Fat Slut

I was at the comic book store the other day, poking around while my friend picked up her pull list. And I came across the last issue of the Pride and Prejudice mini-comic that Marvel has been publishing. And now I have a whole mini-essay on portrayals of historical literature. Behind a tag, because this got loooong, and image-heavy.

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No, I’m not going on a diet.

I just randomly went and looked at the diet blogs a friend of mine and a couple of her friends have, and I realized that just reading these – skimming, really, about a day’s food intake and “cheats” and “being bad” and “why I’m fat” and “I want to be skinny – was making my stomach clench. No, really. Apparently I have grown totally intolerant of diet talk. Which I sort of knew, already, but what a way to confirm it.

I’m actually eating way less these days, but not because of trying to lose weight. I had some fucked-up dental work done, and because of that I am getting food wedged between teeth where it really shouldn’t be. And then I try to get it out and flay open my gums. And then the next time I try to eat it all gets packed in against the still-sore gums. Ow. I am actually limiting my food choices and eating less because I’m afraid of my mouth hurting – I had a really hard time last night when we went out for my dad’s birthday dinner (another post on birthday rituals should be forthcoming) and had to stop eating when I wasn’t really ready to, and take tylenol when I got home. Ow. But I have a consultation coming up, and maybe I can make them fix their own shoddy work so I can eat normally again. It’s bad when I am avoiding fruits and vegetables because the seeds are really awful at getting stuck in my teeth. I want to eat nothing but cucumbers and tomatoes and berries, but I can’t. Because I would cry. A lot.

I am so goddamned lucky.

I had a physical this morning. I’d met the doctor once before for about five/ten minutes, getting a new scrip for my antidepressants, but nothing more than that. We chatted a bit about a couple of things, and then… what I’d been expecting. And dreading.

He brought up weight loss. Which I can understand him doing. I have a BMI that qualifies as morbidly obese; my dad was diagnosed as prediabetic a few years back; my grandfather (Dad’s father) died of complications from type 2 diabetes.

But I told him why I wasn’t going to diet. Because I have problems with disordered eating, and trying to restrict my eating and diet triggers that really badly and makes me gain weight, and I would rather just try to get some more exercise and not try to deliberately Go On A Diet.

And his response was not “well, diet anyway.” It was “your chart says you were seeing a psychiatrist at grad school; are you seeing anyone here?” When I said I was going to the psych services at the local university, his follow-up was “do they have an eating disorders specialist?”

How utterly refreshing. And when he noted that my blood glucose levels were perfect and I’d lost ten pounds since the last visit anyway, he seemed a lot less inclined to push the diet thing.

It wasn’t a perfect HAES experience, but it was so, so much better than I had feared.