Spidey's Dilemma
Although the name of the website Lose Weight Or Die is basically a Fat Hate Bingo square, Spidey the blogger is upset by how many hateful, anti-fat videos show up on YouTube merely by searching for the word “ugly.” Ugly, of course, being synonymous with “fat.” But he takes it a step further and talks about how, for him, self-hate might be necessary.
It is clear to me that the overweight are considered ugly. The media and public officials everywhere will deny it, but there is no question in my mind. If the stuff that is posted on youtube is any indication, the overweight are not just considered ugly, but also fair game for ridicule and outright hatred. Is it any wonder that so many overweight folks have low self-esteem?? On the other hand, what is the answer?
Loving yourself as you are sounds good; but when I accept myself as an obese person, I am very happy to just sit around eating ice cream and watching the TV. Not sure how it is for others, but I definitely need some self-anger to motivate me. Perceived slights also help. By nature, I am very passive and very willing to just sit by and do nothing. It really takes a lot to piss me off, and even more to keep me on it.
This quote really struck me today. I still count Weight Watchers points in my head, and why? For exactly the reason Spidey says. For me, accepting myself might lead down a slippery slope to eating whatever I want, and then I won’t be healthy at all. I would probably eat nothing but french fries and chocolate chip cookies all day. Of course, “accepting yourself” also means respecting yourself and what you put into your body. But my god, it’s a minefield, isn’t it?
I am trying to turn around this way of thinking and focus on health goals: getting to the gym three days a week, eating fruits and veggies, cutting down on sugar. In the past year and a half, I have cut down on the sugar in my diet dramatically. Did it make me thinner? No. Did it make me healthier? Absolutely. But it’s not quantifiable in the way that numbers on a scale are, or pants sizes.
So what can we tell Spidey to move him away from the self-loathing? He calls himself a “fat slob” and has determined that in order to be healthy, he must be thin. How can we disabuse him of this notion without sending him back to the ice cream carton?
Posted by mo pie
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If you “accept” yourself in the way that leads to eating cookies and French fries all day, I wouldn’t really call that accepting. REALLY accepting would be understanding that sometimes you want ice cream and sometimes you want broccoli and neither is any worse or better than the other and in the long run, neither will lead to your ultimate demise.
There’s a difference between welcoming yourself and your body with open arms versus leaving the door slightly ajar so it can creep in. Food is not love, nor is it a punishment or a reward.
If people feel that they have to hate themselves in order to find motivation to be thin, that’s their business. But I’d rather be mentally healthy and fat than skinny and a basketcase. That’s just me.
If you eat nothing but fries and ice cream all day every day, you have an eating disorder. Nobody is saying you have to accept having an eating disorder. But lots of thin people lie around in front of the TV and eat crap and don’t exercise — how many of them hate themselves for it, even if they are endangering their health just as much as the fat “couch potato”?
And frankly, I think part of the fries-and-ice-cream fantasy lies in the forbiddenness of it. If fries and ice cream become just two foods out of thousands and not EVIL EVIL EVIL, they lose their ability to tantalize. See Geneen Roth, Jane Munter or Susie Orbach’s books for vivid illustration of this.
Er, that’s Carol Munter, sorry. Jane Hirschmann is Munter’s co-author.
Well, the fries and cookies thing was an exaggeration. Although I enjoy a wide variety of foods, including broccoli, in fact, if I just “listened to my body” and what it wanted and whatever it wanted was okay by me, I would make more poor choices than good choices. My body likes sugar. It likes carbs. It likes fats. They taste good. And I don’t think it’s an eating disorder to like junk food, either; junk food tastes awesome. So… there you go. I have to adjust for it somehow. And if I do, I don’t accept myself? I think that’s gotta be wrong.
Unless you weren’t talking to me.
No, actually, I was referring more to your blockquote from Spidey. He seemed to be under the impression that size acceptance = sanctioned junk food binges. And I don’t mean that it’s an ED if you like any kind of food, just if you get stuck on one kind and can’t snap out of it. I think it’s an ED if you eat nothing but carrots and tofu, too.
