Body shaming, and "My Big Fat Fabulous Life"

[thesummerqueen]

The woman apparently has PCOS. No fucking idea what that is though. Apparently it makes you gain weight really easily though. No clue how true that is or not. But she's apparently active. If she loses that 100-150 lbs that she says she plans on losing, it could be inspiring for others to do the same.

And yes, the modeling industry is the cause of a lot of women feeling uncomfortable with their bodies. My daughter struggled with Anorexia in high school. She's still not at a "healthy" weight, but at least she doesn't go days without eating. I feel bad for her friend, because she's a beautiful young lady. Anyone telling her she needs to lose weight needs their fucking eyes checked.

You can look up PCOS - I know two women who have it. One of them hasn't lost any weight because she has a victim complex I won't get into. The other is currently researching ways to help treat herself: she already eats healthy, and she is getting out and exercising according to what her body can at the moment, and she's considering surgery - the whole point being that she changes her lifestyle before the surgery to make it effective. PCOS can make it incredibly hard to do anything, but some people have the motivation to use whatever method they can to get around it. Just because your body is "one way" doesn't mean that you have to be held hostage to it. That's like me saying "oh, well, fuck my body naturally makes me depressed and once in a while suicidal plus I get terrible migraines" so there's no reason for me to take the birth control that mitigates most of the symptoms.

The show is not about "celebrating" obesity.  It shows her path to losing weight.  The show is about NOT accepting that a person is "less than" because they are overweight.

I remember standing in line, waiting at my black belt test, when an obese woman walked by.  I poked my friend and said "Eww . . . can you imagine ever letting yourself get that gross?"  I didn't know her name.  I didn't know anything about her.  I just reveled in the obvious fact that I was BETTER than she was. 

A few years later, life happened.  I won't whine about the details.  I gained quite a lot of weight. And yes, I did it to myself.  Walking is difficult now, but I go a little further every day.  People judge you.  I've had cars follow me on my walks with the people inside loudly making animal and retching noises.  One driver threw a soda at me as they passed.  People literally assume that you are stupid - - you are less than human.  You are disgusting.  

It's not about celebrating fat.  It's about celebrating a human being who has their own path and their own story.  It's about combating judgmental attitudes and stereotyping someone because of their looks.

I think on a certain level a lot of this is made up in the minds of fat people who feel bad about themselves. I don't know any of my friends who have ever said anything to the extent of fat people being stupid or less than people. I only hear this from overweight people who are talking about what other people think about them. Since you can't really know what other people are thinking, I infer a little that they feel this way about themselves.

Again, if they show is about losing weight it inherently is not about body acceptance.

You haven't hung around enough honest obese people then. You have no idea of the uninformed and unsolicited advice and opinions they get from people who don't know them. The body acceptance movement might be full of shit, but so is the weight loss movement.




Those of you on my facebook know I've been working pretty hard to lose weight to a certain point and tone up a bit - I have a goal that's not really 'cut' but curved and shapely. Part of this goal is enforced by my doctor due to my family's medical history.

We have to start defining things as "overweight" and "morbidly obese" - not using the words interchangeably.

I am overweight. I am not obese. Literally every time I go into the doctor, she checks my blood levels and everything comes out perfect, because I am active and except for the occasional treat a very clean eater. However, she still wants me to lose more weight because of the statistical probability of me developing those problems from my family history. So technically, I am healthy right now. Yeah, sure, I cannot do everything an athlete does, but then again, neither can people who weigh exactly what the gov't says they should. My ex was right on target and guess who could out-run and out-hike him, provided my asthma wasn't acting up?

Anyway, here's the thing: you can also be technically right that it's calories in vs calories out. That's definitely working for me right now. Weekly and monthly I'm seeing changes in my body as I work out. But to really change things, I had to starve myself. I'm not joking about that - I mean 600-1000 calorie days. I had terrible headaches, I couldn't work out. I was irritable and depressed and it was awful. But I had to do it and start adding food back in as I worked out more, because it's harder to lose weight once you're overweight. Your body has to adjust itself. That takes time, stubbornness, and effort. And it takes a lot longer than people would like to admit. Like I don't know how many of you have gone through the cycle, but the only reason I knew I could do this is I've been through it before. Imagine it being your first time trying to push through the 2 month or more hump of really busting your own balls for exercising before it starts to feel like a habit and feel good? If you don't know that there's an end to the tunnel, you'd give up and turn around because at least you know there's a way out back where you came from. Leaving aside addictions to food and other issues, it can sometimes be whittled down to a simple question: are you dedicated enough to keep denying yourself something your body literally is craving to survive in order to achieve what you want. This is athlete level endurance building - like deep sea divers fighting for control over their body's wish for air. Not everyone has that endurance.

But back on topic: People swing from one extreme to the other. If we're not shaming people, then we have to completely accept them. Well, no, we don't have to accept their unhealthiness, but we do have to accept them as people, and trust me, when you're overweight, you do get overlooked as dumber, or less worthy, than a skinny person. That's not to say skinny people don't get the shaft - people definitely look at women as if they're vapid and terrible if they're skinny. But that's people expect women to be vapid anyway. But we also don't have to accept most of the shit being sold for weight loss either. Most of it is bullshit, just like pseudo-psychological self-acceptance.

What I think most overweight people and obese people want is for other people to get out of their business. They know they're overweight or obese. No one has to tell them. They need encouragement and guidance in how to be happy about losing weight. We need to make eating correctly fun, and exercise stimulating.

Last night I experienced runner's high for the first time, and I've been running for quite a while. It's been over 2 months since I could run because of a hurt ankle. It was a shit run, by some standards, but during the second mile, I was hurdling some fallen trees, and it felt like the wind was in my teeth and I should have been loping along with a wolf pack. Humans evolved to run, steadily, slowly, joyfully, and god I felt it. But it's taken 2 years off and on to get there. What if someone told you that it would take two years to achieve something that's not going to net you more money or possessions? You'd tell them to fuck off, yeah? Because the work to get there is boring. We prefer narratives like what's told on TLC. We're fighting our own brains here - they want things other than what our bodies were evolved to do.