Photos! Because I want people to face their fear...

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, and I think it's probably time... I'm going to drop the '-tacular' in my posts.

It's a bit weird, since I set out to have all of my titles involve the suffix '-tacular' when I started this blog, and for once I was pretty good at sticking to the task I'd set. But I think the shtick is somewhat redundant, and I've been considering doing something a bit more 'regular' with this blog anyway. Updating it every day would be awesome, but failing that, having some sort of special segment every Friday, perhaps, thinking about what I've seen during the week involving FA and my general musings about things I see and hear.

Anyway, the purpose of my post today is to present photos. Of me! Yay!

I'll do that in a moment. But first I want to talk about fat chicks in magazines and newspapers. A few weeks ago Two Whole Cakes wrote this post about a bunch of fat chicks doing a photo shoot for well-known shittiest-newspaper-in-all-of-Britain, The Sun. Basically what happened was that former UK pop star, Claire Richards (no, I don't know who that is) went from a size 10 to a 16 relatively quickly, and posed naked for a photo. The Sun got three women to copy this pose, and I think they all look great. But one of these ladies "could not look at the picture of herself naked." This lady says:

"When I was posing for the photograph, I could feel my belly flopping on to the floor. I couldn't suck it in, so I know it is going to look awful.
"As I'm 5ft 9in, I carry my weight quite well, but my tummy is always a problem area. I always make sure I buy clothes that cover it well."

I've always enjoyed that phrase "carry my weight well". Because, I mean, who doesn't? I carry my weight very well, at 5'4" and 102kg. I never have to take a breather while carrying my weight, and I don't abuse it while I carry it, I don't drop it. Can I get some praise?

Anyway, this is hardly the first time I've seen a chick (or even a dude) be all like "Oh, no, my stomach's sticking out! How horrible!" or "I don't want to look at that photo of myself when I look all fat like that!" or whatever else. It's been long established that people are afraid of becoming fat, and I guess the problem with looking at photos of yourself is that that fear you have of being fat might be confirmed.

To which my question is: um, guys? What are you so afraid of? I mean yeah, the supposed health implications of being a Size Mammoth are probably a bit scary, but it's not as though a person looks at a photo and can see 30% of most common cancers, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, dementia, incontinence, heart disease... and all of that other crap. I really don't think it's the health aspect that terrifies many people, so much as it is the appearance aesthetic. Fat is ugly, of course. That's what our society believes. And I think that's the fear.

... it's actually not that bad, guys. Truly. I mean, yeah, I'll admit, I do often see myself in photos and go "eugh! THAT'S how fat I am?!" but believe me, I'm trying to stop that. Learning to love yourself after a lifetime of being told that you'd be so beautiful if only you lost weight, is difficult.

Anyway, to show you just how not-that-awful it is, I present photos of me and my fat! (no nudity, I promise)


Let's start off big. My fat fat gut, and my legs! Like the dress? I took this one from somewhere above my chest, I think.


Another shot of my legs. They're pretty thin for a fat person, so I'll not post any other photos of them. That's not what people are afraid of.


Here we go! Rotate your heads 90 degrees to the left, and you can see my knockers (again, small, for a fattie) and the majority of my fat, which I store on my front. C'mon, you wimps. Have a look-sie. If you're afraid of becoming fat, THIS is what you're afraid of. Seriously. This is it.

...I kind of think it looks like a beach ball, or something, from that angle.


I thought this one was kind of funny. I took it holding the camera somewhere above my... never mind. Anyway, I dunno if this really shows much. Maybe you shouldn't be able to see any of my stomach from that angle?


This is similar to my third picture, but I'm sitting up a bit straighter.

So there you have it. That's my fat. Someday I might post an underwear shot, but I'm not holding my breath on that front and neither should you.

All joking aside, I feel that this fear says something else - something that I think needs to be addressed. I find that I'm weirdly reminded of the second season of Glee, which featured a homophobe being scared (or violent towards) Kurt, because he's gay. The very definition of a homophobe is "somebody who is afraid of gay people". Most people in society agree that being afraid of a homophobe is utterly ridiculous and downright insulting towards gay people. And I'd like to make the same argument here. We are NOTHING to be afraid of. It is not like hanging out with us is going to make you fat (despite what morons like Mimi Roth will have you believe). It is utterly ridiculous of people to be afraid of what we represent. We're not evil. We're not pathetic. We're not going to fall down dead as soon as you turn your heads. We're just fat. That is really, truly, honestly, all we are. And if you're so afraid of becoming like us that you're sacrificing health, happiness, time, relationships, and whatever else people sacrifice, in order to hypothetically one day be able to guarantee that you will never, ever be like us... that makes me kind of sad.

Musetacular, because bugger me it's been a while.

It's currently 4 in the morning here, so hopefully I'll keep this relatively short. But it has been a long time since I've updated, and there is something I've been musing on of late.

First, the run-down. It's humid as buggery here, I have a month left in Japan before I go to Australia for a few weeks (woo!!), my tea-ventures would be happening if it wasn't so humid that the thought of imbibing hot drinks didn't make me sick in the stomach, my eating is... not great, but I guess it's been worse, and my sleeping is obviously completely fucked because it's currently 4 in the fucking morning.

Now on to my musings. During my days here, chillin' with the peeps in the International Circle lounge, chatting to people in my dorms, pursuing people's Livejournal posts, etc, I've been noticing a lot of weight-talk. It's a constant, of course, but one thing about being into this whole FA business is that it makes you hypersensitive to weight-loss talk. This is what I've been seeing lately:

- several friends doing the whole 'sometimes i think like i'm able to eat anything and it'll be fine, but that's so not the case's.
- a friend putting 'i want to lose weight' wish cards on the wish-branches for Japanese summer festival
- 'i'm trying to slim down' facebook statuses
- weight-related livejournal posts
- 'my weight is my fault' discussions with friends

It makes me want to grab every single one of these people by the shoulders and yell 'THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO! WE CANNOT CONTROL OUR WEIGHT! LIKE IT OR NOT, YOU WERE MADE THIS WAY, SO GIVE YOUR BODY THE RESPECT IT DESERVES AND FUCKING GET OVER IT, MOVE ON, AND LOVE YOURSELF THE WAY YOU ARE!!!' But I can't do that, because people are completely incapable of believing that they are anything other than totally in control of their weight.

That in itself is interesting. The thing is, most of the people I talk to are reasonable, clever, rational individuals. People who think, and do not necessarily fall for the conventions of society. These people are often very much of the opinion that everybody is different, that people do have different body structures, that not everybody can be a size 0, etc.

And yet, they still think they need to/can lose weight.

This has baffled me for years. Even when I was in such a deep relationship of hate with my body that it did not look as though we would ever be able to set aside our differences and move on. I would have specialists say to me "Not everybody can look like a supermodel. Some of us are naturally larger than other people". Sweet. Fine. Cool. But THEN they would say "However, you still should lose weight."

Can anybody else see the total contradiction here? Is there something in these very simple statements that I'm missing? Some kind of loophole I wasn't aware of? Because it really does look to me as though everybody is saying on the one hand that you're fine, but on the other hand that you're not.

I think the difficulty here rests in society's ABYSMAL attitude towards us fats. So ingrained in all of our minds is this attitude, that it always manages to subconsciously be the exception to any sort of self-positivity related rule or belief. You know what I mean. The old "Gillian, you're really very good looking, if only you'd lose weight" malarkey, or the old "Gillian, you're in really good nick. All your stats here are good. But you're overweight, so clearly you are more fucked than anybody who engages in constant excessive drinking, chain smoking, night upon night of unprotected sex, no exercise whatsoever, no sleep whatsoever, unending stress, and any other unhealthy behaviour. No no, you are quite clearly fucked, because of the shape that Mother Nature bestowed upon you at the time of your birth. Don't let the data here fool you. You'll be dying very early indeed, my friend" thing. Even if we remove that personal pronoun (chosen almost at random, I assure you), there are certainly a lot of unbelievably awesome people out there who, I think, are more-or-less aware of the extent of their awesomeness, except in that they feel they need to drop a few kilos.

What I've noticed in particular, is that people cannot seem to understand that our weight is largely beyond our control, and that our bodies will do absolutely ANYTHING to keep us from losing weight. I've gotten into this argument with a lot of people (of that smart, reasonable calibre I was mentioning earlier), of varying weights. Most of them are on-board with me about us having as much right to look and feel fabulous as anybody else, and the larger of these individuals have even gone so far as to actually BE as good-looking and fabulous-feeling as anybody else. But all of them, without exception, become horribly unstuck when I give them my stance on weight-loss. They are all utterly incapable of understanding me, when I say that the human body is so unwilling to have us lose weight, and that no matter what sort of weight-loss-intended diet you go on (it can be the purest, most healthy, most exercise-laden diet in the world), 95% of the time that weight will all come marching back in like the die-hard (try die-IMPOSSIBLE) trouper it is, five years down the line. This idea completely baffles absolutely everyone, even the people who have been on diets and have experienced FOR THEMSELVES this quote-unquote tragic failing of the human body. Y'know, that failing that kept us from going into extinction for 2.2 billion years, thereabouts.

It doesn't strike me as that hard a principle to understand. But I guess I am approaching this from an unusual angle - as somebody who has witnessed most of the people in her family trying to lose weight, and failing, constantly, despite all of them having really good diet and exercise regimes (or at least regimes as good as those of surrounding thin people), and thought that there had to be a reason for herself and her family being this way, beyond our apparently appalling lack of discipline or whatever other tripe the commenters on obesity-related news articles like to prattle on about like they fucking know everything. Having found this reason, I now feel as though we should be celebrating our diversity, how genetics has conspired to make us all truly unique and therefore interesting, and finally telling the weight-loss and diet industry to do all the fucking off it should have done when it started drastically affecting public health with its bullshit. But most people are unable to comprehend what I'm saying.

I think that what I say is only insanely hard to understand in that it goes against what has been drummed into us by every know-it-all weight loss agency, diet pill company, gym, and concerned parent, for the past 50 years. What I'm saying goes against all of these people, and I realise that in saying it I sound like some crazy conspiracy-theory nut who believes the government planned 9-11 or that man didn't land on the moon or whatever. And maybe I am. Maybe it is totally crazy of me to feel that fat is not something to be afraid of. Maybe it is ridiculous of me to believe that we deserve to consider ourselves just as beautiful, or as healthy, as somebody who does not have what feels like a life-long battle with finding clothes of a comfortable fit anywhere that isn't online. And maybe it is beyond the realms of possibility for us to feel as though the way we are shaped, designed, created, by the amazing powers of billions of years of evolution and the resulting variety afforded to us by DNA, is something for us to consider spectacular, rather than one of the worst failings of modern society. After all, it goes against what everybody thinks.

