By Bianca

I have not had a healthy relationship with food since I was kid. And that makes it hard for me to practice Health at Every Size. Mainly because I still haven’t figured out yet what it means. 

I mean, I get The Health.At.Every.Size part, but I am still trying to figure out how to incorporate it into my life, given my eating disordered past.

For instance, I know for the most part that dieting won’t make me thin. I know this because I have tried about 600 of them. My body does not like to be deprived. The only time I have ever lost a large amount of weight was when I starved myself.

But.

I do wonder sometimes if I made some “lifestyle” changes, if I would lost weight. Not so much because I want to lower my dress size, but because I am truly curious if it would work. I wonder what it would be like if I has a normal relationship with food.

I do believe that I may be fatter than I could be, simply because I eat too much. I am not saying this makes me bad, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I often binge after my husband has gone to bed, and since attempting to practice HAES, I eat a lot more junk food than I use to.

Actually, I’ll be more blunt. Since I decided to try and listen to my body, and not feel guilty about what I eat, I have gained weight. Around 30-40 pounds. Maybe more.

In the course of a year and half I’ve outgrown lots and lots of clothing. I have new stretch marks. I’ve developed fat in areas it previously had not been.

It’s hard. It’s one thing to accept the body that you’ve had for a long time or most of life, but it’s another to accept one that keeps changing.

In addition to what I would call unintentional weight gain, I purposely gained weight when I auditioned for The Biggest Loser. Yes, I know, stupid, stupid, stupid. I did assume once I stopped stuffing myself in an attempt to achieve my 15 minutes of fame, that those 20 pounds would come off.

They didn’t.

Now before you get your big girl panties in a twist, I am not saying that I want to lose weight.

I am saying that I can talk about accepting myself until I am blue in the face, but none of that is helping me now, when I am still fairly new to even the idea of HAES, and doing my best to try and conform to what I think it was.

Maybe it’s Health at Every Size, ur doin it wrong? Or maybe it’s much more complicated than that, and what defines HAES is different for each person?

How do you define Health at Every Size?

i’ve removed feministing.com from my blogroll because the bullshit and privilege that they’ve displayed over the last few months, with regard to disabilities issues has just made me sick. there are way to many blogs to link to right now, but quixotess has a pretty good write up of what happened and why i no longer feel that they are a progressive site i want to support.

There was an open letter to feministing’s editors.

There was a chat that went badly.

And now there’s a boycott.

There’s no way this is healthy…

Since January, I have lost 25% of my total body weight. Yes, you read that right. Twenty-five percent. I know for certain that I have lost 25% of my body weight because for the past few years I have been keeping a meticulous spreadsheet of my weight, which I update usually at least once a week. I used to log in my weight every Tuesday morning like clockwork and update the spreadsheet daily with my workout details as well (distance run or exercise class attended in a given day, etc). Now I only update it with my weight sporadically, and my workout routine has fallen by the wayside for the past few months mainly because of health issues.

(Yes, I know that keeping a detailed spreadsheet of my weight is probably not healthy either).

I currently weigh less than I did in high school, even as a freshman, and I am almost embarrassed about the size of pants I had to buy this weekend. I don’t think I ever wore this size of pants even at 12 years old. None of my old clothes fit, even the shirts. I have almost nothing to wear now. Everything I own fits me like clown clothes. I did the math, and if I lose 7 to 11 more lbs, I will officially be underweight according to BMI estimates. Hurrah! (Said with sarcasm).

Long story short, I have been dramatically dropping weight over the past 9 months and everyone has noticed. Some people make comments, some people don’t… but everyone has noticed. There is no way for people NOT to notice, unless they’re blind. It even shows on my face. I got carded today and the woman told me that my license picture doesn’t even look like me. Yep, that’s what losing 25% of your body weight will do.

Here’s the thing… I have not been trying to lose weight. At all, really. I got skinny because I have been really sick this year.

