A Personal Persepective on Weight Cycling

CW: Discussion of extreme dieting and weight loss

A lot has been written about weight cycling and it’s associated dangers. The conversation is usually framed in terms of “yo-yo dieting” and includes a lot of pearl clutching about how if we all could just STAY on the diet we choose and keep the weight off, then we wouldn’t be on this vicious diet cycle. If only we had more “self-control” or if only we were on this diet or that diet. Never mind that most diets don’t work because of the body’s natural, hormonal response to restrictive eating.

You can Google this for yourselves because I’m not here to rehash the same points. More articulate and better educated people than me have already done that work. I’m here to put a personal face on it.

Snorkeling in Bermuda in 2015

This is my Mom and me. My mom died suddenly on April 4, 2018 of a heart attack. She was 66 years old. She was funny and loving and active and a great organizer. She was a birthday and Christmas ninja who somehow always managed to find the perfect, quirky presents. She was my anchor and in many ways the engine that kept us all going. We had an amazing relationship, and I miss her every day.

And she was fat.

I think I was 11 or 12 years old when she put us on our first mother-daughter diet. I’m sure my father and brother suffered through it as well because my mother was the primary food purchaser and cook in our house. But what I remember was that my mother looked at herself (and me) and saw something that needed to be fixed. Over the years, we went on lots of diets together, and even when I moved out and was making my own food choices, I still looked to her for guidance.

My Mom tried them all: Atkins, Weight Watchers, Deal-A-Meal, calories in calories out, NutriSystem… I watched her count and catalog and plan and budget her calories. I watched her “earn” a scoop of ice cream or a pasta dinner with intensive, exhausting, sometimes debilitating, exercise. And over the years she lost and gained over 100 pounds. She was so proud of herself when she reached her goal weight on Weight Watchers about 10 years ago. And she was ashamed at not having been a better role model for me when it came to food. I felt how much it hurt her that she was fat and that she’d raised a fat daughter. And I was ashamed.

Some day, probably with some therapy, I’ll unpack how fucked-up my relationship with food is based on all of this. I’ve since been able to break the cycle of dieting for myself and over the last several years have embarked on the hard work of unlearning all the things I’ve been taught about my fat body. But she never did.

Nana, Mom, and me at my wedding, November 2017

I knew that she wanted to lose weight before my wedding in November 2017, even though I stressed that I didn’t expect her to do that. She assured me it was something she was doing for herself (and because she wanted to fit into the same dress she wore to my brother’s wedding in 2005). I found out only after she died that she was using NutriSystem to do it. Her last month of meals shipped to my parents’ house before she died. My father, rather than throw them away, decided to eat them himself. We talked about it on the phone a few weeks later, and he commented that he didn’t know how she was doing it. He was having to eat 2 or 3 of the dinners at a time just to feel satisfied. When I replied that Mom was starving herself to lose weight, there was silence on the other end of the line.

One of the things that weight cycling does is increase inflammation, which puts stress on the heart. Starvation also puts a great amount of stress on the body, including the heart. I can’t say for sure whether NutriSystem caused my mother’s heart attack, but I firmly believe that systemic fat phobia and decades of weight cycling were a contributing factor.

It makes me so angry when I think about it. She did everything “right.” She dieted, she exercised, she made herself smaller to fit a world that was increasingly harsh to people like us over and over again. And instead of making her life better, instead of the years of golden good health that diet culture promised, it contributed to her death. That is what systemic fat phobia and fat shaming did to me. That is what weight cycling did to me.

For myself, I refuse to participate any more. I will not be ashamed of my glorious body and all the things it does for me, exactly as it is.

Health is not an Indication of Value

Health is a tricky concept. We have fairly arcane ways of measuring it, to the point where there has to be a whole Health At Every Size (HAES) movement so that fat people can hopefully get medical care without too much bias or shaming. But when we glorify health, when we say “I’m fat, but I’m healthy!”, then we are saying that being fat and not healthy (by however we are measuring that) is somehow still a failure.

This is something that I struggle with all of the time. Among other things, I have severely arthritic knees and my mobility is compromised. But I’m strong and capable, and with my rolling walker (that I affectionately refer to as Artie), I can do most of the things I want to. But I’m still not “healthy.”