Of course, everybody once thought that Earth was flat, and the sun revolved around it. Just saying.

Drinks-tacular! Or, my ventures into coffee and tea.

For the past extremely-long-amount-of-time I've had this constant feeling of tiredness. Not uncommon, I know. I think a lot of people feel tired a lot of the time. But I've always felt that it doesn't have to be that way, particularly not during times when I'm not having any trouble sleeping (such as now).

If you've read my entry a few entries down, you'll know that since being back in Japan I've been trying to work on my morning schedule. I've been waking up at around 6-6:30 (I'm trying to make it 6), going for a brisk walk (which is all it takes for me to start sweating profusely, as I'm neither particularly fit nor particularly feminine when it comes to the amount I sweat, much-obliged paternal gene pool), coming back, having a cool shower and eating breakfast. Breakfast for me is normally something like a bowl of cereal, or a few pieces of toast, with water. But lately I've been thinking that I should add a hot drink to the mix, since hot drinks are good for waking a person up.

Problem: I don't like hot drinks. Well no, that's not true. I love hot chocolates. If I feel like treating myself on a cold winter's morn, a Gloria Jeans hot chocolate would have suited me well every time in Australia, and the Starbuck's version is adequate enough in England. But hot chocolates have never suited me well as a kind of "wake-up juice", so I've tentatively decided to start getting into those two species of drink that I've always disliked: coffee and tea.

About a week ago I bought breakfast at Macca's. I had a hankering for a Bacon and Egg McMuffin. Annoyingly I accidentally bought a McGriddle instead (I thought they were McMuffins, I don't know, I wasn't thinking), and I dcided to take the plunge and get a coffee as well. I came home and left everything out while I showered, so it was already fairly lukewarm by the time I got around to consuming it, which wouldn't have helped taste-wise. The McGriddle was revolting. I'm quite fussy about tastes (even though I like a lot of different tastes), and to me sweet and savoury should be relatively separate, and having salty bacon, cheese and egg on a disturbingly sweet bread-like substance (which was soft and dough-y and felt uncooked aswell, yeurgh!) did not bode well with me. It's like putting chocolate sauce on steak, you know? But at least I finished it. The coffee was unbearable. I added the sugar and milk I'd been supplied, then added another teaspoon of sugar and splash of milk from my own supply, and it was STILL too bitter. People tell me that good-quality coffee doesn't taste bitter and I'm prepared to believe that it doesn't, but I've tried a lot of coffee in my time and I've not yet been rewarded for my struggles with a coffee that doesn't taste like hell and everything beyond, to me. I didn't finish it. Didn't want to.

It's a bummer, really, since I quite like coffee culture. I fully intend to do a barista course at some point and I'd be totally into owning a coffee shop, or even just working in one full-time while I complete my higher degrees (in an ideal world, of course. In reality coffee shops don't have many jobs on offer). So it's a pity I can't seem to stomach the primary beverage of these endeavours. Yet, anyway.

Fast-forward to this morning, when I went on my first walk for a few days (I've been feeling depressed lately. Don't ask. The walk greatly improved my mood, but), came back, showered, posted a Facebook status about ANZAC day (Australia and New Zealand's primary day for remembering our soldiers of war), and decided that I should probably do some breakfast-having activities. I'd been to the 100 yen store a few days previous and bought some instant coffee and English Breakfast teabags, and today I decided I would give the tea a go. I poured the hot water, added the teacup, let it steep (is that the right word?) while I thought about my grandpa (ANZAC day, y'all), took the teabag out, added enough sugar to satisfy the quota for at least a dozen Chuppa Chups, poured in a splash of milk and had a taste.

And it wasn't too bad! As I continued to taste intermittent sips of it it became gradually less nice (it was cooling down and I really had added too much sugar, and I think I'd prefer raw sugar to white), but I was able to finish it! And it wasn't the most horrible thing in the world! In fact, at first, I was actually enjoying it!

This probably seems like a really silly thing for me to get excited about, but to those of you who think that, let me explain. When you're with a bunch of people sitting around a table, and they ask if you'd like tea or coffee, it's pretty damn embarrassing when you have to say "water's fine, thanks" (even though it IS. Water's the best drink EVAH, man!). It's also pretty damn embarrassing in a cafe when the waiter brings out a mug of coffee and a chocolate milkshake and places the coffee in front of you and the milkshake in front of your 13-year-old cousin, and you have to swap them around. It's also really annoying when the only complementary drinks on offer are tea or coffee and you're there having to say "yyyyyyyyyeah I'm right" when they offer you one or the other.

So, I'm going to work on this! I've read about taste buds, and how you can train yourself to like particular tastes. This explains why my mother, the fussiest bloody eater the world has ever known (and I mean, seriously, y'all have no idea) likes coffee as much as she does, and why many people talk about controversial foods like vegemite, saying that at first it was the most revolting thing they'd ever eaten, but it ended up growing on them (my mother, incidentally, HATES vegemite). Hopefully with a bit of willpower and determination I will end up liking these drinks too. It's good to know that with tea, at least, this transition will not last for too long. I think coffee is going to take a while.

Debatetacular... or at least what passes for a debate on The Escapist

One of the many great things about Fat Acceptance is that in being part of it, I'm becoming more exposed to other equality movements, and in a way that I'm quite happy about. I'm starting to recognise my casual use of able-ist language (and actively try to stop myself from using it), I'm noticing racism more frequently (which is great, because it has allowed me to firmly cement the belief that I have pretty much always held that I am not racist, despite what people in the past have thought and said), and I have even been getting more into feminist issues. Although feminism should probably be the other equality movement I should be fighting for, being female and all, I've not really given it much thought. I figure it's not my piece to play.

Anyway, if I had more time, money, dedication, etc, I would probably be a fairly attentive gamer. I love puzzles and adventures and all that stuff, and there's something about shooting bad guys in games like Doom that is nothing short of cathartic. I'm a member of The Escapist, which is a great site for gaming and game discussion, and incidentally the host site of some of my favourite weekly series' (Zero Punctuation, The Big Picture and Extra Credits, to name a few). For better or worse I occasionally participate in the forums as well, and one of the topics on the forums today was on breastfeeding in public.

Well, of course, I had to participate in it. I vaguely remember, as a child, watching the occasional woman whipping out her newborn child's feeding apparatus and coaxing said newborn child to have its lunch, and I remember being somewhat intrigued by the process. It never entered my mind that the process was indecent. Isn't it what you're supposed to do, after all? When baby's hungry, baby needs to eat. But the issue of public breastfeeding came to my attention a few years ago via Penn and Teller's Bullshit! episode on Breast Hysteria (season 5, in case you're interested in hunting it out). I was amazed that so many people were against public breastfeeding. I wasn't and never have been a gibbering moron; I know that it's considered indecent for women to remove their bras and shake their bouncing knockers around as though they're church bells, but I figured that most people would surely realise that these women aren't just exposing their breasts for shits and giggles here. I'd have thought feeding a hungry baby would take precedence over possible offending of the populace with your exposed and probably not very pretty nipples.

Evidently not, if this forum's anything to go by. Most people appear to be on my side if the poll's anything to go by, but many are against it. Here are some inspiring bits of prose by the nay-sayers:

As a 20 something man, I feel perfectly justified NOT wanting to see certain things when I go out into public. Its not because I think its wrong to breastfeed, or even because its supposedly "obscene". It just strikes me as something that should be done privately ... Any time I see breastfeeding in public, I turn my head and am forced to make an effort to not look. If its being done in a restaurant, I have trouble continuing to eat without staring directly at my plate.

I can appreciate this bloke (he's the OP, btw)'s discomfort, but my main argument is that his comfort really should not be considered more important than a hungry child. Not feeding a hungry child is something that I would argue to be child abuse (not that that's a phrase I really like slinging around, but it's like when forcing a child to diet. It's cruel). What I really enjoyed was his "20 something man" part. I'll bet he's sis-gendered and white too.

while i personally would prefer it if they didnt, i understand that the baby has to eat, if its outside then there's not really too many places you can go, however if its in a restaurant i'd rather they went to the bathroom or something otherwise its realllly awkward

Sorry about the poor grammar. I think this person's mostly got the right idea, but the bathroom bit... well, maybe, if they have that option. But I'd argue that you wouldn't want to eat your lunch there, so why should the baby?

No one should have to adjust what they're doing so they can keep one person comfortable at the expense of the rest of the crowd

Really? Even when that one person is less than a year old, and as-yet incapable of producing their own meals, while the rest of the crowd has the ability to look away?

Now for some yay-sayers, just to keep things even.

I don't really mind, but you do know that a baby crying in public is much more annoying that breastfeeding, right?

I reckon! A few people pointed this out, and I think it's probably the best argument for getting the nay-sayers to stop complaining, because it's addressing their comfort. Ahh, humans. What a selfish bunch we are.

It's a perfectly natural act. If you wanna act like a 12 year old boy about it you should probably grow up and show some respect. Mothers don't get to chose when their kids are hungry. And how would you like it if someone said that you can't eat in public, but that you had to go into the bathroom to eat.

Spot on. And I told him/her as such.

How dare, how dare I say, that woman drag herself out of the house where she might inconvenience you with the sight of a perfectly natural phenomenon.

Come on, boyo, she went through nine months of relative hell and then squeezed a baby out of a hole severely undersized for the job. Now you want her to stay at home, too? Post-natal depression gets so many women in part because of the isolation you'd see mothers go through to prevent you seeing a nipple. You're perfectly justified in not wanting to see it, but she's also perfectly justified in wanting to go out on occasion. Babies get hungry at all hours, man, she's just got to go with the very literal flow.

This one made me lol. I just loved the "How dare, how dare I say" bit.

Anyway, I commented similarly, emphasising that it's possible to look away. The OP replied saying "should I look at my plate then, if she's directly in front of me?" to which I answered "yeah, if it bothers you that much" This other chap then replied, saying that the mother could take a bottle or two when they go out, and that the nay-sayers are basically saying that asking the mother to have a little decency is not too much to ask for in modern society.

This is where my initial spiel about feminism comes in, because here was where I smelled male privilege coming into play. Not that there aren't women against public breastfeeding as well, because there are, but anyway. What struck me at this point was that, were breasts a male organ, and were men the ones having to expose that body part to feed children, what would the public reaction be? In my humble opinion, I don't think there would be nearly as big an outcry. Men, after all, are not expected to always be put-together and decent and proper all the time, like women are. Consider how much more OK it is for men to rearrange their clothing in public than it is for women. For something more related to the topic, consider how much more OK it is for men to be completely topless in public than women. Now admittedly for that one you can argue that breasts are a sexual organ and therefore should be covered, and women are allowed to walk about in bikini tops all they want, buuuuut... I'll argue that. Firstly, while men are very sexually attracted to breasts (and why wouldn't they be?) I'd argue that their main purpose is for breastfeeding and for telling men and women apart. It's the womanliness of breasts that makes men find them sexy. I mean, vaginas are undeniably sexual organs, but men would surely say they find breasts hotter than vaginas, just like I find pretty much every other part of a male more attractive than his penis. Secondly, even if we compare topless men to bikini-clad women, I think the men are still more socially acceptable. Not by much, nowadays, but still.

