Check out this fantastic article on Crystal Renn, a very successful ”plus-size” model (I still find the term hilarious since it applies to a size 12). She once fought the starvation battle, but gave it up in favor of a healthy, rewarding life. Thanks to Alexandra for supplying the link!
For the past month, I had to take some time off from blogging to take care of something very important in my life. As I rearranged some priorities over the past month, I continued to be very cognizant of self-esteem-defeating magazines, body-obsessed blogs, and value-laden comments about food spoken by some supports very dear to me. (It was Christmas. Of course people would obsess about what they were putting in their mouths.)
During this period of quiet contemplation, one thing stood out above all the rest:
our society’s intense fear and hatred of fat.
Fat.
Whitney Houston was once quoted as saying, “I’d rather be addicted to crack than be fat.”
Which supports my opinion that people are more terrified of being categorized as “fat” than a whole host of other afflictions.
Can I be completely honest here? I’ve never seen people more cruel than when they’re making fun of an obese person.
I’ve heard and seen countless things. I’ve heard people comment, “Jesus Christ, they need to get off the fucking sofa and stop eating cheetos.” I’ve seen peers call friends over to a window to guffaw at a fat person walking by. I’ve observed an individual chortle, “Don’t jump on the scale!” as their friends laughed at a kid on her way to get weighed in gym class.
I want to ask everyone, what the fuck is so scary about your relationship with fat that you feel the need to cover it up with an intense projection of hatred onto the person struggling with their weight?
Because when I see someone make fun of an overweight person, I don’t see someone who embodies health in all senses of the word. I see someone who is scared shitless. Scared of what fat means in their own life. So what does it mean in our present society? Let’s pick it apart.
Someone who lets themselves get fat represents sloth, someone who is disgusting and lazy and someone who doesn’t care about themselves. I liken people’s discomfort with obese people akin to burn victims; you don’t want to look but you’re just so amazed at how different they look than us. So why is it socially acceptable for individuals to label and hurt overweight people more than another stigmatized group of individuals? Why is OA scoffed at so much? Why are there no EDA programs as widely recognized as AA programs currently are? As Jenni Schaefer put it so eloquently when I met her last fall, she said, “I think there is still so much shame attached to food in general.” I agree.
Let’s look at dictionary.com’s definition of the word fat (as a noun). It reads:
“any of several white or yellowish greasy substances, forming the chief part of adipose tissue of animals and also occurring in plants, that when pure are colorless, odorless, and tasteless and are either solid or liquid esters of glycerol with fatty acids; fats are insoluble in water or cold alcohol but soluble in ether, chloroform, or benzene: used in the manufacture of soap, paints, and other protective coatings and in cooking”.
That’s all it goddamn is. Unused units of energy. And yet you attach moral value to it, make it into a reason to hate yourself when you look in the mirror. There is nothing inherently good, evil, lazy, jolly or bad about fat. It’s just goddamn fat.
I am willing to wager that the person who picks on fat people is someone who is terrified of their own propensity to fall through the cracks of their own self-care. So terrified, in fact, that they project it outward onto others in the form of cruelty.
Am I one of those pro-fat people? No. I am one of those pro-balance people. I am so grateful to have been overweight and to have had an eating disorder for this very reason: I now know there is no need to worry or obsess. We all have fat that sticks to us and no matter how much American society tells us to run away from it and numb out of our bodies, we don’t have to. We don’t have to live in this constant obsession of beating ourselves and each other up.
My therapist recently told me a story in which a client’s OA sponsor told her, “Your weight is not your business. Just do what your body tells you to.” In my eating disordered mind, this makes perfect sense. In my Amanda-willed-land-of-control, I would be 110 lbs if I could. But that’s not my business; when I am eating and exercising healthily, my body has an ideal body weight it resides at which is much higher than that. I can’t control that: it’s where my body wants to be, it’s what I was given, it’s what I was born with.
And that kid who was told not to jump on the scale? That was kid was me, circa 7th grade. I don’t say this as a means to hold a resentment against others; I use it to caution individuals in regards how they treat others. In the words of a very funny movie, “Be excellent to each other.”
America the Beautiful, a documentary which was recently created by filmmaker Darryl Roberts, focuses on the unrealistics standards that the beauty industry and American society imposes upon the public. Darryl has recently started a campaign on facebook to show Ralph Lauren how the general public rejects his recent ad campaign choices (see previous post). Join in the fight to boycott harmful advertising and click on the link below!