What is important, I think, in these discussion is what is healthy for you. For me, it is things like being able to walk up a set of stairs without pain or stand for 10 minutes without having to sit down. What are YOUR measures of how healthy you are? Advocate for that and I think we’ll really be getting somewhere.

Fat, Fabulous… and Forty

Today is my 40th birthday. My fat body and I have been through a lot over the last 40 years: broken arms, broken hearts, bad knees, car accidents, the loss of pets, the loss of a parent, but also new tattoos, new jobs, new hair colors, new houses, new cars, new friends, new adventures, and new loves. I’ve done all of it while fat, and I’ve survived all of it while fat.

But couldn’t I do so much more if my body was thin?

That’s the question that has plagued me and so many of us who live in fat bodies. I see so many people caught up in the worst throes of diet culture waiting to live their lives until after they’ve shed that last 5, 10, 15+ pounds. They’re waiting to wear that dress or buy those shoes or go on that vacation or do that fun activity that they’ve always wanted to try.

I lost my Mom very suddenly to a heart attack about two months before my 39th birthday. There was no chance to say goodbye. No warning signs. She was here, and then she wasn’t.

What I have learned in the intervening year is that life is so much shorter than we think. It is unfathomable to me to wait to try things any more. Or to plan for new adventures. I have chronic pain due to my knees. I’m very fat and at every turn I am confronted with the ways that the world is not built for me. Every day it tries to tell me that I don’t belong.

Except that I DO. I do belong. I have belonged here for the last 40 years and I will (hopefully) belong here for 40 more. This blog is just the start. I’m here, I have a voice, and I’ll be damned if I’m going anywhere.

So, my completely unsolicited advice to you, on my birthday: Eat the cake. Go the places. Do the things. Take the risks. Have the chocolate. Drink the wine. Enjoy the living however you can whenever you can. Show the world with me that fat bodies are here, alive, and not going anywhere!

Plus Size Doesn't Stop at Size 28

I do most of my shopping for clothes online. Not because I really want to, but because it seems to have become a matter of necessity. I had an experience just the other day where I went into a store that says it carries sizes from 14 to 32 looking for crop pants. The capris pants I have no longer satisfy me now that I’ve learned that a fitted pair of skinny jeans is actually really flattering. In the entire store, in the middle of May, there was not a single pair of crop pants in my size. Everything stopped at either a size 24 or size 26. I am… larger than that. Not as large as I think I am (which I’ll write about someday), but larger than what was available to me to try on.

Women’s clothing sizes are difficult to navigate no matter what size you are. There’s no standardization and the sizes aren’t really based on anything. A size 20 in one store or in one brand of clothes isn’t equivalent to a size 20 in another store or brand. Same thing with a size 4X or 5X.

Take this size chart from my post on Monday:

Remember that 124 cm = 48.8 inches; 120 cm = 47 inches.

Now compare that with this size chart from Women Within (an online warehouse that carries a variety of plus size brands):

Size 5X in the other chart is roughly equivalent to a size L-1X in this one.

I’m pretty lucky. I’ve been measured professionally a couple of times, so I actually know what my measurements are. But not everyone does. If we do routinely check the size chart before we order something, many of us are likely to be guessing. And god forbid the photos actually show a body like mine, or a variety of bodies, so we can get an idea of how the clothes might look.

So, I can’t go into a store and try anything on, and I can’t get an idea from pictures if something will look good on me. All I have to go on is my instincts and experience. Which means I end up wearing the same types of clothes all the time because it is too much of a risk to try to branch out. The wrong kind of fabric might not have enough stretch for my stomach or my thighs. Or a shirt might not be long enough to cover the round part of my belly or be too tight on the arms.

Brick and mortar stores that carry plus size clothes have to do better. Whether the larger sizes aren’t in the stores because they only ordered a couple in each style and over buy on the smaller sizes or because they simply don’t care to cater to those of us on the larger side of the spectrum, they have got to start realizing that we exist and we have money to spend. If only they would put our sizes in their stores.

