I was sitting at the end of the table outside and L, who’s a mother of another friend of mine and the older brother, was talking about how she wanted some of the rice salad but she was on Weight Watchers. And J, the woman who made the rice salad, was all “It’s a Weight Watchers recipe! I just added more veggies! It’s only 2 points!” And then they started talking about how they lost 15 pounds a few years ago and put 10 back on, and blah blah points and blah blah fat and OH MY GOD SHUT UUUUUUP.

But I managed to keep my mouth shut. Because there’s a time and a place. And a party for someone I love a lot is neither. But goddamn.

And then I had two slices of cake. Screw you guys.

At any rate: my teeth are jacked up. I am fortunate enough to have dental insurance, but my dentist sucks and he’s the only one in the area who’s on our plan. And he keeps messing up the spacing between my teeth, so when I eat, stuff gets packed in really tight and makes chewing painful. Flossing is the only way to get it out, but so much food gets stuck in there that I usually end up flaying my gums open. And then I feel queasy and can’t eat. The worst culprits seem to be meat – those long fibers – and vegetables. Which I would love to eat more of! But I can’t! Because it leads to pain! And it means that I gravitate towards stuff that is softer and less likely to get stuck, but then I feel all logey and gross. Uncool. (I’ve totally written this before, but I just had more work done on the other side of the first problem area, so it’s been an issue lately.) And I think I’m actually losing weight because of it, but? I don’t want to. I don’t really give a shit about losing weight but I’m pissed that it’s happening because I can’t eat properly and I’m hungry all the time. I wouldn’t diet intentionally, and I resent that I’m doing it out of pain avoidance. FAIL.

I age out of this insurance plan (well, COBRA for my parent-supplied insurance) this fall. I hope to god I can find a dentist who will help me fix my teeth so I can eat normally.

I went to the gynecologist last week. She’s lovely – I went to school with her daughter and so she always asks what I’m up to. I’ve been having issues with spotting and wanted to get it checked out just in case something was up. (Hormones are fine, scheduled for a sonohistogram.) And I got weighed.

Now, the last time I was weighed before that visit was back in July when I had my physical and my yearly exam. I weighed 261.

Last week: 259.

I have not been dieting. I was walking around more for a while there when I was getting dropped off in the center of town and walking a half-mile home every day, but that’s dropped off since the guy who gave me a ride has been working ten-hour days. I ate some junk over the holidays, I eat what feels like a normal amount at meal times. And my net change, other than whatever clothes I was wearing, is negligible.

I got the book out of the library. And it is phenomenal. I love that Precious is so determined to tell her story that we get the words directly as she thinks them. Here’s the cover:

Bright, bold, striking. I like it, I think it goes really well with the story. Especially with the significance of the lettering – the letters themselves – and Precious’s struggle to gain literacy and express herself.

Here is the first poster for the film:

Although Precious is the titular character of the film, what do we get for her here? A silhouette. Cracked and broken with the image of a hand between her legs, which strikes me as not the most subtle way of alluding to the sexual abuse she suffers from her parents. She has no features, no face, nothing. It’s unclear whether she’s intended to be naked, which is problematic. The safety orange behind her does a good job of expressing the misery of her situation at the start, but that’s about it.

Poster number two:

I like this as art but I don’t know if I like it for the film. Once again Precious has no features – we don’t even get a differentiation between her face and her hair. She looms out of the dingy background, opaque and oblique. I can’t tell if she’s supposed to be wearing a dress with an apron over it? But Precious in the book describes herself as dressing fashionably and loving clothes, including a pair of neon yellow leggings she got at Lane Bryant. I don’t know that dress-with-apron really fits. The name necklace is a nice touch. But overall it again feels to me like it falls short.

Lesley over at Fatshionista already covered some of this same ground. I want to highlight a couple of lines in particular:

Indeed, our culture would remove big pieces of Precious’ identifiable humanity for each of the two physical characteristics that make her different from most everyone else we see in leading roles: her fatness, and her Blackness. If it’s difficult to recognize Precious’ humanity, it isn’t because of the lighting or the angle at which the camera is seeing her; it’s because we’re not accustomed to seeing women who look like Precious portrayed as fully human.

By presenting Precious as a silhouette, a negative space for us to map our readings onto, we take away a lot of what makes Push so incredibly moving and heartrending. The story is about how despite the absolutely toxic environment in which she finds herself, this girl has a mind that only needs a little encouragement to blossom. She has dreams and ideals and hopes and fears and desires and sadnesses, but we don’t get any of that from these posters. Push is a story that demands to be told in the words that Precious can use. These posters don’t give her a mouth, much less a mind.

I take the bus to work sometimes. Today it was raining and the bus was very full. I was sitting down (next to a guy who, miraculously, put his legs together so as not to crowd me into the aisle) and there were a lot of people standing up. Dude standing right next to me was hanging onto the support pole with his arm on the other side. His arm closest to me kept rubbing against my arm, and he was talking with someone he’d gotten on the bus with and kept gesturing a lot. I almost got hit in the face several times. And yet I said nothing, because I have been sort of emotionally fragile this week and I really did not want to face getting into a brouhaha when I was trapped on the bus and had to stay on that one to be on time for work and not lose my fare.

