I carry …

I carry full respon­si­bil­ity for not fol­low­ing through with this site.

I broke one of the car­di­nal rules of blog­ging: I did not do what I said I would do. Yet.

I have fallen behind in my writ­ing about Fat is a Fem­i­nist Issue. I have no excuse and many excuses. It is much harder for me to write about what I am read­ing than I imag­ined it would be. The book sim­ply hits way “too close to home.” This is not my first time read­ing it, but it is my first time read­ing it at this point in my life. At this age. In the reflec­tive light of all the life expe­ri­ences that I carry with me at all times.

But that, of course, is the point, isn’t it?

One of my high school music teach­ers went on to become a licensed mar­riage, fam­ily and child coun­selor (MFCC) and offered classes on weight man­age­ment. She used a sys­tem called “Think and Be Thin.” Par­tic­i­pants were chal­lenged to cat­e­go­rize food as “pleasers” or “teasers.” The for­mer are foods that sat­isfy you fully, while the lat­ter are just like they sound: Tan­ta­liz­ing but lack­ing the sub­stance or qual­ity to cure hunger. Instead, they just lead you to eat more. An exam­ple is potato chips. They are not sat­is­fy­ing; rather, for most peo­ple, they lead to con­tin­ued eat­ing, fre­quently result­ing in a full-fledged binge. The other main con­cept was this: Using a numer­i­cal rat­ing sys­tem, class mem­bers were sup­posed to keep a jour­nal and make a note of whether they were totally hun­gry each and every time they con­sumed food. In other words, you should not eat if you are not at “0” or “empty.” And we were sup­posed to train our­selves to stop eat­ing when we were com­fort­ably full, not at “10” or feel­ing com­pletely stuffed.

It all makes per­fect sense, of course, espe­cially to any­one who has never strug­gled with weight issues. But it is harder to live than it sounds and, after a few months, I reverted to my old eat­ing patterns.

The thing that I took away from the class, how­ever, and have never for­got­ten is what my teacher/counselor told the group numer­ous times: “Every extra pound you carry rep­re­sents an emo­tion you have not dealt with.” Her the­ory was that if those emo­tions are not con­fronted head-on and worked through, the com­pul­sive eater will con­tinue forc­ing them down through the mis­use of food (some­times referred to as “eat­ing the emo­tions” or “swal­low­ing the feel­ings”) until they are finally, effec­tively explored. In other words, they will sur­face again and again through­out one’s life. When they do, you can choose to face and get past them once and for all, or stuff them down again until the next time that they bob to the surface.

As Hap­pytiler wrote today:

I carry guilt, abuse, anger, and illness

Lay­ered in pound after pound upon my body

That coun­selor was, of course, absolutely right. And Fat is a Fem­i­nist Issue largely deals with those emo­tions with a spe­cific focus on how women have devel­oped unhealthy cop­ing mech­a­nisms in response to their socioe­co­nomic circumstances.

So it is dif­fi­cult to read and even more dif­fi­cult to write about because to do so effec­tively requires an explo­ration of the emo­tions and life events that have, quite lit­er­ally, shaped me, and that I carry every day in the form of extra pounds. Much of what Orbach writes about leaves me feel­ing raw, naked, and highly vul­ner­a­ble. Therein lies the value of her work.

I carry not just the com­ments made to me over the years by my mother, but also many other peo­ple. I carry the non­ver­bal reac­tions from many peo­ple that have left me won­der­ing if they really saw and heard me. I carry the weight — again, lit­er­ally — of the choices I have made over the years, fueled in vary­ing degrees by my phys­i­cal sta­tus and appear­ance, as well as the real or imag­ined lim­its I per­ceived upon those choices as I weighed them through the lenses I have imposed upon myself.

An indi­vid­ual who has never strug­gled with his/her weight sim­ply can­not under­stand the degree to which one’s weight per­me­ates and impacts each and every aspect of one’s daily liv­ing and decision-making, from the sim­plest to most com­plex and life-altering cir­cum­stances and sit­u­a­tions. That’s the process I seek to under­stand through my work with Orbach’s book, as well as other resources.

The good news is that I saw my doc­tor on Novem­ber 6, 2007. I do not weigh reg­u­larly, as I have explained here pre­vi­ously. So I stand on the doctor’s scale back­wards and ask them to merely “do the math,” telling me the num­ber of pounds by which my weight has changed since my most recent visit. In this instance, an addi­tional weight loss of 20 pounds was noted. That means that since I began this con­cen­trated effort to achieve max­i­mum health and fit­ness, I have lost 75 pounds.

I was actu­ally quite sur­prised because I was on a plateau for at least a cou­ple of months, dur­ing which I did not feel like I was los­ing any weight at all. But then one morn­ing I noticed that a skirt was looser and began notic­ing the same thing with sev­eral other items of cloth­ing. My visit with the doc­tor con­firmed that, so I can con­clu­sively state that I have moved off that plateau which was caus­ing me to feel frus­trated, dis­ap­pointed and unin­spired to con­tinue writ­ing here.

Ulti­mately, though, I carry a respon­si­bil­ity to myself to keep writ­ing on this site because it memo­ri­al­izes my jour­ney and stands as a tes­ta­ment to the goals I have set for myself, my progress toward attain­ing those goals, and helps moti­vate me dur­ing those times when I become dis­cour­aged. And if my writ­ing here about the weight — lit­eral and metaphor­i­cal — that I carry each day helps or encour­ages one other per­son who is strug­gling with the same issues, I will have pro­vided a ser­vice and can feel happy about that.

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