Last year I was pretty much "recovered" and didn't stress about what I was eating at all. I ate a lot when bored and that's how I ended up so much above my "normal" weight. BUT this relapse is really fixing my bored eating issue! Hope it stays like this
Chat I just read something, does draculaura really avoid blood? Like legitimately... does she? That sounds very disordered eating coded considering she's a vampire. I don't remember it ever being in any of the movies or anything about her even being around blood so maybe its a presumption bevause of that... but like... HUH
I was looking through some personal archives and came across a photo of myself at 17 that made me mad (ID in alt)
Look at that kid. Are they fat? Are they?? No!! So why have they spent their entire conscious life convinced that they are???
Disclaimer: This is a personal essay. I know fatphobia's effects on thin people are not and should not be central to the fat liberation movement. This essay, however, centralises my thin childhood experiences with fatphobia because the purpose of this essay is for me to process my personal grief and anger over my body dysmorphia and internalised fatphobia. I am a fat adult, though, and I end on a tiny love letter to fatness and fat liberation because this is a movement I truly believe in and a change I think the world desperately needs. But if you're sick of reading the extremely mundane story of how kids in the 2000s developed fucked up relationships to their bodies, it's fine to just skip this one.
At 17, I wore clothes around EU size 40 and letter size L. I shopped at H&M and Lindex and KappAhl and wherever else teenage girls in Finland shopped around the year of our Lord 2010. Certainly I had no concept of not being able to find sizes or having to look for clothes online or in specialty stores. This is because I was not fat.
I would not have conceded that point, had it been brought up.
Diet culture in late 90s and the 2000s was off the rails. We know this. Biggest Loser was on television and every single women's and teen magazine that came into the house endorsed thinness and dieting both implicitly and explicitly. Cultural osmosis alone, though, would have only gone so far. I don't think I would have internalised that my body was too big unless it was modelled to me at home and expressed to me personally all through my life, largely by adults I trusted.
At six years old, I made a mock Weight Watchers food journal page for myself because my mum kept one religiously. At seven, I was relieved that one girl in my class was chubbier than I was (we both got called fat by our classmates, but at least I was Less Fat). At eight, I knew the biscuits we often had at home were good because they were low-fat. At every single doctor's check-up, they noted on the growth curve that my weight was slightly higher than was ideal. They told my parents to watch it, always accepted with solemn nods and concerned looks.
At 11, my parents arranged for me to talk to a nutritionist – I don't remember who initiated it, but I do remember the meeting arising from mutual concern between my parents and myself about my weight. The summer I turned 13, both my parents successfully lost weight through yet another calorie and nutrition tracking programme. A few years later, I had a go at the same. When I was 18, me and my mum agreed that we would both lose weight and when we got to our goals, we would take a trip to Edinburgh.
All through my life, my mum would look at her own body in the mirror, cringe, and say things like, "my belly is really much too big". All through my preteens and teens, my mum would instruct me to stick to certain cuts of dresses so that I looked thinner. All through my teens, my mum would give me concerned looks and say that at least the fat concentrating at the hips and thighs put me at less risk of heart disease.
None of this was ever done with malice or cruelty, and it fucked me up regardless.
I became fat in 2020. A shock response, I suspect, to the pandemic, not that it matters. I became purple with stretch marks and slowly lost my entire pre-pandemic wardrobe. Eventually I had gained about 10 clothes sizes, give or take according to brand. My body changed at such rapid speed that it took me years to feel at home in it again.
I had learned the basic tenets of fat liberation in between leaving my parents' house and getting fat, but actually becoming fat put me face-to-face with really convincing myself of them. After five years, I'm still doing it. It's much easier now than it was then, but it would be significantly easier still if I didn't have over twenty years worth of unlearning to do. And that infuriates me.
I am desperately angry that I wasted my childhood and teens hating my body. Who did that help? Who benefitted from that? Certainly not my relationship to food, or exercise, or the mirror. I am desperately angry that my childhood chub was considered concerning fat, that my small belly needed hiding, that my hip and thigh curve somehow made my body too much. I am desperately angry that over ten years on, I'm still dealing with the inner voices that tell me it's good to skip meals and get excited at the prospect of weight loss as a potential medication side effect.
And I know my mum is a victim of cultural fatphobia just as much as I am. She is a doctor, too, and heavily influenced by medical fatphobia. She is honestly quite woke these days for a 50-something upper-middle-class white lady, but fatphobia has its claws deep in her psyche and I doubt they'll ever come out. She's stopped commenting on my body, because I specifically asked her to, but does still negatively assess her own body in front of me. (She is, nowadays, significantly thinner than I am.) She considers getting on ozempic when it becomes available to "treat obesity" in Finland. She is not, and has never been, fat.
And I know she loves me more than anything else in the world. I know she only ever meant well. I know, too, that she knows the stats – that weight loss is unsustainable in 98% of cases – and I know she's probably never going to come around on this. I don't live with her anymore, and so at least I enjoy limited exposure. But I don't know how to tell her that the way she made me feel about my body for the first 20 years of my life makes me cry.
At the end of the day, becoming fat is the best thing that could have happened to my body relationship. It made me confront my extremely mundane and yet extremely fucked up relationship to my body, weight and to fatness in general. It forced me to start integrating a new belief system which, in turn, made me have more grace and taught me to mind my own business. It made me kinder. It made me more intelligent and better educated. These days I think that, after my medical transition, I might finally reach a place where I can be at peace with my body.
i keep ending up at around 900 a day. i'd like to be at around 700 or lower. it will be both harder to track and restrict for the next two weeks (a friend is visiting), but we'll see
breakfast: tomato 24, iced mocha (low cal chocolate powder) 95, pice of chocolate 24
Chat I just read something, does draculaura really avoid blood? Like legitimately... does she? That sounds very disordered eating coded considering she's a vampire. I don't remember it ever being in any of the movies or anything about her even being around blood so maybe its a presumption bevause of that... but like... HUH
