on weight, body image, performative presentation, acculturation and rebellion

[jmtorres]

This is a post about weight; my fatness and my awareness of its connotations under various societal lenses, including medical. Any concern trolls will be summarily deleted.



Lately, my weigh-in is about 275-280lbs, depending on what I'm wearing and how recently I've eaten, so my fatness is not a matter of perception: I am not average size made to feel fat by the media, I am just fat and no one is going to argue about whether I am fat. (I weigh myself often enough to see those small rises and dips, which is something I want to stop doing, because I feel it is unhealthy obsessive behavior motivated by external fatphobic ideologies.) I have lost weight since moving to LA--I've lost about 10% of my body mass, actually. I say this as a factual numerical statement, because I don't (or at least try not to) have any weight loss goals or work at losing weight.

My body is my body is the body I have to live in, so I don't want to feel negatively about it. Sometimes I do anyway; sometimes my knee doesn't want to take weight or I have a painful period and I do say, "I hate my body," but I mean this in a functional way: I want a body that doesn't give out on me. I don't want to feel upset about how I look, I want to, and am for the most part, satisfied with my own image and self-presentation.

Looking at the silhouettes of my mother and my grandfather, I think being fat is probably my genetic destiny. At the very least I am wide-boned (a phrase my mother recalls using to describe herself when she was a teenager, and realizing that meant she must have felt fat, even though she was not, then) so even if I were to magically lose all my "extra" weight, I would still be too broad to be conventionally thin or slender. I don't want to work towards an impossible goal. I don't want to endure the stress of working towards an impossible goal.

There are reasons to want to lose weight regardless. Some of mine are:

• in order to be chemically treated for depression, I have to deal with my doctor on a regular basis. Though my bloodwork is fine (I have too-low "good" cholesterol numbers, but my overall cholesterol numbers are fine, so excuse me if I don't work on increasing my cholesterol, salmon and avocado are already some of my favorite foods what do you want from me) she wants to run it every four months. She wants me to lose weight; pleasing her a few pounds at a time makes it smoother to get brain drugs.
  
• it would be nice if it were easier to find cute, affordable clothes that fit my body (interesting note: although I've noticed belt hole drop with my recent weight loss, I haven't actually gone down in clothing sizes. In American women's clothing sizes, one of the alchemical properties is that small sizes have fairly fine differences, but large sizes have larger and larger difference, and are expected to cover a larger range of bodies. So even in your size it's almost impossible to find clothes that fit a large body well as opposed to approximately.)
  
• I am aware that there are social and professional consequences to being fat, that people perceive fatness as ugly and ascribe all sorts of negative personality traits to fatness like laziness, and while I really try to avoid internalizing that thinking, it would be nice if I didn't have to overcome quite so much of it in people around me, for instance, when applying for jobs
  
• I want to fit in airline seats without feeling squished, although, again, wide-boned, not sure that's actually going to happen because even if the fat goes away my hip bones are still my hip bones

I got a haircut about six months ago, I went from having long, most of the way down my back hair to having a cute angled bob. Not long after, I caught sight of my shadow and I thought, I like my silhouette. Quickly followed by: when is the last time I liked anything about my body? (Because I try not to internalize negative thoughts about my body, but that's not the same as having positive feelings.)

Today I was walking to the store in my cute boots--I wanted something a little less hiking boot to wear with cute dresses, but shorter than the knee-high boots I sometimes wear when I'm dressing up, because I'm knitting all these socks I want to show off, and as it turned out the forms of cute boot I could find in my size and price range expressed femininity with heels. They're chunky heels, but they are heels, which I have complicated feelings about. Heels can be hard to walk in (I was actually walking to the store in these today to practice, the last time I wore them my calves were tired for like a week so I thought I should work on it if I want to wear them and not get tired out at nice events, like say, my graduation). Heels have a lot of cultural baggage of about objectifying the wearer for the male gaze (butts, they make for nice butt definition) at the cost of the wearer's comfort. On the other hand, they can make you feel powerful. Partially because of the perceived attractiveness enhancement, partially just because you get taller. Every time I wear heels, I really like being taller, whether I'm actually dealing with other humans beings or not.