I lucked out that I didn’t get hit in the face. Showing up to work with a shiner would’ve been awesome. But hey, transit etiquette: try to keep your goddamn arms to yourself when you’re on a packed moving vehicle.

Anyway, so I’m headed out to Boston at the end of the week to hang out with my bff and see a concert, and so I hit Google to look for plus size options in Beantown. And one of the first results was for this Yahoo Answers post. The first person does mention chain stores which are in basically every mall, but they do also note a couple of boutiques. The second person, though.

“Have you tried Lane Bryant?”

Uh. NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. I am pretty sure almost every fat woman has tried Lane Bryant. How many other options do most of us have? And the thought of going to the same goddamn soulless chain store for the same overpriced clothes that I have to suck it up and pay for because nobody else wants to take my good green money for body coverings, but in an Exotic New Location… well, it’s infuriating and depressing all at once.

Maybe I’m just overly hormonal, but this is really pissing me right the fuck off. Yes, I have tried Lane Bryant. I am looking to support local or indie shops or find something actually goddamned interesting for once. I don’t want to wear clothes that would suit my mom, I want to wear something that makes me feel reasonably on-trend and around my age. I want to wear clothes that are not entirely made out of polyester. I want to wear clothes that are reasonably well-made. I want things that are vaguely office-appropriate.

And the thing is, I shouldn’t feel like I’m asking for the goddamned moon when I write out that list. My sister can find any number of stores that would fit those criteria handily; she wears a size 6, and I wear a size 22, and I’m completely fucked.

For me, the shocking part of this article comes about a third of the way through, under the heading “‘Special foods for a special time’”. I’m just gonna go ahead and quote parts of this because I am that shocked:

…Should the Food and Drug Administration step in and ban the event?

No, said Jennifer Pereira, a registered dietitian in nearby Arlington, Texas. A firm believer in the “no bad foods” approach to dieting and healthy eating, Pereira said it isn’t such a bad thing for people to splurge occasionally on foods they truly enjoy.

“The state fair is only once a year,” Pereira said. “I would strongly encourage people not to binge. Don’t build up your hunger so you can eat everything in sight. Pick a couple of things that you really enjoy, savor them, and stop eating when you feel satisfied.”
[snip]
“In my practice, once I get people to legalize all foods, it’s amazing how food loses its grip.”

Wait, what’s that? Legalizing all foods? Enjoying food? Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full? Is it just me, or does that sound remarkably like intuitive eating?

IN AN ARTICLE ABOUT DEEP-FRIED BUTTER?

I’m amazed. And a little bit giddy. I assume the word “splurge” is an insertion by the reporter. The quotes from Pereira are, to me, pretty close to how I live my life and try to eat. At the town fair this spring, you can bet that I got a piece of fried dough. And I enjoyed it. But I didn’t even finish the whole thing, because I had Chinese food for lunch and too much fried stuff was making me feel sick after a while. I’m glad to see a registered dietitian in a big media outlet saying something that half-approaches sense.

I wish I had a scan of the inside illustrations, because these girls looked like the most anorexic fashion models you can think of. Here’s the cover of the first issue:

She looks like a bobblehead doll.

Now, I am aware that people were smaller back in the 19th century. But they were not all skinny. Let’s look at Jane Austen, in the portrait by her sister:

Nice double chin, right? Jane isn’t Elizabeth Bennet, obviously, so what about descriptions of Lizzie from the book?

“I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference.”

Not so pretty as Jane. Also, we hear this from the youngest Bennet sister: “Oh!” said Lydia stoutly, “I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest, I’m the tallest.” Further on:

“I would not be so fastidious as you are,” cried Bingley, “for a kingdom! Upon my honour I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life, as I have this evening; and there are several of them, you see, uncommonly pretty.”

“You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,” said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

“Oh! she is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you.”

“Which do you mean?” and turning round, he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.”

This is supposed to show how disagreeable and prideful Darcy is, but it also shows that Elizabeth is a pretty typical example. Here is Darcy’s assessment later on:

But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.

“Light and pleasing.” Does that mean this?

Or this?

I think this gallery at Sensibility.com has a good range of what were considered admirable figures. These women all have round, full arms and full cheeks; many of them have the hint of a double chin, and most of them have not-insignificant bosoms. Contrast their figures with these:

I don’t think it’s going too far to say that this artist may have been more inspired by the Keira Knightley vision of the 19th century than the Jennifer Ehle one. I think it’s also heavily influenced by comic portrayals in general, like this (potentially NSFW) or this or this.

I don’t know. I wish the art was better in general. I wish we had a wider range of size (and race, and sexuality, and gender, and and and) representation in comics. I wish the Bennet girls looked like they were actually related. And I wish I had a better way to wrap this up, but I appear to have run out of steam.

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 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.