Weight Loss, Denial, and Body Image

(This is an edited version of a post I put on my personal blog last week.  So some of you have already seen this.  So my apologies to those that have already seen this, but I DID warn you it was going to be showing up here!!!  🙂  )

I’ve lost weight.

I don’t know how much exactly – I haven’t weighed myself in almost a year.  I DO know that I’ve gone from a UK size 20 (US 16) to an 18 (US 14) {according to the size conversion charts on the Evans website}.  To put this into perspective for you: I haven’t been a US size 14 since I WAS 14.  I’m 32 now.

I honestly don’t know how this happened.  Not much has changed, other than the fact that the kids were home for their 6 week summer vacation, and now they’re back at school.  I haven’t drastically changed my eating habits or my activity levels.  I haven’t gone off or on medications.  My stress level is high, but to be perfectly honest, it’s ALWAYS high.  (I just don’t always TALK about it.)

And the fact is, I’ve been denying the weight loss for a while now.  People keep asking me if I’ve lost weight, and I keep deflecting the issue, saying things like “oh, you’re just not used to seeing me in clothes that actually fit, as opposed to clothes that are 4-6 sizes too big.”  Not just to deflect the issue (although since I’m finally facing the honesty in this situation, that IS part of it), but because it’s true.  In the last year (less than, actually), I have almost completely changed the way I dress.  For years – since I was a teenager – I purposely wore clothes that were too big for me.  I thought that by hiding my body, I was somehow making it more acceptable.  Like if they couldn’t see my body, they wouldn’t know just how fat I really was, and that was better than actually letting people see me.  But now I actually DO wear clothes that fit.

But the realization that I’ve lost weight hasn’t come from people commenting on it, or the sizes of the clothes I’ve been buying.  It’s come from wearing clothes that I’ve had for years — and suddenly they don’t fit like before.  My favorite jeans have suddenly become baggy.  My embellished cargo pants have suddenly become loose enough that while they’re not falling down or anything, I can pull them off without undoing the button or zipper.  My favorite sweater in the whole world has become so big on me that it’s annoying rather than comforting.  I “had” to go buy myself something else while I was in town last week because it was bothering me that badly.  (On that note, does anybody have any idea if I could alter the sweater?  Like, take it in?  I’d much rather do that – even if I had to pay the alterations place in town to do it properly – than get rid of it.  I seriously love this sweater to death.)

I’ve finally had to face up to the fact that I’ve lost weight.

But now that I have, I realized something.  I didn’t want to have lost weight.  I kept denying it because I didn’t want it to be true.

Yeah, um… let me repeat that: I kept denying that I lost weight because I didn’t want it to be true.

Now HOW fucked up is THAT???

But now that I’ve admitted that to myself, I had to examine why.  Why the hell would I NOT want to lose weight?  I mean, isn’t that what I’m SUPPOSED to want?  Even the most die-hard FA’ers would admit that while they strive for fat acceptance, they’d be lying if they said they didn’t WANT to be thin. Or thinnER.  It’s pounded into our heads on a daily basis, and even if you agree with all the tenents of Fat Acceptance (and I DO), it’s almost impossible to live your life completely unaffected by societal views on body image.  You’d have to live your life in some sort of bubble, and I sure as hell haven’t been.

The one thing I worried about was gaining weight.  In my head, I know that gaining weight wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to me.  But it’s that irrational fear of taking over the whole world that a lot of us can relate to. It was only after seriously reflecting on my weight fluctuations in my adult years that I realized that it probably wouldn’t even happen.  Even with weight fluctuations, my body keeps going back to the same-ish weight.  200 lbs, give or take a few.  My weight has gone up to 230 and down to 190 (barring pregnancy weights, of which the highest was somewhere around the 270+ mark, but the majority of that was water retention from pre-eclampsia), but I always seem to go back to 200 without any real effort on my own part.  (And the weight gains, up to 230?  Have almost always been right after having a baby.  Once the baby is walking age, I always seem to go back down to 200 without doing anything.  Correlation?  Methinks so.)  I never even gave any real thought to losing weight.  I’ve never been able to lose a significant amount of weight (more than 20 lbs.) without a superhuman effort or living through an abusive relationship.  So that?  Didn’t even enter into it, as far as I was concerned.

But here I am, I’ve lost weight, and I’ve had to admit to myself that I didn’t want it to be true.

Am I afraid of weight-related craziness?  Am I afraid that, now that I’ve lost some weight, I’m going to become obsessed again?  Start dieting again, because after all, I’ve just lost weight without doing anything… just imagine how much weight I could lose if I actually tried?! (/sarcasm)

Or am I afraid of how I’m going to feel if I gain weight again?  Am I going to slip back down the oh-so-slippery slope to self-loathing again?

If I’m perfectly honest, that’s one road I really don’t want to go down again.  I am feeling good about myself for the first time in my life, and it is not because person X told me I should be, it’s because I’ve started to realize for myself that I am not the worthless, ugly freak I thought I was.  I certainly don’t think I’m all that and a bag of chips, but I realize that I just might be okay the way I am, after all.  That maybe – just maybe – the way the world sees me just might not be as important as I always thought it was.  That maybe my husband (and most, if not all, of the boyfriends/friends/family that preceded him) was (were) telling the truth when he (they) said that he (they) thought that I was beautiful and desirable and funny and and and.  To go back to hating myself?  Well, I’d rather be dead.  Seriously.

Maybe it was a combination.  I don’t know.  I just know that I honestly did not want to admit that I had lost weight.  And while I’m sure there’s a big huge revelation in there somewhere, I’m not sure exactly where it is.

Other people’s reactions to my weight loss have been… uncomfortable would be the best way to put it.  “You’re doing great!”  Um… I’m not DOING anything differently now than I was a year ago.  The big changes I’ve made in my life have been internal changes – changing my thinking, changing the way I react to certain situations.  Nothing physical.

My SIL Kirsty (who, for the record, is only 12) automatically assumed that I’d made some big diet changes.  Um… not exactly.  “You’re just like my mom,” she said to me yesterday.  “She used to drink coffee all day long, and now she only drinks one or two cups.”  I went on to explain to her that I haven’t done ANYTHING differently in the last year.  I eat the same way I always have, the only change has been how I approach food.  Food is no longer my enemy.  It is not something to be fought; it is there to fuel my body.  I eat what my body wants when my body wants it.  (To an extent; we live on a limited income and sometimes what I REALLY want, we don’t have.  So I pick what I want out of what we’ve GOT.)  I place no restrictions on food.  Food is food, period.  It’s not good or bad, it just IS.

