From over at Kataphatic today there's a comment I'd like to spend a little bit more time thinking about as I procrastinate some more on my horribly horribly overdue homework assignments. Commenter Natalie writes:
I feel that if one loses weight as a result of changes one’s made as part of taking care of ones’ body (i.e., getting more exercise, eating nutritious food, taking care of medical conditions), it’s something that simply cannot be discussed within the context of FA/HAES–which I think is a damned shame.
I replied: I feel this way as well, that if I decided to start working out and changed my diet to more eating with intent and less mindless snacking and lost some weight as a result (but not as a goal) I’d get booted from the feed if I spoke about it in my blog in more than a “Hmm, look at that.” sort of way. Is it possible to be fat accepting but realize there’s more work to be done, on a personal level, towards fitness, if that’s a goal for yourself? Is it possible to embrace intuitive eating and eating mindfully? Can I be an advocate for Health at Every Size if I’ve just lost 20lbs through playing DDR 3x week for a couple of months? Heavy questions (no pun intended)." My other comment can also be seen a bit earlier.
The thing is, I would love to start working out, but I'm afraid too. I might've mentioned this before, at least in a somewhat sideways manner. The fear comes from that little voice in my head that says "Why bother? You wont lose any weight, you'll still be fat. Why are you kidding yourself?" Shutting that voice up is easier some days than others, but it's been a little louder than I'd like lately. In any case, I would love to find out what this body of mine is capable of. The other day, while nearly literally crawling about underneath the house to turn on the tap for the gardenhose, I found that after only a few minutes my arms and legs felt like jelly. There was a moment while I was pulling myself out of the crawlspace door that I thought I was going to be stuck because my arms just wouldn't give me any more strength to get out. Obviously I DID get out but it was a bit of a 'hmmm' moment, a moment where I wished for my husband's arms and shoulders and the power that's there. I'm a bit of a control freak sometimes, so wanting to control my body, make it do things for me, is appealing, but also dangerous. Most of my adult life I've avoided substances and situations in which I would find myself either out of control (drunk, high, in danger, gambling) because I KNOW that I have an addictive personality with slight OCD tendencies. I don't keep booze in the house, never tried drugs or cigarettes of any kind, I've been to the local casino once and very very rarely buy scratch tickets (one ticket turns into two, then three, then the next day and the next...).
I wonder about excersize and working out for it's own benefits, for strength and improved stamina, what I could do. Sometimes I contemplate dropping all the snacks on gaming nights that I love; chips and candy mostly, and replacing them with apples and carrot sticks and celery, or Tostitos and salsa. Eating 'junk' a couple of nights a week isn't helping my energy levels and having it in the house is making Gabe ask for it all the time. (That's another post I've got to put up soon! Asking for chips for breakfast, seriously!) Would that be eating mindfully instead of random snacking, or is it counter-intuitive to deny myself the snacks I love? As you can see, I'm a little conflicted. Comments and discussion are loved!
It sounds to me like control is a big theme here. Correct me if I'm wrong but what I'm reading is almost kind of a dichotomy, like either being completely out of control or being completely in control. I wonder if part of your fear comes from the idea that if you attempt to make healthy changes, but still aren't in complete control of your body, then that will feel like failure somehow?
Forgive me if I'm over-stepping here, I just noticed that theme in your post and as I'm thinking about this I think that there is SO much, for ALL of us, about control when it comes to HAES vs. weight loss, intuitive eating vs. dieting, pleasurable movement vs. a strict exercise regime.
There is also the issue that fat bodies become social symbols of being out-of-control.
I wonder what might happen for you if you consciously made some choices to eat more healthfully and move more often, and then just trust your body to see what happens, rather than try to control the outcome? Maybe you'll lose weight. Maybe you'll GAIN weight as you add muscle but keep fat. Maybe your weight will stay the same but other health indicators, and strength and flexibility, will be better. It can kind of be an adventure! But it's also scary if we feel like we have to be completely in control... it's not an easy thing to realize that ultimately, we are not in control. we can't control our body size and shape, we can't control our strength, dexterity, and flexibility. We can't control our height or the thickness of our hair or whether we get cancer or not. We can only love the one wild and wonderful life that we have in the beautiful imperfect body we have, day by day.