I would get sick, or distracted, or disillusioned, and become derailed on this blog/baby/thing.
But better late than never, I suppose.
******
This weekend I took my mother to the Neighborhood restaurant in Union Square. I had never been in the five years I’ve lived here, and it lived up to every expectation I had. I ordered pumpkin pancakes with mascarpone cheese, and my mother ordered pecan pie french toast. Pictures of the owners from the 1950’s adorned the walls. Prior to the main course, kindly young waitresses brought us plates of fruit and cream of wheat. It all was delicious.
But what I loved most about it was its lack of apology for the large amount of food it served. In fact, they didn’t even try to shove all of it onto one plate; they brought the copious amounts of pancakes, hash browns, eggs, sausage and salad out on two separate large dinner platters.
My mother, who I adore, proceeded to attach all sorts of moral value to the meal. The elderly woman beside us wrinkled her nose in distaste and stated, “I want what you’re having without all…that.” As they muttered around me, I literally felt a comfortable bubble around me that protected me from feeling any sort of bad from consuming the meal. I leaned in conspiratorially to my mother, smiled, and whispered,
“Maybe we should just be grateful for the fact that we have this food.”
Some might claim guilt trip, but I meant nothing by the sort.
******
I went on a camping trip four years ago when I was in day treatment. I went with someone I had been dating for about two minutes; I traveled with him and a couple of mutual friends to a hilly campground in Vermont. One morning, the group decided to go out to brunch at a local diner. This was pure terror to me; per my therapist and nutritionist’s advice, I had meticulously packed snacks and meals as a way of maintaining stability whilst outside of my usual routine. At the diner, I had ordered banana chocolate-chip pancakes in the means of looking like a “normie”. It was a bit of a mistake, as I ended up stuffing myself to the gills and feeling indescribably uncomfortable in my own skin. I clammed up during the meal and after in the gift shop; I sat silently with this utter feeling of grotesque, fearing that everyone could see the bulge in my stomach. I felt for the fat on my sides. I could barely breathe.
On the car ride back, the young gentleman I was dating asked why I was so quiet. Since he knew about my eating disorder, I tried to explain what I was feeling. Shrugging his shoulders, he said matter-of-factly, “Well, you did eat a TON.”
I don’t blame him. His, and other’s lack of education about this disease is exactly why I write this blog.
******
Things are not perfect today. My most recent gripe is my slow-to-heal injured knee, which has prevented me from doing any sort of exercise for the past month and a half. My disorder has become loud during this period, trying to convince me that I have become ugly, and that I have gained so much weight that no man could ever be attracted to me.
But my disorder wants me to be validated externally; it wants comments from others about how I stand out from the crowd and it wants a man, another “someone” to tell me I’m beautiful. It doesn’t want me to be independent, or to eat three meals a day, or to wait for someone who matches me on a physical, spiritual and mental level. It doesn’t want me to parent myself. But I do – I want all of these things, always have.
So, when I do feel the softness that comes with being almost thirty, I take a deep breath today instead of panicking. I instead thank God that I’ve almost made it through my twenties, a decade where I was convinced only extreme measures would get me noticed. I am grateful I am an imperfect woman of almost thirty, with a bit of wisdom to pass down to my younger counterparts. I am grateful for having an eating disorder, believe it or not, because it provided me with a level of understanding about the body and spirit that I never would have acquired before. I am a much more whole person for it. When people comment about my weight, I try to laugh it off. (Note…*try*).
And I finally threw out my size 2 eating disordered jeans. I really don’t have a choice anymore - I can’t go back.
Happy Thanksgiving all! Hope you have a wonderful one!
This Turkey Day, try practicing not putting yourself down when you indulge…it’s one day and normal eating includes days here and there when you eat a LOT.
So enjoy yourself and remember what it’s really about…being grateful.
I think she's got a case of the terminally unique.
OK. There is a phrase called “terminally unique” that is used in various recovery forums. Broken down, this can refer to thoughts individuals have such as:
“No one has ever felt this way before. I’m so alone in this feeling. No one’s as isolated, or weird, or as quirky as me.”
In other words, think of the hipsters you see on Comm Ave in Allston.
All joking aside, I’m sure we can all connect to this feeling on some level or another. (All of you – especially you theater kids – cannot escape this one.) At some point in our lives, we’ve all been in a crap mood, sitting on the sidelines and thinking there is just. no. one. as. lonely/special yet single/depressed. as. I. am. For the average individual, this feeling is awful, yet bearable. For the person who struggles with any kind of addiction, this kind of thinking can be fatal. I’m not being dramatic. It really is. For this kind of reasoning leads to depression, which leads to isolation, which leads to addictive behaviors. (Because addictive behaviors are CLEARLY one’s best friend when no one is around!)
