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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
..especially with this:
Sometimes I think that about five years of mild material deprivation would pull us-as-a-society back into balance and help us spare ourselves a wealth of bad behavior and bad conscience.
I shall get to work on this riiiiiiight awaaaaaaaaay.
>>:-)
Years ago, from about my early teen years until I was in my early thirties, I myself obsessed about my weight. The way this took shape was either in my wallowing in the fact that I was just fat, and didn't care to do anything to lose weight, to my revelling in the fact that I was at my "optimum" weight, and wasn't it grand that I could easily fit into a size 12 (I'm 5'9, so that's about as low as my clothing size could go, realistically, unless I wanted to be a stick figure).
Although I never travelled the route of anorexia or bulimia, thankfully, in that period of time, I did constantly think about how much I weighed. Even the times that I allowed myself to just be fat were times that I was still allowing myself to focus on my weight, albeit in a reverse-double-fakeout kind of way, as in "I'm just going to be fat, and that's all there is to it" kind of way. I still thought about it all the time. Neither road was good for me.
I'd had the pressures from society to keep a slim figure since as far back as I could remember. As a "you'd be so beautiful if you lost some weight" type of girl, I was on every diet available and imaginable at the time, from Weight Watchers, to low-calorie, to Atkins (back in the seventies) to you name it, just depriving myself of food and then binging in a sodden night of ice cream, macaroni and cheese, a whole box of cookies, etc.
What changed that for me? I'm not exactly sure when my moment of catharsis came about (I think I just realized how ridiculous and futile it was), but it did, in my mid-thirties, and when it did, instead of just taking me down the road of being fat or not, I naturally lost about 40 pounds over the course of about a year and a half. Not through dieting, but by no longer stressing whether I was too fat, or too thin, or too anything. I just ate when I was hungry, and didn't when I wasn't. I stopped eating until I was in pain, and I stopped depriving myself of food just to "keep my figure". I just came to accept that my body was going to be a certain weight, probably naturally, and felt less compelled to diet and alternatively, to pig out after periods of deprivation.
While it's probably true that right now I could lose some weight, perhaps for my health, nevertheless, I will never go down the road of dieting for the sake of my appearance ever again. I'm not obese, nor am I skinny. I am okay with the way I look, although shopping is still amazingly challenging sometimes, but at the same time, I'm not in despair if my height makes me a size 20 at my current weight. Size 20, oh that's the fat size, you say? Well for me, with my fairly hippy structure and height, it'd probably be about the equivalent of a size 14 for someone who's 5'6". And I'm done stressing about that. I don't exercise much, which is something I do need to change, for other reasons, but otherwise, clothes that aren't dumpy are more accessible to me now than they were when I was a teenager, and I'm more inclined to accept the fact of my weight as just that. What I weigh.
Perhaps we need to re-examine the whys of our weight and its impact on our health, rather than examine it in terms of our appearance. And perhaps this needs to be less of a woman's issue, more of an issue of culture, and let the men take some of the heat for the obsession as well. Because it seems like it's still mostly women who obsess about this stuff, and overweight men can get away with so much more.
In addition, there's merit to the fact that other countries citizens don't necessarily stress this way, because in my experience, they eat differently than we do. Less emphasis on fast food, on conspicuous consumption, more emphasis on enjoying a meal for the pleasure of it. I do know that when you let go of the obsession, you tend to eat less, enjoy more, and gain less weight as a result.
Nothing to add on the weight-obsession issue.
Rather, the thing that struck me is Waldman's statement that "the only thing I can think of that consumes more of my day than fat-phobic freakouts is reading."
Four children (plus their homework!) and she spends the majority of her day reading and freaking out?
I'm not one to judge... but I do know what life is like with four children and I just find the way she is prioritizing her time.... sad.
Congratulations to all the women who are completely happy with themselves all the time. It's great that you're doing everything right. I'm sure you have very rich inner lives.
For me, being a human in this world is a bit more complicated. Of course a moderate diet with regular exercise is ideal. Of course we should be charitable and kind and hardworking and floss regularly and pay our bills on time and keep a clean house and read Chekhov and shave our legs consistently and a million other things. But I'm pretty sure that the day I actually managed to do everything right, the Lord would return and totally bump my big news to below the fold.
I believe that we must all "embrace our crazy" - we should acknowledge our imperfection and our pesky human frailty and laugh about it whenever possible. I think Ayelet's article speaks to the crazy in her life, and I applaud her for sharing it with us.
I am not a regular Salon reader. I found my way to Waldman's piece from outside. Having now read the responses to her latest column, as well as all of her previous columns, I have to say that as impressed as I am by Waldman's writing, I'm so disgusted by the negative reactions of Salon readers that I doubt I'll be back.
I won't bother with Salon's seemingly inexhaustible supply of savants dismayed by the alarming realization that a columnist might--can you imagine?--attempt to write in a way that is deliberately provocative. Thank God we've got no rich tradition or history of that in America! Ditto the "who cares about the problems of rich white people" crowd, whose penning of such elaborately outraged letters calls into question their own argument (and guilty sympathies). But has any of you narcissistic pots-calling-the-kettle-black noticed that in, in addition to her more personal columns, the woman has repeatedly and frequently addressed many neglected and unpopular causes in her columns, from the rights of women prisoners to Medicare? No, because those columns, which seem to have barely drawn any letters at all, either inconveniently don't fit your preconceived notion of "Crazy Ayelet" or else they vainly attempt to lift your myopic gazes out of the tiny little orbit of your own navels. It's only when she holds up a mirror to your own life that you realize you don't like what you see!
I'm amazed at how self-revelatory are the letters of the people who berate Waldman for being too self-revelatory--in particular her male critics, whose ripostes rarely amount to more than "Shut up, bitch!"--and even more amazed by the total absence of reaction from these same readers when Waldman enlists their attention and sympathy to people less fortunate, less familiar, less like them.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
