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.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Sunday, 10 April 2011
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?
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?
Saturday, 9 April 2011
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?
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?
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?
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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.
What think y'all?
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?
Thursday, 24 March 2011
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 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.
The Unknown Fattie here is not alone.
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.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. You've hit the nail on the head here, buddy!
...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.
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.
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
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
Monday, 7 March 2011
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:
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.
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.
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