Positive Plus Size Role Model: Lane Bryant

It's not quite fury, what I feel, when I read hate-filled comments on the web about overweight and obese people, it's well...frustration. On the one hand, I want to please society. On the other hand, I want to be able to spot these cruel people and avoid them, even if that means being fat and hated.

It's not that I'm not trying to lose weight. I've already lost about approximately 15 pounds since April, sometimes more, depending on whether or not I just ate when I weigh myself. I'm still borderline, in the obese range, being 164, but I've made progress and I work out 2x a day, plus walking, plus dancing. So it's not like I'm lying in bed for the whole day shoving cakes into my mouth.

I do well in college, I work out, I am a nice person, I am a vegetarian who counts calories. But, according to the internet, I am still too fat to be considered "normal" or "likeable" or "acceptable", whatever euphemism there is for "worthless" you can think of, that is what a lot of society sees me as.

Why?

If I had that answer I might not feel such low self-esteem. It's interesting that America is the place where a woman can have sovereign control over her body when it comes to reproductive issues, but fat, no, that is forbidden to women.

People prefer a starving waif who could never naturally bear a child because she lost her ability to menstruate, who is moody and malnourished, whose main achievement in life is self-mutilation, over a plump woman. Society lords this fact over us every second, in every TV commercial, billboard, magazine ad, on the subway, buses, college campus, everywhere. Just everywhere.

I don't hate waifs. What I hate is the attitude that to be worthy I must emulate self-mutilators. I do not want to wreck my metabolism, fail out of college, get hospitalized, get anemia, get mood swings, all that baggage isn't worth it to me. Am I alone in this?

I thought so for a long time, until I stumbled onto the whole fat acceptance movement and their primary fashion spokesperson: Lane Bryant. Watching these women strut up and down the catwalk, toned, fleshy thighs, and overflowing bras, I realized that I don't have to view myself as unattractive just because society says so. I can be loved. I can be worthy of sex. I can wear a skirt should I choose to. Why am I so conditioned to hate my body? How can we let a whole series of generations believe that to be loved you must restrict your dietary intake into the danger zone?

I've decided to keep speaking up, even if nobody is reading this. Even if only one person sees this, maybe it will instill a new mentality or challenge their preconceptions. I can only hope my writing is not in vain.

weight loss: 20 pounds in 4 months

Being bombarded with Carl's Jr. commercials and billboards promoting the latest beer brand makes weight loss an exercise in self-discipline. Everywhere I go, drink Coke, eat meat, buy Bud light, and always, always, it's being advertised by a size 0 model with huge breast implants and a winning smile. As if! There is no way that pretty model ate that burger in her hand, or drank that calorie-laden beer she holds. She probably is underweight, according to the BMI chart, and in no position to tell me how to eat healthy, let alone tell me to eat at a fast food joint or to buy beer.

To make things worse, there is no salad bar at my University, meaning that my choices are extremely limited. After shying away from the campus Taco Bell, I went into the snack bar, passing the Panda Express and Subway along the way. Once inside the snack bar, I could choose between a chicken microwavable burrito, a brownie, a sugary muffin, or a bag of chips. I could have one of their many sodas, energy drinks, or a coffee. I settled on a bag of chips and a large coffee, trying to reason with my gurgling stomach that the coffee would sooth the hunger pangs.

Despite eating only an egg at midday and getting lots of exercise through rowing and walking, I felt guilty ripping open the bag of chips. I'm way overweight. I'm 168 right now at 5'1-5'2. Every tiny choice I make inflates my fat cells and increases my risk of diabetes and fat-clogged arteries. No, I don't have any health problems. I just had a blood test and physical last week, and to my surprise, my thyroid hormone levels have raised into the normal range. My blood pressure was fine, my pulse fine. Yet I'm fat, so fat. Only part of it is the psychotropic medications my psychiatrist has me on, and only part of it is the poor decisions I made several years ago, yo-yo dieting, starvation dieting, and eating junk food. I've been a mostly healthy vegetarian for the last 4 months now, and yet I've only lost about 15-20 pounds. That's only five pounds a month. So what gives?

Unfortunately, the decision to lose weight at any cost has left severe consequences now. Starvation diets slows the metabolism, something not easily remedied, even years later. Plus, you either give in to hunger or you die, and I'm not dead. Once you start eating regularly, your body stockpiles every precious calorie on the chance that a Victoria Secret model will send you on another starvation diet sometime in the future. It's not easy to lose weight now. A non-yo-yo dieter would have lost much more than I have in the same time frame and on the same diet. But enough whining, I have lost weight, I will continue to lose weight, and I will do so eating brain and body healthy foods every day.