Plus-Size Clothing Site Shows No Fat People

Tip of the hat to Scary Mommy who originally posted about this company, Plus Size Baby. When I first read the article, I thought certainly that the site was fake somehow. Perhaps I just hoped that it was. Alas, I visited the site myself and it is all true. The Scary Mommy article, by Casandra Stone, focused on the lingerie specifically, which for sure had the most egregious what the fuckery. But I took a look at other areas of the site as well, and it doesn’t get any better.

In an effort not to drive any more traffic to their site than strictly necessary, I took screen shots. I apologize in advance.

First, an overview of the lingerie section, where first a straight size model shows how stretchy (?) the panties are, instead of just hiring a plus-size model. But more importantly, there is not a plus-size person in sight anywhere on that page.

Seriously? What is even happening here?

The fashion model on the second row is particularly upsetting.

One of the only actual fat people I could find on the site was this one (though she is apparently just breasts and a tummy with no head. There was an abundance of headless bodies all over the place.)

I… I can’t even.

If I was hoping that things would get better in other areas of the site, I was quickly disappointed. Take a look at this bullshit in the Sports Wear section.

This looks like some kind of before and after insanity.

I mean…. WHAT? I just go into anger brain lock when I look at this. I know lots and lots and LOTS of fat athletes who would be much more appropriate models for this. Because we’re selling leggings for plus size women to workout in, but we can’t actually SHOW any plus size women.

And then there’s the swimsuits. Buckle up, folks.

The top one only goes up to a 3XL, but all of the extended sizes are sold out. I’m not even sure what the second one is trying to show us. I guess it’s all about pulling your body in and changing the shape. Not about being able to swim.

In a last-ditch effort, I went to look at the clothing. Things got marginally better here, but not by much. The model here at least looks like she is actually wearing a large dress, despite the fact that the dress itself covers up practically every part of her. And the dress goes all the way up to a size 6XL!

Hmm…

But then I saw it… “Ships From China.” Uh oh. Sizing overseas is very different from sizing in the United States. I’ve seen ads for cute dresses around Christmas and Halloween that claim to go up to a size 5X, but after a little investigation a 5X was actually closer to a 2X in our sizing. So, I took a look at the size chart.

Shit… metric.

My handy-dandy conversion calculator tells me that 124 cm is equal to 48.8 inches. I usually wear a 5X or 6X and my bust is 64 inches. So, there’s that. Also, the difference between 5X and 6X is just 4 cm, which is about 1.5 inches.

Also, apparently this site can’t have anything more than a multiple of 20 in any category. Which makes me question, again, the validity of this site. It feels so much like a scam.

For a super fat like me, it is almost impossible to be able to go into a store and actually try on the merchandise. I depend on plus size clothing sites to show actual fat bodies in their clothes so I have some idea whether an item might look good on me. There is a lot of trial and error involved, and over the years I have had more disasters than successes. There’s a pair of gray pants I ordered recently that looks great on the model and looks formless and shapeless on me. Into the donation bin they go.

So, it’s hard enough out there for fat people to find fashionable, flattering clothing without a bullshit site like Plus Size Baby muddying the waters. The Scary Mommy article ends with “Do better, Plus Size Baby.” I suggest that they do all of us a favor and just go away.

No Place For Me in Starfleet

After 7 different television series, amounting to 769 episodes and 32 seasons—after over 50 years of Star Trek—I have yet to see someone who looks like me in Starfleet. Deep down, I didn’t really expect to have Discovery change things, but with all of the other focus on diversity for the series, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that I might see a fat body in uniform. Especially when the uniforms are individually replicated to each person’s exact specifications. With all of the alien species serving on board, really, not one of them would be fat?

Credit where credit is due, though, one thing that the series has been good at is showing disabilities. From the very start, there has been a vision for what wheelchairs (or support chairs) look like in the future. The Original Series (TOS) showed Captain Pike confined to a wheelchair tuned to his brain waves after an accident. Discovery (right) shows us a vision of Pike’s future that includes the same accident.

We’ve seen other kinds of support chairs, one similar to Pike’s (in Next Generation) and one that looks like it belongs in our century (Discovery, right.) Even better, the actor on Discovery (George Alevizos) is a wheelchair user himself.

