fat girl in tight clothes

I had a weird moment the other day. I was walking down the street, and I saw a plump young woman coming towards me wearing a very tight and low-cut t-shirt and leggings, and I thought "wow, she looks very luscious and confident".

And then I thought, "shit, I just looked a fat woman in tight clothing in a positive way."

And then I thought, "I would never have done that a year ago."

And I realised, the reason that I was able to see this young woman's beauty, despite the fact that she clearly didn't meet modern social standards of beauty, and despite the fact that she was dressed in a way that a year or so ago I would've thought was just "unnecessary" for someone with her body type, was that I've finally, finally stopped looking at fat people in a judgemental way.

As people reading this blog will know, I've done an enormous amount of work over the past year or so in getting on top of my eating disorder, and that, I am pleased to say, has been very successful. I'm so in recovery that recently existential and work stress has resulted in me being less interested in food, not more. The only thing that still seems to be an issue is conflict with my mother, and I'm in a place where I feel I'll get on top of that too.

But all that work has been very much inward directed. I've focused very much on trying to see my fatness, if not positively, at least neutrally, and it's working. I don't criticise my looks any more. I've even been out without make up on, which isn't something I've done since I was fifteen. I'm much more relaxed in my body, and unconcerned about what other people may think of it. (Weirdly, because one of the results of stopping binge eating has been that I've lost weight, my skin has lost some of its elasticity, and if I sit the wrong way, I get kind of soft wrinkles on my boobs, and yet I am able to look at them and go "eh", and then touch them and go "ooh, soft".)

This would not have been possible a year ago.

And now, it seems that the internal has turned outwards, and now I can look at other fat people without judging them. I'm ashamed to admit it, really, but I've been absolutely horrible about it in the past. They (whoever they are) do say you hate most in other people what you hate most in yourself, and so when I hated my own fat, I would walk around hating other people's too, especially when they apparently felt no shame in flaunting it.

It was liberating, actually. So fat girl in the tight clothes, I salute you. You were beautiful and should be proud of yourself.

"you've lost weight..." awkwardness

So, I've lost weight. A not insignificant amount of weight. I didn't do it on purpose - posting here, I feel mildly guilty about it, though, as I said, not on purpose - and I don't care about it for its own sake. That, in itself, is a sign of recovery. I don't know exactly how much, but it's at least two stone (28lbs). I'm still fat, of course, and now I'm saggy as well. But I'm not bothered by either of those things. No, what's beginning to bother me is the compliments.

It's become noticeable, you see, and people are commenting. And I feel deeply awkward in answering them, because...Well, let's see:

(a) I feel awkward because I don't value the weight loss for its own sake - the only reason I value it at all is because it's a sign of my recovery. Well, and because now I can buy clothes in Marks & Spencer and other shops that stock up to my new size, but no further. That's quite good too. Makes shopping easier and less restricted.

(b) I feel awkward because I don't want to say "thank you" as though I think it's inherently complimentary that people are remarking on my weight loss, especially when it's not like they're just saying "You look fantastic, is something different?" They say "You've lost weight" or "have you lost weight?" or "those trousers are swimming on you", and they expect those things to be interpreted as compliments of the highest order, and I just don't feel that they are. Oh, I say thank you, because it's expected, and because I know they mean to be nice. Or, if they ask me if I've lost weight, I say, "maybe, I'm not sure". But I don't put the value on the weight loss they do, and therefore I don't see this as a compliment. It's just...an observation. I've lost weight. It's true. It doesn't equal "you're so beautiful" or "you're so clever" or "I think you're awesome". It's like saying "you cut your hair". It only becomes a compliment when they follow it up with, "you look great". But with weight loss, they assume that the observation is in itself complimentary. And so I thank them, but it makes me feel awkward.

(c) I feel awkward because people who see weight loss also ask how I did it. And I don't particularly want to announce to every casual work acquaintance who hasn't seen me for a couple of months that I've finally got into recovery from a soul-destroying eating disorder, and I have no goddamn diet tips because I didn't go on a goddamn diet. AWKWARD.

(d) I feel awkward because I don't enjoy this kind of conversation. It makes me self-conscious, and I don't want to be self-conscious. I'm making peace with my body - other people remarking on it makes me feel like it's not just mine. This, I recognise, is my issue, not theirs.

And look, I do know that people are trying to be nice, trying to compliment me, and I've appreciated a lot that those people who know about my eating disorder AREN'T giving me "you've lost weight" compliments, even if they're aware of the weight loss.

I'm just finding it awkward.

eating is not moral deviance

I have of late been talking to my sister about the question of fat acceptance - not in so many words, but we've had quite a long email discussion about privilege and fat stereotypes and all that kind of thing. And I'm fascinated to discover that she has, completely independently of me and my own experiences, and without any body image issues of her own, come to the conclusion that my mother has some issues with body image:

Mum has a terrible problem with acceptance of different body types. What’s interesting is that for a not particularly material person, she places a terrible emphasis on appearance. Dad’s, yours, mine, her own. She has this terrible habit of gushing over the way I look. Don’t get me wrong, I like to look good but I never, never want to be SEEN for what I look like, if that makes sense. My face and body is not ME – not who I am. And you’re right, the nagging has the exact opposite effect than the one she wants. Dad, I think, has a binge/secret eating habit as well, actually – so you’re not alone with having had that impulse. I will definitely mention that statistic [note: I told her about the 95-98% failure rate for diets] next it comes up. It really bothers me actually, as she honestly has no idea how to feed a diabetic anyway and HE rebels against her and eats even worse things. Plus, it’s not doing anyone any good. It makes her mad and him withdrawn and ashamed. Not healthy.

Then this morning, I had a conversation with my mother, and in amongst all the other things we talked about, she started going on about how she and Dad had eaten a lot at some event, so now they were trying to lose some extra pounds (she thinks all my dad's pounds are extra, but hey) so they could go to Fiji and eat. But she's been told that in Fiji, they give you lots of salads and things, so you can eat a lot and still be "good".

I told her I couldn't talk to her about dieting or the supposed morality of food, for my own peace of mind, and she was a bit non-plussed.

"I was just telling you what was going on for me," she said.

And that's fair enough, I suppose. But God, I just do not want to have conversations with anyone, however much I care about them, in which eating features as morally deviant, or something you need to suffer for doing. I can't do it. I hate it. I hate the smugness in my mother's voice when she talks like this, because she has no freaking clue how hard it is for me or, apparently, my father, to treat food in a healthy way. I hate how she can't even grasp what I'm trying to say to her when I say that I can't talk about food in moral terms. I hate that she thinks that talking about HER weight losing diet is okay with me, even though we can't talk about mine. I hate that she thinks that her eating disordered daughter should be supporting her in "losing a few pounds" because, all eating disorders to the contrary, losing weight is a fundamental moral good.

I mean, Jesus H. Christ, lady, the result of your attitudes was that you fucked up my relationship with food, possibly for life. What am I supposed to say? "That's fantastic, you've achieved the only thing in life that matters"? This is a harsh reaction, I know, and it wasn't one that I shared with my mother. But it's so frustrating, when I see myself coming such a distance, to realise that, despite knowing what her attitudes have cost me, she is still in exactly the same place mentally that she was twenty two years ago on the subject of "excess" weight. If she suddenly found herself in charge of a slightly chubby eleven year old, she would probably take exactly the same path of trying to make her thinner. I wish she could just enjoy her food in Fiji without needing to lose a few compensatory pounds beforehand, and without justifying the kind of food that is available in Fiji. I wish she didn't seem to feel that enjoying eating a lot could only be morally acceptable if she made herself (and her husband) suffer beforehand.

I suppose, though, this is another sign of recovery. I'm genuinely feeling increasingly detached from the goal of weight loss. Oh, I'm keener than ever on being healthy - not least because we have decided that we'll start trying for a baby in a year or two and I want to make sure I'm up to that physically - but the message that exercise is good for its own sake, and that it's okay to do a bunch of work for your health and never lose a pound is finally starting to sink in so that I believe it. And that has taken some doing, let me tell you.

There is still, I'll admit, a strong temptation to think about my efforts to be healthier as a way to fool myself into thinking that I'm just trying to be healthy, but SECRETLY I'll be trying to lose weight. I have the most tortuous, circuitous mind in the world. But I'm cutting that off at the pass more often, and I think I'm finally starting to understand it emotionally as well as intellectually.

I just wish my mother was on the same page.

fat acceptance and compulsive eating

I got some great comments from people on yesterday's post, and one basically triggered another post, so thank you, lovely people, for being encouraging and smart.

Here is the comment that resulted in the following mass of words:

The compulsive eating behavior has absolutely nothing to do with being fat. You could be thin or average weight with compulsive eating, and your feelings and reactions to it would still be the same. Being fat and being a compulsive eater are two separate things.

This is true. And then again, it's not really the whole picture, especially in the FA community.

I understand why fat acceptance activists, who are usually trying to disrupt the stereotyping of fat people, harp on about health at every size and how fat people don't eat more than thin people and all the rest of it.