(Having the in-laws over yesterday was a great opportunity to preach some HAES, I must say!  It was quite cool, actually.)

And seeing my reflection has become strange.  Obviously the weight didn’t fall off overnight, but I honestly didn’t notice it until the last couple of weeks.  And suddenly I can see the change in myself and it’s just… weird.  I look at myself and it doesn’t even look like ME.

Hubby thinks it’s just me letting go of most of the negativity in my life.  And he may well have a point; I honestly just don’t know.

I just don’t know what to think about all this.  Not so much the weight loss itself (although, on that note, do y’all think it’s possible for fat to re-distrubute itself this late in my life?  Because that would make so much more sense than me spontaneously losing weight), but my reactions to it.

Fat Positive thoughts in the oddest places.

What do YOU see?

I just got on the desktop computer* and opened up a webpage, which is set to iGoogle under my username.  I have it set to “random themes” and I get a different one every day.  This is one part of what came up today.

At first, I just looked at the colors and thought “oooh!  I like that one!”  But then I looked at it a little closer.

I do believe that this is just supposed to be some abstract pattern, but when I looked at this one part that I’ve sectioned off for you to see, what do you think my brain saw?

A beautiful fat body, that’s what.

Now what’s so strange about that, you might ask?  Of course I’m going to tell you, that’s the whole point of this post!  🙂

You have to remember that I’m still fairly new to FA.  It hasn’t even been a year yet since I read my first FA post.  The change in me has been fairly slow, in terms of that <year.  However, when you consider the entirety of my life, it’s been fairly quick.  Especially when the changes in me go unnoticed until one day, it jumps up and slaps me in the face.  Like today.

I, like probably most fat people, internalized the fatphobia just as good as the next person.  Oh yeah, I didn’t just hate myself, I hated fat in general.  Of course there were always fat people that I saw and looked at and thought “wow… s/he’s fat AND beautiful” but I have to admit that it was very few and far between.  For the most part, the internalized fatphobia dominated my thinking.

Now I’ll admit that I’ve gone out of my way to try and change that thinking.  Not for anyone else, but for me.  I didn’t want to think that way about anyone, including myself.  But it was only today, when I saw that design on my iGoogle page, that I realized just how far I’ve come.

Never before finding FA would I have been able to actually think the words “beautiful fat body.”  I might not have reacted to a fat body with disdain or contempt, but those three words would have eluded me no matter what I did.  But today, I see that, and I am immediately overcome with an image of a beautiful fat woman, all roundness and curves and sensuality.

The whole thing.

I realize that you might look at it and see nothing.  Or you might look at it and see a beautiful fat man instead of a woman.

But you know what?  I like the fact that I saw a beautiful fat woman.  I’m glad.  When I realized the change in my thinking, I smiled and got the warm fuzzies inside.

🙂

* – we have 3 computers here at home.  The desktop is commonly referred to as “Daddy’s” computer, the laptop is mine and mine alone, and the other computer is The Little Helper’s.  Lately, though, Daddy’s been spending a lot of time in the bedroom on my laptop, so I’ve been using “his” computer almost exclusively.

Mother, you’re breaking your Daughter’s heart.

'nuff said.

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to write this.  I knew I wanted to write about it, from the moment I had this conversation with her, but I just didn’t know how to approach it.  I’ve decided to make it an open letter to my mother.

Mother,

My heart is breaking for you.  This year has been terrible – first the thing with Baby Sister and Nephew, and then Stepfather died in the Spring.   I’ve been amazed at how strong you sound every time we talk on the phone.  I wouldn’t blame you if you just broke down, but you just keep going, no matter how hard things get for you.  You truly are an inspiration.

But then you talk about having lap-band surgery.  And my heart breaks even more.

You say that you “need” it.  That your health is just “so terrible,” and it’s the only thing that’s going to save you.

But Mommy, you’re going to do yourself more harm than good.

You say that it’s going to cure your diabetes, high blood pressure, and back problems.  All of which you know are inherited.  Grandmother had every single one of those problems, and Grandfather has at least two of them that I remember.  You say Grandmother was once as big as you are now – and honestly, I haven’t seen you in 5 years, so I don’t know how much you’ve gained – and you use that as an excuse to prove to me that you have to have this surgery.

But Grandmother wasn’t always very heavy.  I remember her being roughly the size I am now.  And I know that when she died, she was pretty small.  Just because she was heavy at one time in her life does not mean that one time caused all those health problems.

Having the doctor close off part of your stomach is not going to do you any good.  You’re going to become malnourished.  Sure, your diabetes might get better.  Because you’ll be starving yourself. Your body needs more than just a few ounces of food a day.  And it would even if you were thin.

I know it’s hard to fight the fatphobia that you see every day.  Even people who are well meaning are a lot of the times, unknowing fatphobes.  It’s institutionalized and it’s almost impossible to get away from.  I understand that, I really do.

But I hate to see you taking all of that fat hatred in and turning it on yourself.  Don’t you get enough hatred pointed your way from others?  Do you really have to hate yourself, too?

Part of my reaction is our relationship.  Since finding each other again six years ago, we have developed the kind of relatioship I only thought we could have in my dreams.  I have been able to turn to you when things got bad, and you supported and encouraged me.  I never thought I’d have that.

Part of it is my own rising self-esteem.  I can hear the self-loathing in your voice even when you don’t outwardly express it – because I’ve been there.  And I know how good it feels now to be able to say I like myself just the way I am.  I want you to know that feeling, too.

And part of it is that I’ve learned so much in the last few months, and hearing that you’re seriously contemplating surgery – to fix one thing that’s not broken, and to fix others that it simply won’t work for – seriously terrifies me.  You just don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.  And while I know that there are serious statistics – X amount of people have serious health problems, X amount of people actually die as a result of the surgery, X amount of people will actually end up gaining all their weight back – I never thought to save the URLs of the blog posts/studies/news articles I read, so I can’t “prove” it to you.  I know what I know, but without that “proof” I know you’ll just dismiss me as being a worried daughter.

And I am a worried daughter, no question.  But I also know that what you’re contemplating doing is going to be so much worse for your health than doing nothing at all.

