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.