The thing is, though, if you have a person who, like myself, is inclined by nature to be less thin than other people (if not fat), and who then goes on to eat compulsively for twenty years, you'll get yourself a fat person, who probably got fat by trying to not BE fat. And although I love to hear that being fat is not the end of the world, that it isn't the end of your health, that the stereotypes don't hold up, etc etc etc, I am still a fat person who got fat, primarily, by eating too much. And there is a strong tendency amongst FA activists to reject that as a reason for a fat person to be fat. It doesn't have to be the reason they are fat. It doesn't have to be the reason most fat people are fat - as I say, even if I wasn't this fat, I still wouldn't be exactly thin. But it is a reason that some of us are fat, and pretending that we're not part of the fat spectrum kind of hurts.

It's kind of like if you got a bunch of gay activists together, and one of the things they wanted to do was bust the stereotypes of gay men as "effeminate", and so they spent a lot of time proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that that you can be gay without being effeminate, that gay men are, on average, no more effeminate than your average straight man, and that there's nothing wrong with being a non-effeminate gay man (replace "effeminate" with "unhealthy" and "gay man" with "fat person", and you'll see what I'm saying). Those things may all be true, but you can imagine the feelings of gay men who actually are camp.

And that's without considering the feelings of any effeminate man who isn't actually gay (who would be the thin compulsive eater). I'm not, by the way, trying to draw comparisons between anti-gay and anti-fat prejudice, to engage in comparative suffering, nor to imply that there's anything wrong or self-destructive with being a camp gay man, because obviously it's an entirely different thing from having an eating disorder. I'm just trying to highlight that any group exists on a spectrum, which includes real life realisations of identifiable stereotypes, even if those stereotypes are representative of only a small proportion of that community, and other members of the community would prefer that people did not assume that everyone in the community is the same way. Fat people are not a homogenous whole, and, just as there is a section of the gay community which is identifiable as being stereotypical, there is a section of the fat community that is that way as well.

Fat people who got fat by compulsive eating are not necessarily naturally fat, and are certainly not healthily fat. But we're still fat. And a lot of us got that way by behaviours which our culture identifies as "fat person" behaviours, i.e. eating too much, regardless of the mental illness which drove us to develop those behaviours. And yet the only place we can come to which tells us it's okay to be fat still emphasises the notion of having the habits we recognise as "thin person" habits (even if that's not true) and which we know we don't have.

Now, I get it. If you're a fat person who lives a very healthy life, it must be frustrating and depressing to feel like the compulsive eaters at the other end of the spectrum are dragging down your public image. And I understand that healthy fat people would love to stop being stereotyped and suffering from prejudice because of those stereotypes, and that part of doing that is educating themselves and others about the fact that fat =/= unhealthy and/or greedy.

But becoming fat accepting is, in my experience at least, a vital part of recovering from an eating disorder, because we can't really release this problem without accepting that our bodies are going to end up where they end up, and that getting better may not equal getting thinner (this is not easy when you're obsessed with that notion). And yet being immersed in the "we are healthy fat people" culture in the FA community can actually be just as freaking depressing and alienating as reading a magazine with five articles on how to lose weight, and two photo spreads on how Posh Spice and Lindsay Lohan are too skinny.

The thing is, of course, that those of us who got fat via an eating disorder aren't REALLY stereotypical. We're not "just" gluttonous – we have a mental illness. But it looks exactly the same from the outside. That guy watching me eat my donut at lunch isn't thinking "well, I bet she spent an hour thinking about that before she ate it, and I bet she'll be agonising over the decision for the rest of the day, and that must be very hard". He's thinking, "wow, no wonder she's so fat". And you know, part of me, even while I'm acknowledging my issues, is thinking the same thing.

And more importantly than that, we're people who already have a tendency to beat ourselves mercilessly with our supposed moral failure to control our eating. So sometimes, being surrounded by fat people who have exemplary eating behaviours and an agenda to demonstrate that you can be fat and yet completely "good" (even while they decry the moralisation of food, as they should) results less in feeling better about being fat and more in feeling worse about being such a bad example of a fat person.

Please understand, I am absolutely on board the FA train in theory. There are a lot of really important messages that everyone needs to hear about what constitutes actual health, and how thinness is not the only or even main goal of health, and I don't want the train stopped at all, not least because the external pressure to lose weight would be significantly reduced if people would stop going "OMG U R OBESE U WILL DIIIIIIIIE".

But. That doesn't mean that I'm unaffected by the fact that the people I look to for a reminder that my being fat doesn't equal hideous, worthless and on death's door usually defend fatness with the (perfectly true on average) weapons of "fat doesn't mean being unhealthy" and "fat people are not greedy".

As for the thin compulsive eaters, yes, absolutely, we share an illness and I have no doubt that it is as destructive for them as it is for me. But, as is often discussed in FA circles, thin people with terrible eating habits are not subject to the same scrutiny as fat people, because thin and healthy are so equated that no one pays any attention to the five donuts being devoured by the 95lb girl at the next table. She may be eating a lot of donuts, but it can't possibly habitual, because, hey, 95lbs. (This is probably a bad thing, actually, because it means that compulsive eating disorder is harder to identify amongst the thin, because it's culturally okay for thin people to eat like horses as long as they don't gain any weight, and less support is likely to be available, because eating too much, even in a crazy way, doesn't seem that abnormal as long as you don't end up fat.)

But you see, thin people with compulsive eating disorder are unlikely to seek out fat acceptance, because they're thin. They don't need it. They certainly will need some of its principles, IMO, if they're going to recover, because they'll need to learn to accept and love their bodies whatever weight they turn out, but they don't need to learn to personally accept bodies that are culturally unacceptable. I'm not saying that they are at a particular advantage in that by any means - I'm sure there's a whole other bundle of troubles for the thin compulsive eater - but they don't need to seek out an environment where people will say "there is nothing wrong with your body", because most people will say that of a thin person – even if the eating disordered person doesn't believe it. Those of us who are fat, on the other hand, often find comfort in FA blogs and communities because here, at last, are people who are telling us that it is really okay to be fat, which we, in the midst of our war with our bodies, really need to hear.

It's just that sometimes (I do note significant exceptions to this, such as Meowser's excellent post about mental health counting as part of Health At Every Size) the framework for it being okay to be fat is that it's okay to be fat as long as you're healthy, and you defy greedy, unhealthy fat person stereotypes. And, you know, I just don't.

Of course, the thing about any movement is that there's always a need to raise public awareness, and change public perceptions which are based on harmful stereotypes. I even agree that that's a need. Activism and individualism are an uneasy mixture at best, because any activism is about a group of people who are disenfranchised in some way, and, outside of the one thing disenfranchising those people, they may have little in common. What we fat people have in common is that we're fat. Some of us lead healthy lives, some of us don't. At the moment, in an effort to try to have our existence legitimised, a lot of FA supporters are emphasising the fact that you can be both fat and healthy, and that's fine, because it reverses a lot of assumptions held by society at large.

I suppose just, as a minority within a minority, I occasionally want to put my hand up and point out that the unhealthy amongst us are still people. Occasionally crazy, self destructive people, sure, but we're probably trying really hard, even if we're failing.

So yes. Two different things, fatness and compulsive eating, but when you're a fat compulsive eater, quite often you have to deal with them as part of the same package. For me at least, I'm this fat because of the way I have eating for decades. I need, badly, to know it's okay to be fat, because it's only when I stop warring on my body that I stop eating like this. And maybe that'll result in me being less fat and maybe it won't. But I also need to know it's okay for getting better to take awhile and for me to not be able to be "healthy" at the moment, because the last thing I need is another weapon against myself.

creating eating disorders

You know, the thing that drives me crazy about all these new and horrible measures the government is putting into place to stem the supposed tide of obese children in the UK is not quite the same thing that drives a lot of other people crazy. It's not just about the fact that BMI is rubbish science (though it is), or that diets make people fatter (though they do), or that no one has yet figured out how to permanently make a fat person thin (though they haven't).

No, it's the fact that I can't see how shaming children about their weight – sending home report cards which include their BMI, lecturing them endlessly about food, giving them the constant message that Fat Is Bad – is going to do a single damn thing to make them thinner.

What I can see is that it's going to make them crazier.

And by crazier, I mean crazy like I am. These kids are going to end up in this same boat I've been trying to get out of for two decades. Some of them will become as fat as me, some of them will become very thin. Some of them will remain of average weight, but will still be crazy. I can't see anything but an increase in obsessive behaviour, whether dieting or eating or exercising.

How in the hell does that create a healthy population, let alone a thin population? Aren't increasing numbers of eating disorders going to put a pressure in the health system? We're going to end up with a bunch of people with the normal range of bodies, and the totally intolerable mental state known as an eating disorder. Seriously, I got this way with only my parents having a go at me about my weight. I can't even imagine how horrendous it must be for the kids who have their schools and teachers and random prejudicial people from the local council all chipping in on the notion that being fat is the worst thing that you can possibly be, so, hey, let's treat it like you failed a subject.

The thing is, I'm pretty fat. And I have a few health issues that might be related to my fat. But by far the biggest and most distressing health issue I have is not the pain in my feet or my wonky menstrual cycle (though that might not be related at all). It's the fact that I have compulsive eating disorder and have spent nearly twenty two years obsessed with my body and obsessed with food. This is a health issue far more serious than my actual weight, and it is, in fact, the cause of my weight. Quite seriously, if no one had ever started telling me in adolescence that I was too fat, I would not be this fat. The government is just lining up to do to all children what was done to me, and maybe the intentions are just as good as my mother's were, but the results are going to be just as disastrous.