But so today I was walking in my cute boots with heels and I was looking at my reflection in window glass and I realized there's another effect that heels give, an optical illusion where the extra height makes you look less fat.

Then I realized I was equating fat with ugliness and reminded myself I don't want to think of fat as ugly, I don't want to care about being fat, and if I'm going to care about fat it ought to be about the number, because that's the thing the doctor will look at, that's the gatekeeper I want to worry about. (You know, except that it's not just the number that counts for dealing with other people, it's also what you look like, how fat you look, so it's something to bear in mind, if I can stay meta enough about it, separate it as something to manipulate other people with: wear the cute boots to job interviews, maybe.)

I was raised with kind of a hippie philosophy about feminine presentation being a bunch of crap and unnecessary: I don't shave my legs and armpits, I don't wear make up, I don't use a lot of beauty products except, except--

Since moving to LA, in this period where I'm sort of reinventing myself, I've been trying some new things. Like fingernail polish. Like pampering myself with bath bombs. Like knitting myself things because I think the pattern's pretty, or the yarn colors are pretty, and buying cute boots to show them off.

Some things that feel like the sort of stereotypical feminine performance I reject, so I'm wondering a lot: is this what I want? Am I absorbing the kind of toxic culture where advertising tells me what I'm supposed to want? Or when I younger was I rebelling against stereotypes in an over the top way that cut me out of enjoying things categorized as "feminine" that I really could and now do like? How do you figure out what you like because you like it and what you like because society told you to like it and what you like because your upbringing told you to like it?

And then: all of the above existential feelings angst about fatness.

My body is my body is my body.

If I don't feel good about being fat, is that internalizing societal fatphobia? Or are any of those feelings just my feelings? And when I don't stop to examine it, is there any fundamental difference?

I deliberately do not work at losing weight. I deliberately do not "diet" or have an exercise routine aimed at losing weight. One reason is that those kinds of things do not work on a permanent basis: you go off a diet, you gain all the weight back. I can decide to change what I eat and cook more for myself to control what I eat, but I can't consider it a diet, it's not a means to an end, it has to just be how I live. If I did diet to lose weight, I would have to internalize a lot more garbage. If I did, I would think about how much I weigh even more than I already do, and you might notice, I think about it a lot.

And I worry about thinking about it too much. Because I don't want to have to worry about weight at all.

Comments

[grammarwoman]

So much of what you wrote could be me, too, from the wide bones (I had so much size shaming as a kid from my parents, and at one point I flat-out told my dad that my skeleton wouldn't fit in the sizes he thought I should be, let alone my body) to the genetic destiny (which was something I didn't tell my dad, that if he didn't want a fat daughter perhaps he shouldn't have married my mom, who comes from a long line of rural farm wives who store fat like the famine's coming tomorrow) to appreciating the accessories like nail polish and good shoes (because as you say, there's no love for fat ladies' fashion - if we want something fun, it had better be on the periphery like feet or hands, because nothing else is available).

I still have issues with the color pink, because it has always represented to me the "You must be this girly to be recognized as feminine" cut-off line, which I could never measure up to.

*offers fist-bump of solidarity*

[jmtorres]

if we want something fun, it had better be on the periphery like feet or hands, because nothing else is available

I didn't think of it that way but it's SO TRUE

re pink god I know like, when I'm messing around with nail polish I keep going "but I don't want something that says girly" and of course there's like twice as many shades of fuschia as the rest of the spectrum combined and some of them are really very nice but I don't want to buy in there?

and then sometimes i'm just like fuck it let's do it marina and the diamonds style and go full Bubblegum Bitch

[azurelunatic]

I have been singing the praises of the glitter industry.