Dieting Lifestyle.
My mother didn’t raise me with a thin is better perspective. Maybe becasue my grandmother dieted her entire life and she was a very unhappy person. Maybe becasue my mom has a cleft pallet and it was important to her that I grow up believing that your appearance shouldn’t define you.
I was a fat kid but you wouldn’t know that from the way my mother treated me. At home, my weight was never an issue. I ate what I wanted, when I wanted. I didn’t grow up with a disordered relationship with food.
It wasn’t until my late teen, when I went to live with my cousins for a year while my mom looked for a new job, that I experienced a more restrictive attitude towards food.
My cousins lived on a farm and they ate their meals on a schedule. There was breakfast and lunch and dinner. And it was a big family with a limited income, so there was only a certain amount of food to go around.
And, for the very first time, I heard a family member make critical remarks about weight. I remember my uncle saying to one of my cousins “getting a little chubby there.”
The thing is, my cousins are all thin. I was the fat one. So this was really weird for me to hear him criticizing their weight. He never said anything directly to me but I definitely got the impression he disproved of my size.
At the time, I didn’t really understand it. I just thought my extended family was weird. Even at school I never really got teased about my weight. I was teased becasue I was smart and weird, not becasue I was fat.
Somehow I was in my late teens and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my weight. I knew I was seen as a fat kid but I also figured people should like me no matter what I look like.
I didn’t care about fitting in. And I thought that’s what weight loss was. Just another way for girls to try and fit in.
Maybe that’s why I’ve never had an easy time relating with other women. I’m supposed to have to have voices in my head telling me that there is something wrong about my weight.
I’m supposed to understand the culture of dieting. And I just don’t.
It’s only as an adult that I’ve become painfully aware of how my disinterest in dieting separates me from others. I go to social gatherings and find all the women clustered together talking about their weight.
It sure seems like everyone else considers this normal behavior. Like women are supposed to talk incessantly about food, and exercise, and how much they have or haven’t lost.
I’m always trying to change the subject becasue my friends are smart and interesting people. They’re well versed on a variety of subjects. Why can’t we talk about something else?
What’s worse is that my interest in Fat Acceptance has made me into the passionate activist girl that bores everyone with her ranting about fat. I’m like the polar opposite of diet talkers.
Just as boring, only a different flavor of boring.
I try to be patient and understanding. I listen to my friend becasue I care about what they’re passionate about even when I find their interests snoozeworthy. Even if that means I have to spend time listen diet talk.
Some of you might feel that I should get in the faces of these women and convince them to stop dieting. But I don’t want to be someone that tries to convert people to my way of thinking.
I’d rather inform them and then let them make up their own minds. Even if they end up disagreeing with me.
For the women I know who choose that path, it sure seems like dieting is a lifestyle. Dieting becomes their life. In some ways I wish it were only a lifestyle choice.
Because I can understand the desire to live the life you choose. The problem is that, becasue I’m fat, most people want me to convert. They want me to adopt the dieting lifestyle. Because the dieting lifestyle is normal and acceptable.
But I’m just not interested in normal or acceptable. I just want to be me. And “me” is fat and okay with it.
I used to hear a lot less of the “diet talk” stuff - because I have typically worked with mostly men, and don’t have a lot of female acquaintances. But over the last year or so, I hear a lot more diet talk from the men around me too.
Hmmmm… or else I never noticed it before I found FA, and was just one of the people you are describing for whom this talk is “normal” discussion.
noceleryplease -
I definitely notice a heightened awareness to anything that smacks of negative towards fat people, since I’ve become particularly interested in Fat Rights. It’s not a bad thing, considering I use my skewed perspective as a fodder for writing.
But I try not to take it TOO FAR by letting myself be angry all the time at any small slight. The world isn’t fair, so I figure you have to look for the good, or you’ll just get overwhelmed by the bad.
I don’t know if it’s simply less prevalent in the lesbian community or just my particular group of friends, but there is almost no diet talk at all when I’m hanging with my queer girls. We go out to eat and everyone orders without angst. Sometimes when I’m spending time with straight women - friends and family - I’m amazed at the difference. I mean, no one I know spends hours talking about dieting, but with the straight women, there’s a constant undercurrent of little comments and references to their looks. But I also feel like it’s more for show a lot of times. Like, these women feel like they have to justify what they’re eating or pretend like they’re dieting in order to conform to some standard of behavior.
Honestly, I think someone could write a very long book about body image and weight in the lesbian culture vs straight culture. Not because lesbians aren’t affected by these issues of course, but just the way they’re processed culturally.
Attrice,
Do you think that some of that has to do with the fact that lesbians are already outside of the “norm” and they’re used to thinking outside of the “norm” so they’re not as susceptible to popular messages of what is the “right” and “wrong” ways to live your life?
Peace,
Shannon
attrice -
What’s funny, is I think your right in some circles of the lesbian community. But there are exceptions.
For instance, my mother’s been with this woman (who that I don’t particularly get along with) for the last ten years, and before she was with this woman I never heard my mom talk about wanting to loose weight…but this woman is concerned with her weight and, over time, I’ve noticed my mom also becoming concerned with her weight.
But all the lesbians I’ve know that AREN’T my mom and her partner seem to come from a body positive perspective.
It strikes me that the “get skinny or else” messages women receive are very heteronormative. I’ve been told multiple times that I need to slim down specifically to catch a man. Granted, that was before I came out as bisexual. Still, I think the possibility of being deemed undesirable by men is one of the most common weapons used to bludgeon women into dieting. And that threat is a lot less scary if you’re a queer woman.