“Listening to your body” though isn’t meant to be code for eating only healthy food. Sugar, carbs, and fats all can serve a purpose. And tasting good can be a purpose sometimes, too. Coming off a diet, its normal to overload on foods one had been denying oneself, but thats not an indication of a long-term relationship with food. They idea that without restrictive eating people would gorge themselves on sweets and “junk food” just isn’t well founded and has more to do with fear of fat than a likely result. Coming out of restrictive eating, a person may enjoy fatty foods and carbohydrates. That’s okay. Their weight may rebalance at a higher set point. That’s okay, too. The fear of eating oneself ever fatter, though, is just not a realistic fear. That’s not the experience of fat people who accept themselves and destigmatize eating.
This is something each person has to get straight in their own mind – HEALTH matters not size. I am all for giving our 100% support to Spidey – he maintains a great blog, brings up real issues, and gives support to many others.
We often see so much about women in advertising (like the Brazil yogurt ads I just posted about) that I think we forget sometimes how much these same fat hate attitudes can affect men too.
I think accepting yourself also been loving yourself and respecting yourself – and therefore making better choices – I like to think of it as “reparenting” myself – doing for myself what I would want from the best parent in the world — kinda my way of gaining perspective — if I were a child I could have a small amount of candy – NOT the whole big bag. That sorta of thing.
Lady Rose
I’ll be heading over to Spidey’s later today!
Ooh, Lady Rose… I think that “re-parenting” concept has a lot of promise. If I reframe (there goes the Weight Watchers talk) how I feed and treat myself in terms of how I would treat my theoretical child, a lot of the extreme behaviors on both ends start to make less sense. It would break my heart to see my child on the couch, depressed and bingeing on candy like I sometimes do. On the other hand, I would NEVER berate my child for enjoying an occasional treat or going over a specified number of calories in a day. In fact, an ice cream cone on a summer day is one of life’s great pleasures and I can’t imagine denying a child that because it’s supposedly “bad.” I will have to think about this further.
Personally, I don’t really think “self-anger” motivates me. I have hated myself and been angry and sobbed about being fat countless times in my life, and have just wanted to die because I couldn’t stand my “weakness” and “greed” and out-of-control eating. But those moments don’t motivate me to do anything positive, they just make me feel more hopeless. I actually seem to do best on Weight Watchers when I’m feeling strong and positive about my body.
Also, I don’t see why accepting yourself fat has to mean eating junk. It’s a tightrope walk for sure, and easier said than done, but there is a very clear distinction in my mind between eating with a goal of weight loss, and eating with a goal of health. Your point-counting could be seen as the former, and your cutting down on sugar could be the latter (though of course the reasons why you do them are your own, and I’m not saying either is bad).
Like (and I’m being a little disingenuous here because of course I am still hung up on the number on the scale, so everything I do to some extent relates to weight loss, but anyway) I count points to lose weight, and I rack up activity points both to lose weight and for health. But I follow the “good health guidelines” and try to eat only until satisfied, purely for health. Different goals. If I were going only for health, I suppose I would just keep right on exercising, eating right, and eating until satisfied without feeling the need to change anything if the scale stopped going down. As it is, I might try eating less or something if I stop losing weight, because I do have weight loss as a goal.
I think people mix of the words “acceptance” and “satisfaction.” You can accept something without necessarily liking it. So you can accept that you’re fat, but not be satisfied with your size. For instance, I’ve accepted that my neighbors are going to play loud music in the evenings and I can live a perfectly good life around that, but I wouldn’t be complaining if their sub-woofer blew out either.
It seems like he’s conflating anger with self-esteem. He’s motivated by anger and he claims he doesn’t like himself, but those two things don’t HAVE to be related. Who’s to say he can’t accept himself and be fired up by something else?
