"You Look Great" as blatant fatphobia

This weekend, I attended an event where one of the people there has lost upwards of 100 pounds during the pandemic. He himself was pretty low-key about it, only talking when people remarked or asked questions. He said that basically his weight loss was due to doing mental health work and realizing that he was spending a lot of time eating to avoid wrestling with his anxiety and other issues.

Twice, I heard people say, "You look great!" Both times, I cringed. Both times, I didn't say anything because I haven't seen these people in at least a year and a half, and some of them I had never met before. When my mom recently remarked that someone who'd lost a bunch of weight "looks great," I said, "She looks smaller. She looked fine before."

I wish I'd spoken up this weekend.

Fatphobia is ugly.

Complementing a person's looks when they have lost weight is fraught. You don't know whether they lost weight on purpose (in this case, it sounded like he hadn't), or even if intentional weight loss is something to celebrate. In my case, I got a LOT of positive feedback when I dropped pounds... but the reason I was doing it was to avoid losing someone's affections. That's not something for which I should have been given a pat on the back. I lost weight to comply with someone else's ideal of feminine beauty. I should have been encouraged to explore why I felt compelled to do that instead of insisting that I be treated with respect regardless of my size.

Furthermore, complementing someone on their weight loss implies that they look better now than they did before. This is problematic on several accounts. One is that, if they are like 95% of people who intentionally lose a great deal of weight, their body will fight to put that weight back on... and it will. So when they return to a larger size, they're left with the ghosts of complements past, and they know that they're being judged as having let themselves go or some other such nonsense.

Another problem is that there are often (and there were in this case) people in the vicinity who weigh in the ballpark of that person's "before." You're basically telling them that they'd be better and more attractive if they could just get it together and drop some poundage. That's thoughtless, and it's rude.

The fact is that thinner people do not objectively look "better" than bigger people. We've learned as a culture to value thinness, but one way to help fix this is to intentionally expose ourselves to a variety of body sizes. It's difficult to do that with mainstream media, because most people on television and in magazines are still extremely small. But a great thing about TikTok and Instagram and YouTube is that you can find bodies that are differently-sized, have different levels of physical ability, and whose gender expressions vary from the pretty narrow spectrum commonly seen in content generated primarily for commercial success.

It seems silly that we have to remind ourselves that fat people aren't failed thin people (thanks, Virgie Tovar), and that there are fat folks living great lives everywhere all of the time. When someone loses weight, it's just that: weight loss. It's not good. It's not bad. It just is. Same as when someone gains weight: not good, not bad... just reality.

If we could find our way to this understanding, life would be so much better for all of us.

And next time, I'm going to say something in that moment. I've really had enough.

Healing Relationships with Food and Body is a LONG ROAD

"Someone is getting that 'lean arm' look."

I remember it so clearly. We were sitting in a restaurant and this person commented on the appearance of my upper arms. Months before, he had made it clear that he was not pleased with my body size and shape, and this had sent me on yet another journey of food restriction and forced exercise that I didn't enjoy in order to maintain a body type that is not natural for me. I did it, and it lasted for the better part of a decade.

But even though it was so long ago, I remember the relief and pride I felt when he acknowledged my lean arms. I wasn't really proud that I'd worked so hard or accomplished a goal; I was just proud that someone, the person I was trying most to keep from despising me for being myself, saw something attractive and worthy in me.

It's been a long time since I started intentionally trying to heal my broken relationship with my body, with food, and with movement. The food stuff was the easiest. I just told myself that I was going to eat what I wanted, when I wanted, and not feel guilty. It was actually easy not to berate myself when I went to bed. Not to think, "I screwed up today, but tomorrow, I'll do better." I genuinely extricated myself from those thoughts within a few weeks. Don't miss 'em.

Joyful movement was interesting. I stopped doing that work-out I hated slowly at first, when we moved into the RV and my jumping jacks bothered D (small space, lots of noise and movement). It ended altogether when I realized that my spinal injury was genuine and not just soreness. In fact, I likely worsened it by continuing to push through my work-out (which included sit-ups and lie-down leg lifts) even as I lay in the floor crying from the pain.

