Dieting is Self-inflicted Torture for the Approval of People Who Don’t Care
I wasn’t always the size I am now. I’ve been fat my entire adult life, but I’ve had varying levels of fitness. I was a fat lacrosse player, tennis player, and a rugby player. As I got older, I stopped being as active. Then I joined weight watchers with a work friend and found myself intrigued by the gamification of weight loss with their points system. Each food item had a point value assigned to it and every day; you had a certain number of points you were allowed to eat. I enjoyed trying to figure out how to eat the shit I wanted without being hungry or going over my daily allotment of points. It also made me aware of all the supposedly “empty calories” I was consuming. Each week, I attended meetings of the cult of getting thin and we reaffirmed each other’s commitment to the daily struggle. We lamented the foods we couldn’t eat, celebrated the things we learned we could, and encouraged one another on our journey…after we weighed in and told ourselves that this number that was required for entry wasn’t supposed to be all that important.
My work friend dropped out after 3 weeks, but I was IN. I started working out 3–4 times a week which quickly became daily. I quit smoking when I realized that it was negatively affecting my lung capacity. I kept a food journal, learned the caloric value of every food I loved, every food I liked, and every food I could make myself tolerate. I dropped 40 lbs and you couldn’t tell me shit. I was a winner. I was kicking ass and taking names. Sure, I was constantly going to urgent care from the bloating and stomach issues from all the roughage, but that was just part of the challenge. Sure, I was overworking muscles and causing what I believed to be short term damage, but no pain, no gain. Sure, I thought about food every waking moment, from what I could eat, what I’d planned to eat, what I planned to cook to eat for the rest of the week, what snacks I could have, what restaurants worked with my plan, what parties and events I could go to and be “safe.” I incorporated exercise into all my social activities — I socialized by going on walks or some other workout. I would do 3-mile walk/runs during my lunchtime and eat at my desk. I had exercise classes in the evenings and awoke some mornings to go jog. I made sure I hit 10,000 steps on my Fitbit every single day and openly shunned friends who weren’t on my program. My life became a never-ending weight-loss battle as I fought to escape the inescapable plateaus and any chance of the weight come back.
That was 11-years ago and over those 11-years, I’ve had to repeatedly make the decision to prioritize my emotional health above weight-loss, because that road is toxic and filled with self-hate.
I hear stories of people who claim they can focus on their bodies without shaming themselves, without the self-inflicted verbal abuse. People tell me that they can love themselves but want to change their physical appearance. That wasn’t my journey because for me to want to change how I look by withholding energy to force my body to consume itself, I needed to dislike how my body looked. It wasn’t the same as wearing a wig to change my hairstyle or wearing a corset to change my silhouette. Weight loss is a prolonged series of not just uncomfortable but painful choices with the intent of reshaping my body into something different. People talk about moderation, but moderation gets you stronger without necessarily changing your appearance. To change your size, you have to go extreme.
Changing what you eat and how you move to gain strength and flexibility, alleviate digestive issues, and give your body the nutrients it needs to function optimally is a different course of action than changing to lose weight. To tell yourself that your body fat needs to no longer exist is a form of body eugenics. Combined with cosmetic surgery, you determine which fat deserves to exist and which does not, then precisely destroy the fat that does not align with the appearance you desire. Regardless of how we’ve repackaged it, we are taught to hate our fat and we are taught to hate fat people, especially fat people who do not see their fat as a problem. In our society, fat is always wrong, an affront to our morals. Fat people are taught to hate ourselves — to believe the roundness of our bellies is abhorrent and the fleshiness of our arms is disgusting. I am meant to believe that the spread of my thighs across every seat I occupy and the ever-present ripples on my back act as a visible representation of the internal monster I supposedly cannot control.
I don’t have a monster inside of me, nor am I abhorrent or disgusting. I’m just fat. But we are taught that fat diminishes our humanity when it’s your support of that idea that is inhumane.
What is the promotion of weight loss other than the hatred of fat? The desire to make it disappear at extreme cost? Why is hunger elevated to some spiritual practice, when we know that both hunger and dehydration will result in negative impacts on your mood, attention, memory, and motor coordination. Prolonged hunger and dehydration can make you depressed, tired, cranky, and cause memory loss and muscle weakness. We know that “healthy habits” do not necessarily result in weight loss and prioritizing weight loss above your physical, mental, and emotional needs actually do a lot more harm than good. These are not secrets, but the popular, if incorrect, narrative is that fat is the worst thing you can be, and it is acceptable to torture you until you lose weight.
I internalized this model. I have talked about my body acceptance journey many times, from why I don’t talk about dieting to why I choose to love myself in my fat body. It’s hard looking back at myself and seeing how judgmental and dismissive I was to people. It’s hard seeing how cruel I was to myself. I was vicious, forcing my body to function on insufficient calories, enduring physical pain because I believed the narrative that fat people are lazy and looking for excuses to stop exercising. I was eating more fiber than my body could manage without pain, convincing my doctor to give me steroid shots so I could keep training, living with headaches because I was exercising several times a day on 900 calories, convinced that this was self-love…I treated myself worse than I would have treated anybody else. I told myself I was not deserving of rest or care or compassion because I was a fat person and fat people do not deserve that.
I dehumanized myself and 11 years later I’m still unlearning a lifetime of abusive shit I inflicted on myself. It hurts to think about it. It hurts to remember it. And every day I have to make such intentional choices to push those messages out of my head and out of my life because they are everywhere, and they are lies. Lies fed to keep us trapped in a cycle of self-harm from which many people profit, and an aesthetic from which many people gain power through socially accepted abuse.
I’ve tried a lot of diets in my lifetime. I’ve practiced disordered eating repeatedly. The closest I came to full-blown eating disorder was my time with weight watchers because they made the disorder into a game and I love games.
It took time but now I look at myself and see a person — not a before picture and not a source of shame. I see a fully realized human being whose self-care is a continuous work in progress. Over time, I have made choices that prioritize my needs, but it is a constant slog because this world profits from cruelty and it’s easier to profit if you do the work for them.
I’ve made it my duty to make it as difficult to profit off me as possible because I am not a tool to be used or a resource to be exploited. I am not here to be pretty for you. I am not here to meet whatever you determine are your standards. Love me, hate me, I don’t give a fuck. I am enough and I’ve decided to fuck up anyone who tries to convince me otherwise.
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Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on December 15, 2019.