The whole thing is idiotic and hateful and, you know, it's completely immoral. It's immoral to make children suffer because dubious science reporting and hysteria has created a world in which thinness is equated with moral superiority (and now, apparently, about saving the planet - I mean, GEEZ, people!). It's immoral for schools and governments to tell children that there's something wrong with them, especially when it's something that they don't really have control over.

And you know, in ten years time, when they start complaining about how now seventy percent of teenagers have eating disorders, and blah blah, what a drain on the NHS that is, I will just be sitting here saying, "I fucking told you so."

Sometimes you just want to take the spectacles off

I keep reading a lot of Fatosphere posts lately about Wall-E and how it's anti-fat, and all the rest of it, and...well, people may be right, but I don't particularly want to go into the movie looking for that.

God knows, I'm alert to all kinds of isms all the time. Seriously, I did Cultural Studies at university, and I loved it, but it does mean that I never, ever don't notice things. Sometimes I can just ignore them, but I never fail to notice them.

I'm not sure I want this to become another thing that I can't stop noticing. I'm not sure I can stop it, but I'm not sure I want it. I suppose it's because I take it more personally than anything else. That is strange, when you consider the amount of sexism I notice. But the difference is that sexism and misogyny just infuriate me, they bring out the fighter in me, and that may not be as fun as laughing, but it's more fun than crying. And laughing at the fat people makes me cry.

Once, I went and saw The Nutty Professor, the horrible Eddie Murphy one, and there's a scene in the middle of the film where he was compulsively eating (M&Ms, I think) and everyone else in the cinema was laughing, and I just sat there and sobbed. Because I knew, you see, what that felt like. To everyone else it was something so extreme that it could be a joke. To me, it was everyday behaviour that hurt.

I don't feel bad about being a woman. I get angry when I see misogyny, because I don't think that I or any other woman deserves the bullshit we get heaped on us because of our gender, even by those who share it.

But even now, I feel bad about being fat. Part of me still thinks I deserve what's said about my body. I feel bad about the way I eat. I feel bad that I am positive that when people look at me they see a giant blob taking over the world. Part of me believes all the propaganda. And you know, I'm just not sure that I want to notice the propaganda as long as I believe it.

Of course, it's a vicious circle - is it even possible to stop believing the propaganda as long as it's being dripped into me subconsciously so that I keep on feeling bad about myself? I'm not sure, but since most of my self-loathing really is self-generated, I'm not sure how it's going to help me to invite in all the other players to generate some more.

I can see sexism and misogyny without feeling bad about myself. I can't see anti-fat stuff without it. So I'm not sure I want to look for it right now.

faith and reason

It amazes me sometimes how many contradictory thoughts I can contain.

I'm a fairly intelligent woman, certainly a thoughtful woman, a woman who sees both sides to an argument. On one level, what I believe about women's inherent value and about the body fascism that is so prevalent in our society is very clear and simple to me, and I can articulate that easily.

What I usually don't mention, however, is the violence of the conflict that rages inside me – me versus me, forever at war - on this subject.

Here are some things I believe:

I believe I am not really this fat woman.

I believe I am a much fatter woman.

I believe being fat is not a moral position, nor is it an inherently unhealthy one.

I believe that I am not putting in enough effort, that I'm failing and that I am probably killing myself.

I believe that fat is ugly.

I believe that many fat women are beautiful.

I believe that my husband is very attracted to me.

I believe that no one in their right minds could be attracted to me.

I believe that it's more important to have a healthy relationships with food and eating than to be the "right" size.

I believe that it's quite possible that I would kill someone if their death meant I would be thin.

I feel like half a dozen different people on this. There's someone in there who is clearheaded and reasonable, looks at the facts, considers the arguments, can be dispassionate and logical, and who has it all taped.

But there's also someone in there who agonises every goddamn minute over how fat she is, how her arms jiggle, her thighs sway, her boobs rest on her stomach when she is braless. Someone who sees herself in the mirror and wants to cry.

And someone who is so angry about all that self-hatred.

Someone who thinks that she should just be what she is, yet wears make up every day, in the hopes that maybe she will still be pretty.

I honestly don't know who the fuck I am some days.

The thing is, all the arguments are very clear, and that's great. It's good to have clarity and logic. And I can present with that. It's just that faith, you see, is a different thing. And faith and reason rarely live together easily. And I still cling to the vestiges of a childhood faith in my own shameful fatness which should be hidden and repudiated and expunged. It doesn't seem to matter how much reason I have to defend against it, it still creeps back in.

I don't suppose it's helped by the fact that most of the society I live in shares this faith, and presents a set of arguments about it that are quite convincing also. We all sit together in some kind of bizarre mass in worship of beauty and youth and thinness which undermine any notion of personal value if we do not fulfil those criteria, and afterwards list all the reasons that these beliefs are logical.

I suppose this is the thing about a disorder - at least about my disorder. It can be justified with reason ("thinner is healthier"), but it isn't really about reason at all. That's only its outer garb which makes it more presentable to the world. At its heart, it is about faith, faith in fatness, faith in my own unworthiness, faith that I can't ever conquer either my body or my feelings about it.

Of course, I've left a faith before, which shattered my life for a couple of years, but in retrospect, was a blessed relief. I suppose the difference is that you can walk out of a church, but you can't walk out of your body. But I would like to rediscover that courage that allowed me to get up from a faith my life had revolved around for twenty six years and walk away from it.

choices

I'm different to a lot of the fat acceptance bloggers I read, who seem to live healthy lifestyles, eat in a happy and sensible manner, enjoy exercise, all that palaver. I don't eat happily or sensibly. Sometimes I do, but mostly it's a constant tug-of-war between the part of my brain that thinks I should be on a strict diet and the part that knows that that would lead to bingeing at best, and I'm pretty consistent about eating more than I "should". Yes, "should" is problematic in and of itself. There are plenty of thin people who eat lots of crap and are still thin. But even if I was thin, the way I eat a lot of the time would not be healthy, because it isn't. (Though to be honest, the past couple of weeks have been okay. I actually attempted a binge today and completely failed because I was uncomfortably full. Which was kind of nifty.)

It's just that...for me to follow any kind of diet that puts a restriction on anything isn't psychologically healthy, and results in a diet that's way worse than the one I already have. But it makes me wonder if it's even possible for me to be "healthy at every size", because I've been consistently UNhealthy at every size. I suppose it's a question of whether that "health" includes mental health. I've been prioritising my mental health for some time now, and I'm sure that's come at a cost to my physical health; but on the other hand, if I hadn't made it my priority, I would probably be even worse off. So there's that.

I think this is what makes fat prejudice so complicated. I'm not going to get into whether it's harder or easier or more or less socially acceptable than any other form of prejudice, because that's an impossible discussion, and would no doubt leave me with my privilege showing. But prejudice against the fat is complicated, and the main reason it's complicated is this: most people believe that fat people can be thin people if only they would work harder.

Most people do not believe that women can be men (transgendered people facing a whole other set of prejudices), or that black people can be white. You can see class prejudice (or at least money prejudice) showing in the same way - there are a significant number of people who think that poor people wouldn't be poor if they weren't so darn lazy. And you can see it in some people who are homophobic - for some reason, they think that being gay is a choice, and that being the case, it's just weird or wrong or both that people would choose to be gay.

It is complicated to be part of a group of people whom the bulk of society, including ourselves, believes both can and should change. Twiggy recently said something along the lines that with all the medical knowledge about the disbenefits of being fat, there's no excuse for it. And a lot of people believe that.

So it's wrong to be fat, it's unhealthy to be fat, and yet millions upon millions of people, despite all the knowledge to the contrary, continue to be fat...apparently by choice. Because it's just so much fun to be fat.

I'm not particularly healthy in my habits, and I still don't choose to be fat. Certainly, when I was an unfat adolescent who was put on a diet, and who spent every day from that to this obsessed with her weight, I didn't choose to be fat. Even if I ate perfectly and got even more exercise than I do, I'd still probably be what society calls fat, and although I'm pretty comfortable with where I believe I'd end up (which is just as far away as actually being thin), given a choice, of course I'd still choose to be thinner, because it would just be easier.

The problem with fatness being perceived as a choice is that people assume that all it takes is making the "right" choice. They can't comprehend why anyone would make the "wrong" one, so it must be down to a moral flaw, laziness or greed, because clearly, when the choice is so easy, what else could it be?

But it's not a choice. It doesn't really matter whether you became fat like me because your relationship with food is fucked up beyond recognition, or whether your genes just say "look, we're going to have a lot of padding, I don't care what you say", or whether your means are limited so that you can't make some of the healthier choices Twiggy gives you no excuses for not making. It's a rare person who says "yep, fat is the look I'm going for". Why would we, in this fat-obsessed culture? We're not masochists. We're not stupid. We know it would be easier for us - people wouldn't call us particular kinds of names, or suggest we lose weight. And goodness knows, compared to some of the stories I read, I suffer very little at other people's hands as a result of my weight. Why would we ever make a choice to be fat if being thin was as easy as all that?

I have friends who have lost a lot of weight, who have worked very hard to do so, and are proud of themselves for doing so. And I'm proud of them too, in a sense, because I love them and I know how hard they have worked. But, damn, they've worked hard. They've worked harder on that than on anything else in their lives. They've restricted their food intake, they've worked out for hours daily. They've had to make being thinner the focus of most of their life. It's not easy, even for people who take the trip successfully.