When we moved into the Nuthaus near downtown and the UT campus, I realized that riding my bike actually took some pressure off of my back. It felt good. Plus, in many ways it was easier to ride my bike to places like Whole Foods and Wheatsville Coop than to try to drive in the car. After my back got better, I rode a lot. For fun. It was a cool way to see downtown and to experience the new (then) boardwalk at Ladybird Lake.

Then we moved to the apartments, which was all hills all the time. There were a couple of rides I'd take Mal on, like to the mailbox, to a trail in a neighborhood behind us, and then just around the complex a few times. It was difficult because of the hills and the baby and the fact that my bike needed some chain maintenance that I didn't know how to do. Then the bike got stolen.

I genuinely LOVE riding my bike. But I've found, where we live now, walking is a great way to see things and meet neighbors. When we first moved in, we walked to the lake almost every day, and at least every other day for months. That has been scaled back to once or twice a week now, but we still love going down there. We walk around the neighborhood to see how new houses are doing, or to admire older houses' yard decor and things like that. There is a bass-shaped mailbox (we live near the lake, remember?) a ways away from our house that Mal has a love/fear relationship with. I know when he wants to see it that we're going to get in a couple of miles.

Sometimes I walk by myself. I usually cover more ground and see more things then, but I definitely get more of a work-out when Mal comes with me. He has enough energy to power a small sun, but he HATES walking. So when he's amenable to go, I push him. He outgrew the umbrella stroller I have that holds 50 pounds (which is right where he is, but he's so tall), so we got a push/pull wagon and he loves it. It weighs 30 pounds, so even though it rolls beautifully for now, it's still a lot of weight I'm pushing up the gamboling roads leading away from the lake. If we walk TO the lake, there's a serious hill to tackle on the way back.

Although he has ridden like this a couple of times, he prefers the sun shade because, he says, "I like to look at purple."

I do love getting out and walking. I loved bike-riding, too. If we had a bunch of "extra" money, I can see getting a good bike and getting Mal a good bike and one of those "trail gators" I had when D was little so I could tow the smaller bike behind me.

The other thing I've genuinely loved, in terms of exercise, was Zumba classes. But I'm no longer willing to pay for a gym membership, plus... I don't know if you've heard, but this kid up there takes a LOT of time and effort. (TFW you realize your first kid was easy, but you didn't know it at the time.)

Anyway, those two things - food and movement - were fairly simple to straighten out. The body thing has been more challenging. And I mention this all because, a full five years after I made the definite decision that I was finished dieting and hating myself and trying to change my body through intrusive means that I did not enjoy, when I was putting my hair in a bun to go swimming yesterday, I noticed the bulk in my upper arms. And I flashed back to that approving statement: "Someone is getting that 'lean arm' look."

When I look back on pictures of me from about ten years ago, I am rather shocked at how unsubstantial I appear. Did I have boobs at all? Hard to tell. I was so tiny (but never felt tiny). I do not wish to go back to that body again. But, ironically, why is it so hard to see pictures of myself now? I firmly believe that the answer to that is internalized fatphobia.

When I'm just sitting around and hanging out with my family, I don't think about my body. It moves how I want it to move and when I want it to move. It is strong. I am doing housework and playing hide-and-seek and getting down in the floor and moving around all day long.

But I know my body is changing. Not just from my changing exercise habits (like my upper leg strength declined after my bike got stolen), but also from age. I recently listened to an episode of the "Food Psyche" podcast featuring Erica Leon, who is a dietician/nutritionist who works primarily with middle-aged women.