Thanks for this post! It may inspire one of my own about this control/release dichotomy :)
Thinking about the question of whether you can be an HAES/FA advocate if you lost weight doing DDR three times a week, I say absolutely with a few caveats. Do you feel better after after DDR? Are you doing it compulsively with the sole purpose of losing weight? Are you doing it to the point that you are injuring yourself? Or have you just found a fun way to move your body?
I got sick awhile ago and with being sick I got depressed and I pretty much took to my bed and even when I wasn't in bed, I hardly ever left the house. When I tried to re-enter the world, I found that my feet would start to hurt just walking around the store, which was a huge wake up call for me because even though I've always been overweight, I've also had a lot of stamina and been strong and that was all gone. It's taken a while, but now I can walk several miles without pain.
I don't think talking about exercise in any way conflicts with being Fat Accepting or an advocate of HAES. It seems like there is a fine line though about talking about weight loss, even if incidental/side effect or whatever. I love to hear about what other fat folks and that means all sizes of fat enjoy doing for fun/activity. It doesn't mean anyone wants to hear about a specific number of pounds lost or not lost. I just commented on someone else's blog earlier about that difference between intentional weight loss(diets) and medication and/or lifestyle related weight loss and although absolutely I don't believe the two are the same at all there is somewhat of a difference in the communication medium of cyberspace. Nobody can see people on the internet, personally I've met very few folks in the fatosphere in person, so there really shouldn't be a need to "explain" weight loss/gain around these parts.
Regarding the rest of your worries about eating and exercise, these don't have to be all or nothing. Alot of folks seem to fall into that line of thinking, something along your line of even if I exercise I'll still be fat so what's the point. As someone whose been both very heavy and in shape and then very heavy and out of shape after a knee injury I can tell you that there is a big personal difference at least for me between the two. There's a huge difference between being upwards of 300lbs and being able to hike 15 miles and being upwards of 300 lbs and getting winded going around the block, the first of which I'm trying to get back to now that the knee is getting better.
I've never known anyone in the 'sphere to demand weights and measurements of people to make sure they don't ever decrease, or demand that they eat a certain amount of "junk food," or not exercise any more than it takes to procure said "junk food." There are about 3 years' worth of posts now from Fatosphere blogs, and really, we have always run the gamut in terms of eating and exercise habits and what we weigh and measure now compared to when we started. And any or all of us could change in regard to any of that in the future.
What we're trying to get away from, though, is bragging about weight loss. Saying, "I lost 20 pounds because I did DDR" is a lot different from saying, "Look at me, I lost 20 pounds because I did DDR, and SO CAN YOU!" or, "I lost 20 pounds because I did DDR, and I look so much better than the fat blob I used to be!", or "I lost 20 pounds doing DDR, maybe I can lose another 40 because I'll be SO MUCH HEALTHIER!"
And as the Fat Nutritionist likes to put it, "intuitive eating" is not necessarily the same thing as "demand feeding," although the two terms are often used interchangeably. If your stomach is saying, "Potato chips," and your brain is saying, "Um, last time you ate potato chips you didn't move for two hours afterwards, care to make another selection if you actually want to get something done tonight?", that still "counts" as IE, in my book. What wouldn't "count" is saying something like, "Potato chips? You're such a pig. You can't possibly be hungry, you've already had 1000 calories today. Drink some water if you're hungry."
But jeez, even if you're actually still dieting, you're not likely to get kicked off the feed unless you make a big to-do about how "good" you're being.
Thank you everyone for your indepth and thoughtful replies. I really really appreciate the feedback! You've all given me a lot to think about (which is good). More thoughts soon!
What a wonderful post! Your thoughts are very similar to much of what I have been going through since starting to blog in Jan. 09.
We all know that diets don't work, although the blog-o-sphere is full of people counting points and calories and keeping a tally of all the "bad" foods that they should avoid at all costs. Strangely, though I no longer stress weight loss in my blog, most of the people who read it are weight loss warriors. Sorta weird.
