All the fat we cannot see

I'm going to quote again from Morgan - not just to shamelessly promote my book, but also as a launching point for today's post:

In reality, there was nothing remarkable about her going to yet another activity, and once again not having a good time. There was nothing surprising about Justin whispering "moo" behind her when she took a cookie. One cookie! He'd wolfed down five.

(You can buy Morgan at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016CIBNJK.)

Again, Morgan is not shaped like a model, but she is not fat. She still gets teased for being fat. I don't know that Joanna and Claudia get picked on specifically for their weight, but they and Morgan definitely see movies and magazine ads and it does not matter if they are healthy, they feel fat.

I can say confidently that I am fat, but I have felt the same level of fat all along. I have felt the same aversion to my appearance all along, and that covers a really wide range.

It's not that there haven't been differences. When I was 50 pounds lighter I did not have diabetes. Yes, there is a genetic component, and there are heavier people who still have normal blood sugar, but it is a factor for me. My blood pressure is really good now, but when I was 30 pounds heavier, it wasn't. Stress was probably a factor at that time, but it's unlikely that it was the only factor.

The ridiculous thing is that I keep forgetting that this is not my heaviest, because I still feel so heavy. My doctor had to remind me. And I can force myself to remember that the numbers on the scale were different, but in the mirror I still just look really fat. I can look at the old pictures and remember things people said then and see that it wasn't true, but mentally there was never a feeling that my body was acceptable.

What I'm getting at is that there are differences between a hundred pounds overweight and thirty pounds overweight. That sounds obvious, but it feels like we treat people the same at any level of overweight.

Maybe we are afraid to look at it closely enough to see differences, but nothing good is going to come of that.

Now it seems that to avoid teasing you need to be underweight, but it looks like girls feel the same way about being ten pounds overweight as thirty pounds overweight, and all I can think about that is that maybe worrying about ten pounds is stupid.

The justification that people can always use with fat is that it's unhealthy, which is true to a point, but the playground taunting isn't concern for health, and there are a lot of signs that society - including the medical establishment - is moving to such a level of fat phobia that they are going to fail to look at the whole person as well.

I suspect that even if your only concerns are truly for good health that the means we are using to get there are worse than counterproductive.

I also I suspect I will blog about this again. For now, I want to see things clearly.

This relates a lot to the goal of being connected with my body, but it is not only that because it is also being free of society's influence in how I view others. I want to see whole people, rather than a binary option of fat or not fat.