain, vomiting, nutritional deficiencies, infection, fever-- not to mention the complications which often arose, was staggering.  The worst part was that these women were healthy to begin with (it was often a requirement for the surgery) and they were extremely unhealthy and many died, after.  I can't think of  more obvious proof that thin and health are not the same thing!

In terms of sexuality, I thought it was interesting to note that most of the women in the book identified themselves as lesbians.  I suppose that it makes sense because these particular Fat Lib people had come from a feminism perspective and many feminists at that time were lesbians.  I was a little put out by it, to be honest, because I hate the idea that you can't be attracted to men and be a feminist at the same time.  However, it was also very interesting to hear of women who considered themselves lesbian feminists and then followed men's conventional beauty standards and how upset this contradiction made fat lesbians.  People can learn to be so critical about everything, expect fat hate for some reason.  Why this is was explored in the book but I think there is lots of room for more studies and theories about this contradiction.

There was one essay about fat sexuality, and the author identified that she was attracted to males.  The essay was painful to read.  It demonstrates how interconnected body image is with other aspects of sexuality and shows first-hand how dangerous fat-hate can be to all other aspects of a person's life.  The things that fat women are expected to sacrifice for sex or a relationship are mind-boggling once you really start to think about it.  There are always conditions that must be followed, or else you will wind-up alone.  You must learn to be grateful for any kind of attention, because you are not deserving.  Furthermore,  fat women are pushed into the Eve/Mary dichotomy perhaps even more than women in general.  We are either supersexual and willing to sleep with anyone or we are asexual, jolly, fat women who provide comic relief and little else.

Overall, the book was a great read and one I would definitely recommend for people new to Fat Acceptance or for those who would like to know more about the history of Fat Acceptance.  We need to educate people about this, it has been nearly 30 years since this book was written and almost no one knows about the truths it contains.  We need to end the suffering!

~Mrs. Sprat