The Fat Nutritionist - Nutrition at Every Size

Pictures of you.

By Michelle | Published: May 29, 2011

If all you ever saw were daisies, being confronted with a rose might freak you out.

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.

Posted in D-d-dancing with myself, Fatness, Liking Yourself, Unified Theory | 84 Comments

Eating incompetence.

By Michelle | Published: April 4, 2011

I am not, by any means, a perfect eater. Or even a competent one, every day.

I do tend to score high on the validated eating competence inventory, but I am far, far, faaaaar from perfect. In fact, I’m not sure perfection in eating even exists. Or that I’d want it to.

I’d like to consider this blog more than just a lot of blah-blah where I tell people what to do. As you know, I’m not super-big on anyone telling anyone else what to do. But when you put yourself out there with the big old n-word (“nutritionist”), there come a lot of expectations, and also the assumption that You Know What You Are Doing.

All I really know is that I have an idea of what makes eating work for me, and what research and clinical observation has shown to make eating work for lots of other people. But what that actually looks like in each person’s day-to-day life is different.

Frankly, eating well doesn’t happen for me every day. Hell, there are periods of weeks or even months where my eating looks pretty damn incompetent. When I went through a big old nasty depression and alternated forgetting to eat entirely with eating to the point of numbness; when I lived in a place where the kitchen was tiny and inhabited by roaches; when I didn’t have money to eat much other than oatmeal, bananas, tuna sandwiches, beans and rice.

What I’m trying to say is, though I teach this stuff for a living, I’m still working my way through it. And likely will be for the rest of my life.

I consider this blog a series of reminders to myself of the lessons I have learned about eating:

That we all have the right and the need to eat, no matter how much we weigh.

That we must give ourselves truly unconditional permission to eat whatever we want, in whatever amounts we want, in order to find out what food works for us in what amounts. (Even though that is scary as hell, I know.)

And that “discipline” should only ever enter eating when it comes to the nuts and bolts of self-care: buying groceries. Making food. Taking the time to eat it, and to settle in and notice that we are, indeed, eating it. And sitting with the uncomfortable feelings, maybe even the shame and guilt, that come along with doing those things in a world that tells you to avoid eating at every opportunity.

For the record, I think of eating competence not as an objective measure of what or how you eat, but as eating in a way that supports you both physically and emotionally.

For a lot of people, the formal description of eating competence (feeling good about food, eating food you enjoy in satisfying amounts, and doing the work to ensure you get fed regularly) is that way. And when I describe my own incompetence with eating, it has less to do with the objective behaviours than how it make me feel — tired or rundown, physically uncomfortable, taking little joy or comfort in eating.

It does not mean that I am a bad person eating in a bad way, or that it causes long-term harm (you might be shocked at some of the diets people manage to survive on, well into old age.)

What it does mean is that I’m eating in an unhappy way. And not that I’m obligated to do better, but that I do deserve better. We all do.

We also deserve to be trusted that we will do better, when we’re willing and able to.

Comments make the blog happy. Especially when they’re curious, full of fun and insight, and respectful of everyone else’s experience.

I’m not super-jazzed about unsolicited advice, unwarranted suspicion, or telling anyone how they should eat. Now go play!

Posted in eating | Tagged eating competence | 88 Comments

My husband is a housewife.

By Michelle | Published: March 28, 2011

A lot of people don’t know this but, nutrition and home economics are intimately related. Lots of people in my degree program don’t become dietitians or nutritionists, but Professional Home Economists — because you don’t have to know how to feed someone through a tube to teach people about food and nutrition.

I have a personal background in home economics myself, since before I entered school to study dietetics, I was a housewife — back in my late teens and early twenties, when I first married and immigrated to Canada.

To be honest, I love homemaking. I admire homemakers, and I admire the skill-set necessary to be a good one. I admire people who have the disposition to do under-appreciated and unpaid Woman’s Work. You have to be incredibly self-motivated, and have an understanding of time management, finances, practical chemistry, appliance repair, cooking, textiles, and even decorating. Child-rearing, too, if you’re so inclined.

