Marry Me, Kate Harding
You know, I just love this post and you should all go read it. If you’ve already read it, you should go read it again.
Problem is, if that’s the only reason you’ve got to accept your own fat body and others’, you feel an obligation to demonstrate at every possible opportunity that you eat your veggies and work out — and are still fat. So then, if you skip the gym for a couple of days or eat something “bad,” you feel like you’ve failed as a healthy! fatty! Suddenly, you’re just an ugly stereotype again.
It’s okay to love eating. It’s even okay to love eating food that fat people aren’t supposed to eat, ever. It’s okay to take sensual pleasure in, you know, a sensual pleasure. Fuel is not the only point of food any more than procreation is the only point of sex; if we agreed, as a culture, that it was all about fuel, we would certainly have given up eating and switched over to getting nutrition in pill form by now. We don’t do that because eating tasty food is fucking fun. We all know it, we just don’t all feel comfortable admitting it.
I’ve never sat down and contemplated the fact that size acceptance and food acceptance are two different things. I swear, every day I read posts like this, I feel a little bit more enlightened. Thanks, Kate.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Fat Positive, Health
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I want to see the ring before I make a decision.
(Thanks!)
It seems to me, though, that there is room for a middle ground between on one hand the good food/bad food dichotomy and on the other, total abandon with regard to the health consequences of what we eat, no? I like the author’s analogy of food and sex, and while both food and sex can bring great joy to our lives, both are also arenas where being discriminate in our choices serves us well.
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Mo – what’s with the Cyrillic?
I definitely see your point, Wade. There is still the question of balance and all that. But demonizing food choices in the way that Kate describes has made it more difficult–at least for me–to make good choices.
I’ve gotten a lot better at it, but I used to feel like if I ate one cookie or one “bad” thing, that I was “off the wagon” and then I just threw in the towel. These days I can eat the piece of pie or the burger or whatever the “bad” thing is, and then the next meal I can happily go back to chard and beans (which I was actually eating when I posted this).
The feeling that you’ve “failed as a healthy fatty” can be really damaging not only to your self-acceptance but also to your overall mentality towards your food. I don’t know if I’m expressing this very well. But that feeling is very familiar to me and it used to send me straight for the bucket of ice cream or what have you.
And as for the Cyrillic, it’s a pingback, I guess; I don’t really understand it. I should probably just turn them off!
It’s sort of a religious thing on my part (being a Buddhist) but I practice (try to practice) what is called ‘Mindful Eating’
It’s an attempt at forming a balanced idea in regards to food.
There’s no counting…but you’re also aware of everytime you eat.
Like…there’s a ritual to the eating. You focus on the food, the preparation, the presentation, the taste…the clean up…
So you really enjoy your food…you really taste it and it turns it all into a guilt free, happy…relaxing experience.
It’s helped me a lot since counting calories usually leads to starvation and binge/purge patterns that I developed when I was a teenager.
It’s not really a weightloss thing persay…but it has that result for a lot of people
Hello All
I’m a very new and avid reader to this blog, also being overweight.
I think the difference though is I’m totally against being overweight and I can’t seem to accept it. Feels silly huh. I love big girls, big girls are amazing but I don’t want to be one, :(
I loved this post and that post that was linked to here. Food and sex linked to each other is great – and most times I’ll take the food ;)
But those two things seem to be societies way of picking on people. You either have too much sex and too much food or not enough of each. Prude or starved, whore or fat. I think sometimes there needs to be an intbetween and there more often than not is but people don’t see it.
I look forward to reading more and more – I’m a writer myself and often considering doing a blog like this but couldn’t ever justify it because I have a problem and until I get my own views sorted I can’t point out others who have problems with fat girls…So good on you everyone :)
Actually, food and sex have been linked quite a bit. They are both incredibly sensual experiences. They are both linked to sins in Christianity (sadly).
As for being comfortable with your weight, Jade, I think that is a very personal decision. For me I can’t do the diet cycle anymore. It just messed with my head too much. The last time I lost weight I went spiraling into a major depression. So I’m back to my previous weight and learning, with amazing friends at my back, to love myself. This whole thing of coming to terms with the food I eat is a big one and I’m learning about the part inside of me that uses food not just for body nourishment. I’m trying to be more concious and learn what my body needs from food (and yes this includes fat and sugar sometimes – ’cause YUM!).
Sex is the perfect example: there’s healthy sex, and there’s obsessive, compulsive, self-destructive sex. Obesity is the latter. Enjoying food while remaining slim is the former.
Actually, Winn, enjoying food while remaining healthy — which does not always mean slim — is the former. There are a whole lot of potential healthy weights between “slim” and so fat that the weight itself causes health problems. (Poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle can cause health problems in anyone, regardless of weight, but there are plenty of fat people who eat well and exercise while remaining fat.) And part of the point of my post was that eating compulsively (which is sometimes a factor in obesity, sometimes not) is not really enjoying food. There’s usually so much shame associated with it that enjoyment is impossible.
So I’m with you on the basic point, but “slim” has nothing to do with it. It really doesn’t.
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