And for me, and others like me, it comes, if it comes at all, at a huge and unacceptable price. My ability to function in a normal way, to focus on the things that are actually important to me, to not want to kill myself because I want to eat a block of chocolate, that's too high a price to pay. Part of me wants very much to be thinner, and maybe one day I will be, if I get this disorder under control. But only then, because I can't sacrifice my mind to create a thinner body.

compliments

Two in one day, whoohoo. Actually, they were both written several days ago. I keep writing things and not posting them. Anyway:

This morning, one of my co-workers, who is more than a little obsessed with dieting and going to the gym, said "you look like you're losing weight."

"Oh," I said, "really? Maybe it's just that I'm wearing black."

"No," she said, "you definitely look trimmer."

"Oh," I said, very conscious of not wanting to greet this with OMGYAYTHANK YOU, and yet wanting to be polite, "well, thanks, I haven't really been trying to."

"Oh," she said, "really?"

Hell, I might be losing weight, I really don't know. We don't own a scale, and I'm not measuring or anything. My clothes feel about the same. I haven't taken any particular action – I mean, I walk everywhere, and I'm trying to eat more fruit. But that hasn't necessarily resulted in me eating any less of anything else.

What struck me, though, wasn't the tone of the compliment itself. She really meant it as a compliment. What she meant was "you look nice". It's possible that I look slimmer – maybe I have lost a few pounds, or maybe it is the black, or maybe I do just look nice and she associates "nice" so heavily with "thin" that it amounts to the same thing.

No, what struck me was the tone of her voice after I said I hadn't been trying to lose weight. That "oh really" was loaded, let me tell you.

There was a layer of "you're that fat and you're not trying to lose weight, are you crazy?"

There was a layer of "you're losing weight and you're doing nothing, how is that fair?"

There was a layer of "why aren't you more happy that you're losing weight?"

There was a significant slice of indignation that I wasn't more grateful for the best compliment a woman can be given, after all. And that right there is a horrendous statement, that the best thing you can say to a woman is that there's less of her, that she is taking up less space.

Fabulous. I know she meant it as a compliment, but it just felt hollow. Nothing complimentary about it. I want to feel better and be healthier, I really do, and if that leads to weight loss, okay, and if it doesn't, I have to learn to love myself that much anyway. But the assumption that there being LESS OF ME is inherently better is disturbing to me.

sneaky beast

Eating disorders are sneaky things. I've been having a fairly good week, till yesterday, when I did a bit too much grazing, thanks to an extremely frustrating and boring job.

But then this morning, I was walking through the pouring rain to work, and happened upon a Mars Bar in the street. Which is to say, it was half eaten, and lying on the filthy pavement in the aforementioned pouring rain.

And I thought, "I could totally eat that Mars Bar."

I didn't, I'm pleased to say, but it was touch and go for a moment or two, and that, let's face it, is pretty disgusting. I'm not really sure why it was touch and go. Especially for a filthy, wet, half-eaten chocolate bar, given that I'd been in a shop with plenty of clean, wrapped, brand new Mars Bars about five minutes earlier and hadn't even been tempted, and was about to be close to the work canteen, which also has plenty of clean, wrapped, brand new Mars Bars.

And after getting to work, I didn't even want one. I just ate my Special K, and had a biscuit when it was offered (wafer with white chocolate coating and chocolate cream). Hell, I actually have a clean, wrapped, brand new Toblerone with fruit and nut in my bag, and I haven't touched that.

It's baffling.

It's sneaky in other ways too. I get a fair bit of exercise, which is largely incidental because I don't drive and therefore have to walk everywhere, but I keep thinking I would like to branch out a bit. Consciously, I think this because of the thing itself. Consciously I think I would like to be more flexible, more centred, have better balance, strengthen my painful feet, stretch my painful back...There are many benefits to exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss.

But there's this niggling little voice in my head all the time, what if it doesn't work?

"Work?" I say to myself. "What do you mean, work? Dude, if I do a little yoga and/or a little Tai Chi every day, it'll work. I'll be more flexible, better balanced, stronger and probably in less pain."

"Yes," says the little voice plaintively, "but will you be thinner?"

Of course, to make matters worse, I have a feeling that, contrary being that I am, there are many kinds of exercise I've avoided doing over the years because, if I did them, I would probably have lost weight. There are things I stopped doing, for no apparent reason, while they were achieving the exact effect I allegedly wanted.

For me at least, this disorder is a sneaky, subtle and contrary beast. On the one hand, it's a rare day on which I don't feel desperate to lose weight at least part of the time, even if I'm shoving food into my mouth at that exact time. On the other, this seems to have developed in such a way as to prevent that loss. I guess I could put that down to rebellion or determination by some inner goblin to be loved for itself, not for its body, some battle for control over my body against a mother who was determined it should be different than it was.

I don't know, I really don't. It's like living with a highly erratic and completely unreliable relative who has burdened you with their presence for twenty odd years without ever explaining why the hell they can't just go live somewhere else, or contributing in any way to the running of the household.

My father, who is a psychologist, says that all behaviours originally served an important purpose. We could argue, perhaps, that my eating problems started as a kind of war for territory against my mother. He says the problem is that they often persist long past their usefulness. Assuming that my eating problems are the war for territory, yeah, this is long past any usefulness it may ever have had. It's beyond useless at this point. I'm thirty two, I'm married, and I live on the other side of the world from my mother. Furthermore, I've told her in no uncertain terms that there should be no discussion of my weight and that she shouldn't buy me clothes. So as far as my original war is concerned, it's over – I won. I'm fat as a baobab tree, and my mother does not try to influence what I eat. The territory is all mine. Whoo.

Except...not.

I keep writing these long, rather rambling posts that come to no clear conclusion lately. I don't have a conclusion yet. As much as I can look at events or people in my life and say, "hey, that's how this started", I haven't yet figured out how to make it end, even so many years after the starting points have ceased to be relevant.

I'm just so tired of being ambushed by myself, and I don't know how to get me to stop.

It's interesting, though, in the light of some of the recent Fatosphere discussion about dieting and fat acceptance, to wonder where someone like me fits into that. To be sure, I've been anti-diet longer than I've been remotely interested in fat acceptance, simply because diets make me crazy, and also fat. Actually, I suspect they make everyone crazy, but I know they make me crazy. That knowledge hasn't stopped me wanting to lose weight. Finding FA hasn't made me stop wanting to lose weight.

Fundamentally, you see, I don't believe that I really should be this fat. It would be easier to be accepting, in a sense, if I was also sure of that. And when I say "should be", I mean "my genetics may give me a predisposition to being overweight, but I don't believe that without compulsive eating, I would actually be the aforementioned baobab lady." I'd probably be on the bigger-than-curvy side – there would still be a lot of people who would call me fat. But not THIS fat.

Then again, maybe my current ideal body of size UK16, something I feel I could live with, is just as ridiculously out of range as a size 10 was in the days when I was size 16. Maybe the point of the entire thing is to learn to live with myself as I am, because it would change nothing if I was a size 16 and still felt like this about myself, or a size 10 for that matter.

No less crazy, no less ambushed by this sneaky beast which tracks me all day and all night and everywhere.

Made of Honour

Made of Honour...well, this isn't a review, so I'll just say it's a fairly friendly romantic comedy, with the usual hearty helping of people being total bastards. This bothers me about romcoms - they're usually full of jerks. Anyway, that isn't really the point of this post. There will be spoilers ahead.

The point of this post is the totally gratuitous and unkind treatment of the single fat person in the film. I guess you could argue that it's a rare thing to have an actually fat person IN this kind of movie, but to be honest, I'd rather that we weren't represented than that we're represented like this.

The fat person in question is bridesmaid Hilary, played by Emily Nelson. She's pretty cute, right? Certainly not freakish in any way. She's short and plump, with one of those hourglass figures. She's not done any favours by the fact that she has to stand next to two very tall, slim women, but she's pretty normal looking, and for a brief flickering moment I thought, it's nice that she was included in her friend's ceremony because she's her damn friend.

The moment didn't last, because Hilary's presence in the film is purely "comic" relief, and all the "comedy" revolves around her being fat.

First it's "funny" that she's a size twelve, but she wants to wear a size eight bridesmaid dress. It's "funny" that she's on some kind of liquid-only diet throughout the film - people comment once or twice that she should eat, and she clearly isn't feeling one hundred percent, but they also think it's normal that she should want to be thinner, so they don't really make a thing of it, and certainly no one says, "Hilary, you're fine as you are", because they don't think she is. She's funny because she's fat, y'know.

Then, to add insult to injury, it's funny that she manages to squeeze into her size eight dress, only to have it split down the side, revealing hilarious fat flesh, when she sits down.

And really, that's it. She doesn't have any emotional moments. The bride isn't ever seen with her. No one tells her she looks fine. She declares early on that she's going to meet a Scottish man and be happy, and that's supposed to be funny too, but they don't bother to let her actually meet the Scottish man, which might've made me feel slightly better about it.

It's just a case of, shit, we need some comic relief in this supposed comedy...let's make fun of the fat chick!

I came across some site the other day with "BBW" romance novels. Unfortunately, the samples I read were absolutely horribly written, so I didn't spend any more time on it. But this kind of thing makes me wonder - how well would a romantic comedy about a fat chick do? If she was just the lead, and no one made a huge deal out of her weight, if she just met the hot guy and fell in love and had all the usual stupid romcom crap happen, and she was just a normal, beautiful, fat woman. Well, I suppose My Big Fat Greek Wedding did very well, but she's not fat. On the other hand, she is pretty normal looking. Would fat women everywhere go "hooray" and run to the cinema to see Patrick Dempsey make out with a woman they thought they could actually be? Or are our fantasies dependent upon our being thin, so we'd rather see him make out with the skinny chick we could never be? I really don't know the answer to that.

