I'm not going to write anything here myself much, except to say that I realize my own fears and freak outs about being overweight can sometimes border on the unrealistic.
I haven't weighed myself is some time because I simply don't want to have a number send me into a self-loathing slump for the entire day.
At least, not quite yet. I have too much on my plate right now.
Instead, I'd like to share this piece I just read on Jezebel.com, because it's food for thought for a person like me. When I was thin, I binge drank at least 3 times a week, smoked a pack and a half a day, and ate horrible, horrible things. These days, I eat quite healthily, (more or less) don't smoke and drink for pleasure rather than for self-annihilation. My skin and hair look better than they ever have, I'm sick less frequently and I don't bruise very easily anymore:
Friday, October 29, 2010
Something to think about
Posted by Saktii at 11:45 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
BBW
Or, is it, that I only managed to escape the ridicule for most of my later teen and adult years because I lost weight? Perhaps this is what it means to be a fat person in society; that you never get to escape the junior high school bullies.
I've heard the term BBW (big beautiful woman) before. I've never really given it much thought. It always seemed to be a tag used in places like craigslist dating by women who were very obese and trying to seem proud of their bodies or by men who fetishized obese women.
I, myself, would have never considered myself to be a BBW. In fact, the very term BBW smacks of creepy desperation to me, and I do not like it at all.
I'm about 40 lbs overweight at most.
Maybe I would call myself a CBW, or even a PSBW (Chubby Beautiful Woman or Pear-Shaped Beautiful Woman), but I would have NEVER considered myself a BBW.
Well, I guess I was wrong.
A few weeks ago, I was given the task of hiring a leasing agent for the commerical real estate company I work for. I interviewed a number of people, one of whom was so stupid that he thought that Shanghai was located in Japan.
Of course, I chose not to hire this individual, who took my rejection email as an opportunity to ask me out on a date.
Now, I'm used to being hit on and asked out. Or, at least, I used to be when I was thin (not so much anymore, but because I have an amazing boyfriend that I'm happy with, I don't concern myself with the decrease in male attention I receive these days very often). I usually handle these sorts of invitations by politely ignoring them.
I thought it was weird and inappropriate to be asked out by a person I'd just rejected, via email, for a job but I didn't think much more about it than that.
Then came the other email he decided to send, which read; "I don't know if you recieved my last email, but I meant everything I said. Send me an email let me know how you feel. I love BBW's and want to take you out and get to know you and have fun!!"
What. the. fuck.
BBW? Really?
When, the fuck, did I become BBW? When did I enter the category of having to endure the creepy obsessions of fatty chasers?
I think that being called a BBW is about the very worst thing anyone has ever said to me, and I now find myself incredibly ashamed of my weight.
All of these insights I thought I had had at Burning Man turned out to be delusions, and the reality of the situation is that I am fat and subject to being fetishized by those very creeps I hate.
Gross.
I am seriously considering adopting some very unhealthy lifestyle changes in order to fix this problem, and to be quite honest, I DON'T CARE if they're unhealthy changes. This weight has got to fucking go.
Posted by Saktii at 10:04 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Burning Man
When I was 118 pounds at age 19, I used to walk around wearing a girdle so my "fat" wouldn't stick out.
To me, the overweight proportions of my body are very, very real. Startlingly, humiliatingly, real.
For 4 years now, I've been struggling with the fact that I suddenly have and extra 30 lbs on my body and it's made me feel terrible about myself.
At Burning Man this year, I had to make some decisions regarding how much skin I was willing to expose and how neurotic I was going to be about it. Burning Man is full of half-naked women with perfect figures.
There are so many, in fact, that you stop comparing yourself to them because it just becomes overwhelming and depressing if you let it.
Granted, there are plenty of out-of-shape naked people as well, but that's a cold comfort when you're as self-obsessed and vain as I am.
However, walking around half-naked in the inescapable sweltering heat in front of 30 thousand people has taught me a few valuable lessons;
1) I'm really not nearly as fat as I think I am
2) My legs need some serious work, but this doesn't mean I'm fat and need to starve myself to death-- rather, I can just-- you know-- work out my legs and build some more overall muscle and I should be fine
3) Even with an extra 30 pounds, I am proportioned very well, with nice firm breasts and a small waist.
