Hortus Deliciarum

A couple of months ago I set up a Monday Munchie Club at work.  Ten or eleven of us volunteered to take turns bringing in treats on a Monday.  Now, I didn’t specify what type of “treat” people needed to bring.  I didn’t care if they brought in fruit, home-baked cookies, or something else altogether.  Everyone brought in homemade cookies/breads/etc.   Several people thanked me for setting it up, especially those who tend not to bring breakfast in the morning, because it meant that there was something there for them to eat.

So, with it being the new year, I e-mailed the group.  A couple wanted to continue but bring fruit instead of baked goods.  One thought we had too many leftovers from meetings anyhow (I think this was true around the holidays but don’t necessarily agree now).  A couple mentioned weight and being incapable of resisting “treats” even if there were fruit there.

And I asked myself…how odd is it, how bizarre, that the fattest person in the office, and certainly the fattest woman, has the most balanced view of food?  There were oatmeal raisin cookies in the kitchen this morning.  I took a couple, because I usually like oatmeal raisin cookies, but after taking a bite of one I realized that it was too dry and a little too sweet.  I took a second bite a little later, to make sure that this was still my conclusion.  It was.  I threw away the cookie and a half that remained.

I still have such a very long way to go when it comes to healthy attitudes about food.  This morning I bought a pumpkin scone and ate it around eleven.  I’m realizing now that I would have been better off eating only half and saving the rest for after lunch, because it made me too full.  But I’m working on taking the guilt/shame out of that and just recognizing that next time I can do a better job at reading my body’s fullness cues.  If I’m not in the mood for a cookie, or not hungry, I don’t have to eat it even if it’s sitting on the counter!!

I posted something to the effect of “how sad is it that people’s views of food are so warped by our society” on my Facebook and my mother, ever wise, replied:

I think most people are totally clueless as to how much the culture is obsessed with food and that one can only be truly beautiful if one is thin.  In that sense, you’ve been gifted by being forced to think and work it through and expose those sick and unconscious cultural values.  It doesn’t mean many people will understand you when you talk about it though — for the most part you are speaking a foreign language.

And the thing is, she’s right.  I’ve never thought about it quite that way before but perhaps my weight is a gift.  If I were someone who’d never picked up any kind of disordered eating, and those people are out there, that would be great.  As it is, I do think most American women have disordered attitudes about food (I don’t mean full out EDs – I mean unhealthy ideas about the role of food in their lives).  Because I am fat, because I have come to the point where I can either opt for surgery, kill myself out of despair, or find a way to live in my body and be happy, I have been forced to face the ways that food functions both in my life and in society.  I have been forced to confront the myth that thin = perfect beauty and, for nearly seven years, have fought to escape from that cultural brainwashing.

I still have a long way to go but if I’d been in that middle-weight category, that “slightly overweight” category, I might still be fighting to lose ten pounds, or twenty pounds, or fifty pounds, then regain it and fight to lose it again, over and over.  For all the work I still have to do, perhaps I can see my size as a gift – it has given me the impetus to find a far healthier brain space than the one I was in a decade ago.

Thanks, Mom.