Most of us modern folks get by on working outside of the home and hiring people (or buying products) to do a lot of those things for us. Full-time homemaking is a radically DIY endeavour.

And I’m TERRIBLE at it.

I’ve come to grips with the fact that I am rotten homemaker, though I’ve studied it intensely and love doing it. The problem is, I can only handle it for short periods of time, and I burn out easily. My brain just can’t fire on those particular cylinders 24/7, so I only use my hard-won, mostly-self-taught homemaking skills in short bursts here and there, when I’m in the mood.

When I got married, I did not know how to cook, how to sew, or how to organize my own time without a job or a school schedule to keep me on track. I knew how to bake cookies, do laundry, clean bathrooms, and (awkwardly) care for young children. My mom wasn’t a homemaker — she was a full-time nurse manager with a degree in business. She did payroll on the weekends and served as an expert court witness in her spare time. Needless to say, despite her somehow knowing many of The Womanly Arts herself, she didn’t have a lot of time to transmit them to her eye-rolling daughter.

All of my photo-developing, poetry-writing, makeup-wearing, singing-and-acting skills didn’t turn out to be very helpful when I got married. I had to fill in the gaps myself through a lot of painful trial-and-error.

My husband, on the other hand, was given a lot of household responsibility in his teens. He homeschooled himself, did housework, yardwork, and started dinner. He got into the habit of work first, play later. He learned how to motivate himself and how to spend his time wisely — broad skills that are even more important to homemaking than knowing the intricacies of doing various types of laundry.

My career as a housewife was a pretty miserable time for both of us, especially at first. Neither of us enjoyed our traditional roles as breadwinner and homemaker. When I was finally allowed to work in Canada, we ditched that set-up for the more conventional two-income deal. But three years ago, when he developed a painful-but-not-disabling physical condition, we switched roles again, and decided to live like church mice on my income for a year, while he ran the gamut of doctors and specialists and treatments.

And, except for all the doctor’s appointments, it turned out to be pretty awesome.

I only made just enough money to tread water, and I was physically tired and my feet hurt, but I came home to a hot dinner, a clean apartment, and a cheerful husband every night. Even the cats loved it, because they always had a doorman, fresh food, and a clean litter box.

The biggest problem was this: whenever my colleagues asked what my husband did for a living, I stuttered and tried to explain, and got a lot of meaningfully-raised eyebrows. A few of them even told me straight-out that he was taking advantage of me — the guy who imported me to the country and therefore signed up to be my financial sponsor for the next ten years. The guy who fed and clothed me on factory wages when I wasn’t yet allowed to work. The guy who co-signed my enormous school loans, taking on debt that wasn’t even his, and then moved to the big, mean city so I could pursue a rather unconventional career.

Their suspicions really bothered me, mostly because I knew they were wrong, but partly because it freaked me out enough that I also sometimes wondered if they were right.

After a year, his illness got better, my work situation changed, and he went back to full-time work. He paid for me to continue school, to take extra training, and threw his total support behind my crazy-ass idea of starting a bizarre internet business in the middle of a recession. The business worked enough to equal my previous church-mouse income, and we both started to realize that we missed it — we both really missed having him here full-time.

I hated his job even more than he did, so I begged him to come back home.

Having lived on both sides of the fence, I can no longer buy the idea that there’s anything inherently suspicious about a man staying home to do the work of running a household. Frankly, I think it’s sexist to automatically assume so. All those years I was home, no one even hinted in a whisper that I might be taking advantage of him. A female homemaker is just easier to swallow, thanks to years of gendered sugar-coating.

It’s no coincidence that the largest field to grow out of home economics — clinical dietetics — is still about 98% female. Gender roles die hard, even when they’re moved out of the home and into the hospital. But despite them, and despite all sorts of convenient evolutionary psychology, no one can deny the bare fact that my husband is a better homemaker than I am.

Even though I grew up female with the attendant babydolls and beloved miniature kitchen accessories, while he played with rubber wrestling figurines and Transformers. Even though my professional training includes how to make a flaky pastry and properly sanitize a sink, while his includes how to grind a smooth weld and properly assemble a computer.