And it makes me want to cry.

Some wishes DO come true!

Somewhere, over the rainbow....

When I first found the Fatosphere back in October of last year, I wasn’t looking for a place full of righteous indignation.  I wasn’t looking to become an activist.  No, my initial reaction was much more self-centered than that.

I just wanted to like myself.

I had spent so long absolutely abhorring myself that I was exhausted with it.  I was just so tired of looking in the mirror and saying those hateful things to myself.  Some part of my brain knew that this wasn’t a healthy way of thinking, but the rest of my brain said “but we don’t know any other way to think!” When I found the Fatosphere, and saw that it was filled with people of all shapes and sizes saying that being fat was actually okay, and that liking myself as I was wasn’t a crazy thought, I seriously thought I’d found my lifeline.

Here were people that were saying that I didn’t have to lose weight to become an acceptable human being – even to myself.  I didn’t have to hate everything about myself simply because I didn’t fit some unrealistic, unattainable (for 99.999999% of the world’s population) “ideal.”  I had the right to expect to be treated with respect and dignity just because I exist.  Because I am a human being.  I am a whole person, with strengths and weakness, with thoughts and feelings.  I just happen to also be fat.  That fatness is only a physical characteristic – it is not now, never has been nor ever will be the sum total of what it is that is “me.”

But all I wanted was to be able to say “I like myself.”  And mean it.

Very slowly at first, I started to feel better about myself.  But choosing to immerse myself in the on-line presence of people like me was bound to do that.

Then the rollercoaster that is my life took a downward spiral for a little while, and I didn’t even touch my computer for 4 months.  Not even to check my email.

Then in the spring, something in my head just snapped and part of my brain said to me: “you KNOW what you need to do.  You need to get back in the Fatosphere and back into blogging.  You’ll feel so much better about yourself if you do.”

And I did.  Part of me felt apprehensive – I’d suddenly dropped off the face of the Fatosphere for months and here I was, about to jump right back in with both feet.  How was I going to face the inevitable questions* about why I just disappeared like that?  But I knew that I had to just let come what may, because for my own mental health, I needed to get back into it.

Around the same time, I joined the Fatshionista community on LiveJournal.  Posting pictures of myself took a lot of courage, but it was so good for me.  Again with the mental health.  Seeing all these women – of all ranges of fat; from what I would think of as “totally NOT fat” to the higher end of the fat spectrum – and realizing that they were ALL beautiful, all in their own way, went a long way in re-programming my brain to think “well, if they’re all beautiful, why can’t I be, too?”

And there’s the crux of the matter.  “Why can’t I be beautiful, too?” Short answer: I can be.  And so can you, and you, and you.

Long answer: beauty, in the sense that I’m talking about it, is an intangible thing.  There is no set formula for what is beautiful and what isn’t.  As opposed to physical attractiveness, most people can’t pinpoint down to the slightest detail what beauty means to them.  One person might find nature beautiful, while another might find something like architecture beautiful.  Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder – because each person’s particular likes and dislikes are all different.

People are supposed to be different.  Different colors, different heights, and yes, different weights. The mere fact that I happen to weigh more than what society tries to force me to think is “acceptable” does not negate the fact that I have my own unique beauty.  And again, so do you and you and you.  You over there?  Yeah, you too.

In the last few months, since I jumped back into the Fatosphere with both feet, I have come a longer way in accepting and liking myself than I had in the 32 years before that.  Let me repeat that:

I have learned more about accepting and liking myself in less than five months than in thirty-two years of existence on this planet. (Nearly half of which have been spent in some sort of counseling.)

I have finally gotten to the point where I like myself the majority of the time.  No, I haven’t found self-esteem nirvana, but I have come so far in such a short time that I’m still finding it odd.  I find it odd when I look in the mirror and I don’t immediately put myself down for some flaw or another.  (I still have flaws, of course, I just don’t feel the need to put myself down because of them.)  I look in the mirror and I finally see me – not some warped, hate-filled version of me that has never been accurate.  And me?  Isn’t so bad, really.

Other people have noticed it, too.  My rise in self-esteem has been one of the major factors of my marriage becoming what my husband and I both want it to be.  I finally started to see myself the way my husband always has, and it has brought us closer in ways counseling (which we tried once) never did.  Nothing has ever worked like my learning to like myself.

Friends have noticed it.  I’m so much happier now than I ever was before.  In my life.

Even strangers notice it.  How else would you explain the fact that I’m suddenly getting hit on left and right?  I can’t remember the last time somebody hit on me before I started feeling better about myself.  Now, it’s every time I go out.  It’s surreal.  I almost feel like I must be in someone else’s body, because these things just don’t happen to me.  So I just take it as a tangible sign that this internal change must be visible externally, in some way or another.

I started out this journey just searching for a way to like myself.  What I found was so much more than that.  But that one wish, that I wished so very hard and very long for?

It came true.

Well how do you like them apples?

* – I don’t want it to sound like I’ve got some huge massive ego and the whole Fatosphere was going to be sitting around wondering “where did nuckingfutz go?”  However, I had been so active – commenting on pretty much everybody’s blogs, practically every post – that I was sure somebody would have noticed my absence and would ask about it.

Want to preach FA? Get drunk!

I’ll give you a minute to stop laughing….

Done?

Okay then.

Here’s the thing: as I said in the comments on my last post, I’m not very good at articulating my FA stance to people I know and love, let alone total strangers.  Hubby is the only one that really knows how involved I am in FA, and as a naturally thin person, there are a lot of things that he just doesn’t get.  What he does know is that since finding FA, my confidence has soared, I have begun accepting myself, and my self-loathing (the one thing about me that he really didn’t like) has all but disappeared.  (It still rears its ugly head every once in a while, but not very often, thank FSM.)

Well, I went out drinking last night.  The second time in 2 weeks, but only my 3rd time this year (I don’t go out much, obviously).  I had run into my best friend May’s sister Carol, her daughter Gemma, and her son’s girlfriend Debbie when I was on my way back from Number One Daughter’s school on Tuesday.  They invited me out, and when I mentioned it to Hubby, he was all “go ahead!”  So… I did.  🙂

One thing you need to understand, though: May’s family – even her extended family – are like my second family.  Shit, Little Miss Naughty calls Carol “Auntie Carol”.  When they were younger, The Little Chatterbox and LMN kept getting confused, thinking that May was their aunt and her children were their cousins, so what did that make Carol and Gemma and the rest of them?  They’re only now getting to the point where they understand that no, they’re not REALLY family, they’re just REALLY good friends to us.

