Since I started doing this crazy accept-my-body thing eleven years ago, there has been a series of ups and downs with my own body image. I go through good times, I go through bad times. Sometimes really, really bad times. Over the years, the good times get longer and the bad times get shorter.

What doesn’t change, though, is the amount of pressure on me — on all of us — to look a certain way. To be feminine, to be light-skinned, to have smooth hair, to fit into straight-sized clothes.

As you get fatter, gravity doesn’t get weaker or kinder. It stays the same. Your body is more subject to it, in fact, because apparently the earth is a fat admirer, and wants to keep you as close as possible. As this happens, as the scale creeps up to numbers a previous version of you would have fainted at, you have two choices: to attempt to loosen the bonds of gravity, and Earth’s apparent amorousness, by making yourself smaller — or to use gravity to your advantage, to get stronger, strong enough to carry your weight happily through the world.

History has taught me that I’m not very good at getting smaller, but that my strength? It is awesome. And it can grow.

As one gets bigger, or even just as one becomes more aware of the sickness of the body-obsessed culture, the pressure increases. It drags on you, eventually to the ground, the point of crisis, the valley of decision.

Do I lay here and starve until I am light enough that gravity rescinds its uncomfortable obsession? Then get up and walk fearfully away, knowing I am weakened against the next time it drags me down? Or do I allow myself to rest briefly, then begin to move any muscle I can feel: an arm, a leg, an eyelid — working continually against the pressure, until I’m strong enough to stand the fuck up, under my own power, and walk toward the things I want?

The things the world says it won’t give to me unless I am white, thin, and wearing makeup? The things that I am now strong enough to take for myself, any way I want them?

Each time I’m dragged down, I’m stronger and quicker at pulling myself to my feet.

Gravity doesn’t go away. I get better at remaining upright.

I’m thinking today about body image. My body image, to be specific, and the way I feel when suddenly confronted with photographs of myself taken by other people, showing my whole body.

The experience is one of immediate shock, often followed by a weird cognitive dissonance. My body doesn’t Look Right. Because apparently there is a Right Way for bodies to look, and whatever I’ve constructed in my head as that Right Way sure as hell has nothing in common with the photographic evidence of my squat, round, rather sticky-outy body.

Bodies, in my head, are supposed to be straight up-and-down, to have clean, spare lines and angles. The head should be a particular size in proportion to the rest of the body — not too large, or, in my case, too small. The feet should not be too long in comparison to the length of the legs; the shape from the front of the thigh to the back of the calf not such a dramatic S-shape.

And, for the love of all that’s holy, the whole thing should not be so damn big.

After the emotional reaction, I have to start thinking rationally again. That’s when I realize: hardly anyone spends much of their time daily considering images of themselves, especially not full-body images. Hardly any of us are constantly taking full-body self-portraits, or are surrounded by full-length mirrors. We don’t spend a few hours here and there watching video of ourselves.

We are too busy being in our bodies daily to spend more than a few minutes confronting how we actually look in them.

Then it occurs to me that all those articles decrying the apparent fat-person curse of Being In Denial of One’s Fatness are actually just restating the obvious: when you’re not spending all day staring at yourself, but do spend a considerable portion of your day observing media depictions of bodies that are not much like yourself, isn’t it natural that the part of your brain dedicated to constructing the Platonic composite of How Bodies Look will be mostly filled with images of sparse, clean lines, slenderness, and a particular head-to-body ratio?

Won’t you go through your day, in your body, almost implicitly assuming that it looks more-or-less like the definition of Body you have mentally constructed, based on the images and people you’re constantly surrounded by?

And won’t you then experience a cognitive dissonance when confronted with an image of a body that breaks all those Platonic rules — especially when you realize that it belongs to you, that it is, in fact, you?

Of course. Of course you will. Not because you are a stupid fat person in denial about your fatness, but because the culture we live in has erased fatness (and other forms of physical variation) from most of its artwork and entertainment.

If you’re like me, and fatter than about 97% of the population, you’re also not going to see a whole lot of other people like yourself in daily life. Most people you see, even the relatively fat ones, are going to be a bit less sticky-outy, have proportionally-larger heads, etc. You will also incorporate those impressions into your little Platonic file cabinet, along with the much thinner media impressions.

And your first reaction on seeing a photograph of your body will be one of shock, possibly horror, and an indefinable sense that Your Body is Wrong.

The secret, of course, is that there is no Right Body, no matter how hard our culture tries to define one. There is no Platonic Body floating in indisputable ether — only real bodies that exist in the real world, available in an extravagant assortment of shapes, colours, sizes, and conformations. None of them wrong or right. All of them just are.

And now I can understand that the experience of cognitive dissonance and disgust with how my body looks is an artifact of my cultural training, not a Real and Inescapable Truth About Me, requiring a dramatic gesture of repentant food restriction and mortification of the flesh through exercise.

If anything, the dissonance is a reminder that, because my body is different and even somewhat rare in this world, I must take special care to fill my Platonic File Cabinet with images that make sense to me, that I can identify with. That my own indisputable body shall now be the starting point for my definition of Body, and that I can spend a few minutes daily filling the file cabinet with pictures of me.

But it recently occurred to me that I have been in a long, gradual process of saying goodbye to my waist. I’ll explain.

As a teenager, I was never thin. I passed for mostly normal (with a big butt), and was always “overweight” by BMI standards. Needless to say, I pretty much hated myself, since that’s par for the course as a teenage girl in this culture. Frankly, I thought I was gross.

(Despite many helpful men in trucks loudly assuring me I was not.)

My one redeeming feature, it seemed to me, was that on top of my wide hips sat a comparatively narrow waist. And I fixated on it. It was, at times, the only thing that kept me from abandoning myself to the despair of total self-hatred, odd as that sounds. It was the one part of me that I felt was, for certain, socially acceptable.

Not my big nose, not my oily skin, not the cellulite on my thighs, not my fat ankles. My waist, and only my waist.

Over the next ten or so years, I would gain a hundred pounds. I would go from being a curvy-but-basically-normal teenager to a frankly fat woman.

For much of that time, through my twenties, my body shape itself did not change much. I looked the same, comparatively small waist and all, just…wider.

But in the last couple of years, as I’ve approached and then passed 30, that has changed. I’ve been watching with interest (and a little anxiety) as my body ages and does the things that it’s programmed to do: tiny surface creases have appeared around the outer edges of my eyes when I smile. Silvery-grey hairs are appearing with more vigour along my temples. My fingers are plumper, the skin on my hands more creased.

And I’ve grown a belly.

I denied it for the first couple of years. I resisted so strongly, in fact, that I wore corset-style bras just to feel normal in my body, so I would look the way I was accustomed to look in clothes.

I look back on it now as a transitional stage I had to go through — and I still keep a waist-nipper on hand in case of sartorial emergency — but I got rid of the corsets not long ago, and began to comfortably wear my clothes without them.

A friend I’ve been close with since the sixth grade came to visit me in the summer. We were at a someone’s house, talking, and I’m sure the topic turned to weight and body image. My old friend has always had a remarkably different body type than mine — long and slender instead of squat and pear-shaped, but with just a hint of belly. We’ve both admitted to having envied the other’s body shape through the interminable torture of adolescence.

Anyhow, on this evening, I stood up to walk into the kitchen, our conversation about bodies trailing off, and I heard her say, quietly, “…you always had such a tiny waist.”