She said, "[T]here’s this period of time from, they say the perimenopause, which is the period of time prior to menopause, three to five years, I think it's even longer. Where bodies start to change, because hormone levels start to shift, just like in adolescence. Estrogen levels, and progesterone levels, they drop, they change, they shift. And so what happens during the period of time is that, periods become abnormal, they become longer, shorter, heavier. And in addition to that, people gain weight around the middle. It happens, like in puberty. I call menopause the second puberty. And, I think people aren’t really aware of that. All of a sudden, it’s like, 'Oh my God. My pants are getting tight. Why is that happening?' It's happening, people don’t hear that this is very normal and natural, and the period of time prior to menopause... [B]odies are changing. And things are happening in the body that we’re not necessarily aware of. Because, when hormone levels shift, there are some issues that occur, because estrogen is a very protective hormone. It keeps us [supple], it keeps our bones strong, it keeps our heart strong. And as our levels shift and lower, we start to have things like, more brittle bones, and really we’re in need of more calcium, and more vitamin D. Things happen with our heart. And I'll say on a personal note, I’ve never ever had a health issue, and all of a sudden, I have elevated cholesterol. And, it's because estrogen is protective, and, helps to keep the heart pumping, strong, and then when our levels are reduced, these things, all of a sudden, are concerns. So things like heart health, bone health... [P]robably the most distressing symptom of all, of menopause, is the weight gain. And it is normal, it is natural. It happens because estrogen levels drop. And, as Margo Maine talks about, it is the life preserver. Which I love, rather than a 'spare tire,' because, hey, we get a spare tire around the middle. But it is protective. When the ovaries stop producing as much estrogen, the body looks for other sources. And the idea of having estrogen is that it helps, it's cardio protective, it protects our bones... And so the body does everything to defend that. People have come to me and said, 'Oh my God, I can’t lose weight like I did when I was younger.' It's like, 'Yeah, you’re not supposed to.'"

Anyway, there's the part in my head that I know to be true: My life is constantly changing. My body is changing (and it's perfectly normal and to be expected). I'm taking care of myself the best that I can. I am happy. My family loves me.

Then there is still that nagging, "Um, that's what I look like?" when I see candid pictures of me. I think a lot of people feel that way. And it really irritates me that society did such a good job of pouring into me that I need to have an appearance that fits into an extremely narrow range in order to be "attractive" or worthy of love or self-esteem. I blame it on society because I always thought I was cool when I was a little kid. I liked me. I learned from others to hate my body and, therefore, myself.

That's the part of this journey that is still the most difficult from which to extricate myself.

So...

If you're lucky like I am and you get to go swimming this weekend, be gentle with yourself.

And while you're at it, maybe watch the words you say to other people. You might think, "You look great! Have you lost weight?" is a compliment, but it feeds into a very destructive world view that is detrimental and that really holds on to the heart and soul of a person.

Take care of yourself.

Rebel Eaters, Episode 2 Journaling Prompt

This week's writing prompt was basically: What rules would you like to impose on the people in your life regarding food and your body?

I have this pin on my purse. I bought it about two years ago from Fat Girl Flow, but I don't see it on her merch site anymore.

Since I bought it, I haven't heard anyone talking negatively about food in my presence. That's fairly amazing.

I am extraordinarily fortunate in that I live in a house with people who eat unapologetically and live in bodies without shame. I don't have to set boundaries about diet and exercise talk, because no one around here goes in for that kind of thing.

That has not always been the case.

 It took years to divest from the mentality of "good" and "bad" foods, or from feeling like I had to earn the right to eat by making sure I'd gone through the paces of a rigorous -- and boring as all get-out -- exercise regimen.

One of the reason I'm likely so devoid of the chatter of Diet Culture is that I don't work in an office anymore. I remember food and portions and workouts being prevalent topics of conversation when I was in the corporate world.

When I worked at a newspaper just out of college, I remember a lady counting the calories in each potato chip as a male co-worker ate a bag of them in at lunch. I was ear-deep in disordered eating and exercise at the time, but even I wouldn't have done that to another person.

When I was pregnant, prenatal vitamins made me ill, and I was trying to be extremely vigilant about making sure I got all of the nutrients I needed to provide for a baby. I was sitting in the break room with a packet of baby carrots when my supervisor came in to get a bag of peanuts out of the vending machine, looked at me on the way, and asked, "Do you know how many carbs are in a carrot?"

I don't miss that, and I wouldn't put up with it. I wish I'd just said, "I do not care about that on any level, thanks. I'm trying to enjoy my snack."

