Eat food. Stuff you like. As much as you want.

[sebastienne]

Everyone who has ever read a post of mine on the topic Fat Acceptance should probably go and read this fantastic article. It says a lot of things that I have tried to say about the psychological effects of coercion, but much more succinctly.

A summary:

Being as fit and healthy as is possible for us to be is a natural impulse. On a personal level, I love cycling, and I enjoy eating well.

But every time I see a magazine cover or Facebook ad or hear a conversation or whatever reminding me that food-choice and exercise are all about the OMGHOLYGRAIL of weight loss, then my commitment to eating and exercising for their own benefits is eroded.

I think there's another facet to this, as well, which doesn't get touched on in this article - that any time I eat in public, or do anything that could be perceived as exercise (I cycle to work) or not-exercise (I get the bus to work), I feel myself being judged as trying or failing at my OMGONLYPOSSIBLELIFEGOAL of weight loss. Exmaples:

If I cycle, or eat a salad? "Good fatty, as least she's trying" or "Poor sad fatty, she's trying, but she'll never be happy".

If I get the bus, or eat chips? "No wonder she's such a fatty".

Sometimes, if I'm out in public, and hungry, I will let myself get lightheaded and dizzy and grouchy from low blood-sugar rather than deal with the judgement of the person from whom I'd buy food, or the people who'd see me eating it, or that I'd believe myself on some level. I'll walk up to a chip van, and think, "No - if I eat this I'm walking into the gluttonous-fatty stereotype". I'll walk into a salad bar, and think, "I can't bear for her to think I'm on a diet when I think the very concept is deeply damaging". Of course, the low-blood-sugar is making me panicky to start with, and even if I do manage to buy food (perhaps from a judgement-free vending machine, so it's almost certain to be junk) I might not eat until I've found somewhere private.

The above doesn't happen to me very often any more - maybe once every month or two? - but I thought it was worth putting out here, so that those of you who secretly think that the only barrier to my being a "healthy weight" was laziness or gluttony could get a bit of lived experience shoved their way. I may be able to self-CBT myself out of those thoughts most of the time, but sometimes I will actively damage myself rather than fulfil basic homeostatic functions because of the bullshit I've internalised over the last 24 years.

Of course, the other point which should go without saying (but so rarely does) is that it doesn't even matter if I am a lazy, gluttonous fatty. I get apathetic and lethargic sometimes, and I do love good vegan cooking, so maybe I do fall somewhere on the "lazy and gluttunous" scale after all. And you know what? That doesn't alter the basic human respect to which I am entitled.

I just wish it hadn't taken me over twenty years of internalising bullshit before I realised that.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: I am a fat woman. I am very comfortable for you, the commenter, to refer to me as a fat woman, whatever body type you may have. I find words drawn from the BMI scale to be pathologising and triggering, so please only use them if you are actually making a point about BMI categories.

Comments

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

That's a really good article and a good post. Thank you.

[x-mass.livejournal.com]

BMI is bullshit. it's based on someone's theories based on poor data from over 150 years ago. It's used for the same reason we use qwerty, because it always has been used, it just got popular recently as quotable metric. but it has no scientific basis whatsoever

a better analysis which measures weight to height was done in the fifties which H3/M worked a lot better than BMI's H2/M. Just to restate that that's height cubed divided by mass, not height squared

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Which is what you'd expect from dimensional analysis, anyway.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Jumping in - I don't claim to any specialist expertise - but here's the BMI scale, annotated (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Body_mass_index_chart.svg). The words tend to predicate "normal" at a very narrow range.

Ack, plz assume I have grammar.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Yes, loneraven's right - I just mean the descriptive terms that it ascribes to people based on their height/weight ratios.

[andustar.livejournal.com]

I assume she meant underweight/overweight/obese.

[andustar.livejournal.com]

My apologies, attempting to quickly stealth-LJ at work when I shouldn't really be online = not ideally phrased comment. I meant to put them in quotes, and to apologise for using them in the past.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the clarification - I'm just having a moment of "my space - my rules"!

(I've deleted a paragraph here which apologised for the fact that certain words trigger me, and self-deprecated about my trying to control other people's language. I don't actually want to say either of those things, but I do want to say thanks for helping to keep my journal a safe space.)

[andustar.livejournal.com]

It's absolutely your space and your rules, no apologies needed. I was just LJing when I should have been budget-budget-budgeting, leading to being a bit rubbish at both. I'm very sorry. I shouldn't comment on this sort of post if I don't have the time to do it properly. I'm here now.

I completely agree that those words are pathologising, they've been massively bugging me ever since you pointed that out. I mean, 'over' and 'under' what? The magical 'normal' that totally applies to everyone? That 'normal' where if you're outside it it must be because you have some kind of massive character failing, and the further out the bigger the failing? Cry.