I looked down at myself and had my first conscious thought that that was no longer the case. The body I had mentally defined myself with for so many years was gone, replaced by another I was still getting to know.

Even during all the corset-wearing and fretting about keeping my waist looking slender in clothes, I hadn’t really admitted to myself what it meant. It was just something I had to do to feel normal, and I tried not to think too much about it. Probably for fear of what I’d have to face, which are the things we all face — growing older, changing, losing the easy social acceptability of youth.

But when the realization hit — that I was, indeed, losing my waist — it came with another realization, totally unexpected: I really don’t mind very much. I actually kind of like my new body. And I can look back on old pictures of myself and appreciate what I thought was so hideous at the time, but still feel happy to have what I’ve got now.

If you know me personally, you know that I don’t wear much jewelry, aside from my watch and wedding ring. Nothing on me is pierced, including my ears, and I’ve never really owned a necklace or bracelet as an adult.

If you follow my inane ramblings on Twitter, you’ll also know that I got pearls for Christmas. Or, rather, that I strong-armed them out of my mom (thanks again, Mom!) because I’m an insistent brat who suddenly takes a fancy to something and cannot let it go.

When I turned 17, my mom gave me another piece of jewelry as a gift — another thing I’d suddenly and inexplicably fixated on: a shell cameo brooch, carved in the typical profile of feminine youth. I wore it constantly on a velvet ribbon around my neck, and then put it away when I got married. It’s not surprising that I strongly associate that shell cameo with youth. In my mind, it’s become a token of that period of my life.

And, subsequently, I think the reason I got those pearls, why I wanted them so intensely, was that they signified something about passing from youth into maturity. It was an assertion that there is as much beauty in maturity as in youth — even though it’s rarely admitted by our culture.

I decided I wanted to cultivate that, to appreciate it, after having spent much of my twenties stealthily avoiding cameras, wishing I could reinhabit my teenaged body, and absolutely dreading the thought that I was aging and would soon end up on some kind of social refuse-heap of oldness.

When I got them, I took the shell cameo out of storage. It now lives pinned on the lapel of my coat, like a merit badge of something accomplished, an adolescence survived. I wear the pearls daily, in the cameo’s former place, as an acceptance of finally feeling like a Real Adult, and as a way of showing how pleased I am with it.

The same goes for my belly. When I got rid of the corsets, it took a while to get comfortable wearing my belly so openly. Now it doesn’t faze me, and for the first time in my life, I can look at recent pictures of myself without cringing in horror. When I get up in the morning, and take my usual pains in getting dressed, I actually like how I look in a way I haven’t since early childhood.

I can’t help but think how funny it is that, in the end, gaining a hundred pounds and losing my waist really hasn’t turned out to be so bad. Actually rather nice.

Dear Fat Nutritionist,

Here’s a question from a first-time visiting guy: how would you rate your awareness that you’re so beautiful it’s kind of totally ridiculous? You know, on a scale from 1 for “totally oblivious” to 10 for “painfully aware, I get messages like this every day.”

Have an awesome week … and good luck with the site!

-Anon

Hey Anon,

I appreciate the compliment, and it’s charmingly stated. You probably intended it as a rhetorical question, but if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to tell you a story about my awareness of my own beauty.

When I was very little, I became aware that I was considered more valuable to other people when I looked a certain way. On days when my mother curled my hair and dressed me in ruffles, I was treated with a kind of fawning admiration by the adults I encountered. When she didn’t, and as I grew older, out of that perfectly sweet toddler age and into a considerably more awkward and willful one, the more invisible I seemed to become.

I proceeded through childhood seeing romantic movies, even cartoons, that depicted the lives and problems of conventionally beautiful people as more important, and endlessly more fascinating, than the lives and problems of the dowdy or traditionally unattractive.

Do you remember how, in ancient times, and even up through the past several hundred years, plays and novels and epics almost exclusively concerned themselves with the lives of royalty, the nobility, or, at least, the very, very wealthy? And have you noticed that now, in this supposedly classless modern society of ours, the stories of the rich and powerful have simply been exchanged for the stories of the young and beautiful? In 1847, Jane Eyre was considered a startling departure from this convention — and it kinda still is. I’m sure you’ve noticed. At any rate, from a very young age, I did.

I spent my girlhood, like many American girlhoods are spent, wishing fervently to become beautiful. When I was ridiculed in school, when I was ignored or picked on or called a nerd, I turned to the fantasy of sudden beauty as some kind of protector-saint, as though it could save me from the pain of being a human among other humans. Unfortunately (I thought) for me, I was an awkward kid, a tomboy with straight brown hair and glasses, and a pearish figure unaccommodated by the fashionable clothes of the day.

I began to seek beauty like a person possessed, starting around age 11. I read fashion magazines and bought makeup. I put the makeup on. I looked ridiculous, but I kept practicing. I bought clothes, and did it all wrong and got laughed at and made fun of, but I kept trying. I had a feeling that if I could just find the combination to this particular padlock, I would be liked by the right people, I would have the right sort of life, and I wouldn’t have to feel like an alien or an outcast anymore.

Once I hit puberty around 12, I basically looked like a grown-up and stayed that way. People thought I was an adult when I was still in gradeschool. Objectively, my looks did not actually change very much between the ages of 12 and 16.

So imagine my surprise when, one morning when I was 16, I got the combination right — the fucking padlock opened.

At that point, I’d actually sort of given up on the whole enterprise of becoming fashionable, and thought to myself, “Fuck it. I’m just going to do whatever I like.” Since I have a kind of eccentric personal style, this meant styling myself in a way that would have been right at home circa 1915. The previous evening, I’d bobbed my hair and received some new clothes in the mail. All the years of making myself look absurd with makeup had actually made me quite skilled with it.

I got dressed and went to school as usual — pleased with myself, but not expecting anyone else to give a rat’s ass. I walked into school where, just the previous day, I’d been ignored, completely invisible, and considered nerdy and unfashionable and weird. As the doors opened, the first thing I heard was, “SHE LOOKS LIKE A MODEL,” loudly stated by the most intimidating punk of the school to his entire group of intimidating friends.

I froze, half-mortified and half-transfixed. It was one of the few times I’d heard anyone comment positively on my appearance since I was a toddler. It was exactly what I’d been craving for so many years; how could I not feel at least partly pleased? But I was also taken aback — this was not, after all, what I was going after when I’d gotten dressed that morning. Still…it was not exactly a bad result, no? Surely my life would now get better?

Sadly, I realized too clearly that I was not, objectively, “beautiful.” I realized that beauty was not a static thing, not a fixed commodity, and that there were very few people in the world who rolled out of bed looking the cultural ideal. And I was certainly not one of them.

For me, beauty was a costume I put on in the morning and took off at night, when I was finally alone with myself. I knew this, and it made me nervous as all hell, frightened that someone would see through my disguise and take away the status I’d finally, accidentally, managed to achieve.

I began to feel an external obligation to put on my beauty costume, every single day. I was unbearably nervous to leave the house without it. Sometimes it took hours. Sometimes it meant getting up at 5am. Sometimes I rebelled — there was a period where I refused to wash my laundry, to do anything but lay in bed most of the day, and I would literally pick my clothes up off the floor and put them on, then tramp through the mud in my heeled oxfords and long skirts to school.

Pretty soon, I stopped leaving the house as much as possible.