My point is, even nowadays when feminism has made such an impact on how we as society view women, there still seems to be a fair ways to go. When something like public breastfeeding has such a large percentage of people saying "it's wrong and indecent", when it's, you know, an action that serves a REALLY IMPORTANT BLOODY PURPOSE, you have to question how equal men and women really are, even in these modern times.

Updatetacular, of sorts.

Just a bit of general stuff, I think.

I've been back for a week now, and it's been pretty good. I've been waking up nice and early (6am thereabouts), and on most days doing for fairly vigorous walks, which is about all the exercise my unfit body can probably handle right now. I didn't go this morning, but more on that later.

I've done a few English lessons, and I have a few others lined up. We'll see how my new clients go, because they're a few that I'm worried about. My clients have pretty much all been young women like myself, but on Sunday I'll be meeting a 3-year-old boy whose mum wants me to play with him or whatever, speaking to him entirely in English. I've also got to meet a man in his 30s, I think, in a week or so, which I'm kind of freaked out about. It's a bit silly, but I've had trust issues with men for the longest time. It probably has something to do with primary school bullying or whatever. Anyway, time for me to person up (you know, man up, woman up? I prefer not to specify a gender) and grin and bear it. It's not like he's an ogre of a bloke either - I've been emailing him and he's quite lovely.

Eating-wise, things have been... better than they were before I went back to England, but not the greatest, I'd say. I've consumed a fair amount of chocolate and I'll probably continue to do so. I'm not too worried about this, because even with the chocolate consumption I'm eating far better that I was before, and anyway it seems to be making me feel a little better.

Yes, that's the thing. It's very lonely here at the moment. The only other person on my floor is the American girl, and she's nice and we get along quite well, but she's not someone I'd actively spend a lot of time with. And to be fair, there are very few people I would actively spend a lot of time with here, and none of them are here right now. It kind of sucks, and I'm feeling pretty unhappy and missing my family quite a bit.

And the unfortunate thing is that being in this sort of mood makes you think about your place in the world, in a bad way. Like, I think about friends I have/have had, and I realise that after uni I'm not going to have any good friends, really. Because my uni friends will move on and my pre-uni friends are all in Australia, and if I stay in England I won't be near them, obviously. I might make friends at my next place of stuff-doing, whether it's a job or at another (or maybe the same) university doing a masters, but you can never be sure. I've never been the greatest friend-maker the world has ever known, and even with my good friends I'm hardly the most significant person in their lives (primarily because they're able to do normal-person stuff like have boyfriends). It's somewhat sad to think that the only place where I have real significance is amongst my family. I'm very lucky to have a supportive family, but it kind of makes me worry. Will I ever be able to leave that safety net and have my own family, or will I be helping my mother to live out her fantasy of spending my youth in Paris with pretty much nobody except her for company (and let me tell you, the very idea of only having my mother for company strikes me as nothing short of nightmare-ish)?

I think this all boils down to me and my general rubbish-ness. I certainly want to be able to go out and live my own life after uni is done, but I'm not the biggest fan of loneliness, and since I'm utterly incapable of having a boyfriend or friends that are close enough for me to want to live with them or whatever, I'm worried that I'll be attached to my family for far longer than most people.

I guess we'll have to see what happens.

I feel better after writing that. I might check on some other blogs then go out and do some money transferring.

Japan-tacular! As in, I'm back!

Gee it's good to be back here! We've got nice weather happening (pleasant, since I left Japan feeling as though it might take a miracle for me to ever become warm again), and I was walking back to my room from the station yesterday, my suitcases in tow, and I couldn't help thinking to myself, as I looked at the ugly urban buildings and the hustling bustling people, and entertained myself with thoughts of all the different eateries I could go to along this road, were I so inclined, I couldn't help but think to myself My God I love this country.

I've not reached quite that state of euphoria in England, yet.

Anyway, my purpose of this blog today was to make an exciting announcement. I went for a morning walk! And it was nice, although my feet started hurting quite a bit quite quickly, which is a worry since they were snug in my new ultra-sporty joggers. Perhaps I just need to get used to fast walking. I'm intending to spend the next few days exploring the nearby park and hopefully mapping out a good walking route. Even better would be if there are a few ideal places for me to break into a run. What I'm hoping for is that I can keep up what I did this morning, and wake up at 6-7am, which would leave me a few hours before my first class to go for a walk/run, shower, dress nicely, maybe even apply a touch of eyeliner and mascara, before going to class.

Thinking about this makes me excited, because it's exactly the sort of morning that I would like to have. I don't really like waking up at midday and dicking around in my room before schlumping to class in jeans and a hoodie. It's not remotely refreshing. So yeah, we'll see how we go with that.

In light of this new development, I thought I would take a moment to write down a few things I genuinely love that are actually considered "good" or "virtuous" or whatever else.

1. Running - I announced this to my father a week or so ago, and he declared me a crazy person of the highest order. And indeed, running is definitely not for everyone. For me running always used to be synonymous with EXTREME PAIN, and it still kind of is, but what I love about it is the extraordinary feeling of freedom you feel as you whizz--

--sorry, brief interlude. Just had an earthquake, so I felt I should be good and hide under my desk--

--past other people, your body practically flying. And it's not like you have to do it for long. Ten seconds is great, and you can stop without wheezing uncontrollably and/or feeling as though your last day has come. Then your heart rate settles down a bit, and you DO IT AGAIN!

2. Cool/cold showers - I should probably justify this one a bit. I think showers at a similar temperature to an outdoor pool in summer are probably my favourites. The problem is that most of the time, I don't want to take them. This is most likely because my body is cold in some way and I want the hotter shower to heat me up. Quite hot showers when it's the middle of winter and the hot water on your fingers and toes gives you that curious too-hot sensation are probably my second-favourite. But after I've been exercising my body is plenty warm, so I am able to initialise cool shower sequence, and it's so nice. It makes me feel like I'm swimming, and when I get out I feel much more refreshed and energised than I do after any hot shower. It's great.

3. Broccoli - As a supertaster this is probably a really weird one for me, but even when I was young I found broccoli among the more palatable of the vegetables. It's got a nice flavour, and it's one of the few veggies I would eat by itself, rather than with half a forkful of mashed potato or chicken or something like I normally do with brussel sprouts or green beans or carrots. Peas I like by themselves, but there are a lot of people who like peas. Corn are similar to peas.

This is making me hungry.

4. Swimming - I'm Australian, what can I say. We live in pools during the summer. I wouldn't say I necessarily enjoy doing laps or anything like that, but I enjoy doing random movements in the water, so much. It reminds me of my childhood. Perhaps I should take up water-aerobics.

That'll do for now. Do any of you laize and germs have any "good" things that you genuinely enjoy?

Musetacular, on my own contradictions.

Before I start on this, I'd better get dressed and get my laundry going.

*calming intermission music. I recommend "Can't Smile Without You" by Barry Manilow*

Right, done. I'm returning to Japan tomorrow, you see. I need clean clothes for this.

I've been looking into another blog, Living ~400lbs, lately. For us higher mortals that use metric, 400lbs is about 190kg, and to give some perspective I'm about 100kg, so she'd be about twice my size, I suppose. Most of the blogs I read feature people of around the 260~300lb range, so I've been enjoying reading about someone who is 100lb heavier than that. She's pretty awesome, from what I can tell. Really active (because apparently not being active makes her joints start to ache, which I can certainly appreciate), VERY into fat activism (hence the blog), and struggling with asthma and allergies, which is interesting to read about for me - someone who has nothing akin to asthma or pollen-based allergies (or any allergies, actually).

I'm mentioning her because I've been thinking a bit about my own views, and I've realised that within my thoughts are some contradictions that I'm really not proud of. Mainly, I've been here saying that it's perfectly fine being whatever weight you are, etc etc, and yet I've been reading about the lives of these much larger people and thinking to myself "I hope that I never become that size".

It doesn't stop there. I also find myself thinking about what I'd "need to do" to prevent myself from becoming that size, in terms of diet and exercise. This is despite knowing that I have very little control over my weight, so even if I truly manage to get over my ED and start exercising the amount that I would like to exercise, I might become fatter anyway. That should be perfectly OK with me, but it's not. Not yet. As I read these blogs I find myself smiling triumphantly and thinking "at least I'm not as big as that".

I feel pretty ashamed at myself, truth be told. It's the exact opposite of what I've been preaching. It's insane because I admire these women so much. I think they're beautiful, smart, funny, headstrong... everything that I like to think of myself as being or someday hope to become. They also have to do things like ask for seatbelt extenders on aeroplanes and buy their own big-sized medical gowns for the doctors. They suffer from real fat discrimination, frequently, whereas the most I generally get is the odd doctor or ridiculous woman making gentle or snide remarks, which isn't that bad. I've never been wolf-whistled at, I've never been spat at, I've never been refused medical treatment... but all of that might start to happen if I get much larger, and I don't want that.

The logical side of me is telling me that I'm expecting too much of myself. After all, I'm relatively new to this fat acceptance thing, and it's going to take me a while to relax and let whatever happens, happen. There is still going to be parts of me that want to do what I can to avoid gaining any more weight; parts of me that want to cling desperately to the beautiful clothes I own, hoping that I'll be able to fit them forever and ever; parts of me that want to put my hands over my ears and furiously deny the fact that many women get larger as they get older, and since I'm large now it's fairly obvious that I will most likely be one such woman.

Clearly, I still have a way to go.

Yet more thoughttacular, on discrimination

I think the top of my head's gotten burnt. Ow.

Anyway, this is something I've been musing on for a while, so I thought I would share it with y'all and see what you think.

Quite a while ago I posted a comment on Livejournal's Fatshionista community, and in it I made an observation on how fat discrimination is more socially acceptable than some of the more widely-recognised forms of discrimination (race, gender, sexual preference, social class, etc) because being fat is considered something within a person's control in general society. I woke up the next morning to find my inbox inundated with comment upon angry comment about how my observation was offensive, that people suffer more discrimination from being black than from being fat, that I am obviously extremely priveleged to have that sort of view on fat discrimination, etc etc. Unfortunately (and, yes, this is an unfortunate fault of mine) I'm the sort of person that does not like to offend other people or say anything offensive to other people, pretty much no matter what (exceptions are exclusive to when the person I'm talking to is a total and utter tosser). I proceeded to apologise to every single person that commented and was nearly late for my lesson because of it. I got a few replies, mostly angry, but at least one said that it must have been hard for me to apologise and admit fault and she commended me for that. I wasn't expecting a nice comment like that, so I treasured it.

