Eating and Food Policing in Advertizing

Yanno whats been bugging me for the longest time now?  How women are allowed to eat on tv commercials. To wit, TEENY TINY BITES. BITES SO TINY AS TO PRACTICALLY BE MUNCHING ON AIR. WITH A GODDAMN HAPPY SMILE ON THE FACE.

Who eats this way? Seriously?

I don’t ever see a man eating food this way on tv.  No; pizza, burgers, whatever–its being shoved into a wide open, anticipating maw.  I guess such rapacious enjoyment of food is too UNSEEMLY for women.

Has anyone else noticed this?

NOM NOM NOM

So, there I was on Meetup.com, minding my own business, browsing and looking for interesting things to do in the area. Wondering if there were any fatty meetup groups around, I typed up “fat” in the search box, and hit #1 was a HAES group (HOORAY!) but hit #2 was a “fitness and activity group to stay FOREVER YOUNG” and the description pulled no fat-hating punches! Check this out! (trigger warning for ridonkilous fat hating spew):

…Oh I forgot, i don’t list restaurant events that tend to draw people with Big Guts and Fat Butts that find walking-hiking or any other physical activity a burden either so you can rest assured none of them will eat you alive if they are hungry. We are people that enjoy doing things as a SMALL close group at a variety of places and activities with the goal to keep things SIMPLE, generally CLOSE in travel distance, INEXPENSIVE, ENJOYABLE..

(emphasis mine)

YOU GUYS!! I KNOW!!

At first I was offended, because come ON, it takes more than just being hungry to make me eat people, amirite? Then after a few minutes, I just couldn’t help but laugh at how ridiculous an image that is, and my writer’s mind (being presently busy with writing a sword & sorcery type fantasy epic) came up with the following satirical nursery rhyme on the spot.

FEE FIE FOE FUM

I’M A FAT LAZY BUM

HATE TO WALK HATE TO RUN

BRING ME SKINNIES ON A BUN

 

 

DONUT!

In my other life, I am a jeweler. I have a BFA in studio arts and my particular emphasis and passion is in jewelery design and fabrication. At this point in my life, though, I don’t have the resources to realize my visions, so I spend most of my jeweler energies designing and ogling other people’s creations. The other day I came across this fabulous gallery based in San Fransisco, Velvet da Vinci, and spent over an hour or two admiring the work in the gallery images.

And then….

I found the images of Lynn Christiansen’s 2009 show “Maybe Just One More” and saw so many beautiful pieces, but one image stood out to me as the most hilarious and possibly most subversive piece in the entire collection–subversive in the sense that if a Fatty McFatty Fat like me wore it in PUBLIC, it would be like I were taking PRIDE in my fatness and in the horribly sinful JUNK that made me so obscenely disgusting! Wearing a DONUT BRACELET?! Why, that would be THUMBING ONE’S NOSE AT ALL THE SELF-HATRED AND FOOD MORALIZING WITH WHICH ALL FATTIES MUST FLAGELLATE THEMSELVES!

I want this bracelet.

I can only imagine that looks I would get if I wore it out and about. I would just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Fatties Run Around Outside and Have Fun

Getting in some exercise doesn’t have to be the torturous chore it so often is (for me anyway). We have had an inordinate amount of snow around these here parts so these two Fat Sisters went out this weekend and hit the local sledding hill.

When we were done sledding, we had a vigorous snowball fight. It was truly joyful movement and a good time was had by all. Anyone else out there having fun in the snow?

*the title of this post is a phrase that was uttered a few months ago on a Two Whole Cakes Fatcast by Lesley Kinzel as she described her idea of a perfect Fat Camp. Sounds pretty good to me too.

No Turning Back from the Dark Side.

I have just engaged in my first act of overt FA activism.

This is a big deal for me. Even though I have been in FA for nearly three nears now or so,  I haven’t actually ever had the courage to fight back against the standard narrative.  I’m not a confrontational sort and Im not one to present myself as an expert when I cant back myself up. Instead, I’ve spent the last three years quietly absorbing everybody’s words; every linked study, every argument made, and every myth busted.  When it came to being an activist, I simply refused to be a part of the normal dialouge.  If someone wanted to talk about her diet, I simply put on my deaf face (blankey mcdead eyes) and said variations of “thats nice”.  If someone wanted to snark on her body, I simply expressed my disagreement, and changed the topic or walked away.  If someone attempted to moralize food, praise or judge my food, I simply said “I dont beleive in diets–food is food” and ate whatever I was eating, often looking at whomever annoyed me right in the eyes. That usually shut them up.  (The one thing I have still not yet figured out how to handle is when someone says “I lost X pounds this week!” I don’t want to reward that statement with praise, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by dismissing them either. Right now, I just say “Thats nice.”)

Until today that was the extent of the activism I have been comfortable with.

Today though, a facebook friend of mine, who is VERY new to the whole FA concept after a lifetime of fighting with her body, and only recently resolved to stop dieting, learned from her doctor that her fasting blood sugar is 135, and is back on medifast.  I nearly flipped. Instead I posted on my wall a link to “You Did Not Eat Your Way to Diabetes! and then I did something I hadnt done before; I started evangelizing, and y’all it FELT GREAT!

I dunno where this stuff came from or how I even remembered where to look for the stats I needed (thanks should probably go to Notblueatall for refreshing much of my memory with her post today) but because of everything I’ve learned through three years of reading FA blogs, I was able to tell my friend why she shouldn’t ever feel bad for getting diabetes:

NO NO NO, dont ever blame yourself for it! even the American Diabetes Association says you cannot eat your way to diabetes. http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/diabetes-myths/

A relevant quote: “Most overweight people never develop type 2 diabetes, and many people with type 2 diabetes are at a normal weight or only moderately overweight. ”

Weight gain is only moderately correlated to diabetes, it is NOT a cause, but more likely to be a SYMPTOM of long term metabolic disorders. Only 18% of fat people have diabetes and (from webmd) “Of people with diabetes, 21.1% were obese, 9.8% overweight, 5% normal weight, and 4.2% underweight.”