There was another reason for this — when I reached puberty, but not quite fashionability, at age 12, I had my induction into the world of womanhood via the ritual hazing of sexual harassment. I was tormented, squeezed, hissed at, touched, groped, fondled, and pulled forcibly into people’s laps at school.

Do not misunderstand: this was not flirting. It was humiliation and cruelty. These people were not interested in me as a human being; they did not have crushes on me; they did not care for me. It was degradation, plain and simple. And I wanted no part of it. I physically and vociferously fought back. But I was confused — I did not understand why it happened, what I’d done to deserve it, and why no one came to my aid.

As bad as this was, it only got worse when I started dressing in beauty drag. I began attracting the attention of perfect strangers, of people much older than me, people who didn’t just mean to humiliate me, but who actually meant me harm. I went from feeling like an invisible person who was occasionally objectified for other people’s pleasure, to being a deer in hunting season. I was highly visible, something about me was now considered highly desirable, and I was no longer just vulnerable to attack — I was actively targeted because of the way I looked. My life and physical safety were threatened more than once.

My peers also seemed continually amazed to discover that I was intelligent, as though the previous ten years — when I’d been known by reputation as a school-nerd — were blotted out completely by my changed appearance.

Even so, boys at school wanted nothing to do with me — except to talk to their friends about how badly I needed to be fucked — and girls who weren’t already my friends started kissing up to me because my status was now higher. I rebuffed them. I told them to fuck off (in my head.) But I was desperately lonely.

As I mentioned, I started becoming afraid to leave the house. A computer nerd from way back, I started using IRC a lot in order to talk to people in a context where I could control how/when to reveal my sex and my appearance.

I had internet boyfriends, who sent me mix tapes, instead of real relationships because I thought I could keep myself safe that way. I was almost completely isolated.

I’d been depressed since about age 12 (SHOCKER), but I was finally diagnosed with depression formally by a therapist who told me, “You look like a Maxfield Parrish painting.”

My last year of high school, I started to fuck around with my beauty disguise. I played with the levels of visibility I could achieve, I suppose as some manner of taking back control over this thing that had gotten entirely out of hand. I dressed up some days, and then, other days, I’d wear running shoes, old jeans, my mom’s jacket and glasses.

Once, a kid I didn’t know approached me at school as I sat in my habitual spot in the commons, doing homework.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to ask — are you the same girl who normally sits here?”

“Yeah…?”

“I mean, you normally wear a long dress, right? And no glasses?”

“Yes.”

“You just — you look like a completely different girl. Wow. I thought you were someone else.” And he walked away, shaking his head a bit.

I was oddly pleased by this, but it also reinforced my knowledge that the beauty thing was just a disguise, a costume.

In college, when I was 18, I saw a boy in my mythology class who seemed interesting. He took absolutely no notice of me for several weeks, dressed in my jeans and army surplus jacket. I decided to conduct an experiment: for the next class, I would dress up and see what happened.

What happened was he came and sat by me, asked me if I was new in the class, then carried my books while walking me to my dad’s car when class was over. The only thing different was my mode of dress.

I am older now and a lot fatter, but I still can manage to put on the costume when I need to. I am conscious that I am treated differently when wearing beauty: better in certain circumstances, worse in others. I am sexually harassed more on the street, but receive better service and kinder attentions from people. I get more attention, but people, perhaps, take me less seriously.

I made the conscious decision, when I started this website, that I would use an attractive picture of myself on the front page. Because being fat in this world is already a black mark against me, I knew I would have to tap some of the status that my false beauty can afford to partially make up for that. I knew my writing would be more likely to be read, and people would be more interested in hearing me out, perhaps even giving me media coverage, if they thought I were beautiful.

The truth is the same as it has always been: I’m not actually beautiful. I’m simply and idiosyncratically myself. Beauty is a cultural construct designed to keep people balanced on a knife-edge of anxiety over the potential loss of status, and the rabid desire to gain it. That knife-edge is so slender that hardly anyone, as I said before, rolls out of bed in the morning and balances on it effortlessly. Those who do are highly paid to do just that.

There will come a time when this costume no longer fits, when I am old enough and changed enough that no amount of makeup, no hairstyle, no set of clothes will be able to obscure my nature to the extent necessary to imitate cultural standards of beauty. When that happens, I imagine I will grieve, but I will also feel relief.

So, to answer your original question, the answer is somewhere around 152. Not because I’m constantly showered in praise for my looks, but because I deliberately construct or deconstruct this papier-mâché facade in front of my mirror, depending on what needs to get done that day.

Oh, and I married the internet boyfriend who sent me the most mix tapes.

Warmly,
Michelle

P.S. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m publishing this email :)

I first had to tell my husband and family I was quitting my diet, and all further weight loss attempts. That was a little hard, since I’d been such a devoted and obnoxiously voceriferous dieter (I’m sure you can imagine, given how obnoxiously vociferous a fat acceptance activist I now am. The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

Eventually, I got around to telling my friends, too. In the process, I discovered something that startled: every single one of my female friends had the same issues with weight, eating, and body image that I’d, until then, imagined were my own personal neuroses. I was floored to discover just how common these problems are, and how good we are at hiding them from each other.

I started writing online around 2002, in a personal journal-thingy, as I was discovering more of the literature on health and weight and dieting, and as I came to my decision to pursue a nutrition degree. I had catty drama-filled fights with pro-ana bloggers and with dedicated dieters, and we all did a lot of pearl-clutching at how insane we each thought the other was. Eventually, I realized that, despite appearances, we really were all on the same team, struggling in different ways, using different methods, with the very same problems.

The first time I spoke in public, to real, live people, about Health at Every Size and my own decision to accept myself was in the late summer of 2002. I nearly peed my pants before standing up in front of my biology class and saying loud and clear, I’m a fat lady and I think that’s okay. I thought I would be pelted with rotten tomatoes. Instead, people rushed to encourage and thank me. I was bowled over by just how needed the message of size acceptance was.

I then proceeded through school, writing papers about weight and Health at Every Size and body image whenever the opportunity presented. I did a couple more presentations where I talked frankly about how I’m a fat lady and I think that’s okay. Again, I never received the rotten tomatoes that I never failed to imagine I somehow deserved.

I wrote for and was active on Big Fat Blog for a number of years; I attended a conference about Fat Studies and met heroes — truly kind, scarily intelligent, morally advanced people.

And this has been an inventory of all the ways in which I didn’t hide.

But there were other parts of my life. There was work at the hospital, or rather, hospitals. Despite being a visibly, unapologetically fat person working in nutrition, I was hiding. I never told my bosses about my extracurricular activities, about my interest in fat acceptance.

The closest I came was when, once, my boss asked me what I was writing my term paper on, and I said, “Health at Every Size.” When another dietitian (who I love dearly) asked me how I felt about my own weight, I responded with a hedging, “As long as I’m healthy…”

I put a quote by Marilyn Wann on the wall above my desk, as a reminder of my principles in an environment that was sometimes hostile to my beliefs. It said, “You can’t hate people for their own good.” Sometimes my volunteers asked what it meant, and I mumbled something about prejudice and discrimination. I never explained it to anyone. I was hiding.

This September, I concluded my work as a diet tech at the hospitals. I had the good fortune to work in many areas (like eating disorders and oncology, and with frail, older inpatients) where my job was to encourage, not discourage, eating and enjoyment of food, where any focus on weight was more toward gaining than losing. This made me happy, and I believe my own comfort with food and my body gave me a special knack in this, because there was no inner conflict for me in encouraging people to eat and be satisfied with themselves. But still — I was hiding.