I was admittedly at fault - my wording had been callous, and in saying what I said (something that I do still believe to be true) I had inadvertently trivialised other forms of discrimination. I learned a lot from my mistake, but unfortunately my mistake has made me forever afterwards somewhat petrified of receiving angry comments on LJ. No need to tell me to harden the fuck up, kids. I know it. :P

Why am I bringing this up? Because this experience also made me aware of something else. All too often in places of discussion you see a comment written by some thoughtless (and normally white) person that has the faintest rumour of racism towards blacks on it (and I do mean, the faintest rumour - like mentioning that the people wolf-whistling a person as she walks to work all happen to be black or latino, for some bizarre reason), and below that comment a litany of replies basically talking to said woman as though she has said the equivalent of "there's this black guy that keeps asking me out and I don't like that he does because he's black. If he was white I wouldn't mind, but I don't like black people at all and think of myself as above them". These angry responses include but are not limited to calling the person insensitive, calling the person ignorant, calling the person stupid, saying that the person is clearly privileged and how dare they voice their opinion or participate in the community at all, or just flat-out insulting them.

Trolling? Maybe, but I don't think so. I'd say that what is often going on here is that somebody has been hurt reading their comment, and is exercising their right to lash out at the offending party in an effort to make themselves feel justified in their hurt, as well as to make them feel better. Sometimes, however, this seems like a convenient excuse to bully somebody, and to use their privilege (which, can I just say, they can help just as much as the unprivileged person can help being unprivileged) as a weapon to foster their guilt and shame for being in a fortunate position.

I am somewhat uncomfortable talking about this in reference to race (although that is the most potent example I've observed, by far), so I'll switch to fat discrimination for the sake of this argument. Now, fat people get abused for being the way that we are. We are bullied in school, we are mishandled and negatively discriminated against by doctors, dieticians, recruiters, and other people that might have some bearing on how we live our lives. We are told time and time again by the world around us that we are not worthy of the same love, beauty, hope and happiness that thin people have, and the only way we can achieve that worth is to become thin. This is not bullshit people, and I've said it often enough on this blog. There are many other fantastic blogs out there that have explored the issue more cleverly and in far greater detail than I have managed as yet.

Understandably, fat people feel a lot of anger and hurt from this. I certainly feel it, and I hope that I continue feeling it for the sake of my humanity. As a result I think many would consider us perfectly justified in lashing out at thin people. I remember seeing something like this on the Fat Debate Dr. Phil episode (what of it I could manage to find, anyway), where this rather large woman addressed one of the thin people on the panel as "Skinny Minnie". You see it often. Thin people being referred to as "skinny bitches", or larger women being referred to as "real" women, or, as in that one Glee episode, Quinn being referred to by Mercedes as the "pretty blonde with the white girl ass" (yeah, not only is she thin, but she's both white and pretty as well. How dare she?).

I'd like to propose something here. It's not on. Seriously, it's not, and we should not go around, as fat people, and believe that harassing thin people, calling them names, referring to them as though they are somehow less "real" than us, making them feel guilt and shame for something that is beyond their control, is okay.

I say this for two very important reasons. One is the obvious one - it hurts their feelings. Boo hoo? You say? My response to you is to stop being an insensitive prick. I fully acknowledge that there are some thin people out there who are absolute sons-of-bitches to us. I will even acknowledge that such people could very well be the majority. But some thin people are not like that, at all. Bullying someone simply for being the way that they are is low, and it makes the person in question feel bad when they really shouldn't. I also argue that even if said thin person makes a comment that could be considered fat-hating if you turn it on its side and squint, that fighting back by mentioning their thinness and the subsequent difficulty they probably had/will have in bearing children is inhumane and unnecessarily insulting.

My other reason is that, in bullying thin people, or any people with some element of privilege, you are doing the exact same thing that they (or more likely people like them) have done in the past. Yep, the old "sinking down to their level" option. How are fat people supposed to claim that they have a legitimate right to other peoples' respect if we refuse to respect other people as well? Saying that we have the right to disrespect people because we are the disadvantaged party is a load of bullshit. That's like a non-white person saying that they have every right to call white people, I dunno, "stupid lazy white fuckers", or whatever else, because they are the disadvantaged party. I shall hesitantly dip my fingers into the racism bucket and say that I have heard the argument that racism is equal to prejudice + power, and that in that sense it is pretty much impossible for anybody who is not white to actually BE racist. I have so much trouble with that statement - more than I feel inclined to mention at this point in time. Everybody has the potential to be racist. Hell, everybody IS a little racist, at least on the inside. And in the same vain it is possible for fat people to be just as discriminatory in terms of size as it is for thin people to be. Thin people have JUST as much right to be respected and to feel as though they belong in this world and that they are "real" people, as fat people do. And to bully thin people is to, however inadvertently, claim otherwise, and that should not be acceptable.

One more important thing worth mentioning. Fat people, as a relative minority group, have certain stigmas attached to us. These include but are not limited to being rude, being stupid, and being mean. How are we supposed to be able to claim otherwise and say that we deserve not to have these stereotypes placed upon us if we, in wanting some sick, misguided revenge for the hurt that we've been through, continue to live up to these stereotypes?

Thoughttacular, on being single and fat-accepting.

Two entries in a row, my oh my.

I've been reading Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby (legends, btw. Look them up if you don't know who they are), and there was a chapter on life-partners. In the beginning of the chapter the authors wrote that it was a sad, sad fact that most of the people in the Fat-o-sphere are in long-term relationships. Very few of us are single.

As a single person, I noticed this. Unfailingly. I always tend to notice when people are in relationships - it's one of those things, like whether or not a person is religious, I notice purely on the virtue that I am not it. On the fatshionista livejournal community there are posts everywhere by people talking about going to dinner with the boyfriend or apologising for photographs because their significant other took it or asking for advice relating to their partner's fatness or the scathing comments their partner's parents give them about their own fatness. There is no doubt a lot of relationship mentioning on fatshionista.

Obviously this is great. It's great to see that not everybody who is fat is hopelessly, pathetically single (not that I'm saying I am), and it's lovely to see sites such as The Museum of Fat Love showing that fat people are just as capable and just as worthy of love as any thin person, and considerably moreso than anybody, fat or thin, who believe that fat people are somehow not worthy.

Having said that, this is a difficult issue for me. The longest relationship I've had lasted for, I dunno, a month? Maybe? And it barely counts as a relationship because we didn't do anything (no dates, nothing), and he was actually gay. Yeah, yeah, cue the laughter. I certainly got grief for it (the "Gillian turned her boyfriend gay" thing... although the person who said that was an utter bitch so it's not as if her opinion counts). But anyway, he was the only one. And that was when I was 15. Does this get me down? Um, yeah. Of course. How could it not? And for a long time I blamed my lack of success on my fat. Hell, often I still blame it on my fat.

The authors of Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere mentioned that being accepting of yourself as fat is made much easier when you have someone like a boyfriend. Someone who is not related to you (and therefore has no obligation to love you), who says that they think you are amazing just the way you are. And let's face it - friends that say that are not enough. It's nice when they do say that (particularly if they are also fat-accepting types, which sadly not many of my friends are), but there's a dramatic difference between a friend and a boyfriend, whatever way you look at it.

Despite not having what to many is a vital element in their fat-acceptance journey, I feel that I am becoming more accepting of my fatness, slowly but surely. I even feel that I could get all the way without getting a boyfriend. In fact, that's the thing. I feel almost as though I have no choice in the matter, because I have far more of a chance of becoming fully accepting of my fatness than I have of getting a boyfriend before my journey is done.

Is that a problem? Yeah, I think it might be. Because the thing is, what stops me from getting a boyfriend is this problem I've always had, where I don't believe I'm good enough. For a long time that was mainly because I figured I was too fat, too ugly. Now I think it's because of my inherent horribleness, and I can't really quantify what it is about me that is so horrible, but I definitely feel that I am. A lot of the time I, like I think everybody who thinks like this (and there are a lot of us, I believe) know I'm being silly and that I'm no more horrible than anybody else. But yes, essentially it's because of that. I figure that nobody would be interested in somebody as inherently horrible as me, and I've never sought anyone out, or admitted that I liked anyone or anything, because of that. I'm also painfully shy, of course. So the thing is, how am I supposed to become accepting of myself, including my fatness, when there is unlikely to be anybody at any point to tell me that they think I'm unerringly amazing and that they adore me with everything they've got?

What would be good is if I could get over all of it, and start to tell people I'm into that I'm into them. But that will probably take a long-arse while. For now, I need to focus on fat-acceptance. At the same time, I'll continue to sincerely hope that somebody will take the plunge that I am so petrified of taking and tell me that they're interested. Sadly that's very unlikely to happen. But I would like to believe that, despite my shyness and that niggling belief that I'm horrible, I can still complete my fat acceptance journey. But I don't know. How realistic am I really being here?

Thoughttacular, about Pride.

I've been thinking about a few things lately, and I thought I should share my thoughts on here, for that future day when my blog gets its own domain and becomes wildly well-known by fat activists all around (that's right: I want to be the next Kate Harding. Except I don't think I could manage to be quite that awesome).

Anyway, so I was thinking about Pride. The other day I was talking to an acquaintance of mine on Facebook. I'd posted as a status something along the lines of "Weight is not a problem. Society's problem towards weight is, however, a problem. A huge problem." This friend agreed on an aesthetic standpoint, but not from a health standpoint. She says that her being overweight aggravates her asthma and that it's associated with a bunch of other negative health issues. I disagree, for reasons that I'm hoping to further affirm when I get off my disturbing-small-arse-for-a-big-fat-fattie and read up on health vs. obesity studies, and I told her why. She thinks we'll need to agree to disagree and that I seem a tad one-sided (duh. I'm very one-sided).

Anyway, at one point she said "I'm glad you're proud of your body", and I objected to that. I told her that I'm not proud of my body at all, but rather that I'm learning to accept my body as something that I've always had and that I have very little hope of changing beyond making it more lithe and flexible and fit (all that stuff that comes from exercise).

This reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine a while ago. We were talking about eyesight, and I think she was voicing concern about her eyes starting to go bad. I narrowed my slightly astigmatic eyes at this, and said to her that out of all the senses to go, you'd hope that it was your eyesight, with all of the work that's gone into eye correction. She said yes, but she's proud of having perfect eyesight.