It’s only been two weeks, but already things are better. I have my meals more regularly, there are groceries in the house, and the place is clean. He’s done repair jobs that have gone neglected since we moved in. The cats are, again, spoiled by having their preferred human always around, and I’m slowly regaining the energy and time to write, while also seeing the extraordinary clients who put food on our table.

He’s contented that, instead of helping union-busting assholes make even more profit, his efforts now go toward keeping me sane and helping people, especially women, recover from chronic dieting and fear of food.

Not because he’s secretly exploiting me, but because he believes in this and loves you guys almost as much as I do.

Posted in Random Shit | Tagged gender roles, homemaking | 60 Comments

Gym class.

By Michelle | Published: February 23, 2011

Let’s talk about goddamn gym class here for a minute.

I wasn’t a particularly fat kid, but I was always slightly larger than average. I was heavier, and a little taller, than most of the kids my age (until they caught up with me, height-wise, later on — then I was just heavier.)

And though I’m a naturally pretty strong person (HULK SMASH), and have always had a freakish ability to do sit-ups, I have never been athletically gifted. There are lots of reasons for that, biomechanically and personally, but I’ll just leave it at that to avoid the million-word rant on growing up a flat-footed, bookish girl in contemporary America.

Nevertheless, the memories of my childhood are filled with movement, with gleeful sweat and breathlessness. I was terrified to learn to ride my first bike, but I did it, goddammit, because there is pretty much nothing better than the feeling of being on two wheels, of that flexible, dynamic balance that depends entirely on speed.

Before we were old enough to know better, my girlfriends and I spent large chunks of our adolescence doing insane shit on bicycles. Unfinished construction sites, vacant lots, empty meadows, random kid-created trails through the forest tracing the precipices of ravines that would’ve made our parents shit their pants if they’d known what we were up to — that’s where we spent our time as girls, just average girls, none of us particularly athletic — on mountain bikes in Oregon.

Then there were the summers spent in pools, developing underwater sunburns, learning to hold our breath for a solid two minutes, sinking to the bottom of the pool and screaming to each other in a cataclysm of bubbles. My dad would hide quarters on the bottom of the pool, and this chubby, short-sighted kid would surface dive eight or ten feet to retrieve them, sans glasses or goggles, with absolutely no problem at all.

And then there was the issue of gym class.

It started off well enough, in elementary school, when it was just glorified indoor recess, with floor hockey sticks, pillow-soft dodgeballs, and the occasional “slightly irregular but for-reals” parachute donated for the purpose of making little kids pee themselves with joy — and, once a year, the climbing rope that only one strangely monkeyish kid would ever be able to climb. (Thank you, Mr. Jukkala, for the memories.)

At the end of the school year, we’d have a field day, where everyone ran in goofy obstacle courses and sack races, just for the excellent ridiculous fun of it, and — God’s honest truth — I even once did a charity run when I was ten, because I had two secret weapons: Fleetwood Mac on my dad’s cassette Walkman, and I skipped the entire way. Because I sucked at running even then.

In short, I had a pretty happily active childhood, despite being the unathletic and slightly fat child of two decidedly unathletic and slightly fat parents. Until gym class became a “thing,” that is. A graded, micromanaged academic requirement, starting in junior high — unhappily coinciding with the absolute social, emotional, and physical nadir of human existence. Or at least of mine.

If you want to destroy all the inherent joy in something, slap a grade on it. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Put a grade on your bleary, early-morning coffee-making skills, or set a number of minutes of daily television-watching required to achieve aptitude, or hell, challenge yourself to finish peeing in record time, and watch as the fun (or even the absolute neutrality) of these things is eroded, little by little, until it becomes a chore to drink coffee, watch TV, or take a leak.

Then compare how well you do on those chores compared to your peers, and watch your self-respect begin to circle down that little, demoralizing drain shaped like a “C” — a statistically average mark — written in red ink.