When I began this website and began using my real name in emails and when talking to the media, it scared the shit out of me. When I knew that I had to cowgirl up and actually start promoting myself, admitting to the fatosphere that I’m a nutritionist, and admitting to the nutrition world that I’m one of those fringe fat acceptance nuts, it scared the shit out of me. My cover was blown.

And, predictably, I took some heat for all that. It wasn’t unexpected, but it still scared the shit out of me. I also took a lot of sweetness for it, from people who have been encouraging and admiring and thankful. This, I wasn’t expecting — the sweetness scared the shit out of me, too.

I’ve been in the habit, for a long time, of singing in empty rooms, of reading my poems to no one in particular, of deliberately flying under the radar. It’s a comfortable place for me, for though I’ve always had a streak of the performer in me, I’ve also always abhorred a crowd, hated to have eyeballs on me unless protected by full costume and greasepaint.

To stand here, unaided by artifice, for people to yea or nay my value as a contributor to this world, has been unthinkable to me. I suppose because I take that vote seriously. I integrate it into my valuation of myself.

And now, here I am. Not only have I opened myself up for judgment, I have staked my professional reputation, and possibly the ability to feed and shelter myself, on my name, on this page on the internet. I have sworn like a sailor, I have proclaimed that a lot of nutrition is bullshit, and I have encouraged people to do the unthinkable by feeding their kids dessert twice a day. I’ve ruined the façade that I so carefully cultivated and conserved, and I’m not entirely sure, now, what to do with myself.

My only option remains to construct something new from these remnants.

But I’m struggling. I am not, by nature or training, a carpenter. I’m someone who sits at the back of the class, who covers her writing with her hand, who doesn’t answer the telephone — who, in short, keeps secrets.

But if I’m truly okay with who and what I am, there shouldn’t be a need for secrets, or to shrink from the yeas and nays. The referendum on my right to exist should be fixed, and I should have full right of veto.

Writing this blog is as much about helping people come to terms with their eating as it about helping myself come to terms with being visible. I apologize in advance that you will be exposed to a lot of the messiness and self-indulgence inherent in that process, but you can skip over those parts if you like. There will be times when it will seem like I am talking to myself, because, well — sometimes I am. It’s a habit that isn’t so easily extinguished. I suppose it’s a way of clearing my throat for the actual singing that must be done, whether I like it or not, before an audience.

Ellyn Satter said something this past week that made sense to me: “Somehow, going over and over a thing takes the bother out of it.”

So that’s what I’ll be doing here, taking the bother out of, finally, showing you my face.

I started it off by turning 30, which I was extremely excited about. I’m a bit sentimental when it comes to numbers, and I was doing the whole clean-slate-fresh-start thing in my head.

And there have been a lot of good changes recently, this website and the idea to strike out on my own as a nutrition renegade being not the least of them — but there’ve also been some hard things that I haven’t gone into detail about.

Now’s probably the time to remedy that.

I’ve semi-identified as a person with a disability for a few years now. I say “semi” because my disability is not visible — it’s “mental” or “emotional” in nature. (Except, because of my bias against such Cartesian dualism, I consider all mental and emotional problems as inherently physical, and all physical problems to carry some emotional/mental weight with them.)

This whole “I’m kinda/sorta/not-really disabled” thing is just now coming home to me in a major way, though I’ve kinda/sorta/not-really accepted it since 2005, when I first registered as a disabled student at my university.

To put it plainly, I have depression.

Yeah, it’s a boring thing to have, and I’m so sick of thinking about it that I can hardly even stand to type out the word. I’ve had it a long, long time, since childhood.

I’ve tried a lot of treatments for it — a fair bit of therapy, a fair number of drugs. None of them worked in any long-term, fundamental way. I’ve also done a lot of self-medicating in the form of, shall we say maladaptive behaviours, and experienced some hard-core avoidance that is more accurately described as TOTAL PHYSICAL PARALYSIS rather than “procrastination,” and SHITTING MY PANTS IN TERROR rather than “anxiety.”

So why bring all this up now?

This spring, I tried a new drug. It started really working for me toward early summer.

It was the first time I can recall feeling “normal,” mood-wise, since before I was about ten years old. It gave me so much hope. It realigned my vision of what life could be, of what it probably is for people without mood disorders. I woke up in the morning not wishing I were dead, and it was…it was…

…it was magic. It was falling in love. It was bringing the dead back to life. It was winning the lottery and the Miss America Pageant all on the same day. It was waking up from a nightmare and saying to yourself, “It was all a dream. It’s over.”

But it wasn’t over. The drug stopped working.

Within a few weeks, my stubborn, intractible brain managed to compensate for the new chemicals flooding it, to return to its cherished equilibrium-state of feeling like utter shit. Of fatigue, of tiredness, of hopelessness, fear and guilt.

My doctor told me I have treatment-resistant depression. I told her that I would rather die than accept that.

She told me to stop fighting.

I went home and bawled my eyes out.

For all my talking the talk about alternative definitions of health, of “inhabit, accept, and cope,” I haven’t been much walking that particular walk, except as it relates directly to being fat.

Depression has been different to me, somehow. For as (relatively) easily as I could accept that I was just going to be a fat lady, and buy fat lady clothes in fat lady stores, and never quite fit into certain social or physical spaces, and that I would commit myself to respecting my body anyway, and fighting for a culture than can similarly respect people’s bodies, it remained totally unacceptable to me that I would wake up every morning with this anvil of utter suck pressing down into my heart, hobbling me from doing the things I desperately needed to do and mocking me whenever I stumbled.

Case in point: it has taken seven years, thus far, to reach my fourth year in university. By the time I graduate, it will have taken me eight full years.

This is entirely because of the depression.

Yes, I have worked at the same time, and gained a lot of experience, and been accepted for jobs that students are not normally accepted for. But I did this as compensation for what I could not do at school, which was face my intense fear of judgment, of being graded, of being praised and shamed like a dog.

Even at my worst, I could function well at work — it provided an escape. School, however, became intolerable. It set me in a cage with my worst fears, and restrained me by the shoulders as they took turns socking me in the gut.

This summer, when the medication stopped working, I wasn’t even able to perform at work anymore. It took me an extra three or four hours each night just to complete my basic tasks. I no longer cared about anything — about being late, about getting things done, about what my boss wanted, about being the perfect little employee I’d been for the last five years.

And I realized the grip of this depression was getting tighter, closing doors and windows through which I’d previously been able to escape for a few blessed hours, in my white coat, to neat desks and the smell of disinfectant and tidy to-do lists and calorie counts.

In plain English, my functioning was getting worse. I was becoming increasingly unable to do basic tasks, and I could no longer avoid thinking about it. The typical treatments were not working for me, except as a temporary stop-gap, and I’d done them so many times that I was frankly exhausted.

So, now my doctor has verified my worst fear: I am stuck with this thing.

It is not temporary; it is not external; it is a permanent part of me.

As such, I am now slowly taking the steps required to accept this, much in the way I had to learn to accept my body.

I am disabled. I will have to learn certain kindnesses and flavours of compassion I previously had the privilege of eschewing, and I will have to practise them on the most unsympathetic character imaginable — myself.

Instead of fighting, we’ll have to make it up somehow. We’re roommates, not mortal enemies. There is nothing to be gained by dashing out my brains against this particular rock, and everything to lose by continuing to fight.