So the relationship between us and them is… complicated, sometimes confusing, but altogether a good one.

Well, as we were making our way between one nightclub and another, talk between Gemma, myself, and Gemma’s cousin (can’t for the life of me remember her name right now; she doesn’t go out with us all that often) turned to body image.  Carol’s diabetic and so is Gemma, and Gemma related to me the horror of a doctor’s appointment.  It was the usual fatty horror: you’re going to die if you don’t lose weight; you’re going to have a heart attack by the age of 23 because you’re too fat; etc, etc, etc.  I looked at her and told her “BULLSHIT!”  I was just drunk enough that I could say what I was thinking without worrying about the consequences.

At a UK size 12 (US 10-ish), Gemma is not only NOT fat, but she’s smaller than the “average British woman” (which, IIRC, is a UK 14).  Her cousin?  Even smaller, at a UK 8-10.  And yet they were both talking about how they need to lose weight.  I looked at both of them and let them have it, from both barrels.

Oh, I wasn’t nasty.  I wasn’t all “shut up you skinny bitch”.  I simply told them that this “obesity epidemic” bullshit is just that – bullshit.  I told them that not only do they not need to lose weight, but they need to stop thinking in terms of “dieting” and “good food/bad food”.  I asked Gemma, “if you had never been told that fat was bad or disgusting, or any of the thousands of horrible things people like to say about fat people, would you have still wanted to lose weight?” (At one time, she was a lot bigger than she is now, at a size 18/20 – basically, the same size I am right now.  She has lost weight and managed to keep it off for now.  Either she hasn’t hit the 5 year mark yet, or maybe she was meant to be this size.  You know, set-point.)  Her answer?  “No!  I was fat and happy!  I didn’t care what size I was, until that doctor scared me into losing weight.”  How many fat people are there in the world that know exactly how Gemma felt?  A hell of a lot, I’m sure.

Now granted, we didn’t go into a whole lot of detail, but I was glad that I had the chance to say something to both of them, and also glad that I was drunk enough that I didn’t worry about what they were going to think.  These people are my friends, they love me for the person I am – even if they don’t agree with me, they’re going to at least listen to what I have to say and not make me feel bad for having the convictions I do.  It’s silly of me to even worry about it, but worry about it I do.  When I’m sober.

I definitely was NOT sober.

And in this case?  I think that was a GOOD thing!  😀

Internalized Fat Hatred Right In Your Face

Number One Daughter had a doctor’s appointment today, with her specialist.  Dr. Specialist comes to the school and takes over the nurse’s office for the day and sees the patients there – all the parents have to do is come to school.  I tell you, this is a lot easier than having to keep a kid off of school and drag them all over hell’s creation for a 10-minute appointment!

So I get to the school (10 minutes early!  considering the school is waaaaaaaay across town, this is a record for me), and I wait in the parents’ room.  Dr. Specialist is running a little bit late, so as I’m waiting, two other mothers come in.  Both of them were fat.  Other Mother One is older than me – mid to late 40’s would be my guess.  Other Mother Two is exactly one year older than I am, 33.  Other Mother One and I were talking about the area I’m living in now (we just moved here a year ago), as she’s originally from here – she grew up not 10 houses down the street from me.  As Other Mother One and I are talking, Random Female School Employee comes in and says hello.  These two women obviously know each other.  After a series of “hi, how are you?” ‘s, Other Mother One immediately says “I’m on my new diet now!  I’ve lost 8 pounds!”

Me (in my head): and how are you going to feel when you gain it all back?

Ugh.

Random Female School Employee says something to the effect of “I can’t lose weight no matter what I do.  Even when I was going to Slimming World, I didn’t lose a pound.  It’s my thyroid.”

Me (in my head): or maybe you’re at your set-point!  (Note: I’m not discounting the fact that it could be the woman’s thyroid, but I know that some people just assume that because they can’t lose weight, there must be something wrong with them.  When in fact, there’s nothing wrong with THEM, there’s something wrong with society for making them feel like they HAVE to lose weight to become an acceptable human being.)

Part of me really wanted to go all FA on their asses.  But these are women I don’t know and probably will never see again, and I just wouldn’t feel right launching into a speech like that with somebody I don’t even know.  It’s times like this when I think having some business cards printed up with some web addresses – like Shapely Prose, for example – would be a GREAT idea.  I wouldn’t even have to say anything.  I could just give it to people and let them check it out for themselves.  Let them find the clue-by-four on their own.

The thing is, since I don’t interact with other people all that much, I honestly don’t see the Internalized Fat Hatred Diatribe all that often.  I know it happens, of course, but I just don’t see it.  So when something like this happens, it seriously makes me sad.  Sad for these women, that they can’t just try to love themselves the way they are.  Sad that they feel like they’ve got to put their entire life on hold until they live up to some arbitrary, unrealistic ideal.  Sad that they internalize all this shit to such an extent as this.

Because I know what that feels like.  I talk the talk, and I’m learning to walk the walk, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget what that feels like.  And I want to tell them how amazing it feels to wake up and not feel that hatred weighing me down every day.  I want to tell them what it feels like to be able to look in the mirror and not have those messages that are shoved down our throats by society-at-large running through my head every single time.  I want to tell them that internalizing that fat hatred is worse for them than any weight they might reach.  I want to tell them what it feels like to be free!

I just hate it when I see women looking so happy about hating themselves and their bodies.  Because there’s a 98% chance they’re going to be right back where they are now, if not heavier, and their self-hating is just going to get worse.

And that?  Is just sad.

In which I might get a bit rambly…

I’ve been kind of… “out of it”… mentally the last couple of days.  I’ve been reading, but I’m having a hard time really gathering my thoughts in a coherent manner.  I’m going to give it a shot, though.  But be warned: I might go off on a tangent.  It happens.

I keep going back and re-reading Kate’s latest thinky piece.  For a lot of reasons, really.