That link is excellent. And your post also reminded me that back in the day I used to never, ever order salads or similar options in restaurants, even when they were exactly what I wanted to eat. I nearly always got comments (either admiring my supposed 'restraint' with a knowing 'ah, so that's how you do it', or 'no no, you need feeding up! GET THE WOMAN A JACKET POTATO NOW, SHE LOOKS LIKE SHE COULD BE TOPPLED BY A BREEZE!'*), neither of which I enjoyed. I really really didn't want to eat any food that sent the message that I was at all concerned about my weight, and that meant going for the pizza/chips every time regardless of what I actually felt like eating.

Sadly, it wasn't even out of a feminist awareness of the problems of dieting, but just out of sheer internalised misogyny and trying to be 'not like all the other girls/one of the guys'. I want to give 18 year old me a good shake. Luckily the faily comments have more or less stopped in recent years and I can usually order food without feeling like I'm representing something greater than myself. It must be even harder when it's got the weight (er, pun not intended) of societal disapproval behind it. I'm really sorry people can be so rubbish.

* Someone actually said that to me :/

[andustar.livejournal.com]

Thinking about this some more: from my experience as a formerly-very-thin person, people who you're interacting with in some way (people you're eating with, people who serve you food, people at check outs) feel very free to comment on what you've chosen to eat, whether in 'go you!' or 'eat a sandwich' modes. But I at least never felt any judgment from people who just happened to be around when I was eating. The benefits of privilege right there I think.

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

Love you. That is an excellent post.

I spent most of the last week feeling very triggered about weight. A combination of my gym being arses and 4/5 people asking me if I'd lost weight. I mutter no and then they say "No, you must have because you look so much better" (A false impression caused by me wearing less layers due to warm and being less depressed due to sun, I think). Which annoys me so much because looking good != less weight, less weight != something to praise and if I'm looking good SAY THAT, don't comment on how much I weigh because then I'll start thinking about that and that doesn't go well for pretty much any woman in our society.
The gym on the otherhand are reminding me it's time for my yearly check-up. Once a year, we get a free health assessment, which contains some potentially useful stuff like measuring your blood sugar levels, heartrate while exercising, cholesterol levels etc. And I get perfect green bars for everything because I am (surprisingly) healthy. Except for weight apparently. They claim my weight is too high and I need to watch that because it can have negative effects on my health which they just demonstrated was fine in pretty much every area correlated with weight . And I argue with them, they smile and nod and say that next year if I lose some weight I'll get rewarded with money off. Because I will have demonstrated a desire to be healthier, which I obviously do not demonstate by going to their gym multiple times a week.
I do wonder if I starved myself down to the weight they want in a unhealthy crash diet the week before, they would praise me and reward me for being healthy. They have degrees in this stuff, you think they would know that using BMI as an your prefered indicator of health when you have actual data on people is just... inaccurate and unreliable. Don't get me started on the rant about the free workout trainer they offer...

Sorry, this got really ranty and offtopic. What I wanted to say was *hugs* and I recognise those thought patterns and rubbish world let's go find a new one?

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

The other thing I wanted to say was about the coersion/reward stuff. I need to go to the gym, when I go it definately helps my depression (the other health benefits are just minor bonuses compared to how much that helps me) . But whenever they remind the reason I should be going is weight and that I'm failing at their defination at sucess it makes me feel rubbish, and that is the complete opposite to my reason for going and vastly reduces the health benefit to me to the point where I will stop going for a week or two until I can jump myself out of it.
(While I've been pretty negative about my gym here, it is usually a very awesome gym it's just once a year it puts on a failcakes festival and plays party games with my head)

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Oh, so much this! I know how much exercise improves my general mood, and how much better I feel when I have more physical strength, but I still have to trick myself into exercising by cycle-commuting everywhere, because exercising for its own sake feels too much like failing at weight-loss.

[vampire-kitten.livejournal.com]

exercising for its own sake feels too much like failing at weight-loss

I still find that hardest thing about my pilates class (which is awesome, I ADORE the woman running it and want to have children with her) is that I am considerably bigger than all the other women in it. And it's not that I'm big as much as they are all sufficiently slim that they can sit and bend forward without having to work out how to get round their bellies and sufficiently small-chested that an introduction like lie face down on the mat doesn't require a re-arrangement challenge. The best ones are the ones where we are lying on our sides and told to lift our arms above our heads, because my boob just drops out of the arm or front of my top. And I'm never sure whether to leave it - I'm exercising, it's happy, no-one is looking - or try to shove it back in - because dammit, no-one else is flapping nipples around, but if I do I'm our of sync and drawing attention to myself .
But every class I do have to calm myself down a little over people are looking, people are judging, people think god she must be doing it wrong because she doesn't look like the teacher yet. And it's only a little, and pilates is calming once the class starts but it raise the barrier just a little higher than I can manage some days.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I can't bear for her to think I'm on a diet when I think the very concept is deeply damaging

Could you please explain this a bit further? I'm aware of a lot of problems with specific diets (many of which are based on nonsense), and if your diet takes the form of "eat weird expensive stuff that you probably don't like for a few months and then drop it when you hit target/can't stand to eat lettuce any more" then there's an obvious problem, but that's not inherent to the concept of dieting. Are you thinking of something deeper? If so, what?