Either way, is it really necessary to pretend that public humiliation like having your dress rip in church is funny, that it wouldn't really embarrass poor Hilary and, since, given her liquid diet, she clearly is not accepting of her own body, destroy her self esteem further?

I would probably have enjoyed this stupid movie in the way I generally enjoy stupid romcoms, but it's left a bad taste in my mouth.

Bones and Ownership

Contains spoilers for the most recent episode of Bones, "The Player Under Pressure".

I was watching Bones last night, which is a show I generally like, and was struck rather unpleasantly by the conclusion. The story was about a murdered basketball player, who turned out to be murdered by the father of a girl who was blowing him immediately before the murder. The motivations were somewhat unclear – the father seemed racked with guilt over the fact that in his youth, he, too, had been an enormous man-whore of the use-'em-and-lose-'em school of seduction, and was devastated to discover that his "baby girl" was just as susceptible to the attractions of the team's star as everyone else.

But despite the subplot about how Brennan was dismissive of athletes as immature and Booth's feeling were hurt by the idea that she thought "guys like him" were perpetually trapped in childhood, no one, least of all Brennan (who really should've been all over this), actually pointed out the fact that it is completely, entirely fucked up for a grown man to be so involved in his daughter's sexuality that he fucking killed a guy over it. I mean, damn, I know Brennan doesn't like psychology, but if that's not a case of projection, I don't know what is. Everyone just treated it like it was a logical reaction to the situation, not an extremely fucked up way to view your daughter. I could almost grasp it if he'd committed suicide, having realised that he was a total bastard, but murdering the guy his daughter was blowing is just...weird.

Look, I grasp that the athlete was an arse, and probably deserved a kicking. I grasp that there are men who use and women who are used, and professional athletes get a lot of opportunities for that sort of thing. I grasp that the guy was portrayed as being a bit of a heartbreaker, at least in relation to another young woman, so he could be presumed to have failed to be clear about the fact that he just wanted to get laid.

However, I really, really resent this notion that somehow a man has the right to kill a man who fucked his daughter, and it really felt like the show and its characters tacitly approved of this murder.

Firstly, I am tired of this notion that sex is degrading for women. Now, the girl in question, a cheerleader, may have been conned by the athlete, but that's never spelled out in relation to her - the only person heartbroken is someone else entirely, someone who is outside the circle of athletes and cheerleaders, and who presumably didn't know his reputation (and you can't tell me that any of the cheerleaders hadn't heard about that). The only information we're given about the two of them was that she was blowing him under the bleachers. Whoop-di-do. She had a fiancé herself – there's no particular reason to believe that she was in love or unaware that he didn't want anything more than sex, or that she wanted anything but that herself.

Secondly, the girl was an adult – a college-aged adult, but she was old enough to decide to get married, certainly old enough to decide to have sex. Her father's place in her sex life should be non-existent. I'll grant you, it would be pretty icky to discover in that particular way that your daughter cheating was on her fiancé, especially in a public place, but that doesn't make her father's reaction any less fucked up and bizarre.

And finally, the implication of the father's final confession – "it's different when you see your baby girl..." – is that, well, he never really understood before that using women like toilet paper was wrong, and now doesn't understand that it's wrong because women are people who shouldn't be treated with disdain (not that casual sex isn't fine if both parties are fully aware what it is when they're going into it), but because his "baby girl" has fallen prey to it. Well, probably, we don't really know, her motivations are never explored. But he only feels bad – is apparently only driven to murder – because, OMG! Turns out? Men using women is bad if it's someone's daughter. Because it's not like every goddamn woman you meet is someone's daughter.

(Aside: I had a boss once who had his fourteen year old daughter at work with him at his video store one day, and some lout came in and was making suggestive remarks about her, and he replied "that's my daughter", and the lout quickly back-pedalled with "oh, I didn't mean anyone's daughter, mate, not anyone's daughter…")

I am squicked out by this. I realise that it's probably not an unrealistic portrayal of a certain kind of man, and it's not that I don't think that kind of man should never appear on film – I just think that in a show like Bones, in which our extremely tough female lead is perfectly comfortable criticising the sexual behaviour, not to mention the emotional development, of most of the male characters in the episode, it is very peculiar to have no comment from her on this subject. I feel let down by it, to be honest. Brennan can be annoying with her insistence on viewing everything through the limited glass of her profession, but honestly, couldn't she pull it out when it matters? Wouldn't this actually be a really important thing for her to comment on?

Strangely, this actually does have something to do with eating disorders. I've seen a lot of comments lately from possibly well-meaning, possibly trollish, men on fat acceptance and feminist blogs which amount to "why do women want to be skinny? Men don't like skinny women, so it's not our fault that you've all got fucked up relationships with your bodies and with food". On one level, I understand the protest – probably the individual males making the protests don't pressure their significant others to lose weight (although I'd be interested to know at what point they would consider it acceptable to start that pressure – I doubt very much that most of them are into fat chicks, and they probably still have a notion of what makes an attractive woman, which probably doesn't include "size not important").

But at the same time, it's a disclaimer that I distrust – partly because the assumption that it's all women's own fault that we have body issues implies that only women should have to take any action (I also doubt whether these guys are actually telling women of all shapes and sizes that they're beautiful OR that being beautiful isn't the most important thing in a woman's life), and partly because it comes back to the same old bullshit that was bothering me on Bones last night: many men, I daresay most men, still think they own us.

Hell, they still think they own women they've never met, to the extent that they think their approval or disapproval of our bodies is what should define our relationships with said bodies. They sound like they're disclaiming ownership because they're disclaiming responsibility, but actually, the crux of the question isn't "why do you want to be skinny?" but "men don't like...". The question doesn't mean "why have you developed an impossible goal for you, why can't you love and enjoy yourself the way you are?"; it means "why are you doing something that might actually make you less attractive to some men than you are now? Isn't being attractive to men the most important part of your life?"

The worst part is that it's not an entirely stupid question. It's an offensive question, but not an entirely stupid one, especially for those of us whose battle with our weight has been at least partly motivated by a desire for the attention of the opposite sex. My own father was the one who told me I had to lose weight or boys would never be interested in me. He was wrong, as it turned out, but I believed him. Part of me still believes him, even though I'm married now to a man who thinks I'm gorgeous.

But there I am again, you see. I'm still wrapped in the question of what is attractive to men, even if it's just one man, who has already agreed to spend his life with me, so clearly likes me quite a lot.

Not all eating disorders come from the same source, or have the same goal, of course. My sister was anorexic in her teens, and that at least partly resulted from being raped at the age of twelve. I doubt that she was interested in more male attention just then, and her recovery didn't begin until she took up martial arts and felt some kind of control over her own body again. But a lot of my own self-loathing over the years has been rooted in the notion that I could never be attractive, and I would never be worth anything until I was.

Lately, as well, there's been the wholly disturbing "Open Source Boob Project", which is apparently a group effort to make scifi and fantasy conventions as uncomfortable as possible by forcing women to actually answer the question "can I feel your boobs?" to anyone who cares to ask. (Yes, you can wear a badge that says "don't ask me", but honestly, shouldn't the default assumption be that this is a fucking stupid question to ask a stranger? Ask me and you'll get your fingers broken.) Again, this question of ownership hasn't gone away, even amongst men who tell themselves that they are enlightened and not at all sexist.

But the lead on the "project" also commented in the now-deleted comments that he wouldn't feel up someone who was unattractive to him, because he "doesn't do pity gropes".

I know I said in my last post that I was getting away from anger, and I still am. This is...not anger, exactly, a kind of weary frustration, born of a gut feeling that this is just wrong.

Most of the time, I hate my body and I can't control my eating. Most of the time, this may not be about what actual individual men like or don't like. It's not even about what my husband likes or doesn't like, because all the internal evidence suggests he likes me just fine, at any weight, at any level of craziness. But it is, to a lesser or greater extent, to do with the fact that in my heart – as opposed to my head, which is outraged – I still believe that being attractive to men is of primary importance for a woman, and that being fat is fundamentally unattractive, and you can't disentangle that from the fact that it is still considered appropriate for men's opinions of our bodies, what they look like and what we do with them, should be proprietorial. Fat is still a feminist issue, because regardless of whether an individual man is going to find me or any other individual woman attractive, our culture is still founded on the notion that the opinions of men at large about the bodies of individual women are important, whether it's because they're telling fat OR skinny women that they're not attractive.

And I don't accept this notion that it's all women's fault, because, oh dear, we're putting pressure on ourselves to be TOO thin. We're also putting pressure on ourselves to have bigger (or smaller) breasts, and smaller (or bigger) bums, shiny hair, perfect skin, bigger eyes, not to mention every other damn thing, and it's got nothing to do with what YOU, THE INDIVIDUAL MALE, find personally attractive and everything to do with what SOCIETY, of which you are a part (as am I), says is attractive. If you're genuinely that offended by the notion, try to get some of the companies promoting these images to put some of what YOU'RE actually attracted to into their advertising, or, better still, start encouraging the women of your acquaintance to love themselves as they are, regardless of whether they fit into any social standard of beauty. You can't disclaim responsibility while you're still claiming ownership, and you're still claiming ownership while you assert the importance of what you (or men) are attracted to in relation to women in general, as though, as we already feel, what we look like is really all that is of importance about us. That you don't like "skinny chicks" doesn't make you morally superior, as much as fatter women may often like to make you feel it is. We want people to find us attractive too, and we're more likely to like you if you seem like you might, because it makes us feel better. You're still asserting a proprietorial right to judge, even if you seem to be judging in our favour.