The biggest reason, probably, being that I have four children of my own.  And they do stuff like that.  I remember when The Little Helper was about 3 or 4, and I’d taken her to the supermarket with me.  We were in one aisle, and a large woman walked across the end of the aisle.  If I had to guess, I’d say she was probably about the age I am now (early 30’s) and roughly a size 26/28.  I’m not even going to try and guess how much she weighs, because as we well know, nobody knows what a certain weight looks like.  Suffice it to say that she was definitely larger than I was.  Anyway, The Little Helper sees her and yells – and I mean YELLS – “Mommy, that lady is FAT!!”  She said it so loudly that people in the other aisles came into ours to see who she was talking about.

Needless to say, I was mortified.  I told her “shh!  You shouldn’t talk about people like that!”

Now what I really wanted to say was that she shouldn’t be pointing out any specifics about anybody’s body – that’s just plain rude.  But like I said… she was only 3 or 4 at that point.  She wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about.

I sometimes wonder if I might have had something to do with her outburst, though.  I’d just had The Little Chatterbox not too long before hand, and I was desperate to lose weight.  (Never mind the fact that I actually weighed less at that point than I had when Hubby and I first married, I was just SOOO Fat.  [Excuse me while I go barf at myself.])  But I know that, at that point, I was very vocal about wanting to lose weight and how disgusting I was.  So sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t just a little kid making a (very loud) observation, but her clumsy way of saying “but Mommy, you’re so much smaller than she is”.  (That’s the kind of kid she is and always has been – she always wants to help people, whether that’s physical help or emotional.  Hence why she gets the nickname The Little Helper.)

But children are curious creatures – and they will point out any differences they see, usually without malicious intent.  I remember when my youngest cousin Eric was little – about 4 or 5, I’d say – and I had gone over to his house (I was there a LOT back then… a couple of times a week, easy).  I was about 12 or so at the time, and when I walked in, he looked up at me and said “You’ve got some BIG boobies!”  I was already a D cup at that point, so what he was saying was simply true.  D cup boobies on a 12 year old ARE big boobies!  My aunt and then-uncle (they divorced about 2 or 3 years later) gave him hell for saying it, and I’ll admit I was feeling really uncomfortable at the time.  But now?  I can look back on it and realize that he wasn’t trying to be naughty or anything… he just couldn’t help but notice how I was built (few people could) and remarked on it.

So on the subject of children remarking on the differences in people… be that fat or something else… I have to say that the way we REACT to those remarks has a lot more to do with teaching them whether they’re right or wrong.  If a little child comes up to me and says “you’re fat,” the way I react to it is going to tell her whether it’s an okay thing to say or not.  That’s part of where my re-educating my children comes in.  When they were younger and would say something like that, my response would usually be a resigned “yes, I know.”  But now that I’m trying to view fat in a different light, my responses are so much different.  We tend to talk a lot about physical differences in our family – partly because we have a blended family and we don’t all look alike.  (My oldest 2 both have brown hair and brown eyes while the rest of us have blond hair and blue eyes.)  So the subject comes up a little more often than it does in most families, I think.

But that’s where we first learn this whole fat=bad dichotomy.  From other people.  It’s not something we’re born with – it’s something we learn from listening to and watching other people.  Now in older children… yeah, I think the “we shouldn’t remark on other people’s bodies, PERIOD, because that’s just rude” talk needs to be had.  But when you’re talking about young children who are just expressing their curiosity about the world around them… then really, it’s your own reaction that’s the most telling.

But this quote:

actually acknowledging your body and inhabiting it, instead of keeping your mind — the good part of you — comfortably separate from its housing.)

really got to me.  Because that’s essentially what I did.  It was part of my Fantasy of Being Thin – this wasn’t the “real” me, because the “real” me was thin, sexy, and beautiful.  The “real me” was obscured by all of my fat.  Um… no.  The REAL me is and always has been RIGHT HERE.  She isn’t THIN, sexy, and beautiful… she’s FAT, sexy, and beautiful.  She already is almost everything I’ve ever wanted her to be.  And those things she hasn’t achieved yet… well, she’s only 32.  Chances are, she has a lot of time to grow and change.  But the more I really LIVE in my body (as opposed to EXISTING in it, like before), the more my perception of myself has changed.  Do you know… in the last 8 months (since I found the Fatosphere), my eyes have lost a good 30 or 40 pounds?  What do I mean by that?  Well, it’s like this: my BODY hasn’t changed much at all in those 8 months.  My hair is shorter and has been a couple of different colors since then, and I’ve developed some ROCKING thigh muscles, but my weight?  Hasn’t budged.  Nor did I expect it to.  But when I see myself, I see someone that looks a good 30 or 40 lbs. less than what I saw before October of last year.  I say this fairly often, but I really think it’s true: I think I have/had undiagnosed body dysmorphia.  Because when I saw someone who was easily 100+ heavier than me, or 10+ dress sizes larger than myself, I thought I looked like that.  My EYES were fatter than my body.  I have always seen myself as larger than I am.  Until recently, that is.

It’s like finding the Fatosphere and actively taking steps to try and accept (and eventually love) myself has pulled the wool from my eyes and I’m really and truly seeing myself for the first time.  What’s really there, not just what *I* think is there.

And honestly?  Trying to become more comfortable with the word “fat” and developing different ways of responding to that word has had a lot to do with that.  And since the topic seems to come up so often in my house, it’s actually helped to speed it along a little.  Each time the topic comes up, I take a few more steps down the road to full self-love.

A couple of the comments on Kate’s post really got to me though.  For example:

Not that anyone here has done it, but I do have to say that some folks who are on the smaller side of plus piss me off, because they talk about their experiences of “being fat” as if catcalls and a lack of dates is all that we have to go through. They talk about all the cute clothes that finally come in large sizes and don’t realize that even plus-size shops don’t carry things in my size (hint: if your clothing line stops at size 28, you’re still cutting off millions of potential customers.) When you’ve lived several years of your life not even being able to fit in restaurant booths or airplane seats, you start to realize that the “problems” of being a size 20 or so really aren’t problems at all, and you really start to wish that people that size would stfu about how bad they have it.

That one shocked the hell out of me.  Not that I’m trying to play “one-uppance” or anything… but it just really surprised me that someone larger than I would actually think those things.  And honestly?  She has a right to her feelings.  But for most of my life I have thought of myself as insanely huge (for the record, I’m a UK 20/US 16-18), so to read something like that is just like…. whoah.  It just never occurred to me that someone would think that I, at that size, wouldn’t know what it’s like to “really” be fat.  It’s a learning tool, though.  Now that I know that there are people out there that think that way, I can be a little more aware of my language and the effects of said language on people.