I’m going to work with it, live with it.

And I’m beginning to think that could be okay.

And I didn’t write anything, because, naturally, that’s what you do when you’re gripped with an irrational fear of putting yourself out there.

Last night, I finally took some time to sort things out, do a little housekeeping, light a candle on my desk, and make the attempt to reclaim…what? I’m not sure. My space in the world? My mental happy place?

Something like that. Only pretend I used less cheesy terms than I just did, okay?

I’ve got a million things going on right now that all feel like they’re pulling me away from myself, and I’ve always resented that feeling. I’ve got a class I’m taking (disability studies FTW!), and hospital work to do, and some sort of volunteerish stuff, and maybe writing a Big, Important Paper with someone I admire.

And as much as I truly want to do all those things, and freely chose to sign up for them, when they start becoming The Enemy and I start feeling like The Captive, I know I’m in trouble.

Incidentally, this is all related to that intrinsic motivation thing I mentioned the other day. And to the whole making-friends-with-yourself thing, which is sort of the whole raison d’être of this blog.

So, I recognize that it’s time to get reacquainted with my reasons for wanting to do these things — just as it might be periodically advisable to get reacquainted with your reasons for, say, eating well, when you start to slip back into authoritarian mode and getting all “shouldy” and finger-pointy with yourself.

We all do it.

My first step in the reacquaintancing, as it were, is to remind myself: I don’t have to do this. In fact, I don’t have to do any of this. If I look at things realistically, there are very few things in this world I have to, absolutely have to, do.

One of them is breathing.

Another one might be eating and imbibing fluids — and even then, it’s just enough to get sustenance into my mouth. There are no rules about how well I have to do it. Just enough to stay alive is good enough (and you’d be surprised — I once lived through a period where I basically just ate hashbrowns, toast, and milk. And another period of frosted strawberry Poptarts. Not that I’m recommending this course of action — I’m just sayin’.)

And then there’s sleeping and going to the washroom.

Anything else? No, not really. This is the bare minimum required to sustain existence. So, what I’m saying to myself, which I find comforting at times like these, is I DON’T HAVE TO DO JACK SHIT except survive. I could dump all my “obligations” tomorrow, in the most unceremonious fashion possible, and I would still be a human being who deserved to live.

I start to feel better almost instantly.

Now, since most of us are interested in something more than rudimentary existence — if you’re not, I’ll gently suggest you may want to seek some kind of counsel. I’m a little more well-acquainted with mental illness than I’d like to be, and I can tell you that this is one of its distinctive calling cards — the second step is to take stock of what on earth you’re doing.

I mean, do you have a reason for being here?

Do you have something that makes your heart beat a little faster, just thinking about it? Are there people you love, things you want to see, art you want to create, or just little ineffable ripples you want to send out like Morse code across the big old pond of human affairs?

I do. First, I have a sort of working morality that’s developing as I blunder clumsily through my days. There are people I love, many of whom are far away in a place I’d like to get back to. There’s my husband, who is my buddy and my co-pilot and co-philosopher and co-conspirator all rolled into one. Then there’s writing, which I can’t even explain my attachment to, except to say that without it, I don’t think I’d be fully me, and I seem to crave doing it every single day.

And then there’s the fat nutritionist thing.

I’m passionate about nutrition, which is pretty weird for someone who thought seriously she’d be either a theatre major or a fiction writer someday. I’m passionate about helping people get to the happy place with food and their bodies. I’m committed to it, and it’s become incorporated, inextricably, into who I am.

These are the things that matter to me. And every one of the things I’ve decided to do with my time contributes to one of these things. In addition to being satisfying in and of themselves.

I want to do these things. They are not the enemy.

And I don’t have to do everything at once. I don’t have to write every blog post in the world at once, or have all the research for the paper done instantly, or take on every job remotely related to mine at the hospital. I don’t have to do all the readings and complete all the assignments for my course RIGHT NOW.

I just have to keep the pins in the air, like a juggler. Touch one spot, do one thing, write one thing on a list, move forward an inch. Be in the process.

Plan a good meal. Read a new recipe. Wash a dish. Get reacquainted with the good things you’ve chosen to do for yourself.

But take a breath and be there for it.

I took this picture on Sunday. I like the bee.

Since I believe in kindness and compassion, for other people, as well as for oneself, I decided to figure out what was going on with me.

The thing is, I set up this website, like, a metric eon ago, and I haven’t worked much on it since. I’ve tweaked some settings here and there, and I’ve gazed at it, and I’ve wondered about what to put on it, and I’ve had a million ideas that stayed in my head.

In short, I’ve worked myself up into a state of near-panic about it. Rather than just being excited and happy about having a THING that’s all mine, that can be a blank canvas I colour in as I like.

So, naturally, I haven’t actually been writing anything for it.

When I get scared, the second thing that happens is, I become paralyzed. And whatever is HIGHLY IMPORTANT that I do at that moment, whether it’s studying for an exam or going to bed at a decent time, is exactly the thing I cannot seem, with any amount of force, to actually do.

It’s gotten to the point where I damn near have a phobia about stuff like schoolwork. I actually cannot remember the last time I studied properly for an exam — I take them all by the seat of my pants, just because I find it too scary to study. Talk about conterproductive.

But, as it turns out, this morning I figured out what purpose this paralysis serves. And its purpose, apparently, is to 1) protect me from the scary, scary thing, but more importantly, 2) to act as a signal that I have lost touch with my intrinsic motivation to do whatever that thing is.

And this is the part that’s so very important, and so very relevant to this here normal eating blog.

Intrinsic motivation, to my understanding, is basically the natural reward inherent in a behaviour. Whether it’s eating, or going to the bathroom (eew, I know), or doing one’s homework. It’s the natural high you get from doing those things, because they are somehow gratifying in themselves.

Food tastes good, and it feels good when you’ve had a varied and nutritionally-dense meal that meets your needs. I get a calm, fluid feeling right in the centre of my chest when I’ve eaten a good homecooked dinner. Like my soul is letting out a big, satisfied sigh. Ahhhhhhh.

And peeing when you’ve super-gotta-go provides an immediate, and if you’re honest, heady sense of relief. Ahhhhhhh.

And doing one’s homework is gratifying because, not only might the content be interesting and relevant to you personally, if you can focus on the joy of learning rather than the threat of a bad grade — but also because it contributes to the life you’ve chosen for yourself.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

In short, the only real reason you or I do any of these things is because they are a kindness to ourselves.

But if you get caught up in a sense of competition, or wanting to impress other people, or even trying to prove your worth to the world, it can majorly undermine that intrinsic pleasure.

It might not happen today, maybe not even tomorrow, but, eventually, if you’re anything at all like me (read: rebellious and stubborn), you might find yourself completely paralyzed, some part of you totally unwilling to take another step forward until you’ve straightened your shit out.

Because forcing yourself along for years and years with carrots and sticks is exhausting, humiliating, and, at its base, actually kind of cruel.

Well, homey don’t play that shit.

Being cruel to yourself, even for the stated purpose of doing something “Good for you” is counterproductive. And it’s shitty. And don’t do it.

So, you might be wondering how I’m going to tie this to normal eating. Well, even though I struggle mightily with schoolwork, the one thing I no longer struggle with is eating. So, in order for me to understand stuff, I often filter it through an analogy of how I eat.