I have done a lot of thinking about intuitive eating and what it means to me in terms of how much, what, when and especially WHY I eat when my stomach has definitely said "enough, already!"
I would say the one huge realization that I have had over the past year and a bit is that I do like to exercise. Sadly, this realization has coincided with one of my knees telling me in no uncertain terms that anything beyond leisurely walking, very careful yoga and swimming is unacceptable and will just leave me in mucho pain. No biking, no elliptical trainer, nothing that makes my body sweat and sing with the joy of seriously moving. (End of sad, woe-is-me rant.)
So as someone who "cannot", I urge you to just try it out. Let your body sing. Feed her with nice foods but try not to stuff her. Move. Be.
I'll be watching your blog. I like what you're saying!
A fellow Canuck
To quote:
"Eating 'junk' a couple of nights a week isn't helping my energy levels and having it in the house is making Gabe ask for it all the time. (That's another post I've got to put up soon! Asking for chips for breakfast, seriously!) Would that be eating mindfully instead of random snacking, or is it counter-intuitive to deny myself the snacks I love? As you can see, I'm a little conflicted."
If you know that a food makes you feel wonky later on, I think it's mindful to decide against eating it. And it's just as mindful to go ahead and eat it anyway, as long as you remember to compensate for the effect it'll have.
I try to eat mindfully, and one thing that I make a point to remind myself is that I don't have to eat it just because it's there. It doesn't have to be snarfed before someone else gets to it, it doesn't matter if it goes stale. It's just food. It's value neutral. Buuuuut, having said that... I don't normally bring "junk" into the house. Because it'll either go stale or get eaten instead of an actually decent meal. I don't forbid myself the stuff. If I want Doritos or snack cakes I'll go out and buy some... but the effort of rousing myself to buy some has to outweigh the effort of staying home and not buying some.
It's all very, very personal, in the end. Will you feel upset and deprived if you don't have a scheduled treat? Then schedule that treat. Can you omit it and still feel content? Omit away. There is no overseeing committee of Mindful HAES Overlords that will smite you with lightening. We have the freedom to eat as we wish, even if that freedom does contain structure. Structure can totally be healthy... for some folk. It works for me now because I have no history of dieting or disordered eating, and no negative associations. For others, too much structure would be bad. Um, so. In the end? You can listen to advice all day and night, but in the end you've got to do what's comfortable for you. :)
Am I the only person who doesn't know what DDR is?
I never thought HAES was weight-dependent. I've always understood it to be health at whatever size you are now - and that size is very likely going to change over your lifetime. I'm on the roller coaster known as perimenopause and I'm watching my weight do all kinds of funky things even though I'm eating and moving the same amount. It's taught me a lot about understanding the things I can control and the things I can't.
On Exercise: I've been working out for years, and it's had pretty much no effect on my weight. But what it has done is lowered my stress levels. Increased my stamina and strength and muscle mass. Lowered my resting heart rate. Given me a new respect for and confidence in what my body can do.
But some would call this a failure because I haven't ended up a size 4. This annoys me because I think my exercise experiments have been wildly successful - by my own success criteria.
This is how exercising as an adult is different from grade school gym class - no one else is defining what success means. You're the only one who knows why you're there, you're the one who sets the goals, you're the one who decides if you like doing something - and if you don't, you don't have to keep doing it or you fail the class. You're the adult - you can decide to go do something else. Or nothing else. There's no imperative. You're in control.
Yes, I'm a bit of a control freak :).
I was just goig to Google it...
DDR stands for Dance Dance Revolution, a game that's played with dance-mats for either the Playstation or Gamecube. We have a copy for the PS and the hubby and I pull it out now and then for fun. I really really love to dance (I did a summer of bellydance before and miss it so much!) so DDR might be a way to get moving without the mental stress of 'zomg excersize!'
*waves hello and welcome to the new readers* Well hi! Thanks for popping in, and for the insightful comments. Really, they're great and helping me tackle some of the anxiety around eating and working-out I've been having. Thank you all for taking the time to post your thoughts.
Here via Kataphatic...
