My oldest daughter had a dance to go to a couple of weeks ago, that she was informed was a “show off the girlfriend” event (I won’t get into the issues with her boyfriend showing her off like a prize posession because that’s not the focus of this post, maybe another time). We spent DAYS shopping, trying to find the right dress, only to be disappointed with the choices available to us. FINALLY, at Dress Barn, we found THE dress! And then she tried it on. Oy! Although it was the same size as the other 20-some-odd dresses she had tried on, it was significantly too small, especially over the “boobs of doom” she inherited from my side of the family! We were running out of time, so we decided to go on and buy the dress she loved and I would alter it. We brought it home, and I took out the zipper, added boning, and used a silk ribbon to turn it into a corset-style back. It came out so nice that I really regretted not getting before pics! BUT, here are the afters:

"Although your bright hair diverts our eyes from the rest of your body being stuffed and jammed into those corsets, sadly it’s only a temporary distraction."

*sigh* The caption for this picture is copied verbatim from the website I originally saw it on. That’s (I hope obviously) not MY thoughts on the picture.

Granted, I’m not overly fond of the acid-colored dreds, but IT IS THEIR HAIR and they are entitled to do whatever they wish with it. It’s the “rest of your body being stuffed and jammed into those corsets” comment that really bothers me here. So what? Because these women are not reed-thin they aren’t allowed to wear whatever they wish? Because they are not Twiggy, they aren’t allowed to wear something that makes them feel attractive and sexy? WRONG!

How many times do we have to say it before we get it through the thick skulls of the general public: NOBODY was placed on this Earth with a mandate to decorate your world!!! Get over it! If you don’t like the way someone looks, look the other direction. These are living, breathing, feeling, probably caring human beings who have the same rights and privileges as everyone else in the world! For the time being, at least, there are no laws stating that fat people aren’t equal to thin people.

Personally, I am NOT AT ALL fond of the current trend for young men to be walking around in jeans that sag below their ass so that their underpants show. That doesn’t give me the right harass them or to invade their privacy by taking their picture, without permission, and post it on the web, again without permission.

Aarrgghh! Can’t we just let people be?

It seems like everywhere I turn lately, there are examples of fat prejudice and it pisses me off! A prime example, “Greasy Bear” (Brandon Davis) tweeting that his ex, Mischa Barton is now “the fattest person on the planet!” Now, to be totally fair here, Mr. Bear claims that it was a false account and HE wasn’t the one that posted those hateful comments. BUT! Paris Hilton (who’s Twitter account is confirmed as being real and is a friend of “Greasy Bear”) claimed at one point that it WAS real, AND given his penchant for nasty comments about people (women in particular), and the fact that those tweets were deleted from the “fake” account, I just don’t know whether I believe him or not. Something definitely smells rotten in Denmark, yanno? I don’t know if it really is his account or not, and really his tweets are just a jumping off point for this post anyway.

So. Waif-thin Mischa Barton has turned into “Mischa the Hefer…” I don’t see it. Seriously, she doesn’t look fat to me. A little “thicker” than she was before, yeah; but as thin as she was, she had room to gain without being anywhere near overweight. If you google “Mischa Barton fat,” you get one or two pictures of her looking a little less-than-reed-thin when compared to her OC days, but the vast majority of the pictures are of her looking pretty much as thin as ever and are concentrating on the cellulite on her thighs. As if a little cellulite is some sort of crime! Please! If that’s the case, 90% of the women in America, including some of the “normal weight” and “underweight” women, are guilty. Sheesh. Does NOBODY remember the pictures of size-2 Jennifer Love Hewitt with cellulite?

Does Ms. Barton NOT deserve a break from the killer weight-loss-diet-and-exercise routine she must have maintained when she was starring in The OC? If she’s not working RIGHT NOW, or preparing for a role, do we really have ANY right to criticize her for “letting herself go?” Of course, I don’t think we have any right to criticize anyone’s body. It’s their body. If they don’t want to starve themselves thin, it’s up to them. And yes, IMHO, that includes those that have chosen careers in the public eye!! I don’t care if it is Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Kelly Clarkson, Mischa Barton, Kirsty Alley, or Oprah. Even Brandon Davis! I don’t care who it is, if you look, you can find less-than-flattering pictures of every celebrity out there!

See that middle majorette? That’s my sister. The one that was kicked off the ASU majorette line for being “too fat.”  No, she’s not as skinny as the other two majorettes, but she isn’t FAT  by a long shot! According to ASU, however, she was 5 lbs to fat to twirl for the university’s marching band. FIVE FREAKING POUNDS! Like that small an amount of weight would have made Jack Diddly bit of difference in how she looked.