So now I apparently look all hot (or at least way more attractive than “fatty Kathy”) because I conform better to society’s beauty standards. I’m getting complimented all the time, and all the while feeling like crap. This happened to me all summer especially when I was dropping the pounds at a dramatic rate (and when I felt the most terrible physically). People would complement me on how good and thin I looked (“OMG you lost weight! You look great!”) and while it stroked my ego, I also felt absolutely awful. The first few times I responded with some sort of mumbled change of subject, but after that I gave up and started saying thank you just to end the conversation, all the while feeling like a horrible vain hypocritical terrible person.

I don’t feel bad physically every day anymore (though I don’t feel fantastic either), and I’ve stopped dropping weight. I’ve held steady at this same weight for about 2 months now (that’s why I thought it was time to finally buy some new clothes in a size that actually fits). Now I think I’m beginning the road to recovery physically, for the most part.

But now I’m stuck in the beauty trap. Now that I’m thinner than I’ve ever been in my entire adult or teenage life, I actually kind of like it, despite loathing myself for enjoying it at the same time. It makes me absolutely disgusted with myself for even buying into this BS. I didn’t even TRY to get this way and the only reason I’m so bony now is partially because I allowed myself to be malnourished! It’s more complicated than that (don’t worry, I don’t have an eating disorder), but I did go a few weeks without eating very much at all a while back. This is not the kind of beauty ideal we should ascribe to! Is thin really the be all end all of beauty? (Please don’t say yes!)

I hate that I’ve been sick all year, but even more I hate that I have enjoyed being thin because of it. It’s disgusting and I condemn myself for it. It is wrong and I feel like I have betrayed all women. Why can’t we embrace our physical differences instead of trying to live up to an unattainable beauty “ideal”? I am obviously guilty of falling into the same trap, and I feel terrible for it. I’m sure I will never break free of it, but the best I can hope for right now is to be self-aware when I am being vain.

Will I intentionally try to pack on the pounds now? No, though I might do so if I start dropping any more weight. Will I try to eat more regularly now, and more healthily? Yes, even though it will be difficult because this year has all but killed my appetite (which was a big reason for the weight loss in the first place). If that brings on a bit of weight gain, so be it. And if it does, I’ll try not to cry.

Evolution of Beauty

Check out the Health at Every Size movement. Guess what? Fat does not necessarily = unhealthy! You can be fat AND healthy! It just involves eating intuitively and being physically active for pleasure.

So Annabel over at Feed Me I’m Cranky has written an amazing post about the new phenomenon sparked by Glamour’s pg 194 plus sized model.

They now have apparently answered the many requests to have more plus sized models in their magazine. Still none on the cover mind you.

So I’m all for seeing more plus sized models out there. I won’t lie, I’m a fan of the Health At Every Size movement and even the Fat Acceptance movement. I know right? God forbid! Fat people, accept themselves? I frequent websites like Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose, and Big Fat Deal. One of my favourite blogs is Do you have an extra large in This?

I guess I’m mainly on the fence about this. I see the positive: girls will see bigger women as okay. They might not go, well I don’t see anyone over 125lbs in magazines; I must be fat because I don’t look like that. I see that it’s beginning to make “plus sized” a little more normal, but at the same time not really.

To me it still presents the dicotomization. These women aren’t just beautiful women showing off clothes in Glamour. They are beautiful fat girls, and Glamour is being so accepting and forward thinking by putting these not-a-size-two women in their magazine. They are still the other. They are presented as still the token fat girl. (You know, the fat friend, never the main character…)

Maybe I expect too much, since we are still presented with a pretty homogenized ideal of beauty; mostly white, thin girls. What is it I would like to see?

I’d love it if there were “plus sized” women on TV and it wasn’t about them being fat. You know? When the fat girls and skinny girls are just there because their beautiful, not because they’re the token fat girl/friend/whatever. That’s when I think it’ll be a much bigger victory. For me at least.

I just thought I’d add my two cents. But please reads Annabel’s original post here.

This post was awhile in the making, and I’m still not sure if it presents how I feel on the subject accurately. But I’m going to post it anyway, and see what happens. I mean I know in some ways what I’m saying today completely contradicts yesterday’s post where I mention my own weight loss. But for me, the weight I was at, was uncomfortable. I am no where near being super skinny, or magazine gorgeous, but I am so much more comfortable in my skin, even though there was a time when I felt fat at this exact same weight.