And I have to give props… A Sarah wrote a couple of very well-written responses from a parent’s perspective.  I couldn’t have said it much better than she did.

The whole “queer” and “Aspie” sidetrack made me cringe just a little bit.  One of the last responses on that said something to the effect of “THEY’RE allowed to use that word, but *I’M* not.”  Yup, pretty much my take on it, too.  If People With Unconventional Sexualities feel comfortable calling themselves “queer,” then good on them!  Seriously.  But I could never bring myself to use the word.  I guess it’s because I was growing up in the 80’s – and People With Unconventional Sexualities were just beginning to have the opportunities to reclaim the rights they deserved all along.  And “queer” was still seen as an insult then.  I couldn’t bring myself to say that word to someone without having flashbacks of when people would use it as a slur.  And I don’t want to be slurring anybody.  Ya know?  Like the n****r word.  NO WAY IN HELL am I ever going to use that word.  But if they want to use it?  Who the hell am I to tell them they can’t reclaim that word for themselves?

Okay, I think I’m done rambling for now.

… but you never know! 😛

I Refuse to Hate my Body

I’m totally stealing this, but to give credit where credit is due, it’s coming from calixti over at LiveJournal.  In her original post, she writes:

Started going to the local Curves gym today. It’s the only gym within walking distance and I was deathly tired of just sitting around. So I figured yay, activity.

I didn’t count on all the body hate all the women would express. Everyone was talking about how they’d be prettier, stronger, more confident, yada yada yada if they just lost x amount of pounds and this is a problem area and so’s that and I’ve been working out so long but I’m not losing weight anymore and we’re all fat and ugly and this sweat is punishment for being fat and…ick. Now and then I tried to pipe up, but I’m a wuss. 😦 So I’m bringing it here: a list of things I love about my body.

Because body hate is lame.

Yay for body love!!!

To keep the ball rolling, here’s my list (starting from the ground up, literally):

1. I love my calves. I have had thin friends tell me how jealous they were over the sight of my calves.  They are muscular, shapely, and strong.
2. I love my thighs. They are big, yes, but they have a nice shape and have been developing some major muscles lately, which I think is pretty cool.
3. I love my ass! I’ve always had a great ass.  It’s big and round and just a really nice shape.  And it looks HOT in a snug pair of jeans!  Let’s not forget, though, that it gives me a nice cushion to sit on wherever I go.  Trust me, I’ve learned with a super-skinny husband and daughter, that’s something to appreciate.  They’re always lamenting how quickly their bums hurt when they sit on something hard.  Whereas I?  Am nice and comfy, thankyouverymuch!
4. I love my tummy. (Actually, it’s more of a love/hate relationship, but today we’re focusing on the love part.)  It has protected and embraced four babies and helped bring them into this world.  If I can’t love it for anything else, I HAVE to love it for that.
5. I love my breasts. They have nourished children, they balance out my body shape, and have been known to mesmerize many a man.  And Hubby loves having his own personal pillows to lie upon when we watch movies together.  😉
6. I love my hair. Now that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write, but it’s true!  I have recently learned that I’ve been treating my hair all wrong, and since I started treating it right, I’ve fallen in love with it.  It’s curly and sassy and just very, very ME!  And I like that my husband likes to play with my curls (they BOING!).  It also amuses me that Number One Daughter is fascinated by it.  She’ll stand next to me (if I’m sitting down) and just stare at my hair forever.
7. I love my skin. I first started loving my skin when I watched a video Hubby made of me… and my skin looked positively luminescent!  I GLOWED!  And honestly, I’ve always had pretty good skin – I never had huge breakouts of acne or anything (that’s not to say I’ve NEVER gotten zits, but I’ve never gotten loads of them all at the same time).

What about you?  What do you love about your body?  I’m sure if you really think about it, you can come up with something.  I did!

Self-esteem, attraction, and love: a fat woman’s perspective.

(Because I removed myself from FA for a while, I’ve been spending a lot of time going through various blog archives, reading what I missed. There have been a few posts that I really want to say something about, so I’ve decided to create a new category: What I Missed. This is the first post in that category, but believe you me, there will be more. I realize most of this will be old news to most of the people who read my stuff. But it’s one of those things where I read something, and I’m just itching to comment… but the post itself is old, so I don’t feel right commenting on the post itself. So I bring it here. After all, isn’t that basically what my own blog is for?)

Reading through Shapely Prose‘s archives for the past few months brought me to this particular post. I had read it back when I first found Shapely Prose, because I spent a couple of weeks going back and reading everything Kate, Fillyjonk, and sweetmachine had written. I read through all the comments, and I realized I just had to write my own post.

Kate’s post is brilliant (as usual)- I urge you to go and read that before you continue here (but if you want to read all the comments, be warned: there are a lot of them and it will definitely take you a while to get through them all).

It really got me thinking about self-esteem, attraction, and love in regards to my own life. Because even though I’ve had many boyfriends before snagging The Hubster, I always felt that I was unlovable. Why? The fat, of course!

It was drummed into my head from an early age that no one could ever possibly love me because I was fat. No other reason. My fat made me ugly, therefore I was decidedly unattractive, and no one would ever love me. Ever. Unless, of course, I magically became thin.

Only one person in my life ever attempted to make me feel good about myself, but it didn’t help much; she lived over a thousand miles away and I only got to see her once a year, at most. Aunt D was always the one person I could count on to actually listen to me and take me seriously as a human being, but hearing once a year that I was a valuable person wasn’t enough to counteract the negatives that I heard on a daily basis.

And I don’t just mean from peers, either. My grandmother was one of the worst ones for making me feel less than worthy – simply because she was the one person I should have been able to count on to bring me up, not tear me down. But tear me down she did. Between nagging me about every single thing I ate (even healthy food!) to telling me that the bullies were right when they told me I was fat and ugly to telling me that I couldn’t ever do anything right, she tore me down piece by piece by piece. (And to this day, she denies ever saying anything of the sort, but other people witnessed it, too – and remarked on it – so I know I didn’t hallucinate these things. [This is the main reason The Hubster really can’t stand her: because of the way he’s seen her treat me.])