This struck me as silly. I can certainly understand being happy that you have good eyesight, or at least feeling extremely lucky about it, since some people are blind and many more look totally shithouse in glasses (not an issue for me - I look so much better in glasses). I have a cousin whose eyesight is so temperamental he has to get surgery done on his eyes quite often. Having a close relation like him certainly makes me appreciate how lucky I am to only be slightly astigmatic. But pride? It's the wrong word for it, and I think that is because pride is something that has to be earned.

And I think that is essentially what pride is for me. Pride is something that you have when you have done something to be proud of. and that essentially makes me think that pride is perhaps not a sin, at least for me. Because I don't think I'm ever proud of something unless it's something that I've earned, or someone else has earned. I'm proud of my high marks in various things, I'm proud of my skills as a sewer, I'm proud of my writing capabilities, my acting capabilities, my horn-playing capabilities, etc. Even though I am better at Linguistics than I am at Japanese, I am more proud of my Japanese ability because I've had to work harder for it. I'm more proud of my horn-playing than my acting because I'm much more of a natural actor than I am a natural horn-player, and I've worked harder at horn-playing. But, I'm fully aware that I suck, quite painfully, at both Japanese and horn-playing. But still, I'm proud of what I've achieved so far, or rather I'm proud of the time and energy that I've dedicated to either of those crafts.

But then there's my ambiguous sense of pride: The pride I feel in being Australian. I would say that I am proud of being Australian when asked, and this gave me pause, because Australian citizenship came naturally for me. I was born in Australia, therefore I'm Australian. But I don't think it's that aspect of Australia that I'm proud of. What I'm more proud of is how I carry myself in life. I'm proud of my trouper-like attitude; my way of getting up and, despite often not feeling like it, working on something until I achieve a satisfactory goal. I'm proud of my ability to question those supposedly "above" me, and I'm proud of my belief that nobody should consider me "above" them, either, until I have earned their respect (hence my dislike of the senpai-kouhai culture in Japan). I am proud of my belief in practicality, and I am proud of my efforts to not be lazy, most of the time. Those traits, I think, have to be worked for. And those traits are what makes me Australian, more than any cultural, generational hereditary link to the country. And that's why I'm proud of being Australian. If I decided to become a citizen of another country I would need to earn that citizenship (and rightfully so, imo). If I did earn it, then I would be proud.

So, that's Pride to me. What is pride to you?

I LJ-ed last night!

...and thought I'd re-post on here.

Basically what happened last night way, I found an LJ post from an old high school friend of mine, and she was lamenting a bit about weight. I'll spare you the details in the interest of her privacy, but I commented on how weight loss is a struggle because of our bodies' not wanting us to do it (you know, that old adage that I've been pointing out time and time again on here). That got me thinking about society's obsession with weight, and how upsetting I find that obsession. This is what I ended up LJ-ing about it:

(please excuse any errors btw, I did this at 2 in the morning.

I've been thinking about this a bit this evening, since I posted a comment related to this issue in a friend's LJ.

I've been bothered a lot recently by what I consider to be an extraordinary over-emphasis on the importance of weight-loss. Obviously this involves the over-emphasis the medical community puts on it as being vital for a person's health and well-being to lose weight if they are overweight or obese according to that prehistoric arse-tacular woefully inaccurate measurement of body composition, the BMI, but I've been dwelling more on the importance society places on weight loss.

Let me give you an example that I read a few years ago. JK Rowling, Goddess Incarnate, was at a party a few years ago (about half a year after the release of HBP, if I'm not mistaken), and she saw someone she had not seen for a while. The first thing this person says upon seeing her is "look at the weight you've lost! You look great!"

JK Rowling so did not like this. In the past year she had written a book and given birth to Mackenzie, and yet the thing that deserved the true admiration in this friend's eyes was her weight loss? I mean, woah. She ranted about it on her website, and it was a rant I quite enjoyed reading, and this was before I got into FA.

Here's another example. In 2007 I came down with what I'm fairly sure was food poisoning. I was suffering from nausea so unbearable that I had to go to hospital. I stayed at the hospital for all of Easter Sunday (which was WAY FUN, but at least they gave me an easter egg on my breakfast tray), and got to leave on Monday, still feeling rather tender. When I left my weight was mentioned. Considering how in those past few days I'd consumed only fluids, some of which I threw up again not long after, I'd probably dropped a kilo or two. Dad said something to me along the lines of "welp, that's a good start". Really, father? Your nausea-phobic daughter has spent an easter weekend in hospital, and you're there thinking about my weight? That's just lovely.

It strikes me as utterly ridiculous that weight loss is considered so important. I know why it's considered so important, but that doesn't stop it from seeming ridiculous, to me. I've heard stories of people enduring many-month-long battles with cancer, and having friends and family say to them something to the effect of "wowzers, you've lost weight, you therefore look amazing, how can I do that?" Now, I dunno how many people have seen people suffering from cancer, but as far as I can tell they don't exactly look like the picture of health, beauty and glowing radiance most of the time. But FUCK all of that! How about a bit of recognition for how absolutely horrible their condition is and how AMAZING it is that they are able to endure that suffering and, in the case of many, still turn up to public events with a smile on their face? THAT is amazing. THAT is worth commenting on. NOT the side effect of both the cancer itself and the treatment of said cancer that is weight loss.

I think most people, fat or thin, worry about weight to some extent. Certainly most people believe that fat people are inferior, in some way, to thin people. This would sound so much less self-depreciating if I was thin, but hear me out. I'm not saying that most people consciously think they are superior to people who are fatter than them, not at all. But there are many different measures for superiority, and in the measure that focuses on health, at least, many thin people see themselves as better than fat people.

And that's fair enough, considering all of those really scary-sounding studies out there, what doctors and teachers tell us time and time again about obesity, the horrible images we see of fat people sitting at computers in t-shirts slightly too small for them eating chips and playing WOW, compared to the lovely pictures we see of thin people jogging in parks looking happy and vibrant, etc. But I would argue that health isn't necessarily the issue here. For the haters of fat people out there, their "concern about fat people's health" is the label that they hide under when they shout their abuse to fatties, but I would like to ask who the fuck they're kidding. They don't give a rat's hairy disease-infested anus about our health - they just like knowing that in the eyes of society we're inferior, and because fat people aren't considered a legitimate minority group that is unjustifiably discriminated against, they are perfectly able to treat us as inferior. No, my personal belief is that the obsession with weight comes mainly from the widely-held belief that fat is ugly, and that ugliness must be gotten rid of at all costs.

It's sad that most people in this world, including me (even now) can be so petty, but yeah, it's true. Often back in the days when I was hell-bent on losing weight at all costs, I'd be feeling faint from hunger as all of us fatties desperate to be rid of our evil fatness have felt at some point or other, and thinking "well yay, maybe I'm getting thin now. Maybe soon I'll be beautiful." Concern for my health really very rarely entered the equation, probably because I'm only 22 and health-wise I've always been very, very fortunate. But argghhh noooooo I've always been fat and being fat is the most horrible thing evaaarrr and you must lose it Gillian you MUST YOU MUST YOU MUST!!! Why? My health seriously is not going to get much better right now. My level of beauty, however, could go up in leaps and bounds, if ONLY i would lose weight! That's the real motivation. That's always been the real motivation. The only motivation. Why else do so many fat people hate to look at photos of themselves, or when people look at photos of themselves they cluck their tongues and say "eugh, I look fat in this photo"?

I think it's common knowledge that society places way too much importance on aesthetic appearance, and it's often done in really contradictory ways (you know, fashion magazines that say on one page that INTELLIGENCE IS SEXY!!! then on the next page list 50 different ways of enhancing the shape of your eyes with nothing but an eye pencil and a spitball). The problem with the thin=beautiful mentality, along with many other thoughts on what equals beauty, is that it is detrimental to our physical, mental and emotional health. When a person goes on a diet, what happens is that physically they are not getting the nutrition they need, mentally they become obsessed with counting calories and documenting minutes of exercise and all of that stuff, and emotionally they are putting too much stock into what happens, and dictating their happiness based on the outcome of the diet, so when the diet fails they're miserable. It's a horrible kind of life to lead, and I always hated it.

I've found that in the past month I've started to listen to my body. It tells me what it wants me to eat, and it tells me well. I've been eating more veggies, more balanced meals, and less food in general (no binging. Really. None. At all.) I've felt the benefits. I think I'm starting to menstruate more regularly again. My next step is exercise. Once I start doing more of that, who knows how much better I'll start to feel. It's so exciting to think that in terms of health I could be so much more, and I am so much more than I was. And this, all while weighing 100kg.

I want to spread this joy to everybody who is bogged down with sadness about weight. It's a sadness that I feel is so unnecessary, so un-called for. I want people to feel the happiness I'm feeling now - a happiness that started with what was perhaps a horrible realisation - I'm never going be anything other than a big fat fattie - and became something amazing. I may always be a big fat fattie, but within that there is so much I can do - stuff that I've never ever dreamed of doing before. It's so exciting it's almost scary.

What think y'all?

Success-tacular! Of the constant variety! And thoughts on eating, and another article.

It's been a while, I know. And I'll be fairly sporadic for a while yet, I'd say. I've been getting more into LJ lately. They've been holding an auction there to raise money for the earthquake, and I've offered a few items, and I have a nasty feeling that my inability to say no will mean that I'll have 4 fics to write, as well as a fic for a fest I'm in. It's going to be a writing-heavy April.

ANYWAY, so the last post had me announcing that my eating that day has been fantastic. Guess what? For the most part, my success has been continuing!

I won't lie - there always seems to be a time every day (normally dinner time) where i seem to eat too much, so I'll leave the table feeling quite uncomfortable. It happens most days and I'm not thrilled with it, but considering what I used to do (which was, buy 1000 yen's worth of snacks at a convenient store, or 1000 yen's worth of macca's, and scarf the lot before the evening was done, I'm doing much better. I'm eating, I'd say, 3 meals a day. Not many snacks, surprisingly (in Japan it was all about the snacks, pretty much), but three reasonably solid meals, with dessert and drinks, and no binging! At all! Just about!

I'm not prepared to declare myself completely cured yet. Right now I'm in England, with my family, and life is good, mostly. That might be why things have been going well. But I've also been taking inspiration from Health at Every Size, and paying more attention to what I'm eating and how I'm eating it.

Now for what might have been a slight slip. Tonight Mum announced that she was making omelettes. As somebody that has had to occasionally eat her mother's cooking, my reaction was a completely understandable "oh, fuck". She sent me off to procure ham and capsicum, and I ducked into Co-op, withdrew a tenner and bought three small bags of chips (they were going for 1 pound). Turns out Mum's omelettes were lovely and I think I'll be making some for myself in the future (for someone who likes eggs like me it's weird that I don't eat them often), but a few hours later I ate all three bags of chips, amounting to about 120-odd grams.

