This is also a frequently visited topic (the links below are only a tiny part of it), but I might be able to come up with some new things to say.
For the title, I am going for the juxtaposition with the mean girl of yesterday's post. (Not that you can't be both mean and fat.)
I like those little touches, but it is also "the" because once I started seeing myself as fat it became the only thing about me. It also felt like I was the only fat one. There were so many times where I just could not accurately judge my body size or the size of the bodies around me; that I was fat was all that mattered.
Continuing with juxtaposition, in the same way that Suzy's bullying was aided by the impression of social approval being on her side, targeting the fat as the problem was also brilliant. There were so many other factors in the world designed to show me that my body was wrong, and that was the specific way my body was wrong, and that being fat was awful and completely worthy of censure.
I believe I was still in junior high when my doctor kindly gave me a 1000 calorie per day diet to follow. That may seem like a bad idea for someone who is still growing, but my mother had the same diet and I had been looking at it and trying to follow it for at least two years at the time.
I remember specifically a Health class during the nutrition segment, so 9th grade. I was starting over again, promising myself to be good, and to avoid burning up all of my calories early, I had an apple and an orange for breakfast. Then the teacher talked about energy and how you need to start the day with grains or proteins; there was no lasting energy in fruit. Somehow I was all wrong again.
What makes it brilliant is that you can't get it right. Not only will the overwhelming majority of diets fail, but they will actually cause your body to store additional fat, making you even more out of order than you were before.
If we look at bullying as a form of social control, then targeting body size is very effective. Attempting to reduce saps energy from the targets, making them more pliable, and the constant failure will be demoralizing. Best of all, being set in opposition to your body motivates you to stop listening to it (important information comes from there), so it dulls your instincts and diminishes your sense of self.
I could have been worse off. Accepting social rejection probably preserved a lot of my individuality. It was still a struggle to accurately know myself, or what I needed, and especially what I was worth.
If it hadn't been Suzy, I would have gotten the message that I was fat somewhere else, multiple times. Maybe that's why now my focus is more on the ways that the whole thing was kind of impressive, and less on what it did to me. But again, this is old territory.
There is still new ground to be covered. I have been reading a lot on that, and I am sure I will get back to it. I will go off on many things and I will be angry.
For now, I have mostly accepted myself as I am, and I think I have finished grieving the past loss of my connection with my body. It would have been nice to appreciate what I had then, but getting there now is still pretty cool.
However, I also have to know that I am not completely free. Clothing choices are still limited. I may be judged in job interviews. In fact, lots of people may judge me for my size. I want to not care, but you know those stories about how obese people are in more danger from the virus? It turns out a lot of that is medical bias against obese patients, affecting diagnosis and medication dosage. Once you correct for that, the morbidity factors are about the same.
I get it. Back in the day, everything wrong with me I blamed on that. Dry scalp? It's because I'm fat.
There is a limit to how much I am allowed to not worry about it.
But I can say that the amount of not caring that I have been able to achieve feels fantastic.
Related posts:
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-message.html
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/losing-touch-with-my-body.html
https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/02/laying-groundwork.html
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