So I believed it. The whole kit & caboodle. I was fat, therefore I would never be attractive to anyone, therefore I would never be loved. The worst part? I wasn’t even FAT! I was probably what would be considered overweight, yes. But so was my grandmother, so was my mother, and so were many other members of our family. On both sides. I was 5’2″ at 12 years old – and that’s when I stopped growing. 145 pounds. I wasn’t fat, I was just big for my age. I was one of the tallest kids in my entire grade, with only 2 others being taller than me – and they were both boys. So it was okay for them to be big, but me? Oh no, I was a girl, I wasn’t allowed to be bigger than 98% of the other kids. Nope.

But regardless of the realities of my life (the fact that I would have boyfriends anyway, regardless of what I’d been told), I truly believe that I was an unlovable person simply because of the excess adipose tissue on my body. No matter what, I always believed that one day, the person I was with was going to realize that I was fat and would be disgusted with his choice of a girlfriend. Which really sounds silly when you think about it. Suddenly realize? What, are these blind people? What the hell made me think that they couldn’t see the fact that I was fat when they first met me is beyond me. Like they were all hypnotized like Shallow Hal or something.

And every breakup – at least in my mind – was the fault of my fat. It didn’t matter if I’d done something wrong, or if he’d done something wrong, or if I was a bitch, or if he turned out to be an asshat… nope. It was all because I was fat. Because I was fat, that meant that I was unlovable, right?

I can actually pinpoint the one and only time in my life that I had anything resembling self-esteem. I was living in a group home after my final suicide attempt and hospitalization. (Ironic, don’t you think, that my one period of feeling good about myself immediately followed my period of feeling the absolute worst about myself?) The home was a good 25-30 miles away from my hometown, and I only saw my grandmother periodically. Getting away from the mental abuse I suffered every day and having (at least at first; it slowed down the longer I was there) daily therapy helped tremendously. The school I first went to out there was so different from the one I had come from, as well. At my old school, I was everybody’s favorite whipping girl. Even people I’d never even heard of knew who I was, and would join in on the torture. It was well-known by most of my schoolmates that I was one of the poorest kids there, too. At this new school? Nobody gave a shit about how much money my grandmother made, or if my clothes came from K-Mart instead of J.C. Penney’s. And they sure as hell didn’t care that I was fat. I wasn’t even called fat at this school. My looks didn’t matter one way or the other, it seemed, and because I was new, most of those kids were actually going out of their way to be nice to me.

And the population was much more diverse, as well. I came from a town that only briefly had one black family (until somebody torched their house, isn’t that nice? but I didn’t learn about that until well after that family had already moved to another town [I actually met a member of that family in a church two towns over, where my uncle and his wife lived]). Everybody else was white, and solidly middle-class. Here, there were people of pretty much every ethnicity you could think of, and for the most part, it seemed like a much more welcoming place, for everybody. I made lots of friends – friends that taught me a lot about inter-racial relations. I’d always been the kind of person who really didn’t think that other ethnicities (non-white people) should be treated any differently, but because I’d never really had much contact with anybody who wasn’t white, I really didn’t know how to relate to them. But it didn’t seem to matter to them. It was obvious – many times, I was asked if I came from an all-white town, as if they could read it on my forehead – but I guess it was just as obvious that, despite coming from whitey white-ville, I didn’t have any prejudices, certainly not against them.

So for the two years that I lived in that home, I had a very diverse group of friends, I wasn’t stigmatized as “THE fat girl” (as if I was the only one in the world), and I didn’t have to hear on a daily basis that I was worthless and ugly.  So, needless to say, my confidence soared.  I had boyfriends, I had girlfriends, and for the first time in my life, I was content with who I was.  It was a strange experience, I tell you.

Because when I moved back home in 1992, at the age of 16, it all went downhill.  I was once again living with the woman who constantly berated me for not being good enough – nothing I ever did was good enough.  And getting kicked out on the street at 19 with an 11 month old baby, having to go live in a homeless shelter, did nothing but tear me down even further.  I’m seriously amazed that I never thought of suicide during that time.  Before my BPD diagnosis (which I happened when I was hospitalized), the slightest thing would push me right over the edge.  But during that time, even though it was one of the worst times of my life, I managed to tough it out.  I’m amazed at myself.

My self-esteem had continued to erode to such an extent that at the time, even the breakup with The Little Helper’s biological father – at least in part – was attributed to my fat. Never mind the fact that he was an alcoholic, drug addicted, pedophile (!! – yep, only I didn’t find that little tidbit out until AFTER the breakup), abuser (I also found out – after the fact – that I wasn’t the first woman he’d beat around). And never mind the fact that the woman he left me for looked just like me, in every respect. Nope, I blamed it on my fat.

But then, being a single mother with two children and having the guts to get some job training, get an actual job, and then move out on my own did wonders for me. Finding another boyfriend who did nothing but make me feel good about myself helped a lot, too (thank you, Reg!). Being self-sufficient, raising my girls the way I wanted to (and not being second-guessed at every turn by some fundamentalist nutjobs running a homeless shelter), and really just being myself turned my life around. Oh, I still had self-esteem issues, sure. But I realized something. I didn’t need a man in my life to make it a good one. I already had a good one, and I’d done it all on my own.

I knew the relationship with Reg wasn’t going to last, and it didn’t. But it didn’t feel like the end of the world when that happened. Of course, the fact that Reg was honest with me and never claimed to be head-over-heels in love with me had a lot to do with my reaction when the end finally came. But I came away from that relationship knowing that there wasn’t anything I did wrong. He liked me, he was attracted to me (he was definitely attracted to me, if you know what I mean), he just didn’t feel that deeply towards me. And because he was always honest about it, and didn’t just tell me things he thought I wanted to hear, when the end finally came I was okay with it. Sure, I was disappointed, but I didn’t feel like my life had come to an end.

Kate wrote:

I’m not a big believer in the “You’ll only find love when you’re not looking for it” school of thought.

Well, I’m a living, breathing reason why people say things like that. I wasn’t looking. I was open to the idea, sure, but I wasn’t actively looking. My relationship with Reg had just ended, and from my experience with The Little Helper’s biological father proved, being alone for a while after the end of a relationship is a pretty good thing for me. So finding someone else was the last thing on my mind.

And then The Hubster fell into my lap, so to speak.