It's actually difficult for me not to lecture in the other direction these days. When someone seems apologetic about what they're eating, I try to encourage them with, "Your body knows what it wants. It's fine!" I could actually talk about it for three hours, but that's no better than the Diet Culture evangelists, so I shut my trap.

Wrapping Up Babecamp

This week, Virgie Tovar's book "You Have the Right to Remain Fat" came out, just as we were finishing up the online Babecamp. It has all been great fun, lots to think about, and tons of reinforcement.

One thing I realized is that I'm probably about 2.5-3 years past the target demo for Babecamp... Not age-wise, but body-ownership-wise. Which is a cool, comfortable place to be.

I listened to a lot of podcasts as Tovar did media for the book release. It really made me wonder what I might have thought about what she had to say when I was involved in previous relationships.

At one point in a podcast, the host said something like, "What does it say about your relationship when your partner is okay with your being hungry, dedicating hours to something you don't love doing, and denying yourself things you really like simply because of the social currency it conveys to them?"

:::blink:::

I had an active and overt eating disorder during my first marriage. Also, exercise bulimia. It was all set off by my husband telling me that I was overweight, and my trying to "fix" it. He was a witness to all of this. My appearance pleased him, and he obviously did not care what I did to acquire or maintain that appearance.

I had a more "healthy"-looking eating disorder and commitment to working out in a way that I clearly hated during my second marriage. I had gotten past most of the stuff from my 20s until my second husband also told me I was 50-60 pounds overweight and needed to lose it. He treated me with disgust and disapproval until I lost the weight, all while still expecting me to perform in the bedroom, knowing I was not physically appealing to my partner.

And I lost a LOT of weight due to what Tovar calls "internalized inferiority." I believed that my husband had the right to hate me for being fat "and disgusting," which was a moral failing on my part that showed all over my body. He was able to wield this, using my desire for his affection and approval, into a tool of control.

Over and over, as I've read about women who believe, due to their life experiences, that in order to live a full and free life, they will likely have to abandon their dreams of being in a lifelong relationship with a man, I recognize that I am married to the perfect man for me. He's the perfect match for where I am in my life right now, and the perfect partner to cheer me on as I learn and grow and come to find the woman I'm meant to be, who I didn't have the chance to find as I was spending so much time and energy on artificially maintaining a body type to remain pleasing to a critical male eye.

Furthermore, I'm grateful to be middle aged. It's so much easier to be confident in who I am and not really give a single stinking rodent's hindquarters what anyone else thinks about me.

Finally, Tovar said something I loved during an interview where the host "concern-trolled" her (which is when someone says, when speaking of fat acceptance, something to the extent of  "but what about health..."). Paraphrasing: There is no minimum weight someone has to be to deserve respect and freedom from bigotry.

This applies in so many realms, I want to keep it, most of all, at the forefront of my mind. There is no minimum of ability, health, intelligence, accomplishment, drive, etc. that someone needs to possess. Everybody deserves to expect to be treated as fully human because they are. And that's my favorite takeaway.

Happy Birthday to Me!

All right, fine. If you're keeping track, it's still more than two months until my birthday.

But James already got my present for me, even though I still have to wait a few weeks for it.

Something hit me the other day: I cannot remember the last time I went to bed feeling cruddy and thinking, "Well, I ate like a garbage person today. I'll do better tomorrow."

If you've never done this, then I don't know how to explain the feelings of shame, failure fatigue, and physical illness that accompany that little bit of self-demoralizing.

There have been many times in my life when I've tried, with varying levels of success, to appreciate my body in its natural form (i.e. when not being manipulated by food restriction and exercise for the sole purpose of body-taming), with varying success.

I remember when I was training for the LVMPD entry test, I was able to run 5 miles and felt like a total bad ass. When I was weighed as part of the physical, I was surprised to see 195. That was up significantly from my lowest weight, due to a years-long eating disorder, when I spent some time at about 148 pounds.

Incidentally, the GNC scale still told me I was 7 pounds overweight here, so while I felt pretty okay about how I looked, the numbers taunted me.

However, a few years later, I was nearly 50 pounds heavier and significantly more healthy. And I didn't feel much self-consciousness about how I looked.