Thanks to our former band director, I now have several pictures of my sister in her majorette uniform, but this is the only one that I felt comfortable posting here without editing her face out since her face isn’t exactly recognizable in this particular picture.

That is me. 9th grade. All of 14 years old, so 25 years ago. Not too bad, right? Hubby looked at it and said “Jeez, you were cute! Why didn’t we date in high school?”  I look at this picture and wonder why on EARTH I thought I was fat and needed to starve myself.

This picture is proof that anorexics don’t always LOOK anorexic. At least, *I* don’t think I looked anorexic in this picture. But I was. I was skipping breakfast and lunch, and barely eating anything at dinner while telling my parents that I had eaten a big lunch or had a big snack after school. At the point this picture was taken, I was amenorrheal, anemic, my hair was falling out in clumps but I had a fine layer of “fur”, my heart rate was scary slow and my blood pressure was ridiculously low. All physical symptoms of starvation. I wasn’t scary skinny by any means. In fact, I probably looked pretty healthy, weightwise. I know that I had friends that were thinner than I was, but much MUCH healthier. However this was probably the UNhealthiest time of my life.

People noticed that something was wrong, but nobody made the connection to anorexia because I wasn’t underweight. My friends thought I was ill. My parents and doctor thought something was wrong with my thyroid. NOBODY thought I was anorexic but me, and I didn’t want to change it. I honestly couldn’t tell you what turned my health around. I never got professional help. I was never officially diagnosed. Maybe I just didn’t have the “willpower” of most anorexics, or maybe my parents just got wise before I got so far gone that they couldn’t help me without professional intervention. I really do not know. I just know that by the time I went into 10th grade, I wasn’t starving myself anymore.

THIS is why I am so protective of my daughters and my friend’s daughters when it comes to body image. THIS is why I have a size acceptance blog and read other size acceptance blogs voraciously. THIS is why I am so ANTI-diet. And THIS is why I never assume that just because someone isn’t scary skinny, their weight-loss diet isn’t a problem.

There was TONS of food: bacon wrapped, bbq-sauced, grilled mushrooms for appetizers; chicken breasts drenched in bbq sauce, grilled kielbasa, hamburgers, chips, dips, potato salad, etc. You get the idea. Three couples, but enough food for 10 couples.

After a nice visit around the grill while everything was cooking, we went inside to eat. I notice that the other two women BARELY touch their plates. I mean BARELY: maybe 1 of the mushroom appetizers (which were HELLA GOOD) 2 bites of their hamburgers, a bite or two of potato salad, and maybe three chips each. I’m not kidding! And I’m not the only one that noticed. DH noticed. Friend noticed because he asked if something was wrong with the food.

Turns out, there was nothing wrong with the food. Friend’s Girlfriend has had the lapband surgery, and Friend’s Brother’s Girlfriend has had gastric bypass. Oy vey. I was the only woman there that hadn’t had WLS.

Later in the evening, we were playing a game, and somehow or another, the subject of weight came up (why am I not surprised?); and I said something (non-depricating) about weighing 200 lbs. INSTANTLY, everyone in the room but DH (who knows better) starts in with the “compliments.”

“Well, you sure don’t LOOK like you weigh 200 lbs!”

“Wish I had looked that good at 200!”

“Yeah, but you carry it well.”

Yada.

Yada.

Fucking yada.

Then the subject turned to how much more weight these two BEAUTIFUL (just as they were) women had to lose, and then they looked at me expectantly. Like I’m supposed to chime in with how much weight I want to lose. You should have seen the looks of shock on their faces when I said that I am actually looking for a personal trainer that understands that I don’t give a flying fig if I ever lose a stinking OUNCE, much less several dozen pounds, I just want to be strong(er than I am now), flexible, and build some endurance. After staring at me in shocked, wide-eyed silence for a moment they start in with:

“But you’re so pretty! You’d be GORGEOUS if you lost a few pounds!”

Fuck you! I’m already gorgeous, thankyouverymuch.

“As good as you look now, you probably wouldn’t have to lose MUCH.”

I don’t have to lose anything to look good. You said yourself I look good right where I am.

“I wish I had your confidence.”

Honey, I didn’t always. This level of confidence and comfort with my body has been hard-won and only come RECENTLY.

WHY do conversations with other women always seem to devolve into Weight Watcher’s meetings? Discussions about current weight, pounds lost, pounds to go, calories and how to restrict them, fat grams and how to restrict them, good foods/bad foods, yada yada boringfuckingyada. I’ve worked too long and too hard to finally accept myself as I am, where I am. I have absolutely no desire to join into a bitchfest about my body and how HORRIBLE it is. Even if we restrict ourselves to discussing things that happen in our own homes (no world or national politics, no celebitchy gossip, etc.), there are so many MORE interesting things to discuss! Shit, we could discuss SOAP OPERAs and it would have been more productive and interesting!

