So, I’ve been reading and thinking and I just need to get going. Here are some thoughts, in the order they make sense in my brain, to kick us off:
- I believe, wholeheartedly, that Body Issues are about control
- But maybe not in the way that SaturdayAfternoonSpecialsAboutNotBingeAndPurging mean it?
- I didn’t know there were SKINNY people with eating disorders until…college? Maybe? Even now I kind of don’t believe it.
- I remember thinking I was fat, and fat meant “not pretty” and “pretty” meant “loveable” so “fat” = “unloveable” in, I kid you not, kindergarten.
- Every single member of my immediate family has an eating disorder.
- The first time I joined WeightWatchers I was in the 8th grade. It was a Fun Family Bonding Time activity.
- I have never, ever, ever, in my entire life, not been fat. Ever. EVER.
So, I’m actually really hesitant to talk about/join in on any discussion of LovingOurBodiesAndOurselves because, as the bullet points talking to you from the top of this page might indicate: I’m kind of aware that my relationship with my weight and my body have very little to do with “health” and very much to do with “OH GOD WILL YOU PLEASE DESIRE MY BODY SO THAT I CAN BE VALIDATEDDDDD.” I maybe don’t believe in weight-loss for health (even though my dad is, pretty literally, killing himself with his weight) because I cannot detach mental health from physical health and I have never (ever ever) gone on a diet that was about health and not my ideal body type. Including the diet I’m on right now. I am not kidding. I understand, on a strictly intellectual level, that diets for your health are A Thing That Is Real, and supported by science but when I read things like Claw’s first blogpost, I am filled with such rage and panic that I have to kind of shut down for a minute and take a walk and re-center. Claw eats SO MANY VEGETABLES and RUNS SO MUCH and IS SO HEALTHY and the thought that someone could look her in the eye and say “You need to lose 25 lbs or you will die early, and because you find pleasure in eating you are doing something wrong” (which is the overly simplified message I hear when I read that) is insane to me. I don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s real. At all. Even a little bit. That just cannot be how logic works. Claw, in my mind, is the Epitome Of Doing Everything Right. So, yes. There’s my bias, there it is.
I liked Mundy’s point about intuition: take a deep, mindful breath (thanks, yoga!), listen to what your body is telling you, and follow those instincts above all else. I think this is a way I would like to live my life. This is not the way I live my life. This is what I mean, I think, when I say that I believe Body Issues are all about control: my control over my body (and I do think of “us” as two separate and distinct entities – entities with a symbiotic relationship – but separate entities nonetheless), society’s control over me and my feelings about my body, my control over the environments I put my body in and how they influence it, etc. In recent years, I’ve taken some combination of the “be mindful of your body’s actual needs” approach + a “fake it ’till you make it” mindset I try to use in a lot of my life to create what has been a vaguely-functional relationship with my body, food, and exercise in the past few years.
Here’s another list, to lay out what I mean:
- While I may not believe, in my heart of hearts, that “I eat well because I care about HEALTH” is…A Thing Most Of Our Society Is Capable Of Feeling, I think it’s a really good thing to live my life like I believe. I eat a lot of vegetables, both because they are Skinny Food and because I understand that they are Good For My Body. I read the occasional raw food blog. I opt for locally sourced produce and things I believe have a smaller carbon footprint. I do these things because maybe SOME day I will care more about my body getting the nutrients it needs than I will about being skinny and I want to have a good foundation.
- I tell myself I feel better when I work out. I’m not 100% sure this is true, but I tell myself it is.
- Very, VERY recently – I’ve started pushing my body outside of its comfort zone. I hate pushing myself. A lot. I feel like just waking up and not loathing myself is already such an accomplishment PUSHING my body is just asking for something so outrageously above-and-beyond its laughable. However, I’ve started trying to push my body, to push past those feelings. I recently agreed to do a “Couch to 5k” running program with my friend Carly, in preparation to run a 5k in memory of one of our dear childhood friends who passed away when we were all first years in college. Grace, our deceased friend, was a phenomenal cross-country runner, and running was something which always gave her joy. It hurts my ankles, but yesterday I ran for SIXTEEN WHOLE MINUTES (not consecutively) and some of those minutes were in FIVE MINUTE CHUNKS. My ankles hurt like shit but man…it’s kind of weird that I very literally could not have done that a week ago.
- In my perfect world, I am able to read blogs like “The Fat Nutritionist” and be all “yeah! Eating is totally this thing that I have a great relationship with because I don’t think of it as some fucked up ‘other’ that is controlled by weird societal rules!” but…also be a lady who considers herself desired by other people. I think this will, some day (SOME DAY) have less to do with my actual size and more to do with my FEEELLLIIINGS. Like my attitudes about sex, in general…less about Actions more about Feelings, etc.
Whew. Sharing.
Feminist Phys Ed 
A couple things first in my immediate gut response to this entry.
Did this sentence/paragraph jump out at you like it did me in the Fat Nutritionist entry link I sent you (for the record, a couple of days before I posted about a different entry on the blog): “Responding to your body requires admitting, first of all, that you have a body, that you are a body, that your head does not float on a metaphysical balloon somewhere just north your body, untouchable. This admission requires you to acknowledge that bodies die, and that you will die too. The separation of mind and body, soul and body, spirit and body, is itself a coping mechanism, a sort of immortality project. ”
I need to mull over that one awhile, myself.