 Just to add to it, here are a few more operationbeautiful.com post-its’ I’ve done.

Did you hear about Caitlin’s contest?

I’d been meaning to post about my new bras for a while, but kept forgetting. Thanks to this post over at Living ~400 Pounds it finally got done. (You’ll appreciate that one more than mine if you’re over a D cup.)

I work from home, and my husband works outside the home, so I find it difficult to justify buying clothes for myself because it seems he always needs something (it’s the sort of job where clothes don’t last very long) so the clothing budget goes to him. I was down to four bras, and all of them either the elastic was shot or the hooks were, or they were about twelve sizes too small. One was at least eight years old, the others at least three.

The ones I bought a few years ago, one was a cheapy exercise bra, and the other two were Cacique T-shirt-type-bras. They were comfy and good for the Florida summers. I found them for $8 at a Lane Bryant outlet, and they served well, except being full coverage and difficult to wear with a lot of my shirts. And, well, the hooks were going, and the wires were poking, and, I really (with a great deal of some convincing) decided I needed to buy some bras.

I ordered two: the first was Avenue’s ONESexy Tuxedo Plunge Underwire Bra. I’d never bought a bra from Avenue, but it was pretty, would work well with my wardrobe, and was on sale at the time. I was afraid it’d be horrible. I’d bought plunge bras from Cacique before and they were, frankly, horrible. My boobs looked awesome, don’t get me wrong, and it could’ve just been a sizing issue, but I would cry at night after wearing them, they were so bad. But the Avenue bra is awesome. The cups run big – I’m normally a D, bordering on DD (well, one of them is, anyway), and I had to get a C to get the right fit. The negative is they are not machine washable. At all. Don’t try it. Mine has already been through the washer twice due to not snatching it out of the laundry basket before husband tossed it in, and there is pretty visible damage to the satin and the elastic. Get some Soak Wash and hand wash them. It’s no work at all, and they dry just fine even in omg-Florida-summer-humidity.

Otherwise, it is a beautiful bra and I had no pain or discomfort even wearing it for about 20 hours during a trip out of town.

The second bra was an exercise bra: the Magic Lift no-wire bra by Glamorise Sport. I think this is also sold by Lane Bryant as the “Glamorise back-closure sports bra.” There may be differences but they look the same.

The bra isn’t the type of exercise bra I would wear out without a shirt, and it’s not going to be helpful on its own for anything with a lot of bouncing, but it’s perfect for my needs, which is basically to keep the chest out of the way during yoga, Pilates, weights, biking, etc. I toss a tank top on over it if I’m going to the exercise room or wear it alone when working out at home. And the “Magic Lift” does actually lift without overly minimizing, so it actually looks good on.

On first wear I thought I wouldn’t like it because the band was pretty scratchy/irritating, but a few washes have softened it up and now I often forget to take it off right away.

So, amazingly, I bought two bras online and ended up with two awesome bras. I should’ve played the lotto cause when does that ever happen?

Losing weight like “normal” folks is new to me. I don’t know whether to expect it to continue, and I don’t expect not to be one of the 95% who regain if I get to a significant amount of weight lost, but losing weight in the first place is strange.

The common refrain is that most people don’t have trouble losing weight, just keeping it off. That was not me. The tracking I do now with Daily Burn, I have done before – several times. I’ve watched calories, eaten healthfully, and though I’ve been guilty of overestimating my BMR, every time I’ve done it in the past decade, I was still eating 1,500-2,000 a day and exercising, usually more intensely and frequently than I am now, so there “should” have been loss (in so far as how my body is reacting now). The last time I tried it, I lost about 4 pounds – in 4 months, that could as well have been water weight difference as anything.