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Calorie-restrictive diets cause your body to switch into starvation mode. If you don't want to take my word for it, here's an article in The Times (http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/diet_and_fitness/article4256687.ece).

Every time someone diets, they are increasing their risk for developing an eating disorder, because by limiting their calorie intake in this way they are dysregulating their body's natural self-regulating mechanisms.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

[This comment ended up sounding much more confrontational than I intended, but I'm not sure how to tone it down. Sorry about that. Curse my inability to think of short words!]

Being, as I am, familiar with the state of science reporting in the mainstream media, I don't want to take The Times' word for it :-) Particularly not given that that article appears to have been recycled from a publisher's press-release. But close reading of the article plus a bit of digging turned up the work of Traci Mann (http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Dieting-Does-Not-Work-UCLA-Researchers-7832.aspx), whose meta-analysis of long-term studies of dieting found that "at least one-third to two-thirds of people on diets regain more weight than they lost within four or five years, and the true number may well be significantly higher". Thought-provoking stuff. Actual paper here (http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2007-04834-008&CFID=28541719&CFTOKEN=77879539) - it's behind a paywall, so I haven't read it. Thing is, though, if you overeat by even 100 calories a day you'd expect to gain over fifty pounds in five years, so that could just mean that the participants stopped dieting, went back to their old habits, and put all the weight back on. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet - even if it's not restricting you by much - for a long time is hard. To truly show there was a "starvation effect", you'd have to compare to a control group who didn't diet over that period. They may have done that, but it's not obvious from the abstract.

To be fair, I've noticed that if I eat more than usual for a day or two, I become ravenous afterwards; but if I don't give in to the excess hunger it reverts back to normal levels after a day or two.

by limiting their calorie intake in this way they are dysregulating their body's natural self-regulating mechanisms.

My body's natural self-regulating mechanisms are broken - if I eat what I feel like whenever I get hungry and only exercise when I feel like it, I get fat and unfit. I don't enjoy this, so I have to make a conscious effort to exercise and limit my calorie intake.

That's not really relevant to your point about eating disorders, though. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_disorders#Causes) lists a bewildering variety of possible causes of eating disorders, but previous dieting isn't among them (though I suppose previous dieting might affect leptin and/or ghrelin levels). I'd have thought it more likely that dieting is an early manifestation of what will become an eating disorder, and that the dieting and the eating disorder share causes. If you can cite me some evidence showing that the causality does go "dieting -> eating disorder" then I'd love to see it.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

Sadly all of this stuff comes from the PPP degree and I don't immediately have citations to hand, or the time/energy to look them up. I may come back to this if I get a quiet moment at work tomorrow.

[necaris.livejournal.com]

My body's natural self-regulating mechanisms are broken
As I understand it it's also fairly easy for the natural self-regulating mechanisms to be fooled? E.g. by the differences between modern humans' typical food / drink intake and what they evolved to regulate? (Which is compounded, of course, by additives in the food you get in most developed nations).

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll admit that this is straight off Google Scholar, but some of these are probably the references I studied in my degree.

As early as 1985 we've got people showing that dieting leads to bulimia:

Dieting and binging: A causal analysis.
Polivy, Janet; Herman, C. Peter
American Psychologist. Vol 40(2), Feb 1985, 193-201.

"The present authors propose that dieting causes binging by promoting the adoption of a cognitively regulated eating style, which is necessary if the physiological defense of body weight is to be overcome. The defense of body weight entails various metabolic adjustments that assist energy conservation, but the behavioral reaction of binge eating is best understood in cognitive, not physiological, terms. By supplanting physiological regulatory controls with cognitive controls, dieting makes the dieter vulnerable to disinhibition and consequent overeating."