Dont EVER let a doctor tell you that your eating caused your possible diabetes. Doctors are fat-phobes and brainwashed by big pharma. As for treating your blood sugar, all you need to do is moderate your carbs and exercize everyday. Improvements in health metrics resulting from weight loss alone are temporary–studies show that exercize is itself an effective regulator, and works long term regardless of weight. I’ll see if I can find the sources.

 

I’ve never been this “Activist” before, but Im glad I did, because now my friend is reading Kate Harding’s FAQ,  and doesnt sound like she hates herself for having high blood sugar–a state she admits runs in both sides of her family.  PEOPLE, DONT BLAME YOURSELF FOR YOUR GENETICS, COME ON NOW.

Do I feel ready to be more activist-y in the “real world”?  I  dunno, but I do feel ready to start rehearsing for it. And thats quite a thing to imagine–ME telling folks what’s what?

Shit, son.

I have been trying to compose a cogent post about the whole MCI (Marie Claire Incident) and am unable to put into words how I feel except to say THIS IS WHY THE FAT ACCEPTANCE MOVEMENT EXISTS; because that kind of outright hatred needs an antithesis.

Dusting away some cobwebs.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

O HAI! I wrote this post more than a year ago, and for some reason never hit publish. I don’t know why. Anyway, I came by to brush some cobwebs away and figured I may as well post this thing. Enjoy!

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I belong to this great meet-up group for homeschooling families in my area and a couple of weeks ago I was at this event with a couple of other moms from the group. One of the moms (I’ll call her Kay) is a really fabulous lady who also happens to be very petite. Kay always wears her 3-month old baby in a sling wherever she goes. This baby is ginormo-baby. If this baby lived in Grand Junction, CO, he would totally be denied health insurance. Seriously he is un bébé énorme, so Kay appears even tinier by comparison. Anyway, we’re all standing around chatting, and this completely random woman comes up and, after commenting on her baby’s size, starts gushing about Kay’s figure. It was 5 minutes straight of “you’re so thin and beautiful and the kids must really keep you busy and you must work so hard to stay slender”. On and on and on, so much so that I was starting to feel uncomfortable. I can only imagine how Kay was feeling. Finally Kay says, “you know what? It’s just good genes.” As the gusher’s sails visibly deflated, Kay went on. “Yeah, you know my mother is thin, my grandmother was thin and I guess I just lucked out.” Then she shrugged and the woman sort of awkwardly drifted away.

I am still a n00b when it comes to this whole Fat Acceptance thing, but when Kay said, “it’s just good genes”, something clicked. If the prevailing culture preferred a more rubenesque figure, I’d be the one having to tell this woman that “I just lucked out.”

An Exercise in Frustration. With Flashbacks.

I realized this morning that my soon-to-be 5-year-old is gearing up for a growth spurt. Well, I’ve sort of been aware of it for about a week or so, given the difficulty I’ve had in keeping food in the house. His appetite has been voracious. This morning a pair of shorts which fit him just fine the last time he wore them (last week some time), did not fit him today. So while I was out today (grocery shopping of course!) I decided to pop into to Target to see what they had for him. I found a couple of super cute pairs of Shaun White shorts (on sale, w00t!) in the next size up, so I decided to poke around and see what they had in the long pants department.

Here’s the thing. My kid is not, by any standard of measure, FAT. He is built on the stocky side with short legs and wide hips, just like his mama and there is no getting around the fact that he needs a husky jean. Last year, I wasn’t able to find any long pants in his size at Target or Walmart or the second-hand store, and honestly, I just can’t justify $25+ per pair of pants from one of the higher-end stores for a 4-year-old. (I needed at least 3 pairs, too.) I ended up just making a few pairs of pants for him myself.

Today at Target, it was the same thing. They had maybe 3 pairs of husky sized jeans and not one of them was in his size. Not one. While I was vainly searching through the stacks of little boy jeans, I had a sudden crystal clear memory of pants shopping for me with my mom at Sears, and having the exact same problem: needing a Husky size and not finding it. [sigh]

To top it off, Target charges $2 extra for Husky sized Wranglers. A fat tax. For children. Who aren’t really fat. It’s ri-goddamned-diculous. Luckily he is 5 years old, and won’t care that his jeans are homemade (again). *grumble*

The More Things Change

The other day, I decided to go through some old photos and scan a few to put up on Facebook.

As I was choosing the photos I noticed a few things.

First, I didn’t have that “OMG, I was so fat/thin!” reaction. I just look like myself.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t notice if I was fatter in one picture than in another. I just didn’t have an emotional attachment to my apparent or perceived weight in the photos.

It was just me.

Secondly, I noticed that even though I went through times when I was smaller or bigger, my body shape stayed pretty much the same, even from the time I was very young.

I never realized that. I spent so much of my life feeling like a huge giant whale–that my body was the wrong body. But the reality is my body is nothing more than it is.

And that is actually pretty cool.

I am tired

1. My energy levels are all wonky, so that I am tired at strange times and I have short bursts of energy other times. This is not conducive to blogging.

2. I went shopping today because I needed some goddamned Capri pants.

3. I found some! But not at Lane Bryant. WTH LB?!

4. I did find a dress at Lane Bryant and was even sort of able to make a outfit! Yay LB!

5. This is exciting because I do not really have “outfits” so much as “clothes to cover my nakedness”. Perhaps an OoTD post is in order.

6. But not today. I’ve run out of spoons.