I've done worse, believe me. To be honest though, I don't feel too terrible about it. The last bag, I think, I may have eaten because of the binge-instinct, but the first two I felt I was eating because I was hungry and genuinely felt like eating them. I still want chips now, at any rate. Before I started writing this I was hungry again, and I made myself a ham and cheese roll and poured myself a glass of pineapple juice, and it was soooooo good. I find I'm starting to appreciate how food tastes more, now. I still feel a bit hungry, but I dunno... there's nothing I really feel like eating now, so I think I'll just let it go. I don't like eating right before bed anyway. I might be making spag bol tomorrow night for us all, and I'm SO excited about that. Spag bol! Yum!

Also, LJs Fatshionista community's posts today included a link to this article, which was written by a doctor called David Katz, on the 16th March (I know. I think his last name is awesome too). The person who posted the link said that it was nice to see an article like this, because what this doctor does here, essentially, is apologise on behalf of everybody in his profession who has abused fat people in their offices. I shall offer a few choice phrases, and my commentary:

I quickly ascertained that seeing a doctor was quite a novelty for her. She avoided us ... like the plague.

How ironic, that expression, for professionals bequeathed the proud legacy of predecessors who risked their own lives to treat such antique scourges as plague!

I quite liked how he phrased this. Sadly this is not uncommon, which is ironic. People complain about us using up billions of pounds worth of NHS money (or whatever the equivalent is in other countries. Medicare, in Aus), but the truth is, a lot of us, particularly those of us who are VERY fat (I'd say, 200kg or more), do not go to the doctor because we fear this sort of reprimanding, or we think that the only treatment we'll be recommended is to lose weight (and that's for just about everything, from back pain to high blood pressure to, I dunno, the common cold. Last I checked, thin people got colds too) so we feel there's no point in going through the humiliation of having a doctor criticise us for our weight. I'm going by heresay here, because as a size 20/22 I barely enter the ZOMGFATTIE!!!!! spectrum and I've never been reprimanded for my weight while I've been in this FA sphere (rest assured if I got reprimanded now I'd give them an earful), but yeah, some of the stories I've heard are pretty bloody scary.

She avoided our kind like the plague because we had been that virulent in her life. Across an expanse of medical encounters for an array of reasons across a span of years, a whole battalion of us had abused her. We had treated her not as a patient, but as a fat patient.

She couldn't quite bring herself to tell me the specific words of insult and injury she had encountered, again and again. She came close -- she told me I wouldn't believe the harsh words (although, alas, I'm sure I would) -- then squared her shoulders and wiped incipient tears not quite escaping the brim of her lower lids. She managed in a combination of few words and silence to convey very eloquently the vile, venal, vituperative reception we had given her, again and again.

The Unknown Fattie here is not alone.

In this public forum, I say to my new patient and all others like her: I am sorry. I am sorry for the sins of ignorant brutality originating in a profession that espouses to "first, do no harm." I am saddened. I am ashamed. And I am profoundly sorry.

Wow, thought I. I can't lie, people. I was excited. This is huge, and to those of you who do not understand how huge this is... you've never actually BEEN huge, have you? There is an argument (an argument that I'm sure many doctors fully support, let alone most of society today) that the abuse (and YES, it's abuse! Fat Kid on the Playground, hello?!) fat people suffer is deserved. Talking harshly, reprimanding, scolding fat people is considered OK, because goddamn it, how else are they going to learn that they are JUST NOT HEALTHY? Because fat people are so unhealthy, they deserve this abuse. If you think I'm being overdramatic here, think about things like fat jokes. Think about times when you've seen fat people holding Macca's bags and shaken your heads in disgust, but when a thin person walks past holding a Macca's bag you pay it no heed. It's astounding to see that somebody (and a DOCTOR, no less. As much respect as I have for the professionals who work tirelessly to save people's lives, I'm prepared to acknowledge that many think they cannot possibly be wrong, ever) has humbly acknowledged that fat people are people too.

To my professional counterparts who have perpetrated this abuse, I say in no uncertain terms: shame on you! Have you looked around? Have you noticed that two-thirds of American adults and a rapidly rising proportion of the global population are overweight or obese? Has it not occurred to you that something larger than the will power or motivation of an individual might be in play?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. You've hit the nail on the head here, buddy!

There is, of course a need to address weight control among other medical priorities; obesity can conspire mightily against health. And there is, of course, a role for personal responsibility in addressing the challenge of weight control. But sharing in responsibility for the solution says nothing whatever about being to blame for the problem

...here's where the sound affect of screeching brakes would have been appropriate. What? a need to address weight control among other medical priorities; obesity can conspire mightily against health? Crap. He doesn't quite get it.

To one degree or another, it disempowers legions of us endeavoring to lose weight, and find health. It can be overcome, but most lack the skill set to do it.

It can be overcome?!?! He REALLY doesn't quite get it. C'mon, dude, you're SO CLOSE to seeing the light here! If you want to find a group of people who know more than anybody else about how to lose weight, go to fat people. We. Know. Shit. The problem. The shit we know, *ahem*, DOESN'T WORK.

The prime directive of the medical profession is "first, do no harm." In deriding patients for their struggle with weight, we are doing harm. In denying patients the compassion that was the hallmark of our profession long before the cutting edge of biomedical advance was quite so finely honed, we are doing harm. In driving patients away from the very services we are charged to provide them, we are doing harm -- and violating our professional oath.

I absolutely agree. This was the point of his article, and despite his not quite getting that pesky Diets Don't Work part of fattism, I admire him and appreciate him, for saying something that has needed to be said for a long-arse time. Let's hope some of his colleagues have paid attention.

I've checked out his website, and all of his books are, like, Lose Wight Without Eating Cardboard! and Learn to Tell That Pesky Biological Urge Called Hunger Off and Lose Weight - Permanently! and that sort of crap. My smile and thumbs-up of approval for this bloke wavers slightly upon seeing this, but I will say that if you're desperate enough to spend a few months trying in vain to do what your body will fight tooth and nail to prevent you from doing - lose weight - you'd probably be better off checking out his work than Atkins, or whatever.

PS diets don't work so don't even bother. You're fabulous the way you are, all right? And unlike popular women's magazines I actually mean that, because my next page is not littered with titles like 10 Top Ways To Get Him Into Your Pants (Hint: Wonderbras Work Wonders!) and The Thigh-Friendly Eating Plan

...I am having fun coming up with these titles, yeah! How'd you guess? :P

Success-tacular, on the eating front! And my thoughts on Glee and Fat Positivity

*sigh* goddammit. I'd written a fairly substantial post, and was still going with it when my computer decided to have a cry and freeze up on me. So I'm going to have to re-write the whole fucking thing again.

Oh well. It'll give me something to do before I inevitably have to get up, shower, get dressed, go for a walk and contemplate the afternoon's activities. Maybe I'll finally start working on that dance I want to learn.

Anyway, yesterday, I achieved something amazing. People reading this may or may not know about my disordered eating, but essentially I have a (very mild, I believe) form of binge eating disorder. So I'll eat normally for most of the day then go a bit crazy at night because I'm longing for that sensation of full-ness, and then I'll achieve it to the extreme and realise I don't want it any more, and leave the table feeling bloated, sick and disgusting. I do not want to believe that I have a serious case of it, because I think it oversimplifies the problem in that it makes it easy for me to blame any weird eating-related behaviour I may have (and the consequences of that behaviour, such as spending shitloads of money on food) on a disorder, and I think that's a lazy excuse, like alcoholics blaming every drinking decision they make on alcoholism.

Of course, in saying that, it has been a while since I have been able to look back at what I've eaten during any particular day and felt that it was a decent day's eating (not too much, not too little, not all of only 2 food groups (fat and carbs), no trace of a vegetable, etc), but yesterday I believe I realised that goal. Thanks to the books I've been slowly working through, I have been thinking about intuitive eating, which is the practice of trusting your body to make food-related decisions for you. Yesterday I did my best to follow what my body was telling me, and this is what I ended up consuming:

Breakfast: Two slices of toast with grilled tomato and cheese, one small glass of strange breakfast juice that dad likes and I also found not entirely horrible

Lunch: A chicken pie with salad (that's right, salad), a small tub of yoghurt, two (I think) shortbread biscuits

Afternoon snack: A Kinder Surprise, some lollies.

Dinner: Chinese-style duck with pancakes and Hoisin sauce, half a can of soup, three dessert pancakes with butter and brown sugar (it was a pancake-heavy meal).

I'm really pleased with myself. I did not eat too excessively (I felt a little bit over-full after dinner, but not uncomfortably so), and I actually ate the equivalent of a vegetable or two. Obviously it was not nearly as close to the 5-a-day status that I would like to achieve, but I'm hoping that that will come in time, and if it doesn't then perhaps my body doesn't need that much fruit and veg, which is totally OK too. Also, during the shortbread biscuit-eating, I had the option of having more shortbread, and I didn't. Not because I was restraining myself from something I wanted (at least, I'm pretty sure I wasn't restraining myself), but because I honestly did not want another biscuit.

I learned also that salad is not necessarily something I will have a problem with eating like it has been for me in the past, but oil and vinegar dressing is really not my thing. I don't think I'm the biggest fan of vinegar. As a result I think I will invest in a bottle of french dressing, so that I may eat more salad without wanting to die. I like salad, I've discovered, but I'm fussy about it. It needs some kind of dressing, and that much plant matter really needs an accompanying volume of animal matter to make it palatable (ie. do not think about giving me a plate of lettuce, rocket and capsicum if you cannot guarantee a seasoned chicken breast or several plump sausages will follow soon after), but I do enjoy it. I prefer a bite of sausage with rocket and capsicum than the bite of sausage on its lonesome. Perhaps I'm not as unable to enjoy anything conventionally considered "good for me" as I'd previously thought.

Today seems to be all right so far as well. I had some toast with peanut butter and another strawberry yoghurt. I would perhaps have had a more satisfying breakfast if I'd minus'd one piece of toast and added a piece of fruit. And now I'm thinking about grapes...


Anyway, the other thing I wanted to talk about was Glee. I've been meaning to talk about Glee on this blog for a while, because I find glee to be fat-positive, and fat-positive in a non-confrontational way.

