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.
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