This morning I realized — what I’ve been doing to myself with trying to force myself to work on this or that, to get the highest grade, or compete with people in the business world (okay, so that one’s mostly in my head, but still), is not so very different from what I did when I was dieting — taking something (eating) that IS already inherently pleasurable and a good thing, and using an external motivator (weight) to suck all the joy out of it. And eventually ruin it for myself.

In short, to flagellate myself. With something that is actually supposed to contribute to my well-being.

And how messed up is that?

So, writing this blog is hugely important to me. It’s contributing directly to the life I want to live (maybe I’ll tell you about that later. It’s pretty beautiful, and damn near inspiring, if I do say so myself.) And because I like myself, because I’m pretty good buddies with myself, making the effort to contribute to that life is so totally worth it.

So, hi. I’m here now. And I’ll be here for a while, building cool shit for myself. I hope you get something out of it.

I’ll put some old entries about eating up in the archives. Feel free to poke around and ask questions.

So, I’m working on this thing I like to call my Unified Theory of Kicking Ass. What that means is, I’m reading and learning stuff about normal eating and nutrition and how people change their behaviour.

I have a pretty decent understanding of this stuff already, since I’ve almost finished my nutrition degree, but I’m looking for something more.

Something that will really help people. Something that will totally kick ass.

The thing is, there are a lot of useful theories around. There’s intuitive eating, and eating competence, and demand feeding, and health at every size, and various non-diet approaches to good nutrition. And we’re going to discuss them all on this blog.

They’re based on solid evidence. They work. And a lot of people really, really like the idea of putting them to work in their own lives.

But that can be really, really hard to do.

I know because I went through it myself.

I had a serious Dieting Incident that really messed me up. It took me five years to relearn to eat, and move, and feel normal with my body again.

I’m not perfect by any means, but I’ve reached a place that is, apparently, enviable: I feel comfortable around food.

I don’t think of food as “good” or “bad.” I don’t see my weight as a reflection of my character. I combine what tastes good and what feels good without a lot of thought. I mostly get hungry at regular times, and I mostly eat until I feel just right. My weight is stable, finally.

I’m cool with food. And I’m pretty cool with my body, too.

Five years ago, I literally thought I would never get to this place. I cried just thinking about it. (Yeah, I’m emotional like that.)

But I’m here, and it’s every bit as awesome as I’d hoped. And the reason I’m writing about it is because, after being involved in the Fatosphere, and reading so many discussions about food and intuitive eating and whatnot, I know there are tons of people out there who feel like I did — that normal eating will never happen for them.

Well, I think it can. And I’m here to help.

Normal eating is what we’re born to do — and I truly believe we can relearn how to do it, if it’s necessary. (And it is.)

So, you’re here. I’m over the moon you’re here, because I really need your help with this.

I’ll tell you what I figure out along the way. I’ll bounce ideas off you. In return, I hope you’ll give me your suggestions, your thoughts, your stories and your support.

Help me develop this thing, this Unified Theory, and I’ll be your biggest fan. Seriously. How could I not?

In theory, I’m a food libertarian and don’t believe the state should take responsibility for curbing individuals’ greed.” [Emphasis mine.]

And her…colourful…use of hyperbole, which wouldn’t be entirely out-of-place in the opinion section of your local junior high student paper:

But it’s sad to watch already-chubby kids at the food courts eating hassock-sized cinnamon rolls, haystacks of french fries and stacked baseballs of ice cream. The kids may as well be wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Diabetic in Training.”

Whoa, Hoss, let’s tone down the outrage for a second there and consider things sensibly, shall we?

First of all, people don’t eat because they’re greedy. Greed, and the other deadly sins we hold so dear to our shrivelled, black hearts, has absolutely nothing to do with food. We eat because we’re hungry, or because something looks and smells delicious, and because we’re hard-wired to eat tasty food.

As much as is available.

This is a survival mechanism — because who knows when it’s coming around again, right? Particularly if you’ve ever survived a food shortage (or, the more likely case in North America, if you’ve ever survived a weight-loss diet.)

Hard to believe, I know, since humans obviously aren’t just animals who evolved from other animals, thus still having certain animal needs and certain animal behaviours. No, no — we’re all just greedy little fallen angels slavering with lust at the thought of buggering some poor, starving charity case out of his last can of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato.

So we can stuff it mindlessly down our gaping, triple-chinned maws…

Baconatorzzzzzzzz

Wait. Where was I again? Oh yeah, considering things sensibly.

Look. We’re human. We get hungry. Yes, we even crave and enjoy salt, sugar, and fat. Because those things (aside from representing two of the three existing macronutrients, and one of the most important micronutrients) are precious commodities to animals in the wild, and it makes sense to eat up as much of them as you can, and store that energy against a rainy day.

And, yes, becoming civilized little monkeys has changed our world, and that strategy is now a bit outdated. But the innate desires are still there. And yes, the food industry capitalizes on those innate desires and tries to manipulate our appetites for profit (want to talk about greed? *cough*)

But none of this should come as a big, nasty surprise to a society of educated consumers living in a rich country in the year 2009.

And none of this makes us greedy, gluttonous assholes — it makes us human beings.

The way to deal with this is not to point fingers at the fatties and shriek with moral outrage about their greed. The way to deal with this is not to conflate eating habits with body size, or to blame diabetes on those evil white foods.

Wacky as it may sound, the way to deal with it is to, first, calm the fuck down. And stop being such an asshole to people who don’t look like you. And stop attaching a moral value to food, or to health.

Maybe learn to take care of yourself with kindness instead of flagellation. You might find that all that hyper-processed stuff makes for a fun treat, but actual, ya know, food makes a far more satisfying and delightful staple. And you might learn to even enjoy it, rather than swallowing it whole out of some deranged sense of duty.

None of us, fat or thin, are such idiots that we can’t figure out how to eat appropriately for our bodies. And it really is okay to enjoy things that taste good.

It’s food. That’s what it’s for.

“More To Love is by the same guys that do “The Bachelor” for ABC and is essentially the same show, except all the gals on the show are real girls with real curves.”

It pissed me off. And because this is my blog, I’m about to tell you why.

First, because it’s fucking patronizing.

Second, because it’s a sneaky little divide-and-conquer strategy, of the type commonly used to pit women against other women.

Third, because we’re ALL real women, you fuckwad.

There seems to be a common assumption that, if you’re fat and not particularly ashamed of that fact, you must, by default, HATE thin women, or find them ugly, or some other form of stupidness that can only be described as SOUR FUCKING GRAPES.

Not so.

I’m fat, and not particularly ashamed of the fact, and I also think thin women are just fine. I largely share the same aesthetic standards of my culture (with a few exceptions — most notably, the ones that allow me not to hate myself), and I often think thin women are just lovely. I also don’t feel particularly jealous, because why would I waste my time? They’re them, and I’m me.

I certainly sometimes sigh to myself wistfully about what it would be like to, say, have curly hair, or be blonde, or to be slender and model-perfect, but I don’t spend a lot of time on it. I recognize these moments for what they are: pure fantasy, a grass-is-greener kind of escape from reality. And then I go back to being me without a whole lot of fuss. I see certain pictures of myself, or put on a certain outfit, or flip my hair in a certain way that makes me think, “Yeah, other people are lovely. But I’m pretty alright myself.”

So then, why is it so impossible to believe that we can genuinely admire others, without simultaneously wanting to look exactly like them? We’re not all crazed bitches from some psycho-stalker horror movie here.

I’m going to steal your haircut, and then YOUR MAN. Fear meeeeeee.

