Pre-Obese: Because Overweight People Keep Gaining Weight Forever

Apparently “overweight” is also called “pre-obese” now?

Possible unintended effects of posting calories in restaurants

The gist:

• People with low incomes need to get the most energy for their buck, so they tend to buy higher-calorie foods. (The ability to pay more money to get less energy really is a privilege.)
• Posting calorie counts in restaurants helps people with low incomes make the most economical decisions – that is, buying what they now know to be higher-calorie food.
• This is  a bad thing because high calorie = unhealthy. Who cares about poor people and what they can afford to eat?

Well, that was highly predictable.

Carrie Fisher on the media’s response to celebrity weight gain

I think Carrie Fisher’s blog post sums it up pretty well.

You see, I was hot when most people are hot—- in my fucking 20’s & part of my 30’s……THEN, in an effort to imitate humans, I had a child &, to further maintain my life like disguise, I took medications for about 9 thousand years, &, despite all my efforts, I continued to get older & older——inadvertently, I assure you———-I tried to arrest my development physically as WELL as emotionally, but unfortunately without as much success. I also must confess that I ate food. I’m sorry….. I realize that I promised never to eat anything but lettuce & sun flower seeds, but tragically, I was unable to keep my promise.

Yes, I realize…..I KNOW that I vowed to exercise for 3 hours a day—-aerobics, pilates AND yoga, but alas, I admit with a large quota of shame, that I failed to fulfill this other important commitment.
NO, I shouldn’t look as if 30 years have passed. I understand completely if you can’t find it in your heart to forgive me for looking like 3 decades have passed…….Of COURSE you should mock & belittle me for being so large!! What else could you POSSIBLY do?????!?  I’ve let you down by treating my body as though it were just some giant sad sack that I use to haul my personality around. You have every right to compare me to Yoda or Elton or Kirstie…….I’ve brought it on myself.

Via Big Fat Deal.

Problems Keep Coming

The post at Shapely Prose on The Fantasy of Staying Exactly as I Am really spoke to me.

Also I have been having some of the usual food problems. This is having to do with my new sleeping schedule. I tend to go to bed at 4 or 5 a.m. and wake up at 11 or 12. It’s probably not ideal for me (shift that two or three hours earlier and it’s perfect), but that’s what my body is gravitating towards, especially now that I’m no longer on antidepressants, and since I’m working at home and make my own schedule I’ve decided to stop fighting it.

This is relevant because I keep having a guilt reaction to eating after midnight. It doesn’t make sense. If I’m waking up at 12, then the meal I eat at 12 is breakfast, the meal I eat at 6 is lunch, and the meal I eat a little after midnight is dinner. But because it’s after normal “dinner time,” it’s snacking, and therefore bad, right?

I’ve mostly gotten over the impulse to not feed myself that comes with the depression, and it’s frustrating for this to come back now.

Let me say, since this blog is now apparently All About My Psychological Health, that otherwise things are going well. I have been writing a lot, albeit not on this blog, as it doesn’t earn me even the pennies that my other writing does. It’s harder to write for fun when you’re writing for money, I’ve found, which saddens me.

“Generation XXL”

The advertisement pictured in this Consumerist post* made me sad. (For those who can’t see it, it’s a little kid with their hands on their hips standing under the text “I will not be part of Generation XXL.”) Our society has enough things pressuring our children into disordered eating; the last thing we need is more anti-fat advertisements geared towards children.

The whole issue of calorie counts on menus, and of “healthy” always being code for “low-calorie,” are subjects for posts of their own, neither of which I am awake enough to write at the moment. But I do have a good internet connection at my apartment now, instead of just whatever weak, unsecured wireless network I could pick up, so that’s something.

* Sanity watchers on the comments. I mean, that goes for most Consumerist posts, but doubly as soon as anyone so much as thinks the word “fat.”

Sexist, Fatphobic Quote of the Day

The monster was blocking the whole length of the entranceway to the building. His back was to me, his front facing the window-paneled door. (I guess so he could watch the traffic?) I say it was a he, but that was only a hypothesis. I just could not imagine any self-respecting female–monster or not–ever getting as pudgy as this thing was.

(From Death’s Daughter by Amber Benson. Which is actually a terrible book all around. I’m glad I picked it up for $.39 at the Goodwill so I don’t have to worry about actually spending money on this crap.)

Friday Anti-Fluff

This isn’t fluff, nor does it have anything to do with being fat. I’m posting it in part because it’s the reason why I haven’t had the time or energy to post anything for a long while, and in part because it continues to weigh on me and the more publicly I express myself, the more that feeling goes away.

When I was an undergraduate (which I was up until all of six weeks ago; sometimes I forget that), some of my work was plagiarized by another student. It was difficult for me to tell anyone. I was certain that they would just tell me what the plagiarist told me, directly or implicitly: that it wasn’t a big deal, that I must have given permission and was therefore ultimately responsible, that he had some kind of right to take my work and claim it as his own.