And I agree with the above posters who have pointed out that physical cues and responses to food play a big role in all this. “Listening to your body” definitely makes sense, but what if you’re having trouble hearing in the first place? I think there actually IS evidence that people will gorge themselves on junk food because of the way it creates cravings that throw off the body’s signals. When you add that to emotional associations created by the aformenentioned food stigmas, you’ve got some seriously messed-up stuff going on.
So I can’t help but think that there are a lot of people who go from restrictive, punishing diets to “letting themselves relax” by eating foods that trigger overeating. And if they don’t realize that food can affect their reactions and feelings of hunger and instead they think it’s all a matter of will, then, yeah, they’re going to blame “self-acceptance.” That’s my theory at least.
Very thought-provoking post! I love Colleen’s response about what self-acceptance really means.
When it comes to food, I agree with meowser about “forbiddenness” being one of the things that makes failure at dieting inevitable. Food doesn’t divide into simple categories like broccoli=good, french fries= bad. If you force yourself to eat broccoli by thinking “I want french fries, but they’re bad!” you’re not going to enjoy your meal. And if you add shame to the mix, then eating “bad” things becomes “failure,” and even eating “good” things becomes punishment.
The binary doesn’t work for people either- Self-acceptance also means letting go of the notion that there is a fat part of you which is bad and only wants bad things all the time, and is trapping the thin you who wants out.
I’ve learned that swings in blood-sugar levels really affect me, so for me making good choices means thinking about glycemic index and balancing sugar with protein and fat. For me, “listening to my body” means paying attention to how food choices affect my body, my mood, and my energy level. Since the focus is not on food as virtue or vice, I can take pleasure in the food I choose and how it fuels me.
PS- Excellent point, Wendy! It was a total breakthrough for me to learn about how foods can cause feelings of hunger. I think I read about it in the South Beach Diet book, but nonetheless it has really helped me in just the way you describe- it’s not just about will-power and virtue, it’s about body chemistry!
I find the idea of self-hate as a necessary thing to be heartbreaking.
When you have a dog, you show them love by giving them the right food for them, the right health care, the right training, and lots of affection. I don’t know about anyone else, but i don’t show affection to my dogs by giving them raw hunks of bacon for dinner. Loving yourself isn’t about spoiling yourself (in either sense of the word).
When we love another person, we know on some level that a certain amount of respect is also required… but somehow, when it comes to loving ourselves, that respect isn’t even considered. However, self-respect is an imperative in the process of learning to love (and like) one’s own self.
With love and respect for ourselves, we understand that we can have our moments of couch-sitting and ice cream eating, but we also understand that our health is important.
I’m fat. I’m as healthy as my fibro allows, and i do what’s best for me because i love myself, but i also respect and like who i am. To use someone else’s anger and disgust for self-motivation is not a completely foreign concept to me, but i recognize that it is just as damaging to my physical and emotional health as it would be for me to subside on nothing but lettuce and diet coke (or pizza and icey cream).
It’s all well and good to rebel against some things (and sometimes very necessary that we do). But every now and then, you have to be for something.
I think it is more self hating to be binging on food (any food)
It is sad how this blogger feels that self acceptance equals giving up on being able to change for (what he sees) the better.
There needs to be more encouragement to find a balance between self acceptance and love with the hard work that goes into weightloss and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
I think it also needs to be understood that being thin does not equate happiness or self acceptence…I’ve known too many girls who continue to starve themselves to the point of emaciation convinced that if they were just a little thinner they could love themselves and be happy.
It’s a bad mindset to be in. A bad habit of self flagglation that never leads to acceptance even when you reach your goals.
Personally…I know when I’m NOT accepting my body because the binging starts again and I stop excersizing.
That in of itself is unhealthy behaviour…and it doesn’t make me happy…and it doesn’t mean I like myself as I am.
Quite the opposite.
When I’m feeling good about who I am…when I’m not even thinking about my weight, that’s when I’m out dancing and eating wonderful things without binging…
It’s when I start noticing my weight and hating myself that I ‘give up’ and binge or whatever.