I expect what’s going on is one of two things, or a combination: first, when I went gluten free, for the first time in adulthood, I think, I was eating really unhealthfully for an extended period of time. I was trying to keep from feeling deprived, and keep myself from cheating (along with, you know, wanting to avoid extreme pain and going bald). Also, I was eating a) a lot of prepackaged stuff, b) new-to-me stuff where I wasn’t aware of the caloric content, and c) unhealthy things that I knew were GF – all because I wanted to be safe. And that was fine, but gluten free foods, even relatively unprocessed, very healthy, gluten free grains tend to be more calorie dense. They are nutrient dense, too, which is a good thing – but still, you go from eating how you normally do to eating the GF equivalents and you could be adding a lot of calories. So perhaps I just ate myself out of the range of my normal set point and I’ll settle there shortly. The 40-ish pounds I’ve lost are not that significant, in the grand scheme of things, and I’m more or less back where I was when I decided to go GF.

Or, what was keeping me from losing before was not just the PCOS, but all the ways PCOS messes up metabolism compounded by the way gluten intolerance messes up metabolism. That’s really the only thing that has changed from the last time I tracked diet and exercise. Extended periods of malnutrition slowing down my metabolism on top of estrogen, testosterone, cortisol, and insulin issues inherent in PCOS doesn’t sound helpful in any case. This only strikes me as likely because I didn’t start losing when I started dieting/exercising (the exercising began last September, dieting in March ‘09). I didn’t start losing until the past few months, which is also when my stomach-related gluten intolerance symptoms finally more-or-less completely disappeared.

I guess we’ll see. I am mostly neutral about the weight loss, and so far it’s not really triggered any eating disordered behavior. From time to time an unhealthy thought pops up, especially in regards to the weighing myself (hence, not wanting to own a scale), but I reality check myself pretty quickly. On the plus side, I can fit into my winter clothes now (for the time being, anyway), so I, hopefully, won’t have to worry about cold legs this winter like I had to last winter.

I still have no desire to weight loss diet, or participate in that culture. I read the boards on Daily Burn sometimes, and while they’re miles away from HAES, mostly they focus on sensible things – exercising to build endurance/strength, healthy eating, healthy habits, positive action, etc. It’s at least near the borders of my own values about health, though not within them.

The other day a site I use to earn points to redeem for gift cards gave me 25 points for signing up for SparkPeople. Some of the features seem nice, but the boards and blogs were so far into “normal” weight loss territory – fat hating, self-hating, anti-feminist, eating disordered – I had to flee without really giving it much of a go. Seriously: “x reasons I hate being fat¹” and “I use other fat women as motivation to be skinny²” and “I can’t do x until I’m x pounds³” – way outside my value system.

I guess it boils down to – I don’t think weight loss is an accomplishment. I don’t think thinness is a virtue. I’m not going to ever get how losing more than 2 pounds a week is a good thing, as at that rate, you’re either losing water weight or eating muscle. I can understand wanting to lose weight, for a multitude of reasons, but blaming every bad thing in your life on being fat, or rather, not being willing to love yourself while fat, is not going to make your life better or make you love who you are if you achieve your goal. And eating junk is not going to make you healthy, no matter how much you lose through caloric deficit.

I suppose dieting at all puts me out of favor in some HAES circles, and that’s okay. I’m still adjusting to this new normal. But I still strongly believe it’s the way to go for most people, including myself, even if I’m less flexible in my diet than most adherents would like. And I’m really still turned off and saddened by diet culture, and how our society encourages it. I guess I always wondered if that would change if I could suddenly lose weight. It hasn’t. And I’m thankful. I’m still not invested either way in what my body does from here as far as my weight is concerned. I am invested in continuing to improve my diet⁴, find new ways to vary and enjoy my exercise routine, and just try to enjoy life in general.

And that’s what I’m going to do, whether my body decides to be “normal” or not.

¹ 95% of them aren’t anything to do with being fat.
² Way to play into the patriarchy.
³ Unless you’re talking horseback riding or owning a Segway, most times it’s the insecurity, not the weight, holding you back – life is short, shit happens, you could die before x pounds comes. Don’t wait. Live now.
⁴ I’ve been really expanding the types of veggies lately. It’s pretty awesome. Now if I could just find a way to like broccoli… and beans (ick). I’m going to try quinoa next week thanks to a DB Motivator who is also GF posting an awesome recipe for it.