My response would be to pull out the old feminist "the personal is political" and suggest that it's worth thinking about *why* you (or anyone) would want to blog about your weight loss at all. That is, what's the purpose in sharing that with readers (as opposed to keeping it to yourself in a diary if you feel a need to keep track)?
One of the things that I hope is that FA/HAES might one day come to transform the way that weight loss is assumed (especially for women) to be meaningful and worth sharing.
There are lots of things that happen to our bodies (on a daily basis and over time) that we (culturally) don't tend to feel are notable and that might even be faux pas to share.
Most of us don't make a point of blogging about the shape and color of our shit, even though it does come out in different shapes and colors. If we did blog about (especially more than once) people might assume we were copraphilic and might back away (or they might embrace us as part of a subculture).
Likewise, we don't tend to track and then blog about the precise color, scent, and taste of our own urine or sweat, though both those things change in response to diet and exercise and are measurable and chartable, if we cared to do so.
I, personally, have lots of freckles, and I have gotten more over time (even as some may fade when I change swimsuits). I've never experienced any great social pressure to count ever last one or note its precise shade and chart its location and then announce that information to the world. If I did do so, some would likely wonder why I did it and, further, why I thought my freckle survey seemed important enough to share. If I gave it more than a passing mention once over the years, my readers might even think I have OCD and be concerned about me (but not my freckles).
If it seems weird to think about blogging about these things but perfectly normal to blog about weight loss (or gain) or what, in particular, we're eating or how long we've exercised, that's only because we're socially conditioned to consider some elements of our bodies--particularly our fat-- public business and, especially for women (and especially for fat women) there are strong social pressures that tell us that:
--our weight (and weight changes) should be meaningful to us (more meaningful than just about anything else we do or are)
--our weight (and weight change) is important for others to know about (and potentially comment on)
--our mention weight is inherently likely to be interesting (and not repellent or embarrassing) to our readers
Fat talk, the sharing of weight numbers, and the listing of foods we've eaten are normative activities, at least in America and the UK, and for women, they're part of the bonding process by which we are supposed to compare ourselves with other women and empathize and, as a bonus for capitalism, worry over it and buy things that might fix us.
Personally, I'd rather talk shit than read about or discuss anyone's weight gain or loss. But my failure to buy into the idea that weight merits more than a "Huh." means I'm in the minority and even freakish.
The FA/HAES community tends to discourage the sharing of weight info because it's very, very, very hard to frame our "personal" weight (or weight changes) in ways that make sense to others outside of the existing narrative of diet talk wherein weight loss is de facto to be celebrated and weight gain is awful and to be fat is the worst thing in the world.
"The thing is, I would love to start working out, but I'm afraid too. I might've mentioned this before, at least in a somewhat sideways manner. The fear comes from that little voice in my head that says "Why bother? You wont lose any weight, you'll still be fat. Why are you kidding yourself?""
I find that focusing on things other than the scale (how long it takes to walk half a mile; how many curls I can do, and with which weights; how many squats I can do) helps me to worry less about that voice. I am increasing my speed and strength, which is MY primary goal.
I am pretty focused on it, btw. I have a tracker to check off when I've gone for a walk, or done upper body stuff, or leg lifts. I am also noting things like changes in my treadmill speed over time, and how nice it is to NOT be in pain when I go for a walk.
So...yeah. I'm not quite a gym bunny but I write about exercise...
Living400lbs: Thank you so much for your comment; I really love your blog and have learned a lot from reading it. Maybe a system to keep track will motivate me in more than one way; to keep going and to be proud of accomplishments that have nothing to do with weight. Hell, I don't even own a scale, so I'd have no way of knowing if I lost or gained weight.
@Miriam Heddy: "There are lots of things that happen to our bodies (on a daily basis and over time) that we (culturally) don't tend to feel are notable and that might even be faux pas to share....If it seems weird to think about blogging about these things but perfectly normal to blog about weight loss (or gain) or what, in particular, we're eating or how long we've exercised, that's only because we're socially conditioned to consider some elements of our bodies--particularly our fat-- public business and, especially for women (and especially for fat women) there are strong social pressures..."
Absolutly! You've hit the nail on the head right there. Thamk you as well for your comment. It makes a LOT of sense and helps to put things into perspective. :)