Simone -
The whole idea that fat is “undesirable by men” is so odd to me.
I have never had any problem getting a man. They’re not falling over me, or anything, but the times I’ve gone without an significant other were becasue I hadn’t found anyone I was interested in.
I’m terrified of my husband dying, becasue he’s my world, but I have no doubt that I will find new love given some time.
It’s a messed up lie that being passed around to women that thin = love. I wish I could convince more women of how that’s bullshit.
I agree that it’s BS. I haven’t been the most lucky in love (although right now I have a wonderful boyfriend), but I honestly don’t think my weight has ever been the reason.
The whole “lose weight or you’ll never get a boyfriend” line is something I’ve heard primarily from straight women.
The dieting lifestyle seems completely pervasive… either you’re all in or you’re all out. You either believe that thin is the only acceptable option for your body or you find everyone else’s body image unnecessary.
I’ll have to write about this some time, but I grew up being told I was fat (even though I very clearly wasn’t… I need to post some pictures of young me to illustrate this point, but I was about the size of my son, Methuselah, who is in my profile picture). I think that due to the fact that people had a laundry list of complains about me (I was annoying, disruptive, a trouble-maker, a bad influence, etc.), being fat was just one of those things.
I tried to change to make other people happy, but I almost always failed to sustain those changes (such as not being annoying). In the end, I decided that I was who I was for better or worse. That was a whole helluva lot easier than trying to change myself.
In any case, I embraced the fact that I was fat and no longer cared about whether I would get fatter because, hell, the damage was done. As a result, self-fulfilling prophecy, now I’m fat.
I guess I could have gone the other way and tried to lose weight to make other people happy, but one of my other lamentable attributes is that I’m lazy. In any case, I’m with you. I don’t get the diet lifestyle or mindset. But it sort of seems like our society supports that lifestyle and makes it seem normal through it’s messaging. Those that conform to those messages (the majority) are “normal” and those that oppose it are deviants.
So, I guess we’re deviants. Fat deviants. And I’m cool with that too.
Great post.
Peace,
Shannon
atchka -
Funny you use the word deviant becasue that is a word I really identify with. There are many things about myself that are not socially acceptable and, like I’ve said many times before, I’m just too full of myself to fake it to make others happy.
I think it’s defeatist trying to please those that are determined to find something wrong with us. I’d rather cultivate relationships with people that accept who I really am, and award them by being nice and kind and thoughtful, because someone that can love me for me deserves to be treated like a king/queen.
I grew up entirely immersed in diet culture (although, admittedly, the girls I grew up with didn’t talk about dieting in the way I see girls talking about it now). I always found the talking to be uncomfortable because I knew I would never be able to diet myself to their sizes. Later, as I grew up, I worked in offices that were primarily female and noticed the same thing you did: that women discuss food, what they do/won’t/can’t eat, the exercise they partake in, etc as a way to bond. And I found it to be so incredibly, remarkably boring.
Oh, and sad. Isn’t it sad that THAT is what we have to bond over? That that is considered a “safe” topic for bonding? (As opposed to politics, religion, fashion, whatever.) It got worse after I had my gastric bypass - I could not get any of my coworkers to talk about anything other than food, diet, and exercise for ages. It sucked. To borrow dieting terminology, I was starving for normal conversation at that point.
Candice -
I totally agree that it’s sad.
The funny part, for me at least, is that I never participate. Since I’ve never dieted, I also never talk about how much I weight or how much I’m eating. And since I’m shy about talking about my healthy problems, I don’t even really bring up how much I exercise.
I guess I’m kinda complaining here, but it does seem like the women in my life haven’t caught onto the idea that I’m completely not interested in that subject. Maybe that’s becasue I’m nice and let them get it out of their system before I try to move things to another topic.
It also may be because I’m not pushy about my feelings about Fat Rights. All the people in my life know I have political opinions about size acceptance but I think they get kind of a blissful ignorance thing going. Like they willfully forget.
So, I completely commiserate with “starving for normal conversation.”
Great post. The diet culture is so pervasive that most people don’t even realise how indoctrinated by it they are. We are so conditioned to feel guilty about ANYTHING we put in our mouths. Fat people especially. It is like we just are not meant to eat AT ALL because we are fat. These totally f*cked up relationships with food are half the problem for a lot of people I think. Not all of course, but almost everyone I know has that ‘good food vs bad food’ thing going on, no matter what their weight. Almost everyone I know says things like ‘Oh I need to lose a few pounds’ no matter what their weight. Almost everyone I know has been on a diet at some time in their life. Dieting has become like breathing, something we ‘have ‘ to do in order to be considered human. It is mind boggling.
Bri -
Lately it almost seems like no one is supposed to eat anything. (Which is me exagerating to mean people are supposed to eat very little.) It’s almost like the tide had turned, so that gluttony is now at the top of the list of puritanical sins.
I agree with you. It’s simply “mind boggling.”
I am vehemently anti-dieting in my philosophy, but I don’t believe in pressuring people to change their outlook.
I strongly believe in positive reinforcement. If you build a beloved friend’s self esteem, value them for who they are and their mind, heart and soul, then those things become far more important to them than what size their butt is. It takes time but I can see the evidence in my friends starting to happen now.
I try constantly to tell the people I love just WHY I love them. Strong self esteem is the best remedy for body hate.
sleepydumpling -
I applaud your dedication to helping your friends feeling better about themselves and their lives.