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.

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.

privilege and ethics

Interesting stuff here, on the subject of privilege, which I have been thinking quite a lot about lately, thanks to various discussions both in the Fatosphere and other places online.

This comment really struck a chord with me:

I am not likely to have to listen to conversations/commercials where people talk about how not to look like me.

People in my office are always going on about their diets, their exercise regimes, how fat they are, how they have to lose some weight, how bad they are because they ate a doughnut, and how they absolutely must not look like me. They don't say "we are doing this to avoid looking like you, because, Jesus!" But yeah. That's what they mean.

Of course, if I pointed this out, they'd say that isn't what they meant at all, and that's the truth too. They don't mean that they don't want to look like ME (although they don't) because they haven't actually figured ME into the conversation at all, even when I'm part of it, or sitting one desk away. It doesn't enter their minds that it might be okay to look like me, that I might not be miserable looking like me, that there's not something horribly wrong with me, but it also isn't a conscious series of thoughts in which they think "I hope I never look like Maddie, pass me a carrot."

But I've long loathed their "OMG admire all the effort I am putting into avoiding looking like you" camaraderie, and I didn't quite understand why. It was partly about my own eating problems, which are myriad, and which are made a hundred times worse by making the kind of effort they're making. But part of it, I finally realise, was that they were saying "you are ugly and I would rather torture myself than look like you".

And they don't realise that, actually, I'd rather torture myself than look like me as well, but, lucky me, I get to do both. I've completely internalised the entire line about the relative values of fatness and thinness, and my self-loathing is generated from there almost entirely.

I am now well-armed with very reasonable arguments about health, and the unhealthiness of diets, and my own mental health, and on that level, I can say, yes, I am okay with being fat.

But if I'm honest, I have to admit that on this basic level - the level of not wanting to look like myself - I am not happy about it at all.

You know that ethics test where they say, hey, if you could get a million dollars for pressing a button which would kill one person in a far off country somewhere whose life you would never encounter, would you do it? And you're supposed to say no, because of the sanctity of human life.

Sometimes I wonder what I would do if someone offered me that chance to be permanently perfectly thin.

Of course, no doubt, if I did kill an innocent person just so I could be think, I'd then have the fascinating experience of discovering that it's not really about hating my fat at all, and the feelings could remain long after the body had changed.

Wow, I'm in an impressively bad mood. I'll blame it on the fact that I just had a wonderful holiday, but am now forced to go back to a job I loathe, in the same office as those diet-obsessed people I mentioned above.

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 girl in the pictures

Two or three years ago now, my mother sent me an album of my life. This is the first time I've been able to look at it without crying.

I barely recognise the beautiful girl in those pictures. I don't remember ever seeing her in the mirror. I certainly never thought I looked like that. All my life I've felt that I looked like I look now. This may be why my weight has been stable for about three years. This may be why I'm this big at all.

But that beautiful girl in those pictures believed from her soul that she was the fattest, most unattractive girl in any room, and that no one could ever find her attractive.

I really wish she had known how lovely she was.

I don't wish to imply, by the way, that I'm pig-ugly now, that fat people are automatically unattractive, or that beauty is a woman's only value, because none of those things are true. It's just that at the time, I had placed so much of my own value in my looks, and so much conviction in my unattractiveness that it undermined everything else.

I recently saw someone make the suggestion that feminist fat acceptance shouldn't really be about believing that we're beautiful, regardless of size, but about re-addressing the notion that a woman's value is based on her looks. I agree with this to a significant extent - after all, if I hadn't believed my looks were so all-important, not seeing my own beauty wouldn't have mattered as much.

But at the same time, we still live in this world, and as much as I want to move beyond the beauty=value equation, I still can't deny that my belief in my own unattractiveness (based largely on the belief that I was too fat to be pretty) was the main reason I felt bad about myself for twenty years. Still is, most days.

There are other factors, of course, early rejections that left me with a paralysing fear of opening myself to more rejection. But the dominant thought was always "I am too fat and ugly, he will never like me." And while we should absolutely encourage the importance of all other aspects of a person of either sex, we can't ignore the fact that our looks matter to us.

Some time ago, before I met my husband, I liked a boy I thought was so gorgeous I might die from it. I was, of course, convinced absolutely that he was far out of my league. But really, the girl in those photos, the girl I still was six years back when I fell in lust? She could've had him. Actually, there were a number of hims she could've had, if she hadn't been so terrified of their judgement of her looks, too convinced of her own unattractiveness to admit the thought that, hey, this one wants me.

Depression and compulsive eating have taken their toll. I'm not that girl any more, and that's okay. That girl was gone even when I met my husband, and he's still crazy about me. I'm older, smarter, just beginning to figure this fat thing and this self esteem thing out. There are advantages.

I just wish I'd known, that's all.

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.