Discovery also shows us a future where disabilities and injuries can be treated with cybernetic augmentation if so desired. Take the characters of Detmer (left) and Ariam (right). Detmer has a craniofacial implant and an augmented eye whereas Ariam has a full-body augmentation after an accident. These augmentations are almost never remarked on, treated as simply a fact.

Discovery has also made strides in representation for people of color and women as well as LGBTQ characters all serving aboard ship. But still, the closest thing we get to a crew member in a fat body is Tilly.

She does have a larger body than might be expected, and in an internet search for fat Star Trek characters, Tilly is one of the top results.

Any other fat character that has been on any of the series, at least that I can think of, has been either an alien or evil (or some combination thereof, like Harry Mudd or the Grand Nagus of the Ferengi). In fact, one of the other top results for a fat Star Trek character is L’Rell, the Klingon Chancellor from Discovery.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan almost my entire life. I think I was 8 years old when I watched my first episode, and I’m now almost 40. In all that time, I have yet to see someone who looks like me on the show. I’ve always wanted to be in Starfleet, but all evidence points to me not being welcome there.

Fuck the Food Police

Today’s post comes from an interesting experience I had with a coworker the other day. I was standing in the kitchen chatting with one coworker (we’ll call her A) when another coworker (B) came in. It was around lunch time, so I was heating up my lunch while we chatted. B came in to grab a snack, then all of a sudden she started telling A and me about why she was getting a snack at that time and why she was getting that particular snack (trail mix). This was a totally unprompted justification of her food choices, and it got me thinking about food policing.

I have always had a complicated relationship with food, as I think most people who’ve grown up in a fat body do. I think I was 12 when my mother put me on my first diet. In fact, I’m pretty sure we were co-dieting (which is a topic for a whole other post). Anyway, around the age of 12 (or perhaps earlier) I learned the lesson that food had to be earned with sacrifice or deprivation.

That was all it took for my internalized food police force to form. That voice inside me that says I haven’t “earned” that piece of chocolate or slice of pizza or whatever “bad” food I’m having. Eating in public while fat means that I constantly feel like I’m being observed and judged for what I’m putting in my mouth. Shutting out those voices is a serious act of will.

I’m one of the lucky ones, too. I rarely had the experience of having an external police force, too. I hardly ever had to face the raised eyebrow when I went for seconds at the dinner table or the more overt “don’t you think you’ve had enough?”

Back to my coworker, B. She’s a straight-sized person, and yet still felt like she had to justify her food choices to two fat women. Which I think is just more evidence of how pervasive diet culture really is.

I posed the question to my personal Facebook, asking about a time my friends policed their own food or had their food policed by others. The responses I got varied, but what stood out were the ones where the responder has an allergy or some other food limitation and other people inserted themselves into their food decision making. For instance, one friend commented that she makes choices based on her allergies but had one coworker “who decided that I had to give up eating certain things because she knew better than me what I should be eating.”

Another friend had an encounter with a woman in the grocery store based on what foods she had chosen for her toddler to eat. She and her toddler are vegan and “Our cart was filled with fruits, veggies, hummus, cashew/almond milk, gluten free/vegan ‘Oreo’ cookies for me and some other misc items.” This apparently so offended the other woman, who thought my friend’s son should be eating “chicken nuggets, pizza, ice cream, cows milk, peanut butter & jelly, chips, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Fruit Loops,” that the woman went off in a huff, proclaiming that she would call Child Protective Services.

Overall, I took a couple of key things away from these discussions and experiences. One, everyone needs to do a much better job of minding their own business. Two, we all need to be much gentler with ourselves when it comes to food. The only way I’ve been able to shut my own food police down is to give myself permission to eat the food I enjoy whenever I want. Any kind of food restriction is a danger area for me.

My new philosophy is that life is short, so eat the foods. And tell those food police to fuck off.

Fat Women as Superheroes!

Fan art is a great medium. It (along with fan fiction) allows us to imagine a world — slightly or even radically — different from the ones that we’ve enjoyed already. It lets us play in a universe but tell our stories and express our realities. Thanks to the Geek Girls Assemble FB group, I was turned onto this gem of an artist, Edull Ardo.

Edull seems to love drawing fat women from imagination and from real life. His About information includes the tag line: Everyone in this world needs to see how beautiful plus size women are.