To their credit, it didn’t take either woman too terribly long (maybe about 15 minutes) to realize that I wasn’t going to join in on the WW meeting and that it was boring me half to death and allow me to change the subject. I don’t know that I could have taken much more.

And most of my women friends wonder why the hell I prefer to hang out in the garage with the men! At least THEIR conversations aren’t impromptu Weight Watcher’s meetings.

A woman goes to the doctor for her yearly physical.  The nurse starts with certain basic items.

‘How much do you weigh?’ she asks.

’115,’ she says.

The nurse puts her on the scale.  It turns out her weight is 140 (I wish).

The nurse asks, ‘Your height?’

’5 foot 8,’ she says.

The nurse checks and sees that she only measures 5 ‘ 5‘.

She then takes her blood pressure and tells the woman it is very high.

‘Of course it’s high!’ she screams, ‘When I came in here I was tall and slender! Now I’m short and fat!’

Ok, remember a while ago when I told you guys to mark your calendar because I would probably never use the BullshitMI as a voice of reason again? Well, ladies and gentlemen, aparantely hell has frozen over, because I’m doing it again! The woman in the joke “thinks” she is tall and slender at 5’8″ and 115. According to this BullshitMI calculator, that would be a BullshitMI of 17.5, or UNDERWEIGHT. Not just “slender,” but approximately 10 pounds underweight (and that’s to be at the very BOTTOM of the “normal” weight catagory). Her actual height and weight (you know, the ones that make her “short and fat” and raise her blood pressure so severely) is 5’5″ and 140. Same calculator shows her BullshitMI to be 23.3, or NORMAL.

And this is the kind of shit I’ve been fed since I was a child, by BOTH of my parents.  ::::eyeroll::::

Saw this ad this morning and it just set me off.  “Sprinkle your coffee with something better than guilt.”

Really? Seriously?

And then there’s this one. “Indulge your sweet tooth, AND your conscience.”

So, once again, the diet industry implies that consuming anything with a calorie should be guilt-inducing. ::::eyeroll:::: 

On another note… DAMN but the diet industry is working overtime this season! Guess they want to try to get their name FIRMLY implanted for all those New Year’s resolutions to lose weight. *sigh* I’m so sick of seeing diet ads. It’s Christmas Eve for heaven’s sake! MUST I watch at least one diet-related commercial EVERY commercial break? Within the past 20 minutes, I’ve seen ads for Truvia, Jenny, Nutrisystem, and SlimFast.

Oy. We aren’t even allowed to enjoy a “cease fire” on Christmas!

So here’s my new tattoo:

The show started out showing a “fitness guru” filming an infomercial with some of her clients. Fitness chick was talking to the camera about “being the best YOU you can be” while her clients are climbing bleacher stairs behind/around her, and one of the heavier men was having difficulty. My first thought was “Oh great. Here we go with the ‘fat kills,’ ‘all obese people are walking time bombs,’ obesity epipanic crap.” Then the twist: Instead of one of her clients falling over, it’s Fitness Guru chick! Hello?

During the differential, House’s team uncovers the fact that FG had gastric bypass surgery. Hmmmm… When confronted by the team, she reveals that she “tried everything and nothing worked.” WHOA! You mean someone on national television (even if it was a fictional character) admitted that diets and exercise alone don’t always work?!? And she even gets called on the hypocrisy of hiding her gastric bypass from her clients, while telling them that diet and exercise will work for them! She claims that she’s doing it for the health of her clients, yada, yada, yada; that she “got healthy” and then she “got happy” to which Taub replies “No, you got PRETTY, then you got happy” (Thin Myth anyone? Oh, and I really do NOT like the implication that to be pretty, one must be thin. I’m not thin and I get all kinds of people, both fat and thin, telling me that I’m pretty).

Finally, they discover that she has some extremely rare disorder that literally REQUIRES her to eat a high carb, high glucose diet. When she was fat, she was “self-medicating.” The BEST treatment for her is to have her gastric bypass reversed and start eating high carb, high sugar foods. She asks if there is any other treatment. There is, but it will only make the symptoms manageable; it will not treat the disease. She’ll still be sick, but the symptoms of her illness will be masked somewhat. She chooses the less effective treatment, refusing to have her gastric bypass reversed and gain weight. She would rather be thin and unhealthy than be fat and healthy. And the show didn’t leave you feeling like she had made a good choice. House even commented on how she would rather be “pretty” than healthy (I know, again with the thin=pretty thing, we can’t win them all though, can we?).

Overall, I felt like it was a small step forward. The patient/FG seemed to be the only one assuming that fat=unhealthy even if EVERYONE seemed to assumed that fat/=pretty. I’ll take it though. Even baby steps are still forward progress, right?