ENOUGH already with all this real woman garbage. We’re all real women, for fuck’s sake — the thin ones, the pale ones, the dark ones, the hairy ones, the not-hairy ones, the short ones, the tall ones, the young ones, the older ones, the fertile ones, the sterile ones, and yes, of course, the fat ones. If anyone has the temerity to identify as a woman in this culture, I’m handing them over an Official Membership Card and inviting them to the pool party, since, you know, I’m a real woman and all. By the power vested in me, etc. etc. And because if you’re willing to put up with the bullshit women put up with every single day, then shit — you’ve earned it.

In closing, I’d like to say: you’re not fooling anyone, fancy-TV-producers-attempting-to-ingratiate-yourselves-with-the-fat-people-you’ve-used-as-the-butt-of-all-your-super-sophisticated-sitcom-jokes-for-so-long. You’re just pissing me off.

And you sound like a fucking squid.

Well, as most of us have probably figured out from hard experience, bodies don’t dig that kind of stuff. They fuss. They rebel. They infiltrate your mind until they get their way, one way or another.

And given what we now know about brain structures and neurotransmitters affecting emotions and thought and judgment, it seems more sensible to really see the whole thing — us — as an organic whole. Not one of those Star Wars AT-AT walkers with, like, a dude inside manipulating the controls and shooting at stuff.

Pew, pew, pew!

No. Rather, your body is the space within which you exist. It’s the material assertion that you have the right to exist in this world, that you have a place in it. It’s the concept of ‘home’ — not a house, a thing to be remodelled at whim, bought and sold — but a cherished, adored, childhood home comprising memories both sad and sweet. Something you will lovingly tend to and care for over the years, give fresh paint and make repairs to when needed, but whose fundamental essence you would never hope to obliterate — imperfect, even broken, as its assembled parts may be.

It’s an extension of yourself — not your whole self, but definitely an irreplaceable part of it.

And that is why we’re so sad when things change. If our bodies were just machines, just external armour, why would we care so much about suddenly looking different? Hell, I sometimes cry when I get my hair cut, and I know that shit’s growing back.

So, to bring this around to something resembling a point — why does it matter how we think of our bodies? Well, in my experience, treating my body like a machine has not ended well. Treating it like an expensive outfit designed to impress other people has not ended well. Treating it like an unruly child or pet who needs to be reckoned with and brought under submission has not ended well. And I’ve lived for long periods of time where it was as if my body and myself were no longer on speaking terms.

The only thing that seems to make sense, that brings some kind of contentment to my relationship with myself — my eating, my moving, and my relationship with the great big world around me — is to appreciate the thing that I am. This warm, pink, mammalian flesh gives me all the tools I need to negotiate a pretty spectacular and time-sensitive existence. I see, hear, taste, and feel, both tactilely and emotionally, entirely at the discretion of my architecture. It doesn’t just mediate my interaction with the world — it creates that world. It is the stuff of my existence. And it’s the one place I can always return to, when weary or tired, to recreate that existence.

So, we look out for each other. I keep its structure sound, and it provides the world to me. My body is far more than the circumference of my thighs, the completeness of my shaving job, or the size of my appetite — it’s my home. I carry it with me.

Which is not only stupid, but impossible.

People age and change, and I want to be relaxed and happy with those changes. There was nothing wrong with me as a child when people told me I was ugly and misshapen and that I should be ashamed of myself; there was nothing wrong with me when one day I woke up looking more like the cultural ideal than I’d bargained for and was hunted like a deer in season by people who treated me like an orifice.

And there’s nothing wrong with me now, as I age and get fatter and, hopefully, wiser. The problem was never with me…it was with the ridiculous significance we attach to the way people look, and the arbitrary dividing lines placed between “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”

One day, I was unacceptable for wearing glasses and having straight hair. Another day, I was highly prized for wearing a different dress. One year, my rounded derriere was outré; the next, it was the height of fashion. I literally woke up one morning and changed my hair and put on new clothes like a costume or uniform or, more likely, armor, and the way people treated me changed 180 degrees — based entirely on my appearance. This severely undermined my already-shaky faith in humanity, and I’ve been suspicious of people ever since.

How about this: I have always looked basically the same, with slight alterations in hairstyle, clothing choice, and makeup. I am the same person, always, and my worth does not change based on the whims of fashion. And how about if it’s no one’s business to tell someone that she’s either in or out or ugly or beautiful — because all she is, all she has ever been, all she wants to be, is human?

Not a canary in the coal mine of cultural beauty.

What about fat women who’ve tried to love themselves and have failed at that too?

It’s a curious dilemma. I mean, what do you do when not only diets have failed you, but your effort to try and accept yourself has failed? You’re kind of stuck, and I don’t think it would be a fun place to be stuck. You know that dieting is pretty stupid, but you’re starting to think that the idea of actually *liking* your big ugly body is starting to sound stupid as well…

I have a few questions, and please don’t take offense…I’m just trying to understand.

-Have you put as much effort into learning to accept yourself as you have put into dieting? Have you thrown out the ‘thin’ clothes and bought new ones that you like? Have you read books and websites?

-Have you talked to your spouse or partner about this; does your spouse or partner find your body unattractive? Have you talked to your family? Do your relatives harass you about losing weight?

-Have you found a doctor who is not prejudiced about size? They do exist.

-Have you looked for a size-friendly exercise or support group? They also exist.

The reason I ask this is because learning to love yourself is not easy. If anything, it’s even harder than dieting, but with one important difference: in the end, you will succeed. But the effort must be real. Self-love does not automatically appear when you decide you’re done dieting. It takes work and effort.

Ask yourself this: Suppose you have a set amount of energy to apply to a task. And you have two choices. Which one are you going to choose to spend your energy on? Dieting, which works for most people only in the SHORT TERM, and can make you feel worse about yourself if you gain the weight back…or self-love, which will produce long-term results and can actually improve your physical and mental health?

Making the choice is easy. It’s following through with the choice that takes work. Loving yourself requires ACTIVE changes, since everything in our culture is geared to weight loss. When you look up health, you find weight loss. When you look up nutrition, you find weight loss. When you look up body image, you find weight loss. Therefore, if you sit passively back, the tides of our culture will gradually erode your resolve not to focus on weight loss. You must actively seek out size-positive information and support.

If anyone needs resources for self-love, ASK ME. I have tons, and am more than willing to share. There are websites, books, advocacy groups, dietitians, doctors, and researchers galore who believe in health at any size.

And, for the record: I do not advocate weight gain. My agenda is encouraging people of all sizes to live healthy lifestyles, regardless of weight. I actually believe that keeping a STABLE weight is healthiest of all, whether you start off fat or thin. Sometimes you will gain or lose naturally; but that is not my concern. My concern is for people to love and respect themselves, their bodies, and each other.

One last thing: a note on medical conditions. PCOS has been mentioned to me more than once now, by two different people. I don’t know the specifics of the disorder other than what I have read here, but what I’ve heard is that the condition results in a higher weight, and a harder time controlling weight for women who have it.

To this I offer the following logic: we’ve determined that for perfectly healthy people, controlling weight is near impossible, unless through extreme, unhealthy measures (we’re talking self-starvation, bulimia, compulsive exercise, weight-loss surgery, etc.) In fact, it is so difficult for normal people to control their weight that many health professionals have decided to encourage people not to worry about weight, and focus instead on living healthfully (which means eating nutritious food and exercising regularly.)