I will very readily admit I have a case of the terminally unique, and I think this kind of existence can be very prevalent in girls and women with eating disorders. Why? Think about a starved woman. She stands out from others. It’s a visual way of communicating to the world that something is off-balance, but also a way of communicating that she can perform an inhuman feat that no one else can: extreme self-discipline. Therefore, terminally unique.
This concept is the reason I cherished my “glamorous” city existence for so long, ripe with pomegranate martinis, Carrie Bradshaw-inspired outfits, and knowledge of all the trendy restaurants. I wanted to be one of Boston’s young and beautiful. And to be that, I had to be thin. When I was really sick in 2005, I remember hanging out solo in Fenway at Boston Beer Works. Some guy had temporarily attached himself to my arm because of our terminally unique shared fondness for blueberry beer. He pinched his forefinger and thumb around my tiny arm, smiled, and sputtered incredulously,
“You’re so….tiny! Oh my God, I love it.”
Therefore driving the ball out of the park in the means of cementing my belief that you had be super skinny to get a guy, or to do anything in life for that matter. But I digress.
Now that I’ve got that shpiel out of the way, let me segue into current varying schools of thought in the eating disorder research and educational world. When eating disorders were first getting talked about and treated, doctors and therapists thought that it was mainly a social disease. In other words, they thought eating disorders were different from disorders like autism and schizophrenia, which have a genetic component. Well, just recently, scientists have started to figure out that there is a genetic component to eating disorders (i.e., the hypothalamus is shaped differently in the brains of eating disordered clients, all anorexics and bulimics contain susceptibility genes, etc). As I blogged in an earlier post, Aimee Liu recently wrote an informed book, Gaining, about the genetic component to eating disorders.
Let me start by saying that I agree with Aimee: there is most certainly a genetic component to this disease. Also, her book provided me with various studies that delineated the different subdivisions of anorexic and bulimic personality traits (which are different). However, I reject her rejection of Caroline Knapp and others who continue to fight the battle against the social forces which are clearly a factor in the development of an eating disorder.
I stand by my old biopsychosocial model – any mental illness or disorder is caused by a combination of biological, psychological and social factors. Not one alone.
In Appetites, Caroline Knapp contends that most white, affluent, over-educated women struggle with a sense of self-deprivation that is similar to what anorexics experience. In Gaining, Aimee disputes this, asking the question, “And do all white, affluent, educated women in fact feel compelled to deprive themselves?”
Maybe not all, but I’d wager that about 95% of the women reading this blog have struggled with their literal and metaphorical appetites at one point or another.
“I’m afraid that Lelwica and I are looking at the same picture from two very different perspectives. She’s standing at a distance and painting the landscape with a broad brush, while I’m looking close enough to see the actual faces and lives of individuals. She’s including every woman who looks at fashion magazines or thinks twice about having a hot fudge sundae. I’m interested in the factors that distinguish those who easily maintain a healthy weight from those who are psychologically enslaved by their obsessions.”
This is what I fear: that Aimee’s dismissal of social and psychological commentary further propagates the terminal uniqueness that only makes eating disordered women more enslaved by their illness.
Why? To say all eating disordered women possess these similar genetic traits may isolate the one girl out there who doesn’t quite fit into the bulimic or anorexic genetic jackpot. She may think, “See? I don’t fit into the anorexic stereotype. Therefore, I must be too fat or not sick enough.” (Thereby establishing her terminal uniqueness, even from other eating disordered women. As she throws up her breakfast.)
Don’t get me wrong. Aimee has made a huge contribution to the field, and I cannot thank her enough. However, I am wary of her tendency to discount women writers who recognize the dangerousness of the media. It is out there, and it is a dangerous force. I worry that she is isolating the field and not uniting it. I worry that she is isolating women, instead of joining them in a battle against an unhealthy society.
PS, I consumed an entire Ghiradelli chocolate bar in the writing of this entry, clad in sweats and glasses. Am I cured from my own terminal uniqueness? Nah, not cured, but definitely on my way.
So, I have been super cranky, bitchy, sick and tired lately, so I apologize for my blog posts that have been dwindling rapidly. However, when I am down I have my faithful readers (reader? haha) to rely on, so the video clip below is again from my beautiful cousin Cassie. In it is a small bit on how Kate Moss has influenced womens’ views of their bodies and what they should look like.
