The Weight Police
Body shape is something that cannot be changed. Oh sure you can change your weight, but the basic shape of your body will stay as it is, just smaller or larger.
Ideal body weight is largely predetermined by genetics and medical conditions, and varies from person to person. Generally speaking, if you’re taking a good amount of exercise and eating a reasonably balanced diet, you’re around where you should be. Now that might be a size 8, or it might be a size 20 or whereever, but it’s not really up to YOU what your ideal weight is, your body knows where it should be. Bear in mind that a balanced diet does include cakey things, which are as much for mental health as to offset all those salads. Avoid Rice Cakes, they be pretty blah. You can of course become even thinner than ideal, but it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of self denial and a lot of starvation.
Anyway. There’s plenty of fat acceptance blogs out there, and there’s plenty of thin acceptance. There may even be standard Body Acceptance, I haven’t really looked. I am a fat acceptance failure, in that I am about to restart treatment to control my insulin resistance. The upshot of this is that I may lose weight.
Granted, not all fat acceptance movement members judge or belittle people who do lose weight, but plenty do. I stopped bouncing around the fat blogs a while back, feeling like even thinking about treatment for the PCOS that I have was a shameful horror. I should be happy in my fat skin, and frankly I’m pretty okay with my fat most of the time.
Health and fat are linked in the minds of about everyone, from those who want the world to see that you CAN be fat AND healthy (and you can too, no argument here) to those who want to explain to fat people that fat = unhealthy. Which is not always true.
Sometimes it is. Yes, there are gray areas. Let’s take two fat people I’ve made up. We’ll call them Stella and Lola. Let’s pretend that against all the odds, they’re the exact same body type and weight and are both size 22. So let’s say Stella takes spanish dance lessons once a week, swims regularly and does other interesting body moving things almost every day, as well as watching her food and making sure she takes things like cheesecake in moderation. Medically, she is in fine fettle – blood pressure great, cholesterol great – everything that should be fine is fine.
Lola on the other hand takes no exercise, has a diet that leans more to the fast food end of the spectrum and tends to snack on less than great for her foods. You can’t argue, in this case, that she is a healthy fat person, because she isn’t. She’s overweight because she eats too much crap and never works it off.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is this: What should come first, the consideration of health or the fat acceptance? Should I be okay with my insulin resistance which caused my obesity because there’s a strong and growing movement to accept all body shapes, or should I seek treatment for it, therefore becoming a failure in the fatlove circles?
Bear in mind I will never – ever- be skinny. I’m not built that way, I come from a long line of curvy ladies and there’s no reasonable way I could ever be a size 4 or whatever the ideal is (not that I would want to anyway. Winter would suck without some extra insulation).
I’m at the stage here where my doctor blood tests me quarterly to make sure I haven’t developed diabetes. Now before you get up on your high horse about that, there’s a good chance I WILL develop diabetes since my insulin is all screwed up – she’s just keeping an eye on me so we can catch it early.
Regardless of how I feel about my body, I HATE my PCOS. I seriously hate it, I hate everything it did to me and everything it took away from me and I’m tired of just letting it go. I want to do something, and there’s another treatment available to me which I wish to try.
So why the guilt? Why the shame and the horror and the self loathing? Surely taking control of your health is a GOOD thing? Maybe. Maybe not. When fat acceptance goes too far, and when people are discouraged from taking the best care of themselves they can – at ANY size – then it’s become a Weight Police Issue, and that’s not right.
Crappy suck crappyness
I’m having a bad couple of days, emotionally. Well, emotionally I’m alright I think, but my self esteem which is barely there at the best of times has been utterly erased. Utterly. To the point where I can’t bear the thought of walking out the door tomorrow morning to go to work. I have a class to teach in the morning, so I can’t take the day off, but I’m terrified.
At the same time, I’m incredibly annoyed with myself. I’ve been fat since I was about 11, so it’s now 20 years and surely I should have better coping mechanisms by now. I should be used to seeing skinny models and diet ads without feeling like a waste of skin, but I am not. What triggered this plummet? What else – wedding dresses.
When I shop for clothes, which I honestly do try to avoid as much as I possibly can, the first thing I ever look at is the neckline. Anything lower than a shallow scoop neck – say around t-shirt level – is instantly dismissed as unsuitable. This is because I have, thanks to PCOS, hair on my chest. Yup, I’m fuzzy and it’s probably the thing that depresses me most about my appearance. No matter how gorgeous, flattering or amazing a shirt or dress is, I will not buy it if the neckline is wrong. I simply can’t wear it.
Now, logically I know that the chances of anyone even noticing this chest fuzz are very slim, but we live in a society where billions of dollars are spent on hair removal because women who dare to be a bit beardy are subjected to humiliation on a grand scale. I often wish I was a stronger person and able to just say “Fuck you too!” but I cannot. All I can seem to do is crawl into a cave and hope it all goes away. Which it doesn’t.