In my mind…the excersizing…the eating…it should make you feel good in a different way then the transitory satisfaction of a binge (which never feels satisfying…compulsive eating rarely does)
Also I think to many people think “I accept myself so that means I don’t want to change”
Someone can accept themselves and love themselves and then choose to lose weight.
Our bodies and our lives are dynamic…we are going to change and it is alright to accept that change as well…especially if you have honest reasons WHY you want to change.
Being convinced that you will find an ultimate happiness if you change is a myth though.
I accept the fact that I’ll never be a size 6 nor do I want to be. I also accept the fact that just because I eat healthier and exercise doesn’t mean I’m going to be as rake-thin as Nicole Ritchie. It only means that I’m doing my body good. I accept myself but I want to be healthy. I’m not eating right or exercising so I can shed the weight and get into a dress that I probably still won’t be able to wear.
For me self hate does nothing but bring you down further. It’s stupid how some people will hate on themselves because they think everyone else is.
I think that the heart of Spidey’s challenge lies in the phrase “when I accept myself as an obese person…”
I know that I’m obese, but I am not an obese person. I love myself for myself. When I put the qualifier obese in there, it is more difficult to accept who I am. I don’t let my fat define me, until others force me into that definition.
The more I love myself and my life, the less inclined I am to sit in the house all day and eat Mayan chocolate ice cream until the frozen cows come home. The more I live a life that I find interesting and fun, the more inclined I am to want to be fit enough to engage in that life. This has the added effect of getting myself motivated to do exercise, which never feels good when I start doing it. It’s only about 15 – 20 minutes after moving that I start to like what I feel like when I’m moving and sweating.
And when I find pleasure in my life, I find that I relish the pleasures of whole foods and healthy eating. I crave salads and fresh fruit. I want steamed brocolli (yes, I’m a strange girl).
But it is difficult to really love your life, if you don’t like yourself. And it is going to be almost impossible to accept love for yourself when you incorporate the hatred of our society for fat people by becoming an obese person, as opposed to a person who is obese. You are always a person, and valuable, first.
Accepting yourself for what you are is not admirable. What is admirable is to transform yourself. There are people who emerge from their cocoon of fat into beautiful, slender butterflies! They do it through tremendous willpower. These are the people we should look up to. Try that, instead of wasting your efforts trying to convince the world that you are beautiful as you are.
I think someone needs a new name. Sweet does not seem appropriate, at all.
“beautiful, slender butterflies”? Are you serious? Or possibly you’re a Weight Watchers leader from the ’60s, stuck in a time warp?
Mo pie, my comment wasn’t directed specifically at you. It just makes me edgy when people use deep-seated self hatred as motivation. Anger can certainly motivate people to do great things but when it’s anger at oneself, you may reach your goal but ultimately I’m not sure the damage would be worth it.
It’s dangerous on many levels, the most obvious being how it easy it is for an anger induced diet to become a full blown eating disorder. I really think healthy should include emotional health and self esteem and if the only thing you have to fuel that is how you perceive your outer appearance, that’s not healthy.
I think “balanced” would be the word I’m looking for. I can’t hold a gun to anyone’s head and say “LOVE YOURSELF!!” but I do try to abide by one simple rule – I try not to say or think things about myself that I wouldn’t say to someone else. I’d never tell anyone else that they’re too fat or imperfect or not “good enough,” so I avoid saying that to myself. Who deserves my respect more than me?
And when you take all that stuff from the outside telling you that you’re ugly and gross and believe it, you’re putting other peoples’ wishes for yourself above your own. You’re letting OTHER PEOPLE live your life for you.
And “light and sweet” – oh, honey.
What was that, light and sweet? Can you speak up? I can’t hear you through this cocoon of fat!
Colleen, I completely agree. If we decide that the only way to be beautiful, worthwhile, and admirable is to loathe ourselves into thinness… well, it’s dangerous, it could lead to eating disorders, and it could definitely get in the way of living a happy life in the meantime. God, I can’t imagine living my life as if I were worthless until I reached some magical butterfly stage of thinness.