One trick I've learned the past four months is to use Indian spices on all my vegetables, with double the cayenne pepper. Coriander, cumin, garam masala, turmeric, and cayenne pepper are all ways to make a vegetable delicious and these spices also raise your metabolism and make you feel fuller than you really are. My favorite meal has got to be a zucchini drenched in lemon juice, sauteed in olive oil with the above spices simmering, and with a dash of black pepper ground onto the zucchini in the last stages of cooking. It's so good I have to immediately stick all but a small portion into the fridge lest I return for seconds.

Another trick I've learned is to refrain from snacking after 7:30 pm, and instead drink green tea with no sugar and just a little bit of fat-free creamer. I know, half and half is terrible for a dieter, fat-free or not. But seriously, you will have to pry that carton of half and half out of my cold dead hands. I cannot stand tea or coffee without it. And if I don't get my coffee or chai, I will start rummaging through the fridge for something to snack on. So instead I drink chai and don't snack on anything.

I watched this documentary, on fat and it was a very eye-opening experience. In this documentary, we follow several people who have either lost weight or are trying to lose weight. We also get to hear from a specialist who studies the digestive tract. The data was surprising. The specialist says there are transmitters in the gut, like neuro-transmitters in the brain, except they're gut-transmitters. He claimed that the gut was like a second brain, I am not joking or exaggerating!

Here is the title. It is available on amazon dot com. FAT: What No One Is Telling You. (2007). PBS Home video.

So anyways, what really caught my eye was the plight of a formerly morbidly obese female comedian. Over the course of a number of years, she lost all her weight, except for some extra pounds that refuse to leave. She went from being mega morbidly obese to moderately overweight! How did she do it? She began to eat small portions of healthy food with little snacking. More incredibly, she exercises for hours each day, without fail! The video showed her slipping into one of those full body work-out suits that make you sweat a lot, and using multiple exercise machines, plus cardio and weight exercises.
'All this so I can be chubby,' she dead-pans.

What is this point of my relating all this to you? Regardless of how you got to weigh what you weigh: life circumstance, medications, metabolism, poor decisions, whatever, you know have a problem you have to deal with. No, it's not fair that people laugh and harass you, make you feel unworthy of love and respect, or that clothes are hard to come by because discrimination is so rampant, but a problem is still a problem that needs to be addressed. This film made me realize that like my homework, I must work harder than the rest just to get an A.

Wish me luck, with some hard work, I can drop another 20 pounds in the following months: then I'll just be a little plump!

Message From a Thick B$&* To Hate-Mongers Maligning My Body

Cruising on youtube for plus size models made me realize how far women need to go to get some basic respect for their thick sisters. On every video there were comments posted belittling the women, calling them fat, attempting to analyze their fat to muscle ratio, claiming they were going to die because of their extra 30 pounds....it just went on and on. What's worse, I know some of these people were women, angry and hate-mongering women who want to raise their self-esteem by destroying the confidence of other women they have deemed inferior.

The one thing that really drove me nuts was some comment where a person wrote that society shouldn't encourage plus-size women because it would just give "fat women the excuse to eat junk food." I've heard this argument all over the place: the fat-is-beautiful movement is mean to skinny women and you shouldn't encourage fat women because they'll think it's okay to eat whatever they want.

Here are some points to consider: $&@@! you.
Point 2: punishing someone who has not committed a crime is unethical and cruel.
Point 3: trying to control a person's life is cruel and violates their right to liberty
Point 4: the fat-is-beautiful movement is not cruel to skinny women. Nobody goes on national  television and talks about skinny women's unhealthy, potentially life-ending disease of anorexia and bulimia. Nobody calls anorexia an "epidemic", though it really is. On the other hand, fat women are constantly bombarded with messages on prime-time TV calling for an end to this "epidemic" of obesity. Furthermore, being fat doesn't doom a person to a quick death or serious heart problems, risks vary from person to person. Here is an article on msnbc that says that thin people are also at risk for heart disease, and that just because a person is thin it means nothing about the health of their internal organs. For example, Zena weighs 100 pounds and drinks shots every weekend, diets on a dangerously minimalist meal (one meal a day with a snack of a carrot with mustard) that is not purely vegetarian and fruits, and smokes cigarettes to keep her weight down. Tammy is 160 pounds, works out 3 times a week for 30 minutes, walks for an hour each day, is a strict vegetarian who gets lots of green vegetables, and is a moderate drinker and doesn't smoke at all. If you're going by the physical outer body, you're not only being a jackass you're also not thinking analytically.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18594089/ns/health-fitness/t/thin-people-can-be-fat-inside/

Point 5: Demeaning, degrading, devaluing, and destroying women and their self-esteem is either a sign that you're a chauvinist or a brainwashed female with a streak of self-hatred.
Point 6: You have no right to tell another person what is and what isn't beautiful. If you don't agree you can click away, you don't have to make derogatory comments about an already marginalized population who experience discrimination on a daily basis.
To reiterate my main point, #$%** you!


~message from a thick bitch.