I've decided to only weigh myself once per month from now on as well as stop obsessively counting calories. I will try to eat as close to a Paleo diet as possible and spend at least a few hours a week on the stationary bike at the gym.
Most of all, I'm going to try to stop hating myself every damn time I look at more than just my face in the mirror.
Posted by Saktii at 1:34 PM 0 comments
Thursday, May 27, 2010
I want to be just like mother when I grow up, but only the good traits..
My mother was most likely abused by her father (this is an assumption based on the fact that I was never allowed to be alone with him and once my grandmother called him a "pervert"), and I think this has caused her to be why she is the way that she is.
My mother is soft-hearted, giving and kind but she often has the emotional maturity and outlooks of a little girl. She doesn't do a very good job of thinking through the cause and effect probability of most situations and frequently blames others or comes up with excuses for why she's unable to do something that is patently more logical or better for her.
To give you an example:
Me: "Mom, have you been using the recipes in the diabetic cookbook I gave you?"
Mom: (first, she lies, to avoid getting in trouble) "Yes, they are delicious"
Me: "Really? Which one did you like the best?"
Mom:"Um, the first one. With the vegetables"
Me: "You aren't using it, are you?"
Mom: "Well, I tried, but then Kenny (my stepfather) wanted white bread, not wheat, and they were all out of those kinds of ingredients in that book at the store"
Me: (sighs) "Mom, you realize that if you keep eating this way, you are either going to go into a coma or they are going to cut off your legs. Do you really want to be fat, with no legs and a bad back for the rest of your life?"
Mom: "No, I'm fine. My feet only started tingling that one time. I'm having cinnamon tea every day now, and I'm pretty sure that's curing the diabetes."
Me: (silently bangs head on the desk)
My mother is in very poor health for her age. She is only 51 years old (she had me very young. my parents were still in high school when they got married. Surprisingly, it was not a shotgun wedding. I was born over a year and a half later.) and she is something in the range of 150lbs overweight. She is 4'11, and the last time I forced her to get on a scale, it read 260lbs. She has also been smoking about a pack and a half a day of cigarettes since she was 14 years old. She wasn't always like this. In the 80's when I was little, she was a young beautiful single girl with golden blonde hair, tight slacks, and a shiny blue Camero. She looked exactly as you would expect Marsha Brady to look, post Brady Bunch at a coke-fueled disco party.
I think it was a combination of poor food choices, excruciatingly painful back problems and poor relationship choices that caused her to get to the weight she is now.
I think a lifetime of feeling like a victim to her circumstances in life has made her unable to grasp the concept of personal responsibility of the conditions she often finds herself in.
My mother is great. She's loving and funny and a really good person. I just wish she valued herself as much as I value her.
Posted by Saktii at 12:04 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Fat Lady at the Buffet
As I sat down with my salad, I happened to notice a morbidly obese woman sitting down and eating a lunch that consisted of 6 full plates of food. Now, mind you, this is an establishment that offers buffet, but it's NOT all-you-can-eat. The food is also priced by weight.
This woman had something like 40 dollars worth of crappy Financial District chow splayed out before her, and there wasn't a single vegetable anywhere on any of her plates.
The horror I felt while watching this woman eat was akin to the horror I used to feel when I'd watch my junkie friends shoot up in front of me back in my early twenties. It's difficult and extremely uncomfortable to watch a person doing something that you know is killing them.
It's like a suicide in slow motion.
There are many people who belong to online communities that support what they like to think of as , "Fat Acceptance", or The Fatosphere, as it's more commonly known.
This is a collection of bloggers and activists who fanatically defend the right for anyone to get as fat as they want to and not be demeaned, harassed, or discriminated against because of their size.
Though they say that they are proponents of the Health at Every Size concept of body acceptance activism, they have been known to criticize and even outright delete, from their websites, any member who expresses a desire to lose weight.
Fat discrimination is too complex an issue for me to discuss with any depth and quite frankly, as a person who is only 20-30 lbs overweight at most, I also feel that I am not qualified to speak that much of it.
I may have become invisible since becoming overweight, but I certainly have never experienced the kind of cruelty the morbidly obese face, all the time, from random strangers.
Do they deserve to be mocked and marginalized for "letting themselves get like that"? Is there ever a time when any human being deserves to be mocked?