Therefore, if you have a medical condition which makes losing weight even MORE difficult than it already is for normal people, why would it make sense to try losing weight? You’re fighting a losing battle. For anyone with a medical condition, I think it is conservative to say that you should eat well and exercise moderately. Why add to the stresses of your condition the impossible task of trying to control an uncontrollable weight?

I had no idea this book would undermine everything I was doing and, subsequently, change my life. I am always wary of people who say something Changed Their Life…it was rather unsettling when I found myself in that situation.

I read the book, and thought for a few weeks. I turned things over in my head. I thought long and hard. I looked at my life, and what I was doing. I realized that my entire waking life had been consumed by my goal of losing weight. My interests had been swept aside so I could devote all my energy to this one thing. I was exercising between two and three hours a day. The only reason I was able to sustain this incredible burden was because I had no job and nothing else in my life to keep me busy. Once I started working and going to school, as I planned, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to keep up. Also, I realized that I was putting my life on hold until the day I weighed 120 lbs. I needed new clothes NOW…not 60 lbs. from now. And I needed to like myself NOW. Not when I was finally a socially-acceptable weight.

I looked at the boots in my closet, and promptly sent them back to Sears. Instead, I ordered a pair of shorter, lace-up boots that I knew would fit. My dream had ended.

It took me a long time to feel normal again after my stint logging all of my food. Reading How to Get Your Kid to Eat…But Not Too Much by Ellyn Satter helped a lot. But it took time for my compulsions and the guilt I felt for eating until I was full to subside. I stopped exercising for a while, because it was too related to weight-loss for me still, though I had learned to love it.

Also, as I have mentioned, I had to face the very scary possibility that I would gain back lots and lots of weight. I had to accept the fact that I might weigh 300 lbs. or more, but I still had to love myself, and I had to keep my promise never to ‘diet’ again. Because although I told myself it was a lifestyle change, that’s really what I was doing. I was not listening to my body, and eating when I was hungry. Effectively, I was denying myself food (though I met all of the nutritional requirements of the food pyramid, and ostensibly consumed an adequate amount of calories) and my body would not forgive me for that. That is why, I think, I felt so horrible about myself although I was looking ‘better and better.’ My body felt neglected and betrayed, like a child I was punishing for no good reason.

And now I can honestly, with all my heart say, I’d rather be fat. I’m happier when I respect myself (and show that respect by allowing my body to dictate what and how much I eat), and I love myself. I don’t feel strange in my body, like an ill-fitting garment, anymore. And I haven’t had a relapse of pneumonia.

There are times I see pictures and think, “Oh my God I’m huge!” but I’d much rather think that about pictures occasionally, than feel that way constantly and have to look in the mirror to confirm my self-worth. I’d rather be fat and deal with other people thinking, “She could be so pretty if she just lost some weight…” than think that way myself.

I don’t know everything there is to know about nutrition. No one, not even an expert, does. No one can say, irrefutably, that being fat or ‘obese’ is unhealthy. For myself, I’m willing to bet on what my body naturally wants to do, with mild guidance (I eat lots of fruit everyday, drink water, and I get a bit of exercise walking on my way to work. If I want a chocolate bar, or even a whole box of chocolates, I eat it. I trust myself.) I’d bet on my body’s natural hunger signals and the weight it seems to want to cling to before I bet on what anyone else tells me…a fashion magazine, a diet guru, the women at my office, or even a doctor.

When I turned 16, something weird happened. I got pretty. And suddenly all those people who once told me I was ugly and fat and a dork, were now telling me I was desirable. I couldn’t buy it. Those people had betrayed me before, and I frankly didn’t give a fuck to hear any more of their opinions. All the same, I felt the need to live up to some kind of expectation. I was concerned with my looks and would not leave the house unless I felt I looked good enough. There were many times I skipped school simply because I had a big zit or had picked my face raw (one of my many ways of dealing with anxiety) the night before. I weighed around 160lbs. during this time.

When I got out of high school, and away from all that kind of pressure, I became more independent and stopped being so worried. So by the time I left home to get married, I thought I had outgrown these problems. I was wrong.

About six months into our marriage, I noticed I had gained weight. I was now about 200lbs. Hitting the 200 mark was a blow, as much as I hated to admit it. I wanted to pretend I didn’t care, but I no longer could. My jeans were uncomfortably tight…I had trouble tying my shoes…I felt depressed and lethargic (no thanks to the oppressive Ontarian winter) and I felt the need to DO something.

For a few months, I studied nutrition on my own (at this time I was immigrating, and therefore forced into housewifedom with no job and no school) and tried to figure out the best way to get healthy. After researching for a while, near the beginning of summer I finally decided to put what I’d learned into practice. I vowed to myself that I would do this ‘the right way.’ This meant no fad dieting, no starving myself, and no compulsive exercising. I would simply keep a log of what I ate, make sure I ate the daily requirements from the four food groups, and exercise moderately, keeping my calories around 1800 a day. I made sure to keep telling myself that this was not a diet…it was a lifestyle change, and after I reached my goal weight, I would stick to a maintenance program for the rest of my life.

By no means is this extreme practice…most commercial diets hover around 1000 calories a day. I signed up with an online dieting website for moral support, and most of the women there were doing their own thing, like me, but were eating about 1200 calories a day. I would later learn that 1500 calories is considered semi-starvation, and that, not much below 1000 calories, you’re getting into anorexia nervosa territory.

It started off well. I felt an incredible surge of pride and almost euphoria. For once in my life, I was doing The Right Thing. I was doing something that everyone I knew could be proud of. I was encouraged by my husband, my mother and brother, my in-laws, and their friends. I even worked out a system where I could still eat as much chocolate as I wanted…whenever I wanted a candy bar, I simply had to walk to the store to get it (which, according to my calculations, burned about the same amount of calories as was in the chocolate, and so they canceled each other out. Theoretically, I could have eaten five chocolate bars a day and walked to the store five times a day, and not derailed my program at all.)

The weight came off around 1-2 pounds a week. I didn’t weigh myself more than once a week, and I tried not to get too wrapped up in the weight game. I set my goal weight for around 120 lbs., which, for my height (5’4″) is quite reasonable, according to the BMI. I only hesitated for a moment on the thought that I hadn’t weighed 120 lbs. since I was 11 years old.

On a bit of a side note, I went away to be a volunteer counselor at a camp for kids whose lives have been affected by cancer for two weeks during the summer. I returned home tan, happy, but with a small cold virus. The virus bloomed into pneumonia, which stayed with me for ten weeks. It drove me crazy because I could not exercise much while I was sick, but I stuck to my plan as much as I could.

Soon I found myself celebrating my ten pound weight loss. Not long after that, it was 20. I was so happy. I was putting away $10 for each pound I lost, with a view to buying myself a whole new wardrobe with the money once I reached my goal weight. I noticed something funny, however. Though I could now look at myself in the mirror with a feeling of approval, I was feeling slowly and slowly worse about myself. My body felt huge and wrong to me when I was not looking at myself; the feeling would persist until I proved it wrong by checking the mirror or stepping on the scale.

When the Sears Winter Catalog came out, I ordered a new pair of winter boots. They were black leather, mid-calf height, with a zipper up the side and high heels. Very cool. When they came, I was a bit disappointed that they wouldn’t zip all the way up my plump calves. I carefully wrapped them in the tissue paper they came in and put them in the closet, knowing that soon they would fit.