(I do wonder sometimes if I would find this whole thing easier if I were a lesbian, or if I'd just find a way to feel like women couldn't find me attractive either. I don't know. But the lesbian gaze doesn't yet have a strong enough hold in culture at large, so doesn't really come into this entry.)

I'm not blaming individual men OR women (apart from those of either sex who glaringly deserve it, who individually harass individual women or make their partners feel bad for being heavier than they think they deserve etc) for a society-wide issue that crosses nations and continents. But I don't believe that women's investment in being attractive, even if we're individually hit and miss with men's supposed requirements (as though those are universal), is purely a woman-created problem – how could it be, in our still male-dominated society? Men as a group feel quite free to dismiss us if they consider us unattractive, whether it's by leaving "men don't like skinny women" comments on our blogs, or criticising our bodies from building sites, or dumping us because we are too fat/thin/short/tall/ugly for them. Even our concerned commenters seem to feel quite free to dismiss slender women, as though they're somehow lesser because they're thinner than the commenters themselves find attractive. If they're really that concerned, they should find a way to be sympathetic to the pain of those obsessed with their weight and attractiveness without dismissing the concern because "men don't like skinny women". That doesn't engender confidence in slender women, it doesn't make fat women feel any better because we may not be skinny but we're probably still too fat, and it doesn't move us any further from the fundamental position that men's opinions of our bodies are still paramount.

This is a sticky business, because attraction is obviously still pretty important to the human species. Without it, we come to a dead end. I'm here in a blog no one is reading, muttering about television shows and my own struggles with my weight and my eating, and I have no real answers. I just know...I'm tired of this. I'm tired seeing the assumption of male ownership of women plastered everywhere, from stupid TV shows that can't be bothered to question a man's possessiveness about his daughter's sexuality to advertising which uses women's bodies as a kind of public message board about what's acceptable and isn't solely in order to make us buy things, to commenters who disclaim their part in women's obsession with being attractive because we're not doing it the right way for THEM, to my own despair when I look at my body or the newly forming lines on my face. I'm not even angry. I'm just tired.

So far my fat positivity has not come around to the notion that I could be devastatingly attractive at any weight, or that it doesn't matter a fuck if anyone ever finds me attractive because I'm clever and talented and a bunch of other good stuff. If I ever get there, you'll know I've recovered. And that I've reached a new level of personal evolution in which I understand in my heart as well as believe in my head that my attractiveness to men, or lack thereof, is not the most important thing about me.

forgiveness

This is the problem - time flies no matter what you're having.

I'm in a rather odd frame of mind at the moment. I've been doing some energy work around my eating problems, and it seems to be working, insofar as I've been a lot less psychotic than usual in the past week, and I feel better for it.

But at the same time, I'm reading an awful lot of anger and negativity in the Fatosphere and everywhere else, on racial issues, fat issues, and gender issues, and because of the fact that I'm in this particular energetic headspace which is all about healing and peace, I'm finding the juxtaposition rather peculiar.

On the one hand, there's some great thoughts out there, and I always like to read intelligent pondering.

On the other hand, what I want, more than anything else right now, is to be healthy, physically and mentally, most specifically with regard to eating and my relationship with my body. I'm not sure how healthy I can get if I'm angry all the time. I don't WANT to be angry, if being angry is going to get in the way of my being healthy.

And the truth is, it does. The truth is, when I do this kind of energy work, I feel like I'm seeing something beyond all this, beyond this life even. The desire for health and happiness in this body is, in a sense, rooted in the notion that I am so much more than this body that I want to be able to relate to the world around me as best as possible, that I should love my body because it is how I get to be physical. It's my body that allows me to look at bluebells, knit cardigans, make up stories. My love for it should go beyond any culturally comfortable notion of beauty, because my love for it should not be based just in form but in function, which, to be honest, has been neglected, while I've been so fixated on form.

But I come back to earth with a bump when I start reading all this anger. Yes, these are blogs which have helped me enormously to get to this point of wanting health above any other physical priority. But in the process of becoming more healthy, I'm not sure about where fixating on outrage is actually going to get me.

This is a challenging question, because I do think the fight is important - not just for me, but for all the fatties out there. I do think it's important for society to become more tolerant, less hateful, no matter who the target is. I do think it's sick and wrong for people to be writing articles about how it's the fat people who are creating global warming (I don't even drive, dude - whose carbon footprint is bigger?) or how we "ruin moments". I do think these people need to have the hatefulness and prejudice of their notions challenged.

Hell, I think all those things about women's issues, gay issues, racial issues and more.

I'm just not sure I can do that right now without undermining my own healing process, because anger just makes me, well, angry. It doesn't make me feel at peace with myself.

Some background:

Basically, my parents, particularly my mother, are the only people in my life who ever gave me a hard time about my weight. My mother put me on my first diet at the age of eleven, and never quite let go of it. And, while I was never destined to be a skinny person, thanks to my genes, I was actually never fat until decades of compulsive eating had taken their toll. So in essence, my parents made me both crazy and fat.

When I first realised this, I also realised that their motivations had been good, so I tried for a very long time not to blame them.

Then I did blame them, and I blamed them hard. I got angry, I stayed angry, and I told them I was angry. To their credit, they just went with it. It probably made them sad, but they didn't fight me.

And then, having gotten angry, it was like I'd never been angry at all. All of a sudden, unexpectedly, having announced to both my parents that forgiveness was overrated, I found that I really did forgive them, because they really hadn't meant to hurt me. They did everything they did out of love, and while I still wasn't over the eating disorder, and while I was still the fattest I'd ever been, anything that happened from that point had to be up to me.

And it turned out that forgiveness wasn't overrated at all. Oh, the "forgiveness" of my childhood was overrated - the desperate need to push hurt deep down into my gut because I thought God would be angry with me if I was unforgiving, that was overrated. That was, in fact, not forgiveness at all. But the actual forgiveness, the actual gut knowledge that I was really okay with my parents, no matter what fuck ups of theirs I was still living with, that was not overrated. That was amazing.

And the anger was crucial to the forgiveness; the anger was vital to my being able to move past this huge barrier of resentment. The anger was, in fact, my impetus for moving forward. I'm down with the anger. If you don't get angry, the resentment will stay with you forever.

But, and this is a big but, I didn't get any better while I was angry. I felt better, in a lot of ways. It felt good to get to that point of just being really fucking pissed with those people who, however ignorant or well-meaning, had taught me to hate myself for things I had no control over. I fairly revelled in it.

But my eating didn't change, my self-loathing didn't change, certainly my body didn't change (not that it's obliged to - we'll see what happens as I really get healthy). The only thing that changed was that I stopped repressing my rage at my parents. It didn't change how I felt about myself.

I think it's good to be righteously angry at those who make us doubt and hate ourselves. It's good to be angry, because it's the first step to understanding that we are, in fact, not obliged to hate ourselves, that those people who loathe our fat are ignorant and hateful and probably hate themselves as much as they hate us. That anger is good and necessary.

It's just not the whole process.

(Actually, even the forgiveness isn't the whole process. I did the forgiving a couple of years ago now, and it's only in the past four months or so that I've really started to address the disorder itself.)

This step of the process is the one in which I really, finally, learn to love and care for myself. And that takes work and it takes energy, and I'm not sure I have the time OR the energy to learn that love AND be angry at the same time. It's too...confusing.

"I love myself...those guys are bastards" doesn't really work as a personal mantra.

grief and contentment

I recently had a couple of assessment visits with an eating disorder clinic. I'm not terribly impressed at this stage, for various reasons, and I don't know if I'll end up getting any help from them. There are distance and time issues which make it harder. We'll see.

But what I remember vividly is the sheer power of my emotions once I got onto the subject of my relationship with my body and with food. I haven't cried like that in years, not since I was depressed and seeing a counsellor weekly. And I just realised why.

It was grief.

I don't think I understood that before.

I don't think I understood before just how much I have lost.

My sister emailed me the other day, making, to me, a completely astonishing remark:

I just live with my body type. I should absolutely do more exercise and stuff, but I'm content enough to go along with what I have!

This shouldn't be shocking to me – even by current standards, my sister is in good shape. She's a Type 1 diabetic, so her diet is pretty carefully monitored anyway, but she's not uptight about what she eats. She doesn't mind if she gains or loses weight. She just is, in her own words, content.

I wonder how that's possible, especially considering that she came between me, with compulsive eating disorder, and our youngest sister, who was anorexic in her teens (though happily fully recovered now). How did she manage to glide right by the issues with food that have plagued me for over two decades, or those which plagued our sister in her teens.

For me, you see, I can't imagine a world in which I don't imagine people judging me when I buy crisps with my lunch, in which I don't feel guilty and yet compelled whenever there's food in front of me, in which my body is a neutral thing that I can just "go along" with. At every point, I seem to be battling, feeling conflicted and ashamed, either because I'm failing to meet even the beauty standards in my head or because I'm failing to meet the moral standards I've been setting myself. Even as I begin to understand the meaning of "fat acceptance", I'm still usually overwhelmed by the feeling that it just isn't okay for me to be fat.