More correctly, he popped up on my screen. He and I met in a chat room that doesn’t exist anymore (on the Zone; they took out all the chat rooms back in ’03/’04 [can’t remember exactly], when MSN decided to get rid of all chat rooms across the board). He seemed like a nice guy (having to deal with repeated requests to “cyber” might have colored my perception a bit, though; anybody who wanted to talk without it being about sex would have seemed appealing to me), and talking to him seemed to be as good a way to pass the time as any. But never, in 1,321,858,498,432,321,687,984,651,657 years did I ever dream – at the time – that something permanent would have come out of it. Ha! Shows you how much I knew!

But we very quickly became attached to each other and fell in love. It still sounds a little bit strange, even now, but that’s what happened. We met online, fell in love before we even knew what the other one looked like, and he travelled halfway around the world to be with me.  Within 2 months of his arrival (well, 2 months and 4 days, to be precise), we were married.

But for some reason, the longer we were together, the faster my self-esteem continued to slide down that slippery slope into self-loathing-ville.  I can’t really put my finger on why.  I think it had something to do with the way The Hubster treated me for a while.  Not badly, per se, but he definitely started to take me for granted.  I began to feel like a piece of furniture for a while there.  And then he had the affair, and it pretty much destroyed any shred of self-esteem I had left.  In my head, I knew it had nothing to do with me (it wasn’t anything *I* did, I didn’t cause it), but part of me couldn’t stop thinking that maybe, if I wasn’t such a fat, ugly, worthless person, it wouldn’t have happened.  And I couldn’t help but believe that the other woman had been slimmer and ultimately more beautiful than I was.

It has only been in the last couple of years that my self-esteem has finally begun to make the slow, agonizing crawl upwards again.  The Hubster and I managed to salvage our marriage.  I began to realize that him having an affair had absolutely nothing to do with me whatsoever.  It affected me, yes, but he had compartmentalized me to such an extent that his decision had absolutely fuck all to do with me.  And I began to trust him again, to be able to believe that he really did love me.  (After all, if he didn’t love me, he would have had to have been the most masochistic person on the face of the earth, to go through that period with me, and to stick it out with me.)  I’m finally beginning to be able to accept that he truly loves me as much as he says he does, and that he finds me as attractive as he says he does.

So I hate it when people say “nobody will ever love you until you love yourself.”  I don’t mean that to say that self-esteem isn’t important; of course it is! But that’s taking away even the possibility of finding love from people who need that hope the most.  Of course you should love yourself – but even if you don’t, that doesn’t mean that you won’t meet someone that loves you. Even when you don’t.  And it’s harder for some of us than for others.  Not everybody has a great support system; and a person’s background has a lot to do with how they feel about themselves as adults (I’ve only scratched the surface of my background here; there are a ton more things I could tell you to explain why I grew up with such poor self-esteem, but this is getting long enough as it is).  But that doesn’t mean that someone with low self-esteem is never going to find love.  It does, however, mean that they might not recognize it when it’s standing right in front of them.  But it’s not an impossibility.

So if you’re single, and you think nobody’s going to love you because of the way you feel about yourself, let me just say you’re wrong.  You are attractive, you are lovable.  Maybe Mr. (or Ms!) Right just hasn’t crossed your path yet.  But that doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen.  I didn’t think it would ever happen to me, simply because I thought the way I saw myself was the same way everyone saw me.  But I was wrong.

And you are, too.

Reason #153568736165687 why my husband is awesome.

(The man in question, on a bouncy castle with Number One Daughter.)

As I said in a previous post, we have been communicating a lot more. Some of it has been a change in him, but the change in me has increased that desire for communication tenfold. As an experiment today, I asked him to find me a picture of someone whom he thinks I look like.

Contrary to what you might think, this was not a roundabout way of putting him on the spot and trying to get him to tell me I look better than I am. It was a way to get it straight in my head what he sees when he looks at me.

Because I gotta tell you, from the language he’s used when he describes me to myself, I really got the impression that he saw something completely different to what I see when I look in the mirror. The only way I could think of to put myself in his position and see what he sees would be to find a picture of someone else that he thinks I resemble physically.

When I saw the picture, I didn’t know what to say. Because it was obvious at that point, that he wasn’t seeing something different to what I saw… he just had a different opinion about what he saw.

You know, it was easier to understand when I thought he was seeing me completely differently. But to know that he’s seeing the exact same thing that I’m seeing… and he likes what he sees? It’s just really hard to comprehend. Not that it’s a bad thing, mind you. I just find it hard to wrap my brain around (as I said to him after seeing the picture, my brain hurts now).

So we talked about why I have such body-image issues. And this man, bless him, knows me inside and out.

“I think your biggest problem with your own looks is your stomach,” he said to me. And you know what? He’s absolutely, 100% spot-on. That IS my biggest problem. Ever since having children (because I didn’t have a problem until becoming a mother), the shape of my stomach has horrified me. I can’t stand looking at it, so I can’t understand how anybody else could look at me and not want to throw up, either.

So what does he do? He doesn’t say how disgusting my stomach is. He doesn’t just brush aside my insecurities. Instead, he suggests I try using a collagen-based skin cream to see if it would tighten the skin on my saggy belly.

And then says to me:

“You don’t have to lose weight for me, because I think you look beautiful as you are. As a matter of fact, I think you would look strange if you were thin. You don’t have the build for it.”

You know, he’s the first person in my entire life to say that to me. But it’s something I’ve thought about myself for years. I’ve never been thin. I’ve been thinner, but I’ve never been thin. I think I would look weird if I were to suddenly lose enough weight to be considered thin. I’ve got my polish great-grandmother’s build: short and stocky. Big bones, wide shoulders, the whole nine. And honestly? If my stomach had never come out of childbirth being so saggy, I really don’t think I would have the body image issues that I have now. That’s not to say that I would be perfectly happy with the way I look, because I never have been. Yes, I’m making a LOT of progress lately, but I’m not 100% there yet. But if my stomach looked even vaguely like it was before children? I’d be a lot happier with the way I look than I am right now.

And I just think it’s awesome that this man not only loves me for the way I look right now, but understands what it is that bothers me about the way I look and why, and cares enough to make suggestions on how to remedy it. And not because it bothers him, but because it bothers me.

I really don’t know if it would do any good – the collagen-based skin cream, that is – but the fact that that’s what he thought of? Not plastic surgery, not fad diets, not exercising until I collapse in a heap? The man is made of win.

No wonder I love him so much. 🙂