So. Right.
I've been sitting on this new blog address for a while trying to think of what to do with it. This morning, I was inspired.
Skimming through the headlines on cnn.com, I spotted "Chunky kids miss more school than others". A blinding red rage came over me. The clear implication of the story is that fat kids are miss school because their fat makes them less healthy (or is an indication that they are less healthy).
Now, I was a fat kid. I was fat under the old BMI standards which have since been lowered. And I missed a lot of school in grade school and high school.
But I was fairly rarely physically ill. In fact, I was probably ill slightly less often than my skinny younger sister.
I missed school because I was trying to avoid the other kids. You know, the other kids who would torture me about my weight (and my height and my intelligence and my nervous twitches)? I was "sick" not because I was fat, but because the other kids made my life such a living hell that I just couldn't face it some mornings.
And what stories like this one do is make it okay for "normal" kids to pick on fat kids, because there's so obviously something wrong, unhealthy, and disgusting about the fat kids. C'mon, CNN does it, so it must be okay. And if the fat kids would just stop being fat, the whole problem would go away, right?
So, now that I'm on a roll, let me take this story up to the present day.
When I was taking all of this crap for being fat, I was roughly five-two, one-twenty-five. About fifteen pounds over the Metropolitan Life weight chart. Doctors told me to diet. My parents told me to diet. The media told me to diet. And all those kids I had to deal with every day told me to diet.
So I dieted.
I'm good at dieting. My second to last diet, I manage to survive on five hundred calories a day (one quarter of your daily recommended allowance) for four or five months. Months. Lost nearly one hundred pounds. Then I made a tragic mistake. I talked to a doctor and a nutritionist. They ordered me to eat more, saying that I was doing permanent damage to myself.
And then this horrible thing happened. I gained weight. I gained back everything I lost and twenty more.
This diet was the most extreme I ever tried. But the final count is that from the time I was that fat high school student to now (about twelve years later), I've been on six diets where I've lost more than ten pounds. I now stand about five-two, two-fifty.
So now you're going to blast my willpower, right? Go right ahead. I have fifty years of scientific research (starting with the Keys starvation studies) that says that fat is mostly genetic, that dieting can create only temporary weight loss, that dieting can be linked to a number of health problems (many of them generally thought of as caused by fat or more serious than those supposedly linked to fat), and that as an active fat person I'm going to outlive a lot of the sedentary skinny people out there. My genetics say that if I make it past sixty-five (when heart attacks tend to take out members of my mom's family, whether they're skinny or fat) I'll probably live to be ninety (which is where the survivors on both sides make it, whether they're skinny or fat), barring a tragic accident.
You're going to say that I just haven't found the right diet yet, right? Tried Weight Watchers, low-carb, low-fat, high exercise, no refined sugar, vegetarian. All worked temporarily, then my metabolism said "oh no you don't" and I would find myself ten or twenty pounds heavier than I started.
So I quit. Just quit dieting.
I'm exercising a lot these days. But it's gentle, pleasant, enjoyable exercise. No jogging or high impact aerobics. I bike or walk to work (a total of five miles a day). I dance. I have sex. I try to eat when I'm hungry and stop when my body says I should. With all the years of thought-, rather than body-controlled, eating behind me this is sometimes a bit challenging.
And I've rarely felt better.