It's not even coming from the outside, mostly. Oh, there are occasional comments, and occasionally I read hateful remarks that people make on FA blogs and wonder if that's what people are actually thinking that about me. But mostly, it comes from me. There's no one else who's second guessing my crisps – really, if anyone was, I'd say they were in serious need of a life. It's me.

I wish I knew how to make me shut up.

But then, maybe that's part of the problem – I don't look at the part of me that is terrified by crisps and try to understand her, ask her why that bothers her. I tend to want her to shut up and go away, because I think that if I was free of her, maybe I would be able to be happy in my body. Maybe I would lose weight. Maybe not. I think of her as a burden, as something to grieve over, and maybe she's still screaming, in the midst of all my understanding and indignation over FA issues which you would think would make me feel better, about how I'm too fat to live because she's still scared, and I still treat her like shit. I can see so clearly how my disorder works, and yet I still don't ask it what it's doing for me, what necessary function it performed once upon a time that made me cling onto it.

The other day, I was reading Geneen Roth's blog, and came across the following:

"Whether we are sailing into the New Age or facing Armageddon, our work is still the same: to look as deeply as we can into our hearts, to tell the truth, and to question our old beliefs. To be willing to have our hearts break rather than keep ourselves protected. Emotional eating is based on old beliefs of what keeps us safe. Wars between countries are based on old beliefs of what keeps us safe. Question the war inside yourself because what you find inside you is what gets reflected in the world we live. It can't be any other way, since the world is us. If you want to change the world, start with yourself. Start by asking yourself if eating cupcakes for breakfast is an act of tenderness. Question the way you treat yourself, your children, your neighbours. Become your own beloved."

It's so hard to remember to do that. It's so hard, in my grieving for the body contentment that my sister has and I, somehow, lost, to remember not to blame the part of me that has spent twenty years trying so hard to get on top of this. I'd like to separate from her, but she's still me.

It's back to the abused spouse metaphor again. I still haven't stopped treating her like shit.

Sigh. If anyone's actually reading this, I apologise for being so misery-guts-ish.

a question of sleeves

When I'm not blogging about my body, I have numerous crafty hobbies, the most time-consuming at present being knitting. Since I've not yet reached the point of designing my own knitting patterns, I therefore spend quite a lot of time looking at the millions of patterns available online.

Recently, I've gone a little yarn-mad and bought several different beautiful yarns which I want to use to knit things for myself for a change, including some French blue silk which is light and soft and beautiful, perfect for a summery top. I'm limited by a few things – the amount of yarn I've got, the sizes most patterns go up to (a subject for another post), finding patterns that really suit a body of my dramatic curves, and most of all, by sleeves.

I'm looking for a pattern with sleeves. Because I want to cover my arms.

Originally, I was going to knit a rather nice pattern for an empire style tank top with wide straps or a corset top, but as time as passed, I'm thinking, "I like those, but my arms are fat, which will undermine the niceness of the top, and my beautiful yarn..."

But I wonder why I think this. I'm a warm person – even when I was smaller, I got warm easily. It's not as though I need the extra coverage. I'm simply looking for it because I feel like leaving my arms hanging out there will present some kind of visual affront. Never mind that the top might show off my killer rack or (comparatively) tiny waist. It's my arms that are a problem. Note: my arms are the problem. Not "people looking at my arms instead of my gorgeous handknitted top", not "society which judges my arms", but my actual arms are the problem.

This is stupid. Hard to fight, but stupid.

To be honest, I'll still probably go for a top with sleeves, if I can find one. I'm working on getting on with my body, but I'm not sure I trust anyone else to do so yet.

I wrote that earlier and looking at it now, I'm thinking, but isn't that the point? Not that other people have to get on with my body, but that I have to love and approve of myself to the point that someone else's judgement, particularly judgement that is almost certainly going to stay inside their own heads, doesn't carry any weight? I mean, if I'm okay with my arms, and my husband is okay with my arms, then who the hell cares about anyone else's private opinions of them?

The frustrating thing is that I intellectually understand this. It's not that I wish to make myself obnoxious to the world at large, I just want to love myself so much that I'm really okay with being seen.

the story of a body

When I was fourteen years old, a friend of mine, after a class swimming trip, reported back to me a conversation she'd had with one of the boys in our class (a boy, incidentally, that I would, a couple of years later, have a huge crush on).

She was commenting on the body of one of the girls in the class, saying she thought this girl had a great body.

"Oh no," said the boy. "No, if I had to choose, it would be [Maddie]. She's perfect."

You would think this would inspire a person to try to maintain her figure exactly was then, even if it was a size 14 with DD cup breasts.

But my eating and my relationship with my body were already fucked up, alas. I always wondered why no one ever picked on me for being fat - it turns out, it was because I wasn't, except in the eyes of my well-meaning and otherwise lovely parents, and I've no idea what their problem was, unless it was the boobs. And the hips. I was always a curvy girl.

I'm not extolling my past physical "perfections" here because I'm trying to disassociate myself with my present fatness. I am fat. I'm pretty much exactly as fat as Miss Perfect thought she was.

I guess it's just that in reassessing and reforming my relationship with my body now, I'm also thinking a lot about my past relationship with it. It says a lot that a third party could tell me that a boy I liked a lot thought I was perfect, and it changed nothing about how I felt about myself. You'd think it would, wouldn't you? It reminds me of this ad from Dove.

To be honest, it still doesn't change how I feel. My husband tells me I'm gorgeous all the time - "magnificent" on more than one occasion - and although I've learned not to argue, in my head, I call him an idiot.

Now, I'm fixating on my looks at the moment, which is problematic in itself because there's a lot more to any person than the body that holds them. But there's a disjunction, you see, a total inability to see what I really look like or to see my SELF as represented by thsi body. And love has always seemed out of the question.

But since we're bound together tell death do us part, my body and me, it seems to me that there can't be a healthy body when living with a mind which despises it, or a healthy mind when living in a body it sees as a prison. As much as I've learned to feel this way, I am not a separate entity to my flesh, and not only because my relationship with it has defined a significant part of my psychology.

This is all me, whether it's the hands racing across the keyboard, the legs the laptop is resting on, the breasts being slightly displaced by the arms reaching for the keys, and the mind guiding the fingers. I can't separate me from my body.

And it tells you my story. Oh, a lot of people won't read the story it tells. They'll glance, assume they know what it's about, decide they don't want to read it and move on, never knowing that not all fat bodies, or thin bodies, tell you the same story.

But here is the story mine tells:

Once, I was perfect, but I've spent so many years despising myself that now, when you look at me, you will see a mass of failure, of imperfections you may believe I should hide. But this body is the story of my struggle, and I am not ashamed of the journey I have taken. It has taught me to think, and to have compassion. It has taught me not to assume that I understand the story I'm looking at.

Parts of this story are very unhappy. For far too long, I've treated my body like an abusive spouse, pounding away at it like it was dirt, instead of my most intimate partner, my best friend, the companion of my life. If we really were separate entities, I'd tell my body to leave me. I'd find it a refuge where people would be nice to it, say kind things, and not make it feel worthless.

But since that can't be done, we need a new relationship, and it starts with this: I'm sorry, body. I'm sorry that I've hurt you for so long in so many ways. I'm really going to try to treat you the way you deserve to be treated. I'm going to learn to love you beacuse you are my story, because you are me, and because if you're going to spend your life with someone, you really should love them, and love them hard.

the desire not to be something it's okay to be

I hate my wedding video.

Oh, it's well put together, it's actually quite entertaining for a wedding video, and there are many lovely things about it. But I spend the whole time I'm watching it fixated on a bulge in the shoulder blade area over the top of my corset.

I spend the whole time wondering how my husband could bear to marry me.

Logically, this is stupid. Logically, both from my experience and from his own words, my husband adores me and my body. I understand this on an intellectual level.

But since I've been sure most of my life that I am hopelessly undesirable, I find it very hard to trust that love.

That is a goal of the healing process, if you like: not just to love my own body, but to accept others' love for it. More, to understand that love, so that when I watch that video, I can see what my husband sees.

I feel, though, as though I'm in two places at once. Intellectually, I accept and appreciate the notion of fat acceptance. Intellectually, I want to embrace that, and myself. I had about a week of doing exactly that, and I felt great. Unfortunately, it didn't last, and now I'm trying to get it back, while trying to fend off the shades of habits past.

Around the time of my epiphany which resulted in the week or so of feeling great, I had a conversation with a friend who has recently lost a lot of weight, but had also been reading fat acceptance blogs, and she said something that is hitting a chord with me right now. She said, "it's hard to reconcile my belief that it's okay to be fat with my desire not to be."

This is a problem for me at the moment. I want to accept myself fully, regardless of my size. And I do not want to be this fat. I do not want to waste my mental or physical energy trying to lose weight, because that inevitably leads to the exact opposite as well as misery. I want to feel happy with myself because I am me, not because I have managed to coerce my body into fitting into a social standard of beauty.

But oh, how I do not want to be this fat.

Or at least, how I do not want to feel this ashamed, and I still can't conceive of a world in which I am the size I am and am not ashamed of it. So it's not really the size at all, I suppose. It's the shame.