Oh, and PS, Kate probably gained weight cause she’s off the crack.
Thanks to my beautiful cousin Cassie for providing me with the link to this story. Apparently one is now not allowed to gain weight after your boyfriend’s death. One should stay uber-skinny because it’s more pleasing to the eye of many an idiot internet-goer.
There is not any combination of words that could capture the beauty of Amherst, MA.
As I think about it now, I feel overwhelmed by a plethora of sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and most importantly, tastes.
Amherst was the place where I rarely felt intimidated by my own appetite of any sort, whether it be food, men or feeling. In fact, I embraced my appetites in Amherst.
I consider Amherst to be my first home. I never felt at home in Littleton for reasons I have exhaustively recounted in this blog. Before attending UMass as a freshman at the age of 20, I had experienced a failed attempt at dorm life at the University of Hartford. On that hot move-in day in September of 2000, I was terrified that this experience would be the same. But, to my utter joy, it could not have been more different.
My love affair with life began in Amherst. And humorously enough, it might have started at the Franklin Dining Commons. My floormates (with whom I got along famously well) and I would trudge down Orchard Hill to the dining commons at 6 every night, and we often met in between classes for lunch. The best thing about it was that there was a huge selection of everything. Salad bars, wrap stations, cheeseburgers, tofu, ice cream cones…I was in heaven. My favorite Franklin DC meal was a salad drenched in Caesar dressing with chicken and sesame noodles piled onto it. And much like other recovereds, I learned to eat by watching my friends eat. I followed Kerry to the dessert tray every night. I learned to try weird combinations of things from my roommate Ashley. And I grabbed a muffin for a mid-morning snack after watching my friend Scott do so after finishing a Psych 100 class. It was a beautiful time for me and my appetite.
You might wonder why it was so easy for me to eat there, as opposed to Littleton or Boston. Anyone who has lived there knows there’s a simple organic quality to the Valley; there, one can’t help but shed their usual materialistic needs and just pay attention to and abide by their gut feelings. Also, in addition to leaving some trauma behind in Littleton, I was independent for the first time. I was actually living life the way I wanted to live it and was making choices for myself instead of having them made for me. I couldn’t have felt healthier.
This, of course, is not without error. There was the brilliant time halfway through Junior year when I decided it would be a smart move to eat only Slimfast bars for meals. And, after I got into a relationship I manipulated from the start, I started to seesaw with food. The level of comfort I’ve had with food has always been directly related to the healthiness of my life choices.
One of my best memories lies in the Field dorm. My friend Brian lived next door to Ashley and I; there was many a day when Brian would convince Kerry, Christina, Jenny and I to forgo our homework and watch a movie instead. Brian had a constant supply of peppermint patties on hand, and he would feed us them until we were sick. We would stick the wrappers in the springs of the bunked mattress above us, and would giggle and eat and quote our favorite lines from the movies. I couldn’t have been happier.
I think my appetite worked for me then because the amount I took in was equal to the amount I gave out; I was always moving. At UMass Amherst, it can take up to 25 minutes to walk to a class. In addition to that, there were hiking and bike trails nearby, and sets to move during a theater guild strike. I was always eating, but I was always in motion.
My food-related love affair moved off-campus as I did. After moving in with Jen and Franny, I became accustomed to ordering a dozen of Sugar Jones cookies regularly (delivered right to your door with a gallon of milk). I was a regular at Antonio’s, and quickly discovered that the quesadilla pizza was my favorite. After dancing the night away at the local drag bar with theater friends, we would order a Concorde of wings with crispy French fries. The next morning we would order the blueberry corn bread from Rooster’s, and later on we’d chat over coffee and a cookie at Rao’s after visiting Mike behind the register. On dates with my fiancée and then boyfriend, I would request that we go to the Amherst Brewing Company so I could get the apple-chutney burger, and the fried Oreo sundae afterwards. In between classes, I would stop at Pasta Y Basta and partake in their amazing garlic bread. On the day I voted for Gore, I had a burrito brimming with rice and beans from Bueno Y Sano. I could literally go on for paragraphs about the pepperoni calzones, Japanese food, and soup I guiltlessly devoured there.
Although I have had successes with my struggle since then, none have felt like the success I had there.
Read Carrie Arnold’s blog. She is a fellow “recovered” who has given us this informed, evocative blog about controversial issues regarding the treatment of and research on eating disorders.