Now, this isn’t something I’ve made up for the benefit of a bunch of lazy icky fatties who want an excuse to feel like they’re not total losers. It’s a phenomenon confirmed by behavioural research — and one of many reasons why I hate school in general, though I’m naturally a good student.

But it’s one thing to destroy the intrinsic joy of doing, say, a set of math problems or memorizing the names of the presidents of the United States — and if a kid has a good enough teacher, or naturally enjoys a subject enough, they might even make it through school without having their spirit crushed in a particular topic.

It is another thing entirely to interfere with a person’s joy in one of the basic requirements of biological life.

When you put a hamster in a cage, you’re preparing to give it a pretty bare-bones existence. And what do you provide it? Food, of course, and definitely water. A place to poop and a place to sleep. And a hamster wheel.

It’s considered cruel to keep a dog tethered to one spot without a place to run, or cooped up in a tiny apartment unless the owner is really dedicated to going on walks. Even my cats, the most indolent creatures ever to occupy the earth, need strings and foam balls and random, crumpled up pieces of paper to bat inconveniently beneath furniture. They sleep, eat, and poop for twenty-three-and-a-half hours of the day…but for the remaining thirty minutes? They are tearing shit up like it is their mission in life.

Animals need movement, and even have an appetite for it, just as they do food and sleep. Also, humans are animals. We need to move. All of us — even those of us who are not physically gifted. But, just as with eating, external pressures and expectations get in the way of our ability to negotiate this very primal urge.

People say we need gym class because OMGCHILDHOODOBESITY!!! People say that this generation of children is hopelessly addicted to screens of every variety, that they will be the first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

People, in short, say a lot of stupid shit.

You want to help fat kids move? Help them enjoy moving. Help all kids to enjoy moving. And how do you do that? Well, I can tell you how you don’t — by throwing a bunch of them together like army recruits to do bootcamp calisthenics, and then give them mostly-arbitrary grades for it.

Just like with eating, helping kids to move well requires a division of responsibility — which, strangely enough, is pretty much what happens when you turn kids loose on a playground: the adults choose when and where and what to make available, and the kids take it from there. They get to decide how much, and whether, and which. And, unless you’re a disgusting misanthrope, you’ll trust the kids to work to their own level, to their own strengths and capacities.

You won’t interfere, you won’t get heavy-handed, you won’t suck all the natural joy out of it. And you’ll leave the red pen in the classroom.

You probably have some choice words for gym class. And that’s why the good Lord gave us comments.

Posted in children, Moving | 208 Comments

Surprising results from my totally unscientific survey.

By Michelle | Published: February 4, 2011

I recently asked a bunch of people what, if anything, they would most like to change about their relationship to food. As expected, since people vary, there was a wide range of responses, all of which were cogent and wonderful.

I guess I had my suspicions about what issues would be most popular. I expected maybe people would want to learn how to stop eating when full? And, yes, that was a pretty popular wish. Or maybe, how to eat nutritiously (or, to use the phrase from Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs, “instrumentally”) without driving oneself bonkers? And, yes, that came up too.

But the most popular wish of all, the one that came up most often, was one that wasn’t even really on my radar when I asked the question – despite the fact that it was something I have struggled with myself, and something that was a key lesson I learned when I went through the Learn to Eat process myself several years ago.

You know what it was?

How to eat in front of other people.

By this, people do not, of course, mean how to put food in their mouth with other people present, or what foods they should choose when eating with others, but how to stop feeling so damn self-conscious about eating in public. Or with friends and family. Or with strangers at a party.

This not only makes perfect sense to me, having tussled with the same thing in the past, but it’s something that comes up again and again, now, with my clients.

So, I thought, yes – of course! Let’s write a little primer on how to eat in front of other people. And I have.

It’s a pdf, made with love…and with absolutely no clue how to make a pdf. I’ll email it to you if you fill in the form (the one that says “Join THE LIST”) over there on the right.

Alrighty then! If you take a look, let me know what you think. Or if you have things to say about eating in public, please do so in comments.

Posted in eating, Random Shit | Comments closed