As you say, balance is key.
How can one possibly take care of a body they hate? Think of people in your lives you have hated (and if there are none, good for you – you must be a very centered person!) have you had a strong inclination to take good care of those people? Do do nice and loving things for them?
Starving your body thin is a hateful act to your own body. For most fat people, being healthy is going to also mean accepting being fat, because it’s probably what your body is meant to be. That doesn’t mean you should eat anything you want whenever you want (nor should thin people because it isn’t healthy for them either).
Love youself, love your body. That’s real health. Leave the hatred to “light & sweet” and her/his ilk – they have plenty of it to go around!
“Accepting yourself for what you are is not admirable. What is admirable is to transform yourself. There are people who emerge from their cocoon of fat into beautiful, slender butterflies! They do it through tremendous willpower. These are the people we should look up to. Try that, instead of wasting your efforts trying to convince the world that you are beautiful as you are.”
BLEAH.
No less than the ripped-to-shreds Jillian Michaels says that willpower is overrated. And I emphatically agree.
Has anyone else noticed that the self-hate-and-anger-as-motivation models tends to rear its head more frequently in hierarchical societal (and business) models filled with men? I’m generalizing wildly, but I can’t help but think that in our culture, the type of motivation one responds to most – productively (depending on what one wants to accomplish – might have something to do with gender acculturation.
And enchanted black, don’t be so sure about the size 6. I tried on my first Marc Jacobs today and after a lifetime of double-digit sizes, thanks to vanity sizing, I wear size 6 in his clothes. That’s a different thread for the most part, but maybe it’s also one less hook to hang the self-hate on.
(Further interpretation — that the fashion industry is going to muck around with the sizes anyway, so it’s a “you are who you feel you are instead of what the industry says you are” kind of thing.)
/ramble
I think if you’re the sort of person who hates yourself, you will still find things to hate about yourself even if you change the aspect of yourself you thought your hate was directed at.
(That was well-expressed, wasn’t it?)
By which I don’t mean either that there’s no point trying to change, or that self-hate is incurable. I just don’t think low self-esteem is usually that logical.
I spent several years not exercising because I was obviously so fat that people would laugh at me and I would die of embarrassment. I hated my body, but that didn’t make me change it, it just made me despair of ever changing it…
I don’t adore it all the time now, but I do let it move, and nobody’s laughed at me yet.
Hi, since you loved me so much, I decided to come back.
I do not hate fat people. I don’t think anybody should hate themselves. I think being as beautiful as possible is an act of self-love – isn’t it?
Everyone wants to be as attractive as possible to the opposite sex. This has nothing to do with the patriarchy, or the oppression of women. As we speak there are thousands of men busting their asses at the gym so that we, women, will want them more. It’s human nature. And whether you like it or not, current fashion dictates that a slimmer person (male or female) is a more desirable sexual partner.
Here’s a challenge – just for once, just as an experiment, get your BMI down to 20. That’s not Anorexic, it’s not even Model Skinny, it’s just Very Slim. Don’t do it for health, or politics, do it for vain, egotistical, shallow reasons. Do it because you want to be the girl at the party who every guy wants to talk to.
Maybe you have already tried this. Maybe you really do have a medical problem that prevents you from losing a lot of weight. If that is the case, then ignore my comments. But if you haven’t tried, then I ask you – aren’t you curious?
Hey. . .are you MeMe Roth?
OK… I’ll engage. light and sweet, I think you’re probably pretty young (right?) and I think you probably have some issues with food and weight. And I find your premises squicky and not really relevant to me… like a lot of people with a “less than ideal” body type, I’m happily married. It’s a fallacy that you have to be anywhere near ideal in appearance to love and be loved.