I felt a loss of power, a loss of self. This same student also abused and sexually assaulted me, but (and it feels really strange to say this) the plagiarism was ultimately more traumatic and dehumanizing. The assault was an attack on my body; the abuse I was able to recognize and unlearn the terrible things he taught me to believe about myself. But the plagiarism was an attack on my intellect, an attack on my right express myself and to have my accomplishments publically recognized. I don’t mean to dismiss anyone else’s experiences of assault and abuse, but this is mine, and this is how I feel.

When I finally worked up the courage to report him I figured things couldn’t really get worse. If they didn’t believe me, that would hurt, but at least I’d know. At least I’d have tried. And if they did believe me, justice would be done. Universities took this sort of thing seriously; at least that’s what everyone has always told me.

Soon I realized that there was something worse than people not believing me: people believing me and still somehow believing that the plagiarist didn’t deserve to be punished. Professors who had such little respect for me, my work, and the principles of academic honesty that they would defend someone who stole from me—despite not doubting his guilt—to the point of granting him awards and honors in the subject in which he plagiarized. Department heads and administrators willing to turn their heads and close their eyes, to pretend that they had no power or that something that would (or at least should) reflect poorly on the department and the school wasn’t any of their business or concern.

It’s difficult to recover from having your work stolen, but even more difficult when that theft is accompanied by a loss of faith in justice, the academic system, and people you once respected. It’s hard to keep from losing heart altogether; what reason do we have to put our best work and our passions into something, when someone else can steal it and no one in power will care?

They say that success is the best revenge, but they’re wrong. Justice is the best revenge; success is just a consolation prize. And success in what? When I was certain that there was no way that something like this could happen, that no school, no department, no professor would logically see this as right or even acceptable, I was certain I wanted to go into academia. Maybe I could still be successful there, successful enough to feel that I’ve had my revenge. But the last thing I want to do is watch this happen all over again to someone else and not have any power to stop it.

I might start posting here again; I don’t know. I’m certainly not leaving the Fatosphere entirely. But this blog brings me back sometimes to things I’d rather forget. Finding the Fat Acceptance movement right at the point where I was gaining a lot of weight and starting to feel terrible about myself, right at the point where I was being reassured by an abusive boyfriend that my fat body was perfectly acceptable because it pleased him and learning that what I felt about myself was irrelevant, right at the point where I needed something to latch onto to build my confidence, acknowledge my rights as a person, and help me feel like I was worth something—finding Fat Acceptance was ultimately a big step in getting me out of that relationship. (I’ve tried to write a post about this a hundred times here, but I kept deleting it, kept not knowing what to say. I never knew I’d be able to get it out in one sentence.) And now that things have ended this way, sometimes I feel like there are too many bad associations. Maybe I’ll be able to move past them and claim my own space again, but I don’t know.

Starving and Overeating

(No, I’m not dead, although I thought I was for a little while. Posting will continue in a completely unpredictable manner until further notice.)

You know what I’m tired of, other than constantly having trouble reminding myself to eat when the depression is telling me I’m not hungry or I shouldn’t care? All the people who respond to a problem about not eating with something to the effect of, “That’s terrible; when you start eating again you’ll overeat.”

First of all, no, you’re just making up the calories that your body’s been missing; it’s hardly ideal to have them all at once, but it will make my body happier than not having them at all. Second, I’m fucking up my body right now; I have screwed up energy levels, I can’t understand my body’s hunger signals, and I can’t keep a balanced diet because I’m just so happy to get anything into my stomach when I can finally convince myself to eat that I don’t have the energy to think about that right now. You see the effects of this, and your biggest concern is the threat that I might start overeating? There’s something very wrong with these priorities.

I hope these men’s girlfriends realize they’re dating douchebags.

Ten subtle ways to be emotionally abusive tell her she’s getting fat.

(I’m not going to link directly to this tripe; link goes to Mo Pie’s post at BFD.)

Throw-shit-in-a-pot soup

This isn’t going on Party In My Kitchen because there’s no pictures, and because I figured I haven’t posted here in forever so I should write something here. Especially as a follow-up to my last post to prove that I’m eating again.

This is how I roll when I cook: I just throw shit in a pot and hope it turns out good. And most of the time it does. Here’s what I did tonight:

Sautee one chopped onion, two cloves minced garlic, 2 sliced leeks, and 5 sliced carrots in a little olive oil. Add 1 c. adzuki beans (soaked overnight), 1 c. wild rice, 1/2 c. red wine, 8 c. veggie broth, 1 tsp. ground ginger, and 1/4 tsp. ground star anise. Cook until beans are done; add 3 c. frozen corn and heat through.

The star anise was something I bought on a whim at an Asian market and wasn’t sure quite what it would do to the soup, but it turned out wonderfully. It adds this subtle sweet fragrance and a very slight numbing sensation. The corn made the soup all colorful and cheerful.

So there you have it; happiness in a bowl and a shitton of leftovers in my fridge. Today was a good day. (Except that the first time I tried to post this WordPress erased the whole damn thing. WTF, WordPress?)