There are more recent studies, too, such as:

"The role of dieting in binge eating disorder: Etiology and treatment implications"
Clinical Psychology Review
Volume 19, Issue 1, January 1999, Pages 25-44

BMJ 1999;318:765-768 ( 20 March ):

"Female subjects who dieted at a severe level were 18 times more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet, and female subjects who dieted at a moderate level were five times more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet"

Yes I'm aware that this does not prove causation. Most of the causation evidence comes from studies with rats, which I'll look up if I get any more time today.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[opportunemoment.livejournal.com]

I don't really have anything constructive to say but OMG YES to the thing about eating in public. I'm both better about it and worse than I have been, but, yeah, it's a problem.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

That bit sounds horrible :-(

[eurynome1967.livejournal.com]

thank you for this. whenever we talk about these issues i am always hugely (n.p.i.) grateful to you for being able to put into words, let alone syntax, concepts and thought processes which bump around my head making me feel frantic. nearly twenty years older than you, and nowhere near as able to talk about these things so well :) *hugs*

[deathbyshinies.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, if I'm out in public, and hungry, I will let myself get lightheaded and dizzy and grouchy from low blood-sugar rather than deal with the judgement of the person from whom I'd buy food, or the people who'd see me eating it, or that I'd believe myself on some level. I'll walk up to a chip van, and think, "No - if I eat this I'm walking into the gluttonous-fatty stereotype". I'll walk into a salad bar, and think, "I can't bear for her to think I'm on a diet when I think the very concept is deeply damaging". Of course, the low-blood-sugar is making me panicky to start with, and even if I do manage to buy food (perhaps from a judgement-free vending machine, so it's almost certain to be junk) I might not eat until I've found somewhere private.

This +1. Improved upon only when strangers/acquaintances actually do police your food choices for you in public. Very good link and post, thank you.

[the-whybird.livejournal.com]

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: I am a fat woman. I am very comfortable for you, the commenter, to refer to me as a fat woman

A disclaimer on what I'm about to say: I'm aware that it's not your duty to educate me, it's mine. I also want to make this clear: this isn't me trying to dictate policy on anything, it's me asking for advice on the right way to behave.

I have no problem avoiding BMI words if you find them hurtful.

But I am still uncomfortable using the word 'fat' to describe a person, whether that's you or anyone else. While I know you're comfortable with it, I'm also aware that there are people who aren't, who find it painful and hurtful, and who might interpret my use of 'fat' as giving legitimacy to entirely the kind of body-negativity that you're using it to try to avoid. And on an entirely more selfish level, I also worry that people would interpret my use of 'fat' to mean "the_whybird is a judgmental prick who can't see beyond peoples' appearance".

I'm aware that when working with the goal of using neutral language there's always a tightrope to walk between being patronising and being hurtful. I'm aware that I tend to stray on the side of the former. I don't know whether this time I'm too far on one side or the other.

Am I Getting it Wrong by making this decision?

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

It depends; what would you say instead of "fat"? Just because it's my preferred term doesn't mean that you can't use "person of size" or "larger person" or whatever.. but I do think that the use of pathologising, BMI-type terms increases stigma, in the same way that subjects in the US rated "homosexual marriage" a much bigger evil than "gay marriage" in several studies.

[the-whybird.livejournal.com]

Good question. The only answer I have is "I don't know".

All the terms I can think of tend to come across as either pathologising, patronising, or something that anybody who is of size will have had shouted at them from the back of a school bus at some point.

The net effect of this is that I tend not to talk too much in any conversation about body image issues. Which, on reflection, is probably not too bad a thing, if it means that I end up listening instead.

[sebastienne.livejournal.com]

The grade-A, gold-star thing to say, it occurs to me, would be "my fat friend - and I use the term 'fat' advisedly, she uses it, she thinks it's just a descriptor like 'tall' and I agree, there's nothing inherently wrong with it".

But that's one hell of a mouthful...

[necaris.livejournal.com]

But I am still uncomfortable using the word 'fat' to describe a person, whether that's you or anyone else. While I know you're comfortable with it, I'm also aware that there are people who aren't, who find it painful and hurtful, and who might interpret my use of 'fat' as giving legitimacy to entirely the kind of body-negativity that you're using it to try to avoid.
+1 to this -- I can't think of the right words either.

[huggyrei.livejournal.com]

According to the BMI, my ideal weight is about 7 and a half stone. This strikes me as a ridiculous weight. When I started uni I weighed around 9 stone and was probably a bit thin. I am certainly now healthier - for starters I actually eat vegetables rather than kebab van food - but weight about 10 and a half stone. If I was at my 'optimum' BMI weight I'd be in serious trouble. I am naturally curvy and happy to be so.

[robot-mel.livejournal.com]

Most excellent post. I enjoyed reading it and the comments. It also helped me realise something about myself. Exercise does make me feel better, but then I also have it deeply engrained in me that exercise=weight loss. And in my mind being skinny=terribly depressed. So not wanting to loose weight I find it hard to get the motivation to exercise. Hopefully now I realise this I'll be able to change that association. So thank you!