I don't want to be ashamed to want to be smaller, as well as ashamed that I'm this big in the first place. I don't want to be ashamed full stop. And it's that lack of shame that I had for all of a week that actually gave me a really good boost in terms of exercise, because I started doing it for its own sake instead of for the possibility that it might make me lose weight.

I know that, for me, trying to lose weight is destructive. The desire is still here, but I know that the attempt makes me insane. So there's probably not any way to just treat it like hair colour - it's okay to be a redhead, but that doesn't mean I can't want to be a brunette, just for a change. I can't treat it like that, because I really am okay with being a redhead, and I won't see being a brunette as being a huge step forward either in looks or in health. It's just different.

I really need that feeling back, that "it's totally okay to be where I am, and I never ever need to change it" feeling, because at the moment, I'm chasing my tail.

appalling

I was in a meeting recently, in which someone made the remark that nearly a third of year 6 children in the town I live in were overweight.

"It's appalling," she concluded, and went on to talk about the plan to promote healthy eating.

She's lucky that I didn't have anything sharp with me, and that I was an observer rather than an active participant in the meeting.

I sort of wish, though, that I'd pounced on her, either in the meeting or immediately afterwards, and asked her what she thought that highlighting the supposed obesity of twelve year old children would actually achieve, apart from humiliating the children and laying the groundwork for eating disorders. Hell, when I was twelve, my own shameful weight had me eating compulsively in secret and occasionally, when I had the courage, barfing it all up again.

When I was twelve, I thought I was the fattest thing in the world, and that no one would ever love me.

When I was twelve my mother told me that, at eight and a half stone (119lbs) and 5'4", I was overweight and should make sure I never got any heavier. Ironically, of course, this is at the lower end of the BMI "normal" range. Worse, when you look at photos of me with my peers throughout my teens, I look perfectly normal at every point. And yet from the age of ten or eleven, I believed that I was a huge fat thing, completely unlovable and undesirable (and since I'd also absorbed the cultural decision that women's value is largely based on our physically desirability, this was devastating).

My actual averageness isn't really the point, though. The point is that telling a child that they are not okay does not automatically make them strive to be okay. Sometimes they rebel. Sometimes you create problems far bigger than a few extra, or even a hundred extra pounds. My problem isn't actually my body – it's my mind. And if this woman had come to my school when I was a self-conscious twelve year old and told me that my body – my confusing, changing, frightening, developing body – was wrong, she would only have had the same effect that my mother's words did. I would become obsessed with being thin, but utterly fail at it for more than two decades. That wouldn't make me a more healthy eater, and it wouldn't make me thinner. It would make me miserable, and it would make me fatter.

To this day, I wonder if I would actually have gained all this weight, or spent as many hours as I spent agonising over it, if my mother hadn't decided that I was too fat when I was going through adolescence.

My mother, by the way, deeply regrets this action. She, unfortunately, was always very slender herself, and she just didn't understand that her very curvy daughter was never going to be built like her, even if she lived on celery. She wasn't bad, any more than the woman in the meeting above was bad. She just didn't understand. But it's this very lack of understanding that created the fat person I am today. If I'd just been able to go through adolescence without that pressure, would I even be fat now? If the woman with the food plan goes to a bunch of twelve year olds and says "being fat is bad, stop being as fat as you are", is she actually, in trying to make them thinner and more socially acceptable, going to create people who are fatter than they might have been if no one had ever said anything that put them in the wrong?

Oh, she might make a few of them skinnier – she might make some of them so skinny they'll die from it. But I'm pretty damn sure that she'll make a few of them fatter as well.

I do believe that I'm fatter than my body is really happy with. I completely believe there are people my weight and heavier who are the weight their body is happy with, but I am also sure I'm not one of them. In a perfect world, where I only think of food when I'm actually hungry, and eat in the way that makes my body happy, I suspect I'd be around a UK size 16. So…still fat, from one point of view, but not this fat.

Sometimes principles are difficult. I strongly believe in what I understand to be the principles of fat acceptance. I believe that I have value regardless of my size and should be treated as such. I believe, and know from painful experience, that dieting doesn't work. I know that I don't need to lose weight to be loved.

But all this knowledge and belief is still at odds, to some extent, with my gut. My gut keeps telling me this isn't good enough, that I'm failing at both fat acceptance and having the body my body wants.

This, I have to recognise, means I've got a way to go before I get where I want to be.

i think you know what i mean

This morning I woke up with a pain in my chest. After four hours of constant pain, I gave in, and spoke to my boss, who took me to the emergency room. They checked me out, described all my heart readings as "perfect", and concluded that I have pericarditis as a result of a virus I had a week ago.

On the way back, my boss, a man I generally get on very well with, said, "sometimes it can be a wake up call. I think you know what I mean."

I did. I didn't pursue it, though, and neither did he, and that's a good thing, because the last thing I want to do is explain to him the kind of relationship I have with food and with my body.

But I keep thinking about the remark. I think you know what I mean.

Yes, boss, I do know what you mean. You mean I'm a fatass, and that you think you know how that happened, you think you understand its value, and you think you know how I could change it. But this is why the good/bad fatty argument has to die: because you don't know. You don't know how much exercise I get. You don't know what I eat. You don't know what I don't eat. You don't know what vitamins I take or how much meditation I do, what my blood pressure is, what my cholesterol level is, what my family history is.

You know two things, boss: that I'm fat, and that I had a pain in my chest which the doctor has examined and found to be something unrelated to my fat.

I believe that he meant well. He lost a bunch of weight himself a couple of years back, before I started working for him, and maybe he had gained it through eating and drinking too much. Maybe I have too. But he doesn't know that. He knows nothing about my health except that I'm fat, which he assumes to be bad, and that I've currently got an infection in the outer part of my heart due to a nasty virus.

The truth is, most of the anti-fat feeling I experience comes from myself. I've never had a doctor try to tell me to lose weight – the only time we've had a bollocks up in that department was when I asked for some help (assuming that losing weight=being healthy), and she referred me to the practice nurse, who, despite being told that I had massive eating problems, gave me a long list of dos and don'ts, which promptly sent me insane. No one ever teased me about it as a kid (though this was probably because I wasn't actually fat at the time, even though I thought I was). I've had things shouted at me in the street, but that's a side effect of being female as well as being fat. I don't get hassled about this too often, except by myself.

But here's my boss, who knows almost nothing about my health, concluding that he has the answer to what ails me – even though what ails me has been determined to be something else entirely, over which my fat or lack thereof has no control – and suggesting, albeit in a fairly low key way, that I should get on fixing that. Because, in his eyes, there's something wrong with me, and therefore anything that is actually wrong with me must be connected to the primary thing that's wrong with me.

Even when it isn't.

so bad

Sophie and I stroll down to the canteen, mostly to take a few minutes away from our desks. I'm not hungry, so I'm not really bothered, but I think some water and a hot chocolate would be nice.

Sophie, however, starts eyeing up the pastries.

"It's still warm!" she bemoans. "But I've been so bad this weekend…"

I shrug, because I can't encourage her to have the pastry without making her mad at me, and I won't encourage her not to have it, because I don't see why she shouldn't, if she's hungry. To be sure, I've no idea if she's hungry or not. But I'm going off my own reactions, and I'm not hungry and have no desire for pastry. Oh, I could eat it – hunger and eating are not necessarily part of the same event for me – but at the moment, I don't really care for it. I want my hot chocolate, and that'll do me.

But Sophie is in a lather of guilt, simply because she wants the pastry, and presumably because she ate on the weekend.

"I can't be bad," she concludes, and buys some sparkling water.

This is becoming difficult. Sophie and rarely have a conversation in which she doesn't berate herself or moralise about the relative goodness or badness of food. I've never seen her eat anything that I'd even call unhealthy, let alone "bad". She's not skinny, being about a UK size 18, but she looks great, and she gets a ridiculous amount of exercise.

I just resent the moralisation of food. It's just food. Unless Sophie ripped that pastry out of the hands of a starving child, it doesn't have a moral value. It may be higher in fat and sugar than, say, an apple, but that doesn't make it bad. It's flour and water and butter and sugar and some fruit and almonds. Wherein lies the morality? Obviously, I am aware that there are morally problematic sources of food. That isn't the point here. Sophie isn't denying herself a pastry because the flour was ground by three year old slaves, she's denying herself a pastry because she feels that eating it is in and of itself a "bad" act.

Furthermore, you have to wonder, why is it always food we crave that is considered "bad"? Is it just that desire for something delicious or luxurious is morally problematic? Oh, I know there's this assumption that certain foods will make you fatter, and that, again, is assumed to be "bad". But again, is being fat supposed to be bad because it looks like you've been enjoying yourself too much?

Hell if I know. As I've mentioned previously, I'm not fat because I've enjoyed myself. I'm curvy genetically, and I'm as fat as I am because of a disorder which is so full of self-loathing that the notion of enjoying food has, at times, seemed as ridiculous as turning the act of eating itself into an ethical minefield. So it seems to me that enjoyment in food is something to be achieved, not rejected.

I don't believe that food is good or bad. Some food may have more nutritional value, but that's not the whole story. Health doesn't just apply to a body, and a person whose mind is entirely preoccupied on the morality of food, or their own worthiness as a human being because of the fuel they've consumed on a particular day is not a healthy person. I know this, because I'm not one.

Learning to be is going to mean unlearning everything I've ever thought about food or health.