No Celery Please

It’s an odd thing when you change your life.

I was looking at the wedding pictures and it got me thinking…  I really, truly, for the first time…  Do not remember how it felt to be that fat girl I used to be.

When I woke up on whatever day that was back in May, 2001…  Fatness had pretty much been a defining characteristic of my entire life.

I was a fat kid, a fat teen, fat adult.

So yeah… it was ingrained.

But it was also the feeling of the body I was living in. The way I moved.  The way I knew how long I could bend over before I had to come up for a breath. The way I plotted a course through a room based on what I could squeeze by.

After I lost that weight… it was still there in my head.

I still felt like the same old person.  I still tended to make sure a passageway could hold the old me before I walked through.  The feelings were not different.

It was, literally, 7 or 8 years before I could even think of myself as “not fat” without having to do a double take to check to make sure it was true.

Maybe the ten year mark is what did it, or maybe it was the tummy tuck that changed things, or maybe it’s that in the last year or so I have really been working on being FIT… not just “not fat”.

But looking at those wedding pictures… for the first time, I honestly can’t remember the feeling of taking up that much space.  I can’t remember how living in that body felt.  When I think of “me”… I think of this me, not that me.  And that’s a very recent thing.

It’s just weird, after so long, I thought I’d always be that girl in my head… and then I turned around one day after not thinking about it for a while, and she’s gone.

It’s kinda like looking at a picture of someone else, when I know that it’s really me.

Very strange.

I find it interesting that now, when I currently weigh less than I have since I was, I’m guessing, 9 or 10, that I managed to literally stumble into the world of “Fat Acceptance”.

I have gotten something of a revelatory education about some bedrock assumpions I’d had about weight and health and how the media drives so many incorrect theories into the public mind as though it were “truth”.

I don’t know why I would find this revelatory…  I know how sensationalized everything in the media today is, and how they look for “the angle” in every story from serious things like global arms treaties all the way down to surfing squirrels…  but it just never occured to me to question all the “obesity epidemic” stories, or see how they are used as another wedge to drive schisms into public thinking.

FA also has quite a feminist angle to it… although it’s not all about women…  but women do seem to be someone more targeted by the beauty industry, and it’s really made me realize how we, as a country, seem to take it for granted that women’s bodies are somehow a subject to be judged and found wanting, all in the name of selling us something to make us feel better about the thing they are making us feel bad about (gah – the circles within circles!).  I never really “identified” myself as a “feminist”, but I am starting to rethink that position a bit.

It’s all given me quite a bit to think about, and I’ll probably start posting more things here about body image and acceptance, etc.  It’s MUCH easier to embrace FA as “that’s fine for you, but not for me”.   Accepting myself for what I am is something that needs to be reinforced each and every day… because each and every day I (and the rest of the country) get messages from various sources that say I am NOT good just the way I am.  And as much as I try to discard those messages…. well… I’m only human.

Self Acceptance is such a cliche’d kind of thing, that blogging about it seems a little, um, I dunno – overdone?  But hey… it’s my blog, and I guess I can use it for anything I like.

So here are some things I am going to be working on…

- Loving the body that I am living in today and treating it properly (with a little Derby abuse here and there

- Looking at the body I used to have and realizing that it, too, was a perfectly acceptable body and I should dump the shame and self-hate that I carried around about it and embrace that person that I was then as well.

- Realizing that as I get older, my body is going to continue to change and may do so in ways that society looks down on…  and being OK with that, because “society” tends to be a big, judgemental bitch, and is something I ought to not care about.

There’s other stuff I need to think about and ponder, but that’s enough for now, I think.

So a while back, I stumbled upon the website of a certain Kate Harding (
http://kateharding.net/
)  – and –  don’t judge what’s up there today as what’s usually there, because it’s usually WAY better than this post about her wedding.

Anywho… This site – Shapely Prose – is part of what is referred to by those in it as “The Fat-o-Sphere” … part of the movement for “Fat acceptance” or what I think of as – “leave me the hell alone and stop telling me I need to meet your ridiculous cultural standards of what it means to be female and beautiful”

It’s unabashedly feminist.

It’s unapologetically fat.

It’s calling out marketers, fashion designers, doctors, media pundits, and all the other people out there who tell us that we have to make ourselves crazy tring to be what they tell us to be, and showing them where they can stick it.

I love it. 

And it’s really gotten me to thinking about how I feel about myself, and why I think I need to obsess over the fact that my own body is kinda floppy here and saggy there, and maybe a little flat in other places where the media tells me things ought to stick further out.

Who am I trying to please when I poke at my belly and wish it was some other shape than what it is?  Me?  Would a flat tummy make me any happier to be me?  Or should I just say… hey.  This is what my stomach looks like.  Yes… I have floppy arms.  Stick it, Cosmo… I refuse your judgement… I refuse your message.

Now – I am not planning on chucking my current level of exercise and food consumption.  While I am truly embracing the notion that people ought to be as fat or thin or tattooed, whatever, as they wanna be… I do feel better at the size I am now, and I think that being able to walk up the stairs without gasping for breath is worth not having burgers and chicken strips on a regular basis… but I am re-examining WHY I am willing to continue to eat salads and turkey and rice cakes and vegetables (and, of course, the occasional giant piece of cake with ice cream).   I want to make sure that I am doing this for myself… and not for some mythical goal of acceptance by a world that, frankly, I really ought not care what it thinks, anyway.

Seeing these sites with these truly beautiful (and, yes, fat) women who like themselves just fine the way they are, thank you… I like it.

Go here and look at these women.  They do not meet the standard definition of beauty. But they clearly do not care. 

(not safe for work iffn someone can see your screen probably)

http://www.leonardnimoyphotography.com/7body.htm
  (yes, THAT Leonard Nimoy – he’s a photographer – who knew?)

But here’s one that’s SFW…