Still, what I didn't realize was that Diet Culture was pervasive in my thought processes and self-esteem.

I had so many "rules" about how I ate, even while giving myself permission, kind of, to eat as I pleased. I still saw foods as "naughty" indulgences or "healthy" choices. If I did too much of the former, I felt really bad.

Even after James and I got married and I was looking in the rear-view mirror of those miserable forced workouts (even while loving riding my bike challenging places, walking all over, dancing, etc.), I would still often look back on my day with a sense of backward-facing dread, and feel ill at the thought of the "bad" food I'd put in my body.

Or I'd remember that I'd forgotten I'd had a snack and then still eaten as much as dinner as I would have if I'd not eaten a snack. And I'd be frustrated with myself.

So, that's a long way of saying: I don't do that anymore. At some point in this work I'm doing to listen to my body, to move as I please, and to eat as I will without any of this becoming an energy-draining focus from my very full life, I've managed to throw off the go-to guilt that has gone hand-in-hand with food choices for as long as I can remember.

I no longer linger over glances at myself in mirrors or storefront windows as I walk past. I don't feel self-conscious about what other people looking at me might think. I buy and wear clothes that I enjoy, that allow me to move, and that I don't have to think about, regardless of the "rules" of what might or might not be "flattering."

There is, however, one area in which I still struggle: Pictures.

I LOVE pictures. I often hand my camera to James (and cringe, because, frankly, for as brilliant as that man is, he cannot take a dang photograph... and now that I think about it, it might have to do with how overstimulated he gets in loud/busy situations in that he cannot filter out superfluous information, and that's exactly what his pictures look like) or someone else and ask them to get a picture of me doing whatever we're doing, because I tend to be the recorder of memories.

However, my tendency still is to be hyper-critical of snaps of me, because... I guess I'm seeing myself from someone else's angle, and I'm not used to it, so it reveals things about me I don't see in the mirror, even though my son has fully mirrored closet doors, and we're in his floor about 10 hours a day, so I've likely glanced at myself at almost every possible angle in the past year and a half.

I'll give you an example from a couple of years ago. My friend Jana, of Jana Gross Photography, had brought her girls to our apartment to swim. She snapped this candid shot of Mal and me.

This picture is pure joy. But at first blush, my reaction to it was, "Holy crap, that arm! Those bulges! Ugh!" I had to look away from myself because I couldn't take it (it was a couple of months after this that I did my last-ditch effort to drop a few pounds, and after calorie-restricting for two months, decided I'd rather try to be happy than thinner). In the past, I'd delete pictures of myself that I did not like but knew, absolutely, that some day I would adore this picture and the moment in time that it captures with such buoyant energy.

(Incidentally, this kind of "documentary photography" is Jana's milieu, so if you need pictures that are absolutely YOU and not the same poses that are trending with every other photographer on earth, you should absolutely book her.)

And now we get to James's birthday present for me! He purchased admission to Virgie Tovar's Babecamp, It's a four-week online course to learn how to have a peaceful relationship with your body, first by examining how we got to where we are now, and then by working on tools for self-love.

If this sounds horribly self-indulgent to you, especially given that there is so much real trouble on earth, then let me assure you that dissatisfaction with my body has been an incredibly time-. energy-, money-, and talent-consuming function of my life for as long as I can remember. Ridding myself of its last vestiges frees me up to be fully present for the people and causes that mean most to me.

As an ancient example: When D was smaller, we had an absolute bedtime of 7:00 PM (which is funny; Mal just finally conked out at 11 tonight). D could read or play in bed, but had to stay there. There were countless times D would call down the hall with a random question, clearly just wanting to chat, desiring company. And I'd yell back to "go to sleep!" Because I "needed" to work out. Not because I enjoyed it. Not because the exercise brought me peace and life. Because I did not want to be as fat as I'd been in the past.

Time and time again, I chose attempting to alter the natural size of my body over building a relationship with my older child.

I'm not ever going to do that again.

Babecamp will end about a month before we go on our family vacation. I look forward to taking, and being in, a ton of pictures. Without obsessing over myself in any of them.

And many more.