So poking around for dresses starts as “Don’t any of these have a high neckline” and moves to “God I wish I could look that good” which leads to “I hate how all these women get to show cleavage” which leads to “I’m hideous and cannot have a wedding and I need to tell Matt we’re eloping so no one has to see this mess”. Not logical, and hard to escape.
I don’t actually know how to make it better though. After almost 20 years of being as covered as possible, avoiding hair dressers, dentists and doctors and giving up on swimming and other fun things, it’s difficult to now say “I don’t care any more, I’m fuzzy, YOU deal with it”. Instead I’m going to start the hair removal cycle over again. Because it’s just not okay to be a hairy woman.
The Business of Marriage
Although we’ve no set date for the upcoming wedding thing we’re doing (twice), naturally Matt and myself are poking ideas and I don’t know about him but I’m poking the internet in new and somewhat horrifying ways.
We’re not looking at a traditional wedding dealio to be honest. For one thing, there will be no church and no religious vows. We’re both atheists, so it was never a question that walking down the church aisle wasn’t in the plan. Poor Matt is being hauled into a hippy/vintage/handmade nightmare, but stiff bikkies, I’m the bride! That’s about as Bridezilla as I’m getting, to be honest. I’m mostly “Let’s just get some people together and have a laugh”.
When you change your relationship status on Facebook, your targeted adverts change too. No longer does the advertising strip down the side of every page try and flog me dating sites (“Single? ZOMG Suck! Click here for hot matches”). For a while, when I was just “In a relationship” and the ads were mostly for unrelated things. Now Facebook knows I’m engaged, so all of the adverts are wedding related, sometimes with the most tenuous of links – wedding umbrellas anyone? I shit you not.
Now let me state it here and now, we’re not spending a bundle on the wedding. Partly because we ARE doing it twice and partly because spending $20,000 on a single day makes me say “Holy shit, no way. Get out. Go. Go”. Let me also state I am getting married in red. I’ve not found the dress yet, because I’ve not really looked to be honest, but I know it will be red. It will also probably be from a local hippy shop.
However, being curious as to what proper brides be wearing this season, I did click a facebook advert for wedding dresses. They are stunning, of course (except for the one that looks a little bit like the bride is dressing to sex up the best man. That one is less lovely) but I suddenly understand quite clearly why so many women starve themselves before the big day. One site offers a gallery of “real brides” wearing their dresses, real brides not being over size 10 clearly.
Eh, I know it’s stupid to let these things get to me, but it does bother me that big girls aren’t represented in the wedding galleries of most commercial dress makers. It also bothers me that a plain white dress that you could pick up off the rack for $150 at Myer is suddenly worth $3000 because they slap the word “Wedding” above it.
Which is partly why my lovely man is being dragged into a festival of DIY goodness. For more uplifting wedding stuff (rather than Bridezilla insane scary places on the web) I like Off Beat Bride.
Plus what now?
Poking around the internets today I hit news.com.au which is tabloid as hell but not bad for when you don’t want to read anything that makes you think. Seeing a link saying “Plus sized models at Sydney Fashion Week!” I, of course, clicked it. Being a plus sized gal I was interested to see what was going on on the catwalks of Sydney. This, apparently:
Uh oh! Hope someone reinforced the catwalk before letting THIS heffer plod down it. Shitfire, that’s an OHS issue right there.
Sure sure, the gal there is not all bones and skin, but she’s not exactly PLUS sized is she? Seriously? Because if this is classed as plus sized then … wow.
To be fair, some of the girls were maybe size 14. MAYBE. Even that’s not plus sized really. In my opinion, if you don’t have to go to special section in Kmart to find something that fits, you’re not plus sized. Also don’t shop at Kmart, their clothes for curvy goddesses are horrible. I digress.
I’m not sure if it was staged (probably) but the front row of the audience had some actual plus sized ladies in it, two of whom could barely contain their mirth. I like to think they were laughing at the idea that the lady before them was plus sized:
The captions for this gallery runs “Plus-size stunners at Rosemount Fashion Week in Sydney prove that the latest fashions are not just for beanpole models”. Which is quite true. However all of the plus sized stunners were actually in the front row, not on the catwalk.
You can see the gallery here on the news.com.au site.
A History of PCOS by Me – aged 31.
Yesterday as I staggered around Borders wishing for early death (not to be overly dramatical) I told The Boyfriend I’d picked up the PCOS Diet Book and Managing PCOS for Dummies. He said surely I could write a Dummies guide to PCOS by now, having immersed myself in it for so long.
Apparently not! Quite apart from the fact that there’s more information in one single paragraph of these books than I ever got from a single specialist, the information in them is stuff I’ve never heard linked to PCOS before. Which has put me in between relief – “Oh good, it’s not just that I’m weird, it’s the PCOS” and anger – “Oh great, another fucking thing to go fucking wrong”.
Much of my “knowledge” of PCOS is gleaned from websites, communities and books. Simply because the specialists I saw were there to treat or look at one aspect of the whole, and therefore they’d do that and wander off. So as new information comes to light about the effects this condition has on the body, I need to make sure I keep up. In this case, it’s interesting to note that poor sleep and oversleep have been linked to – you guessed it – PCOS.