Why are fat people so frightening to us? What is it about them that we fear so much? Is it purely a pack animal reaction to poor physical health? Do we react in the same way wolf packs do when they chase off and attack the sick and weak ones?
Why aren't there more people approaching this issue from the perspective of mental illness the way we do anorexia or schizophrenia?
As I looked at this woman eating herself to death, I wondered what her story was.
I tried not to stare, but as I looked at aoo of her plates heaped with burritos and lasagna and cakes and then at my own tiny salad bowl, I had two thoughts.
One of them was, "I wonder if I would be so disgusted if she were a skinny person sitting there with that much food" and the other was this: "Her food probably tastes way better than mine, and I bet she's enjoying her lunch more too".
Posted by Saktii at 5:18 PM 0 comments
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Thursday, April 1, 2010
A Lazy Post
I haven't written a post in a while, mainly because I've been waiting to see if my new Thyroid Meds make any noticeable difference to my weight loss efforts.
After discovering that I am hypothyroid, I have gone through a variety of emotions, most notably, relief and hope.
It's been almost six weeks now, and it does seem as if I'm losing weight at a more "normal" rate, but I think it's still way too early to tell.
All the same, I am very happy to have reached my 5% lost mark in Weight Watchers. Just another 22 lbs to go to be considered "borderline" healthy weight!
Posted by Saktii at 1:37 PM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Eat Less, Move More
Yesterday, I went to have my blood drawn to test for diabetes/cholesterol/thyroid problems.
So far, my diabetes came up normal and my cholesterol came up very good. I apparently have very high levels of HDLS, which are apparently the "good" cholesterols that help prevent the bad cholesterols from building up in the arteries.
I attribute this to 2 years now of staying mostly away from processed foods and sugars.
I am still waiting for my thyroid test back, which is kind of the most important of the three. A part of me is kind of hoping that there is something wrong with my thryoid so they can give me pills and i'll be thin again.
It's not that I mind eating well and working out, it just seems to be so much damn work for such little return. There are some weeks where I don't lose any weight at all, and this is frustrating, especially when I know I've done everything right.
All of this reminds me of an old MADTV skit that pretty much sums up the general attitude to weight loss that most people have. I love it:
Posted by Saktii at 12:14 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
The Kirstie Alley Effect
I first started this blog with the intention of it becoming a beauty products news and review site. Hence, the name, Pretty Baby, which is what I will name my very own Beauty Supply store someday when I get around to growing up and becoming self-employed.
The blog lay fallow for months and months until I finally realized that I didn't know enough about beauty products anymore to write an interesting blog about them. I've been out of the beauty biz for too long now. For fuck's sake, I still think Glycolic acid is the wave of the anti-aging future..
I also realized that it doesn't really matter what you put on or do to your face if your body is a mess. It doesn't matter how beautiful your face is, really, if you happen to be overweight.
It's not right or good or fair, but it's the truth. I call this, The Kirstie Alley Effect. In case you don't know, Kirstie Alley is the beautiful actress from Cheers in the 1980's who has gained notoriety these past few years for letting herself get very fat:
Now, you will read any number of celeb gossip blogs, news stories, or other such nonsense regarding Kirstie's ever losing battle with her weight. I often notice, however, that nobody ever talks about what an amazingly gorgeous face the woman has. Or, if they do, it's always in the context of what a shame it is that she's gotten so portly and lost her looks. As if, somehow, her face mutated into a rubber pig mask or something when she got fat.
Posted by Saktii at 11:00 AM 0 comments
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Sad story of the day
Today, I came across this really sad story on Divine Caroline of a woman who struggles with severe depression and obesity:
http://www.divinecaroline.com/24133/92534-bbw
Now, I want to point out that I 100% believe that the only way to combat the things that cause you sorrow in your life is to change the way you perceive and react to them.
I also believe that Morbid Obesity (like, obesity that has reached the point where you need to ride a cart around the store)is entirely self-inflicted and that you need to take responsibility for yourself if you want to correct it.
That said, I also want to add that this is the saddest story I've read all day, and it's a good reminder for me to be patient with people who seem to be victims of themselves (the morbidly obese, addicts, etc.) because you never know what events in their lives led them up to that point.
Posted by Saktii at 2:57 PM 0 comments