New roommate Responsible Girl brought a scale with her when she moved in. Apparently I average 115 lbs now.
Goddamnit I want my jeans to fit again. (Which, for those of you tuning in late, would mean regaining another ten pounds or so.)
It’s weird because my stomach has definitely gotten rounder again. It’s been like that for a while. But what I had on my thighs and my sides and my back is gone, and my breasts are still smaller than they used to be.
It’s about 1/3 cool dancing and gymnastics, and the other 2/3 could be a documentary about the power of society’s body standards and how it’s maintained.
So, first of all, everyone there– everyone who even tries out– is extremely fit and can rightly be described as an athlete.
But then they also have to live up to the highest possible standards for their appearance. And the coaches’ attempts to impose both of those are a lesson in all kinds of things.
In this episode the coaches called aside a number of the cheerleaders to tell them that they need to lose weight. They’re not anything remotely close to fat, but their stomachs look a tiny bit soft and jiggly instead of “flat and smooth and almost hollow” or “visible abs” which are the acceptable looks. It’s not that much of a difference they’re asking for. Like ten pounds or less. But when you’re already very muscular, and you need to eat enough to get through strenuous exercise and stay healthy, I can only imagine it’d be pretty hard to find the sweet spot that actually lets you lose that weight.
They were crying when they left the coaches’ office. Being so close to perfect doesn’t make it any less painful when those standards are enforced against you.
One of them this little tight angry scared comment about them being “the fatties on the team”. And the coaches came down on her like a ton of bricks. She is “toxic in the locker room”, “toxic to her teammates”, “bad attitude”. And it might not even have occurred to me to examine that but clearly the coaches know it means something. It’s a tiny bit of fighting back against body shaming. She doesn’t really believe that fat isn’t a bad thing, you can tell from her tone (even this tiny speck of fat), but she’s saying it herself before someone else can say it to her. And even that is too much rebellion for them.
It reminds me of this article about working in a warehouse. Among many shitty things the author experienced, the workers were expected to meet extremely unrealistic speed standards. And more than that, they were expected to play along. If you said “I’m working as hard as I can already, I can’t meet these standards,” you got fired. You had to always say that yes, you’d failed, and you’d try harder next time.
I think that the coaches here are creating a similar situation. They want the cheerleaders to agree that their current weight is completely unacceptable, agree that they can make it acceptable, and accept responsibility for fixing it.
When the truth is that it’s only a problem by the pickiest standards imaginable, they probably haven’t done anything “wrong” to gain weight, and it’s hit or miss whether they’ll be able to lose it.
They rejected one new trainee because she had the wrong body type to look good in their uniform.
She auditioned, she got provisionally accepted, she did all this work, and then they photograph her in the uniform for the first time and it’s “her calves are huge, her legs look too short, she looks awful.” She and the coaches both know it’s nothing she can fix. Those calves are solid muscle. But they still told her she’s too big, and she still cried about it.
117 pounds, before eating a late dinner. This is good, you guys. I could stand to gain another ten pounds or so, but the fact that I’ve actually gained significant weight back is good by itself.
RDG just said on Facebook that she’s starting a cleanse-type thing. It involves not eating any carbs or sugar, among other things, for a couple of weeks. Her mom is doing it with her. Normally she hates it when her mom talks to her about diet stuff, because her mom likes to guilt her about her weight and make her feel insecure about what she eats. Fuck.
It’s not my place to tell her what to do but fuck I hate the idea of cleanses and I am also suspicious of any idea about food that comes from her mom.
I know I don’t really get her point of view because I’ve never been as big as she is, but the more I see the more I’m convinced that I seriously dodged a bullet by never really getting involved in dieting, and I’m scared for her. It’s so easy to get into messed-up thinking about food. There are so many awful ideas floating around dressed up as cool healthy things to do.
it leaves Reference Desk Girl as the fat girl in an apartment of really thin girls.
She had only met me once or twice when I was the weight that’s normal and healthy for me, and it was a while ago, so apparently she thinks of me as a skinny girl who hardly eats anything, instead of as a sadly underfed girl with acid reflux who keeps forgetting to eat because she’s totally lost touch with her sense of hunger.
But I don’t think there’s any way to tell her this without making it seem like I’m making her problems about my problems. I just really wish there was something I could do.