But in answer to the question you actually asked… yes, of course I wonder what it would be like to be Very Slim. So slim that nobody could ever realistically say that I needed to lose another pound. So slim that nobody could ever find my appearance wanting. Although that’s the problem, right? People will always find something else to judge and criticize if I give them the power to decide whether my body is acceptable. Just look at people criticizing Katie Holmes’s “cellulite” or whatever on web sites and it becomes clear you can never win. (Plus I’m an “ancient” 30 so I’d be screwed anyway.) The main thing I envision if I got to that 20 BMI is feeling an overwhelming sense of relief that people would no longer feel entitled to judge my body. But of course they would anyway.
I’m obviously not going to try what you suggest, because I don’t think it’s a good or healthy idea for a host of reasons (and when all was said and done, I doubt it would be possible for me without near-starvation… my body isn’t meant to be that small), but yeah, of course I wonder what it would be like to be a size 2 or whatever. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Would I take that magic pill if someone offered it to me tomorrow and if it were safe? Heck yeah.
Spacedcowgirl, you are right, I do have issues with food and weight, probably from being told all my life by my mother that I needed to lose weight. I do feel much happier and better about myself when I am at my target weight, but I know it would be better if my self-esteem wasn’t so tied up with that.
You know your own body, so if you feel it would be unhealthy to try to slim down drastically, you are the judge of that. I know what it is like to be told you don’t meet a certain standard, so I should know better than to do it to other people. I won’t interfere anymore.
“I know what it is like to be told you don’t meet a certain standard, so I should know better than to do it to other people. I won’t interfere anymore.”
That’s what I wish every hate-spewing troll would say…
After a reasonable post like that, I think we can hardly call her a hate-spewing troll. I think she respectfully presented her views, and I appreciate that. God knows we don’t want a monolithic wall of agreement around here.
Yeah, I thought it was a pretty interesting question you raised, l&s. And by asking if you had “issues” I sure didn’t mean that I don’t…
I’m actually not sure how small my body is meant to be; my mom also encouraged me to diet from a young age so I’m not sure how I would have turned out given a good selection of healthy food and no dieting as a kid. I’m thinking probably size 14-ish but I’m not sure. My Weight Watchers goal weight would probably put me into a 10 or so, but if I start to have a terrible time losing before I get to that point, I’m planning to bail or at least step back for a bit, stick with the good habits I have managed to develop so far, and not try to tighten down on it too hard. I’d definitely rather weigh 180 than 275 (my start weight) and I’m afraid working too hard to get past that to “goal” would send me down a counterproductive path. I’m kind of interested to see where I level out, actually. If I can get to goal without being too restrictive, so much the better.
I tend to believe people can lose weight in some cases, but the mistake comes in when they take extreme measures to get past a point where their bodies want to go–whatever that point might be. But I honestly know next to nothing about this. I would hate to think I’m an authority, even on how my own body works because I’m only starting to learn.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion and good luck.
sorry, I wasn’t calling l&s “hate spewing”.
I merely meant that we see a lot of hate directed towards us and it would feel good after dealing with a troll to see them say something similar to that.
I meant no disrespect.
Oh, no problem Alison! I suspected that’s what you meant, actually.
I had not read this before. I don’t think you ever posted a message to me. I am glad that the blog entry inspired you in some way. I found your thoughts on it illuminating. Unfortunately, it is five months later so the discussion is long over!
Light and sweet:
“Everyone wants to be as attractive as possible to the opposite sex.”
I know you already know this, but I have to remind you.
No. Not everyone wants to be as attractive as possible to the opposite sex. As a gay woman, I probably wouldn’t notice until three days after every man fell off the planet. Not because I hate them, but because they mean very, very little to me. My attractiveness to men is not a willful fact of my life. It is to some MEN, and occasionally, a man might feel the need to make his appraisal of my sexual attractivess known.
To slam this point again: I could not care less if I ever gave any man a boner. (Because that’s what you’re talking about here.) Ever.
I do want to be as attractive as possible to my mate. And wonder of wonders, weight isn’t the top of the list for her. Just like it isn’t for a number of heterosexual men.