To give an example of being non-confrontational, let's consider women in film/TV for a moment. The feminist movement has done a lot to stop women in cinema from being solely the weak, male-dependant creatures they largely were before that time. Nowadays a large portion of female main characters are extroverted, loud, kind of rude, successful, smart, kind of quirky, sassy, etc. That's great, obviously. These sorts of characters are fun, they're entertaining, they're essentially positive portrayals of women, because these characters show that, yes, women are allowed to be just as extroverted, loud, often kind of rude, successful, smart, kind of quirky, sassy, etc, as any man. But I would argue that these sorts of characters, while arguably quite a necessary development in cinema at the start of the feminist movement, are not strictly necessary now. If we consider men in cinema, they come in all sorts of flavours. You have the weak-willed men and the strong-willed men, you have the quirky men, the straight men, the lazy men, the sporty men, the feminine men, the masculine men, the bad men, the good men, the pretty men, the ugly men, etc. Women, I would argue, still do not have that same variety of representation. Introverted women, lazy women, ugly women, predominantly silent women... these types of women are sorely underrepresented, I believe, and I would argue that it is the same way for any of the minority groups out there (I mean, seriously, when was the last time you saw a token black character... who was not a token black character?). With regards to women in cinema, however, directors like James Cameron are oddly good at portraying women. He doesn't give women these sorts of strongly extroverted characteristics or anything; his strategy is more to have the same bizarre situations that happen to men in movies happening to women instead. If you think about the female characters in his movies (the wife in True Lies, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, Sarah Conner in Terminator 2, Rose in Titanic), they were none of them the ludicrously "feminist" character archetypes, and I would argue that they are some of the best female characters ever written on the big screen.

Fat people are another minority group. Generally in film/TV they're portrayed as lazy gluttons, unable to run far or be in a scene without wolfing down crepes or whatever. It's a pretty horrible archetype and not one I take great joy in. The most blatant recent example I saw of this archetype was in Gokusen, a Japanese drama that featured a group of young high school lads, one of whom was fat and always eating. It makes me facepalm most epically, but Japan is still ridiculously immature with most of their dramas, which is why it was so amazing that they got so many things so amazingly right in Smile. Lately in America this has been starting to change. You've got shows like Huge, which represent a great range of fat people, and a sort of fat sub-culture (life in fat camps) that most people would not have been exposed to before. It is a serious shame that that show was cancelled. Shows like Mike and Molly, while hardly what I would call a great leap in cinematographic story-telling, at least take fat people and put them in the limelight, and show audiences that, yes, fat people are people too.

And then, there's Glee. The thing about Glee is that there are a lot of different characters, and quite a few of them represent different minority groups. There's the gay guy, the black girl, the disabled guy, the asian guy, the asian/gothic girl, etc. Some of these minority groups are perhaps a bit too stereotypical (the gay guy is BLATANTLY gay, the black girl is full of stereotypical black girl sass, etc), but I would argue that they are better and, believe it or not, more realistically represented in Glee than they are in other shows (the gay guy actually has gay-related issues, the disabled guy once dreamt of being a dancer, there's a bit of a story about the asian guy coming out of his shell, etc). It is refreshing to see this side of these minority groups.

And it is particularly refreshing, in my opinion, to see it with regards to fat people. Let us not forget that, unlike many of the other stigmatisations out there, fat stigmatisation is still widely accepted and often encouraged by modern-day society. I made this point once on a livejournal entry and, thanks to exceptionally poor wording on my part, was greeted with a hailstorm of comments by angry and predominantly black members of the community. To this day I get scared when I read that somebody has commented on any comment I've made on livejournal.

I understand and appreciate that my personal experience with stigmatisation has been entirely on the basis of my being fat, because I also happen to fit into pretty much every other advantageous majority (white, straight, middle-class), and I also know that racism, gender discrimination, class discrimination and all of those other discriminations are still being carried out, and that saddens me. But I think that if you were to ask your average young unbiased American/Brit/Australian/Canadian/Native English speaker in general, they would say that, yes, racial and gender stigmatisation is terrible, but fat stigmatisation is not so bad, because after all, fat people could choose not to be fat if they wanted. This is all to do with perception and what we as a society have been taught to believe and accept. We are told to accept people of colour, women, and gay people (and believe me when I say that I think this is something society is absolutely getting right, and it should definitely continue this way), but we are reversely told not to accept fat people. This is mainly done covertly, through scare tactics about obesity and warnings about weight gain and the total lack of obese people modelling and all of this sort of thing.

So because fat stigmatisation is encouraged, it is refreshing to see Glee take fat characters and treat them as the people they deserve to be treated as. More than that, however, they give these fat characters storylines and put them in situations that I honestly have not seen before.

Glee has two fat characters. The first character, who has been on the show since its start, is Mercedes. Mercedes is also the token black girl, and I would argue that her blackness is more prevalent than her fatness for the most part. From the start, Mercedes has been portrayed as a character who, against ALL ODDS, does not act like a typical token fat girl. She doesn't eat, unless it's a lunchtime scene or something. she isn't constantly huffing for breath if the characters have to run around or something, she isn't always sitting down and watching as all of the thin characters jump up and start dancing - she's dancing right along with them. This sort of character is exactly the sort of thing that we need more of on the small (and big) screen, and it is absolutely fantastic to see.

In episode 15 of season 1, entitled "Home", Mercedes is told that she has to lose 10 pounds to remain on the Cheerleading squad. She attempts to diet, and after a few days she's weighed again and has gained two pounds (strike 1: dieting very often does not lead to weight loss). She starts to starve herself. Everybody else is concerned for her, and at one point everybody around her starts looking at food before she faints. At the infirmary she is told that her blood pressure is low and that's probably why she fainted (strike two, fat people do not always have blood pressures so high that they're under constant risk of exploding at any given moment). Then the nurse leaves the office and Quinn, the pregnant girl who was in the cheerleading squad but had to quit because of the aforementioned pregnancy, comes in.

And here is probably my favourite scene in Glee so far (except maybe for all of the funny scenes that I love). I'm going to write exactly what is said during that scene right here:

Quinn goes up to Mercedes, presents her with a Granola bar
Mercedes: Thanks, I'm not hungry.
Quinn: Yes you are. You're starving. I know, I've been there. Did all the other kids start looking like food right before you fainted?
Mercedes: (surprised) Yeah. How'd you know?
Quinn: Been there. *pause* Eat the granola bar.
Mercedes: *takes it dubiously* Why are you being so nice to me? I can't remember the last time you said two words to me that weren't 'you' and 'suck'.
Quinn: Because I was you. Scared. HATING myself for eating a cookie. But I got over it--
Mercedes: Yeah, course you did, Miss, Pretty-Blonde-with-the-White-Girl-ass--
Quinn: When you start eating for somebody else, so that they can grow, and be healthy, your relationship to food changes. What I realised, is that if I'm so willing to eat right to take care of this baby, why am I not willing to do it for myself?
Mercedes starts crying
You are so lucky. You've always been at home in your body. Don't let Miss Sylvester (the person telling Mercedes to diet) take that away from you.
Mercedes: (after a pregnant pause) I'm so embarrassed. This isn't me. How did I become this person?
Quinn: YOU are beautiful. You know that.

It's a kind of cheesy scene, I'll freely admit. And I think Glee does paint it with a pretty simple brush, but we are trying to cater to the average-IQ-of-100 crowd here. And the scene does make me cry every time. The thing about it is, you see this scene everywhere, but rarely do you see it being applied to somebody who is actually, properly fat, like Mercedes (you rarely see it happening to ugly people too, but ugliness is subjective, and Amber Riley is hardly ugly).

The interesting thing about this is that Mercedes is a character who is normally VERY secure about herself. Right at the beginning of this episode she says that she's worried about "showing off too much skin and causing a sex riot". Like Quinn says, Mercedes KNOWS that she's beautiful, but then something happens to make her doubt that.

When Quinn, who is a stunningly beautiful girl, says "you are so lucky", it kind of makes people go "wait, what? The beautiful blonde white girl has just said that the fat black (also beautiful, but would people who find fat people unattractive also think that?) girl is lucky? That makes NO sense." But it absolutely does. For somebody, particularly a FAT somebody, to be completely comfortable with who they are and how they look, is a rare and wonderful thing. To be that secure with yourself is something to be envied, because with it comes a constant satisfaction that all of us should have but do not, thanks to modern society.

Also, when Mercedes says "I'm so embarrassed", that's another interesting point. She's not embarrassed, as some would expect, of having fainted or of not being 'strong' enough to keep on eating nothing. No, her embarrassment comes from her temporarily becoming the sort of person that Sue Sylvester, and much of modern society, expects her to be: ashamed at how she looks and desperate to change it.

Later on in the episode she sings "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera, which had me lol'ing somewhat. I mean, really, how cliche is it possible to be in one episode? However, I am able to forgive, because I was so impressed by the whole concept and it actually being applied to a properly fat person.

So that's Mercedes. The other fat character is a new addition to the Glee squad, Lauren. She's white, so 'fat' is the only minority group she represents. Sadly the Glee people have gone back on their good work and made Lauren an eater. She's frequently eating in scenes and that is kind of annoying. However, another thing she does is wrestle. There have been a few times so far where she's been seen doing push-ups, or doing her thing in wrestling training, or in one instance quite casually fending off an irate Santana. Admittedly wrestling is probably one of the most cliche big-girl sports for Lauren to do, but I'm glad that at least she's doing a sport and isn't completely immobile, so snaps for Glee there.

Anyway, the thing about Lauren that impresses is that Puck falls completely head over heels for her. That's right: Puck, a bad-ass bad boy who is known for sleeping around and being primarily interested in conventionally 'hot' chicks, falls for the fat girl. In the Valentines Day episode he tries to woo Lauren in several ways. He gives her chocolates (which she declared all sucked, and she ate them all just to be sure), he sings a song for her ('Fat Bottomed Girls', which offended her to no end), he does... some other stuff. This is the episode where she defends herself from angry Santana, and after Santana has been defeated, as it were, Puck is all "Please go out with me... please?" But what really impresses is the reason why, Puck realises, he likes her: "I'm not into you because you... have curves. What I like is that you're a girl who's an even bigger bad-ass than me."

I find that refreshing. Also, Lauren, like Mercedes, is so secure with herself. And that's a beautiful thing.

So yes, Glee is a fat-positive show. I recommend watching either of the episodes I mentioned if you need a "fat-people-are-awesome" shot.

Alter-tacular! And, another interesting article and its moronic comments.

It's been a while! I apologise! I've been busy travelling and doing such other things.

I've been reading Health at Every Size by Dr. Linda Bacon (what a fantastic name for somebody who has a profession that concerns eating and nutrition), and it's been an interesting eye-opener. It's pretty intriguing finding out about the variety of reasons that exist for people being overweight (more now than ever, allegedly) and the health impacts of that (such as they really are, not as they're said to be by people hoping to sell you a diet or pill or surgery). I'm enjoying it, but my attention to it has been side-tracked somewhat by my going on little holidays and watching Korean dramas and reality shows.