It doesn’t help that Sparkly somehow manages to believe that RDG would weigh less if she simply ate less. I am considering (metaphorically) pouring the contents of my “fat acceptance” bookmark folder on her head. It doesn’t help that Sparkly feels like RDG’s “I’m embarrassed to be a fat person eating in front of thin people who aren’t eating” is an indictment of her in some way, so I’m caught between “Darling, calm down, it isn’t your fault, it’s not about you” and “You think it’s as simple as calories in, calories out? Really? Come on! Also RDG doesn’t actually eat that much!”
But I can’t actually get her to understand either of those things, or really show RDG that nobody here is judging her. People don’t just pick up big fundamental ideas like that. They get to them when they’re ready. Which is why I need to just nod to myself over my last post (people not changing their fundamental beliefs, yeah) and be a sympathetic listener and not try to shove my epiphanies on other people, because it won’t work.
I worry about you with your attempts to lose weight, and your constant hunger. I worry about you when you alternate between “Yay! I’m losing weight!” and “New all-time high. This needs to stop” in the space of a few weeks. I especially worried about you when you said that thinking about your weight makes you lose your appetite.
There are a lot of things I want to tell you, but I don’t want to be rude, or pry too much into what you’re doing, or lecture you on things you already know. For the sake of my brain, here is what I wish I could say:
If you’re concerned about your health, your weight is not what matters. Excercise and good nutrition are good for you whether they’re changing your weight or not. Please feel good about yourself for the good things you’re doing (excercising regularly takes a lot of determination!) rather than feeling bad because you still haven’t lost weight.
It is normal for your weight to fluctuate from day to day by 5 pounds or so, depending on what you’ve eaten/drunk before you weigh yourself, what clothes you’re wearing, how precise your scale is, etc. Don’t worry too much about small, short-term changes. (I admit to having a possibly-unjustified distrust for scales that I haven’t calibrated. Scratch that, that’s not what I actually mean. I have no idea whether bathroom scales are usually accurate, meaning whether they’d say exactly 50 pounds if you put a 50 pound weight on them. My concern is, I’ve used some that were not very precise at all, meaning you could put something that weighs exactly the same on the scale three times and get three different numbers. End science terminology pedantry.)
I don’t know exactly how much this applies to you, but it is normal for me, at least, for my waist size to fluctuate a bit too, depending on how much I’ve eaten, and my hormones, and how my digestive system is doing. Having your belt suddenly be too tight is depressing (not to mention physically uncomfortable) but again, the “suddenly” means it’s probably not caused by a fundamental change in your weight.
Maybe it’s unreasonable of me to worry this much, but I do. I worry that you’re going to mess yourself up by going on a diet that doesn’t give you enough food. And I worry that, even if you’re physically okay, you’re going around feeling bad about yourself because of your weight. You are an awesome (and good-looking!) person. Please be kind to yourself.
Last spring, during my senior year of college, I developed a bunch of stomach problems. I had heartburn, I mostly lost my appetite, I felt nauseous at irregular intervals for no discernible reason. I was constantly afraid that I would throw up during class. I lost some weight, because I wasn’t eating well. In February I weighed about 125 pounds, which is normal for me; in May I weighed 115. Pretty much the highlight of the experience was that the nurse from the student health service, which was famous for assuming female students to be pregnant until proven otherwise, never brought up the possibility with me. After the semester ended, I got to see my regular doctor, took Prilosec for a while, and got myself to a much better place stress-wise. Things have been pretty good since August or so. The problem is, I still haven’t gained any weight back. As of two weeks ago, I weigh 111 pounds. I haven’t weighed this little since I was in middle school.
Partly, I’m worried that this might mean there’s something more serious wrong with me. Four months of feeling pretty good and eating as much as I was hungry for should have let me gain some weight, or at least not lose more. At minimum, my sense of how much I need to eat seems to be pretty messed up.
But mainly it bothers me because I don’t like how my body looks now. It’s not normal for me. I know I look more like I’m supposed to want to (and I do sort of like how my waist looks) but mostly I don’t like it. My collarbones aren’t supposed to stick out this much. My hipbones definitely aren’t. I miss my stomach being a little bit round. I miss the fat on my hips. My thighs look a bit more like “normal” instead of “fat”, but they don’t look like my thighs anymore.
So, I’m making an effort to eat more, as well as to get better nutrition, this year.
Some Open Space 