Hortus Deliciarum

I tend to live in a little FA bubble. My viewing choices are usually Netflix DVDs (I’m currently on a run of Criminal Minds and ITV’s Marple) or cable shows that have fewer or no commercials. When those annoying BURN OFF BELLY FAT! ads come on, I flip the channel. I don’t see much input about weight loss. I ask to not be on friends’ diet filters. I skim over most of those entries in the lj pregnancy community, where women bewail that they’ve gained 25 whole pounds during pregnancy and moan that they “look fat instead of pregnant!” (the subtext being that pregnancy is acceptable, while fat is not).

I’m pretty successful at tuning out a lot of those outside voices. But not all of them.

Yesterday I got an e-mailed notice from our building’s management company letting us know that one of their tenants in another building across the street runs a Weight Watchers group and is opening it up for everyone to join. The tagline of the e-mail message read, “These meetings are fun, supportive, informative and motivational. Current members have lost a total of 273.4 pounds. Three have made their goal weight. Stop dieting. Start Living!”

I’m supposed to send on these informational e-mails to the whole office. I wanted to just hit “Delete.” The only thing I could do, and I still agonized over it before I actually did it, was add a line of my own, which read, “And, to be balanced, for an alternate, subversive wellness perspective: http://www.sizediversityandhealth.org/index.asp” I searched hard for a completely work-safe site that wasn’t also selling a book (Linda Bacon’s site is helpful but could be argued to be selling a specific product, her HAES book) and wasn’t a blog (i.e., could be misconstrued as just personal opinion rather than scientifically-backed fact).

That tagline made me angry. It made me think of all those weight-loss surgery ads that were airing with the fat woman who wanted to lose weight because she wanted to fly to Paris with her husband and the dad who wanted to do karate with his daughter. Apparently all those trips I’ve made abroad have never happened, because it would seem fat people can’t fly on airplanes? Can’t visit France? Get turned away at the Parisian city limits? Presumably fat people can’t be fit and can’t do martial arts, either.

Stop dieting. Start Living! pretty much sums up my attitude toward life, only I’m not paying WW for the privilege of going on a renamed, rebranded diet that is going to be as successful as all the others I’ve done…which is to say, not at all.

I made a friend on LJ angry when I posted about the e-mail I’d sent on. In my post, I included the following: Note: I know a few of you are doing WW and that’s fine with me – it’s your lifestyle choice. Size acceptance is mine. We can agree to mutually respect that we each have differing perspectives! She’s a good friend (we mod a couple of communities together and I enjoy her fashion blog, where she does her darndest to include both plus-size and mainstream fashion advice). I respect her opinion and she felt I didn’t really mean what I was saying.

I guess, if I’m brutally honest with myself, in a way I don’t. If any other industry sold a method (at a premium price) that failed over 90% of the time, they’d go out of business. Every single day, the diet industry and the media try to sell us the message that diets work and that we are the failures if we don’t lose weight and keep it off. That FA bubble that I’m in keeps me sane, because if I looked at the fifteen years that I dieted as an exercise in my failure to lose weight and keep it off rather than as the failure of diets to actually do what they say on the tin, so to speak, I think I’d be so incredibly depressed and unhappy that I might never find my way out. Fifteen years of my life and thousands of dollars were spent not on getting healthy and starting living, but on trying to make myself thin because I wanted to look the way I thought I was supposed to look in order to be desirable and successful.

In a very real way, though, I absolutely meant what I said, or I wouldn’t have said it. I do wish all of my friends the very best of luck with whatever diet plan they’re taking on next. The Fantasy of Being Thin is a remarkably powerful and compelling one. Reading that entry was like an arrow in the heart; THAT is what I was chasing all those years. I wasn’t after a healthy lifestyle. I was, as Kate put it, entirely caught up in the fantasy “that is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, ‘When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit’; it’s ‘When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.’”

When I was thin, I was going to go to Paris…but I wasn’t going to go to Paris as Heidi R. I was going to go to Paris as Heidi Klum, a tall, blonde bombshell (the “tall” and “bombshell” parts of that were an issue from the very beginning) who exuded charisma and made sexy French men chase after her in endless, unrequited longing. I would be extroverted, happy, and confident. I would fly in first class and have flight attendants whispering to each other in the back of the plane about how beautiful I was and how gorgeous my clothes were, and oh, she barely TOUCHED her delicious meal because she was so in control of what she put into her body.

When I see my friends using WW, there are a fraction that I believeuse it for re-learning healthy eating patterns. For those people, I am entirely happy, although I think there are probably cheaper ways to learn healthy eating habits (a full subscription to Cooking Light was less than a month in WW, back when I was a subscriber and dieter). They seem to be independent of the drive to lose, lose, lose weight that characterized my WW experience. For the others, who are still there in the Fantasy of Being Thin, I hope it brings them happiness. I sincerely hope they’re in that group of people that finds success in WW. I struggle to believe that they will be but I very much hope it.

But if I have to send out a message about an industry that is going to fail everyone who tries it 90% of the time, I’m also going to include a link that says, “Stop dieting! Start Living!…and you can do that RIGHT NOW without paying a penny!” because when all is said and done, I shouldn’t have to hang out in my FA bubble. The world should be my bubble. We should all, fat and thin, women and men, short or tall, feel like we can be living our lives without having to lose ten, twenty, one hundred, or two hundred pounds first. If I want to learn to eat in a way that is not disordered, I shouldn’t have to comb through every nutritionist’s page I can find, looking for those who are pro-HAES.

I am sorry that my friend was hurt. I’m not sorry that I stuck up for the underdog and said my piece. My one voice isn’t going to bring down the diet industry giant but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to say it.

I do respect everyone’s right to make their own life choices but that doesn’t mean I have to like those choices. I just wish I’d been able to express it in a way that didn’t cause offense, as clearly I missed the boat there!