I needed a break from watching shit in Korean (a language that, despite my listening to it pretty much constantly for the past three days, I still do not understand the workings of. I'm going to have to investigate it in more detail, because I'm kind of fascinated now), so I thought I'd do what I've been wanting to do for a while, and alter my purple skinny jeans.

For those not in the know (so, pretty much everyone), these jeans were purchased for 20 quid (a really good price for jeans), and they are purple and skinny. Yay. Unfortunately "skinny" is a difficult term to fulfill for jeans for fatties, because fatties come in different sizes. These jeans I felt did a pretty good job, but they were still baggy down to the knees. I put up with them for a while, all the while thinking that i'll eventually tighten them up and make them the true skinny jeans they should be. And this is the result:

Picture one: one knee bent.



Picture two: other knee bent.



I know. My variety of poses astounds even me sometimes. :P

Basically I took up two inches at the bottom and took in different amounts from the side seam. It took me a few tries to make the bottoms of the legs wide enough for me to be able to fit my foot in, but I think it's all right now. The tightness of these is such that I feel a bit like Taemin from SHINee during the Hello video:


He's second from the left, and it basically looks like he had to be sewn into those trousers. He looks good though, which is kind of weird because the trousers seem to have been matched up with his mother's best going-out knitted jumper. hmm...

Anyway, they're tight, but comfortable. I don't feel constricted or anything. My only concern is that they might be susceptible to falling down. My shape is a bit funny. I carry my weight on my belly, and as a result I have something of an overhang, and since I only wear waist-high trousers the top part (the part I wouldn't have if I were to wear hipsters, or as I like to call them, the most effective method out there for showing your arse crack to the world) has to be comparatively roomy. So I've kind of altered these with that in mind, and they're not a weird shape at the top. I'll only be wearing them with shirts that cover my body to the tops of my legs, that much is certain.

Anyway, on to my other topic. A month ago some Biggest Loser spinoff involving family members came out in Australia. I dislike The Biggest Loser as a concept in itself, since it sounds pretty degrading and the contestants are putting themselves through hell to lose weight that they'll most likely put back on. One thing I will say is that it apparently teaches good eating and exercise habits. I wonder if any fatties already practising good eating and exercise habits ever get on the show... anyway, this bloke in Brisbane decided to write about it, and he says a few things that I thought I'd copy/paste onto here:

They (the writer's children) also thought it was a bit unfair to people who really needed help that most of them would be kicked off the show. “Why can't they just stay on until they're better?”

The post criticises the nature of these sorts of TV shows. It's not really realist TV, there's still directors and crew there, etc. Interestingly enough the writer was quick to say that his children, having him for a father, understand very well about it all being set up for the camera. I'm amused by his indirectly implying that the rest of us are gibbering morons who wouldn't have told our kids the very same thing at some point in time. Anyway, I object to the "really needed help" and the "until they're better" part of this quote, obviously. To imply that obese people are either in desperate need of help or in someway ill discredits both the obese people in question and the people who are sick/in desperate need of help.

as a parent fresh fruit, oatmeal for breakfast, drinking lots of water, and playing sport rather than Nintendo DS, is a hell of a hard sell. The grotesque obesity on display in Biggest Loser makes explaining the benefits of good nutrition and exercise that much easier.

Well, perhaps. I'd argue that it's more likely to make children utterly terrified of becoming fat, which will ultimately lead to incredibly unhealthy weight-loss and dieting practices. The reporter talks about shows like the biggest loser being a great way to get kids to see the supposed dangers of being overweight. He doesn't like these shows, he says, but the way they present their "grotesquely obese" participants is stark, cold, "real", and that will make said kids "careful". I kind of wonder if his opinion would change if any of his kids ended up fat anyway.

Also, for explaining the benefits of good nutrition and exercise... well, no, I don't think these shows would make it easier. Even if good nutrition and exercise were an iron-clad guarantee for thinness, the biggest loser is showing one benefit to looking after yourself, and one benefit only: not being overweight. Bugger all that shit about living longer and feeling healthier and being able to do more physically. Those things are small players compared to the "not being overweight" benefit. "not being overweight" is the only benefit kids need to know about.

There is another element to the movement, however, that's more problematic; a belief that obesity is not so much a health problem as a political or cultural construct. In the face of constant warnings from the medical profession about the dangers of letting ourselves get fat flies an argument that it's really not a big deal.

And to take issue with this argument is to hazard yourself to being described as a douchebag for hating fat people.

I've been seeing this sort of argument everywhere. It seems as though the issue many have with FA is that obesity is a severe health issue, and people actively involved in the FA movement are just as actively ignoring that.

News for you, mate: it's not an issue of us ignoring something. It's an issue of us refusing to acknowledge a lie that has been propegated by a society concerned with image and conformity. It actually kind of boggles my mind how much the world has been influenced by the diet industry. You will scarcely find a person alive that believes there is hardly any direct correlation between fatness and poor health, and that is just astounding. I think that one of the biggest hurdles the FA movement will have to address in the future is this widely-held belief. People seem so unable to, even for a small period of time, enter what is apparantly a bizarre alternative universe that says, well, no, actually, it is your conscious actions that effect your health, not how much extra weight you carry.

As for "taking issue with this argument", which this reporter obviously does, I would personally like to invite him to have a cry. We're hating on people like you because you're refusing to listen to us. That's all.

I will admit though, there are some pretty sensitive people in the FA movement.

The original article is here, and I recommend having a read. Unlike past blogs I've read, I think this chap is pretty clever and his arguments are relatively sound, if based on misguided information. The article is as much on exploitative TV as it is on the FA movement, so there is some worth in the article.

Because I'm the kind of sad masochist that enjoys upsetting herself at 2:30 in the morning, I had a scan down and read some of the comments. It was your usual fat-hating masquerade, but I thought I'd show some anyway. These are commonly-held opinions, people!

I'll say it, Obesity is disgusting, unhealthy and almost without exception the result of someone who did not know when to say no. I am 37 and recently looked over some old primary and high school photos, the fatties where a slim (boom tish) minority, now they are everywhere. Sorry, but there has not been some mysterious illness that has stuck the population in the last 30 years that has lead to the condition, nothing more than idleness and complacency.

Stop whining, eat some vegies, step away from the burger and get some bloody exercise, it is not difficult. When there are millions of people every day not knowing where their next meal is coming from it is revolting and selfish to sit on your fat acre cramming garbage down your neck and moaning about being so fat.

Go on, skip a meal, know what it feels like to be hungry, remember what it feels like to be hungry; it is not something to be feared, once your body looses the ability to gauge hunger and fullness obesity is luring around the corner. Try not eating until you really feel you need to, then have some veggies and wholegrains and lean protein, walk away before you feel like you want to spew, in fact go for a walk!!!!

Looks like SOMEBODY'S on their period and just saw a fat person having lunch.

While it's true we've not been struck dumb by some horrible fat-causing illness in the past 30 years, I think any gibbering moron who's in the 50s can say that the food we eat has changed. There's now much more pre-packaging, more of a reliance on fast food, etc. Are you sure it's not that that's making us fatter?

I like to think that, as you go about your daily life, you're surrounded by fat people jiggling their fat rolls at you, giving you nightmares. That's the only image I really get when you say that fat people are "everywhere". Believe me mate, we're not. If we were than we'd be the norm.

I'm actually really insulted by that second paragraph. How dare you say that we're selfish, or that we in some way don't know about how many millions of people in this world are starving? It is not US in the FA movement that are moaning about being fat. It is fat people who are NOT in the FA movement that are moaning about being fat. The fatties who are on YOUR SIDE. As for it not being that hard to lose weight, I'd like to see you try to do it.

And also, "go on, skip a meal"?! Yeah, like THAT'S good for you.

I realise this guy wasn't worth my time, but the comment is (mostly) kind of amusing, don't you think?

I'm a health worker and several times we've had patients come in who are morbidly obese and yet appear to be in denial of the seriousness of their illness. One gentleman was unable to walk more than a few metres yet he claimed he didn't eat a lot at all (there were no underlying pathologies).

Again with obesity being an illness. C'mon, guys. Placing obesity in the same category as heart disease and cancer is doing an incredible disservice to all parties. Obesity is a state, OK? Just like being black, female, or gay. Of course, homosexuality is considered an illness in some places as well.

Also, how about entertaining the possibility that that one gentleman might be telling the truth?

The fact of the matter from a casual observance at any local shopping centre is that the average aussie is indeed getting bigger. Unfortunately this idea of fat politics that fat people have rights too ignores the looming health sector catastrophe of rising proportions of the general population contracting diabetes, heart disease, and cancers all related to everyone being heavier.

All right, let's consider something else. Recent rises in diabetes, heart disease and cancers? During the last 30 or 40 years, maybe? Is that recent enough for you? All right, well what else, I therefore ask, has risen substantially? If you answered 'medical diagnoses', you're smarter than I thought. Can we therefore not entertain the possibility that the actual cases of these conditions has not risen, but the diagnosed number of cases has? Is that an unrealistic idea?

A thoughtful piece, JB. I just hope that the people who comment will exercise a fraction of the sensitivity you have today.

They haven't so far I'm afraid, buddy. And I dunno about sensitivity. He was eloquent, sure, but there was a fair amount of self-righteousness and cockiness there too.

Well people still continue to smoke despite the fact its lost a fair bit of its cool factor and it still kills more people than anything else going around.

Humans can be incredibly selfish and hide behind "its my right to do what i want" without actually thinking through the consequences.

This one interested me. Yeah about the smoking, but is 'selfish' really the right argument here? Selfishness implies that you're doing something without care for the consequences towards other people. Does smoking, or any other unhealthy behaviour, damage anybody else's health (ignoring all that second-hand smoke stuff)? I'd argue that it is a person's decision to do what they want to themselves, but is it a selfish decision if the decision doesn't impact on you, and everybody else has that same right as well?

Obesity's unhealthy and ugly (unless you're a fat fetishist - look it up) but something uglier is the revulsion most people feel comfortable airing about it.

So somebody's fat. Who gives a damn? By and large, fat people aren't ignorant, and are well aware they're fat. So what purpose does disgust and mockery serve, apart from making fools feel superior?

This incessant need people feel to control others and demand they behave a certain way, makes me far f**kin sicker than some half-tonne hippo gorging themselves to an early grave on extra-cheese pizza.

Ending on this one. OK, "unhealthy" is something society's led you to believe, and "ugly" is your personal opinion. But you know what? To the rest of your comment, I have but one thing to say: Fucking SPOT ON.

So what say the rest of you?