To be fair and clear: my personal trainer said “You need to lose twenty-five pounds” and I didn’t exactly hear “or else you’ll die early,” I think what I heard more like “or else you’ll age faster and be less mobile faster and suffer from having to carry excess weight by getting arthritis faster and have to take blood pressure medication (which is not without its side effects) sooner.” I didn’t hear “because you find pleasure in eating you are doing something wrong,” I heard “you eat too much to lose weight with what you’re currently doing, which is already definitely not nothing.” This is why I’m suddenly talking a lot about emotional eating. I only eat too much at night, and 95% of the time, I don’t overeat foods like cake, ice cream, or peanut butter because those things don’t come into my house. I overeat foods like cheese and bananas (not together) because those come into my house. (As an aside, it might be a weirdly interesting project to actually record what food I overeat and why. Weirdly interesting like a mild car accident, like a fender bender.) I don’t know how much pleasure I actually get out of overeating bananas and cheese?
Dude, srsly, the couch-to-5k thing is amazing. Running just TOTALLY sucks in my book. I envy those who like it. When my lungs and chest start burning on the treadmill, it makes me so desperately uncomfortable, I can’t believe some people look forward to this shit. Then I start to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth (as a runner friend once told me), turn up my music, and try to convince myself — for the bajillionth time — that I can be like those people. So far, no dice.
I hear you that a lot of other motivations, not all of them healthy, go into the “health” quest — more on this in my reply to Claw’s latest.
For me, feeling better physically has really helped to muzzle that inner asshole that used to feed messages of unworthiness into my brain 24/7. The voice is still there, but less insistent, and less convincing. Yes, I do feel better when I work out. The other side of the coin is that I am terrified what might happen if something keeps me from breaking a sweat when I really need to — an injury, say, or a bout of existential crisis (my version of depression, which I don’t think you’d call clinical).
My current fitness goal: do one real pull-up. I’ve been totally off the DVDs for over a week, but that pull-up bar is now in the doorway to the kitchen, staring me down. I want it to happen SO MUCH.
I never thought of the body/soul divide as a coping mechanism, exactly, but that makes so much sense. Maybe taking care of ourselves really can be the ultimate acknowledgment of our inevitable demise. For now, I’m still pretending I can cheat death.
Amen to overeating what’s available. Allow me to go off the ranch for a moment to confess some of my sad eating.
When I was super homesick and depressed while living abroad, I would take white bread and dip it in things. In Peru, I’d take like 3 or 4 big white flour rolls and dunk them in this very sugary yogurt beverage they have down there — sort of like kefir, I guess, but sweeter. I’d also dunk it in this suuuper sugary, watery style of oatmeal that you’re supposed to drink. Ana, the “help” in this particular homestay (yes, they all had “girls” who did housework — a topic for another blog) would shoot worried looks at me. Little did she know how much I ate outside the apartment. I vividly remember the textures and flavors, and the feeling of — relief, I think? — when I was as full as I could possibly make myself, actually sweating from being so full. This entire time I also went to the gym periodically and ran hard on the treadmill until the peruanos became worried that my beet-colored self would finally collapse. To this day I have no idea how I ran that far, or that fast — I certainly couldn’t do it now, unless running from some predator, perhaps. What an ordeal I put my poor body through.
In Spain, a friend told me how she learned to dunk white bread (sliced sandwich-style bread this time) in olive oil and sugar, and I made that combo my late night special. Again, it’s just what was in the house. They didn’t have cheap Chinese takeout or drive-thrus, so I improvised. I no longer worked out, but went for long walks that somehow made more more anxious than ever, and did apparently very little to stave off weight gain. I came home about three sizes bigger.
Those were days of legit compulsive overeating, I would say. And the urge to binge is still with me, but less frequent. I think one reason it hasn’t been as bad lately is that when I’m coping with Sad Feelings, I now mix in other types of thought-killers like TV and alcohol. (Health!) That, and vegetables; I will binge on a veggie like nobody’s business… and then fart loudly for hours. It sort of takes the glamour out of the whole affair…
Oh, re intuition: mine is buried somewhere deep, and has not risen to the surface yet.
Here I’d like to quote Mindy Kaling: “I wish I could just be one of those French women you read about who stays thin by eating only the most gourmet foods in tiny, ascetic proportions, but I could never do that. First of all, I largely don’t *like* gourmet food. I *like* frozen yogurt. I think it tastes better than ice cream. I love diet soda; when I drink juice or regular soda it makes my blood sugar spike and I act like a cracked out Rachael Ray, but without the helpful household tips. I even like margarine, though everyone tells me it’s basically poison or whatever.”
When I hear “intuition” I’m totally thinking about the Stereotypical Effortless French Woman. I know y’all are talking about something else entirely, but I can’t picture it.
The comment about eating too many vegetables and farting killed me. I totally have been there: see also fruit and reduced sugar reduced fat chocolate fudgesicles I used to buy from Smith’s, the local version of Kroger. I had a sore throat and a cold one week, and they were all I wanted to eat for dinner while watching too many episodes of Friday Night Lights. Oh, distress in my guts, when will you teach me to listen and develop mystical French lady qualities regarding minute portions of food.
P.S. I have totally gone through phases, like when I was writing my dissertation, when I regularly overate toasted bread + olive oil + sweetener + cinnamon. Well, at least that was included in the collection of things I ate when I overate.