Amen to that. One of Edull’s previous collections is called POWER. Here are a few examples:

I’ve got your Fat Thor right here!

Did someone call for Captain America?

Well, hello there Wolverine.

This is from Edull’s description of the collection:

This collection is called Power. The inspiration and the goal is to show (and encourage) the women's power. They are real women. And they don't gained superpowers by chemical accidents, laboratory experiments or came from another planet. They were born with their power naturally. The power that all women have. And I want to show this incredible diversity of races, styles and colors, each one has their own power and use it in their own way. I want to show that all women are powerful and make them reflect: "What is my power?" What's better on me? " So... SHOW YOUR POWER! :D

There are a total of 10 images in this collection and I seriously encourage you to check them all out.
What I love about Edull’s style is that these women are fat, sexy reimaginings of familiar superheroes. They are playful and in motion. They do not have time for your shit. And they will take you down if you cross them. I can’t tell you how much gender-bent, pinup style art I’ve seen where all the women have long, blond hair and ridiculously disproportionate breasts. Next time you’re at a convention, stop by Artist’s Alley. I promise you’ll find them. So, this is particularly refreshing to see.

I don’t know if any of this collection is for sale, but I would love to have a few of these for my very own.

The Cost of Being Fat (And a Woman)

I’ll have a lot more to say about the Fat Tax because that shit is real. This is about fandom shirts specifically. This shirt was an ad that showed up on my Facebook feed.

I don’t claim to understand it, but there it is.

Now, the above t-shirt isn’t maybe my cup of tea exactly, but it is pretty awesome. What do you think the largest size available was?

Surprisingly, it was actually a 3XL. But that’s still not big enough to fit me or a lot of fans I know. Of course, that’s a “unisex” t-shirt. Or really, a men’s shirt. These are the kinds of shirts Facebook shows me ALL. THE. TIME. And while this one maybe wasn’t for me, I see shirts that I LOVE and know that there’s almost no hope of one fitting me.

These shirts are from the same site. The top shirt is the Men’s and the bottom shirt is the Women’s. You can see that the women’s shirt is cut differently: Scoop neck, narrower shoulders, wider at the bottom for hips. But where a men’s goes to a 3XL, a women’s shirt only goes to a 2XL. Which is probably about the same size as a men’s large.

Now this shirt… this is something I might like to have. It’s both explicitly a shirt about my fandom and makes a cool, inside reference to Endgame. And to my surprise and delight, it actually comes in my size (yeah, see what I did there?). But look at this.

There are 5 color options for a unisex 5XL. But for a unisex S… there are EIGHT. And then let’s look at the price difference. For fewer options and a shirt that is likely to not feel comfortable on me, I get the privilege of paying $4 more. Lucky, lucky me. And if I want a women’s cut (not that it has a size to fit me anyway)?

Well, that is an additional $5 or $7 depending on what kind of neck I’d like. So, not just a fat tax but ALSO a pink tax.

I don’t really think there’s much more I need to say about this. The photos are enough. This is what it is like. Finding a shirt that looks good, feels good, fits and is fun and expressive of who you are comes at a price if you’re fat. Or a woman. Or both.

Choosing Empowerment (Avengers: Endgame Thoughts Part 2)

Source: https://thors-soft-cheeks.tumblr.com/

Fat and STILL WORTHY. Thank you to Thor’s Soft Cheeks for this (and for my Fit Fatties group on FB for posting it). After a lot of processing and reading of other people’s reactions to Fat Thor, this is where it lands for me. I choose to feel empowered. He’s been through A LOT. He’s lost his mother and father, his sister tried to kill him, he had to destroy the planet, he had to watch his people and Loki and Heimdall die at the hands of Thanos, nearly get burnt to a crisp trying to forge Stormbreaker, and THEN fail to kill Thanos before he can snap half the universe out of existence. Anyone would want to hide away and play Fortnite for 5 years.

But despite all of that and the depression and the PTSD… when he summons Mjolnir, he is still worthy. Still. Always.

And no matter what you’ve been through or what you’re going through or if your belly is soft or hard or your thighs rub holes in your jeans… YOU ARE STILL WORTHY. Still. Always.