However most if not all of the worst parts of the syndrome can be bashed on the head with a quality low GI diet which includes a lot of whole grains and whatnot. This is a relief. I’ve avoided looking into PCOS diet simply because of the mental “I suck at diets” block. To find page after page of nummy things to eat that I can eat daily – big big big relief. My favourite of the three books I got yesterday – The Ultimate PCOS Handbook – even includes options and advice for vegetarians like myself. Hurrah!
So now for the history part. This post will be long, you can take a nap in the middle. I already napped today, so I’m good for a while. Ready? Let’s begin. (Boys should note at this point, I will be mentioning periods. Don’t be scared)
In about grade 5 (age ~ 10) I went from a tiny elfin little creature to three times my original weight within about 5 months. BANG. At age 12, my periods started just before I started High School. They were heavy, horrible and I missed a lot of school due to exhaustion and other things related to a 5 month constant period. Then they stopped, started, stopped, started… they never lasted less than 4 weeks.
No cause could be found for this cycle, nor for my massive weight gain apart from “You eat too much and you’re lazy”. I was, at this stage, not overly lazy. If I went to a friends house, for example, we’d walk into town, catch the train to the city, walk the city for the day, come home and walk back to their place. I was moving. I wasn’t a great sportsperson because I was fat and therefore slow, and my knees and ankles were giving way in alarming manners.
The ankles were addressed by a doctor who had me use insoles to support the foot, but the problem remained. A specialist in something or other tested my blood and said, without looking up from his notebook “Ah, yes. You probably will not be able to have babies. Everything else is fine. Goodbye”. Meanwhile I was growing body and face hair like whoa, which got me a referral to a dermatologist who – and I am not joking but I wish I was – said she couldn’t help with the hair problem but I clearly ate too much junk food. When I said I didn’t, she stood over me and blasted me for lying to her because I was so fat I was clearly eating junkfood every single day. Unable to defend myself, and crying hysterically, I swore off doctors for a long time. The Boyfriend can attest it’s a nightmare to try and get me to see a medical person these days.
However, I happened to read a magazine article about PCOS and the symptoms seemed to fit so I marched back to the GP and asked to be tested. In the darkened room of the ultrasound booth, a lovely smiling little Chinese specialist sat me down and pointed out on the pictures exactly where all the cysts were, and confirmed that yes, I did have PCOS. Without doubt he is the best specialist I have ever seen, not just because he took the time to explain what was going on, but because he was sympathetic about the whole deal.
Anyways, that was 9ish years ago and back then (listen to me like it was 1963) the treatment was the Pill. This was purely to get the periods ontrack again, and resulted (in me) in more weight gain and feelings of suicidal depression. So I stopped it and gave up for a spell till I read on the internet that someone had found a link between PCOS and Insulin Resistance, and treating the IR would help the PCOS.
AND HOW. Taking metformin, a drug used for diabetics, and adding a tiny bit of activity to my life I dropped almost 25 kilos. The drawback? I felt, constantly, like I was about to puke. Medication didn’t stop that, it was just something to put up with and I decided I didn’t want to put up with it anymore and stopped met. BANG, 25kilos straight back on. I dabbled with met again earlier this year, but I really cannot stand the feeling of nausea and the idea that if you cough, you’ll need to change your pants (sorry, TMI?).
Which brings me, rather neatly, back to diet. Currently I can only do parts of it, but I hope even a little bit of the diet will help in little ways (this is because I still live at home, and my mother considers the phrase “Low GI” to be something someone made up to make money).
I’ll start slowly, mostly because I’m spending most of my time with the books reading through the case studies and thinking “Oh yeah, me too. Me too”.
Of Ankles and Frogs.
The many moods of PollyFrog. I finished her today with the coconut buttons for her eyes. The material is from a skirt I picked up at Savers for $3. Whoot whoot cheap fabric! She came out super well, her limbs are nice and dangly and her body is very firm and snuggle-able. I put a bag of plastic pellets in her butt to allow her to sit which she does pretty well, though sometimes you have to thwack her into place. She’s really rather dee-vine darlinks.
The other thing I did today was crack my ankle – again. As a teen I had very weak ankles which would give up on me when walking down steps or slops, leaving me to fall in a heap at least once every couple of weeks. Seems like this is happening again, as two mornings this week I’ve cracked it getting out of bed. Today it actually made a noise when it did it, so that’s new. I know it’s directly related to my weight. The other day when it happened I was mostly alright, except for when I’d been sitting. Then it would give way as I stood up and send pain up my leg. This morning and until lunch time the whole lower leg throbbed. It’s better now I have it braced. I’m waiting for the other one to go now, which it will as it’s been aching for a while. Oh the fun of a collapsing skeleton!
It always starts in the left side, which the physio pointed out is again about an inch lower than my right. Which is a sign I really do need to pull my finger out and get some weight off as I was aligned quite nicely for a while.