More thoughts on New Year’s resolutions

A few far more kickass bloggers than I have posted their thoughts on New Year’s resolutions, particularly as they relate to pressure to lose weight/go on diets/generally screw your health up in the quest for impossible anatomical change:

sleepydumpling at Fat Heffalump is making 2012 the Year of Living Fatly:

However, after stumbling across some douchecanoe on Twitter whining about being offended by seeing “fat, lazy people”, I’ve decided that I have a goal for 2012.  Are you ready for it?

Here it is…

I am going to be willfully fat this year.  Offensively, obnoxiously fat.  All over the damn place.  In fact, I’m fatting at all of you right now.

s.e. smith at This Ain’t Living is talking about how Fat Hatred Kills:

Every January, people, especially women, hit the gym and cut out sweets and drop pounds. Maybe they keep it up for a few weeks or months. Then those pounds come back on and they return to the starting point. Maybe they repeat the process in the next year, feeling guilty about their failure or pressured into it by someone else, like a ‘friend’ who insists on having a weight loss buddy. This is known as yo-yo dieting, for the constant bouncing up and down between weight points.

And, it turns out, it’s not very good for the body.

Go forth and read!

Fat-o-sphere classics: The Fantasy of Being Thin

I mentioned this on my New Year’s post … and then figured out I hadn’t linked to it yet!  D’oh.

Anyway, today’s blast from the past is from Kate Harding, formerly of Shapely Prose, and pretty much illustrates how difficult it can be to defeat long-entrenched fat-hating bullshit.

We’ve talked a lot here about how being fat shouldn’t stop you from doing the things you’ve always believed you couldn’t do until you were thin. Put on a bathing suit and go waterskiing. Apply for that awesome job you’re just barely qualified for. Ask that hot guy out. Join a gym. Wear a gorgeous dress. All of those concrete things you’ve been putting off? Just fucking do them, now, because this IS your life, happening as we speak.

But exhortations like that don’t take into account magical thinking about thinness, which I suspect — and the quote above suggests — is really quite common. Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, “When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit”; it’s “When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.”

…
In light of that, it’s a lot easier to understand why some people freak out when you say no, really, your chances of losing weight permanently are virtually nil, so you’d be better off focusing on feeling good and enjoying your life as a fat person. To someone fully wrapped up in The Fantasy of Being Thin, that doesn’t just mean, “All the best evidence suggests you will be fat for the rest of your life, but that’s really not a terrible thing.” It means, “You will NEVER be the person you want to be! All the evidence suggests you will never find a satisfying relationship or get a promotion or make more friends or feel confident trying new things!”

Kate goes on to talk about how basically, we just have to accept at some point that this is our life.  I’m never going to be a quantum physicist or a chess grandmaster, I don’t have the temperament or nocturnal habits to be a sassy tattooed bartender, I seriously could not handle working in retail again even if it were my fantasy combined plus-sized clothing/feminist literature store. And no amount of starving myself and damaging my health to somehow transform myself into a “good” person would make those things happen.

On the “childhood dreams” front I guess I could one day be Prime Minister, but that would take … a pretty bizarre set of circumstances.

2012!

Happy New Year, tiny pool of readers!

I’m not really a New Year’s Resolutions kind of person in the first instance – I connect a lot of the pressure around them to the Fantasy of Being Thin – as in, you’re meant to commit to some kind of huge life-changing new behaviour which will magically make you a whole new awesome perfect person – despite the fact that humans are pretty crap at changing the big things that make them them, and that even if you do lose the weight, quit smoking, stop drinking, join a gym, etc etc, you’ll still be you, with your past and your habits and your personality.

And of course, I’ve listed off some of the classic resolutions there, and gosh, aren’t they all united in a wonderful puritanical body-hating worldview which equates being a moral person with being a person who does/doesn’t do X, Y and Z and whose morality is demonstrated by their thinness and/or self-denial.

Of course, to completely contradict myself, there is some kind of logic to using the (arbitrarily-determined anyway) beginning of the year to mark our choices, our decisions, the small areas we might like to focus on for the medium-term future.  (Christ, that’s a wanky sentence I just wrote.)  So a few distinctly non-resolute resolutions from me:

1. Keep reminding myself, where possible, and largely through this blog, that I am awesome and foxy.
2. Be happy with the things I have, and acknowledging the privilege that provides many of them, but not to the point of cancelling out the good
3. Enjoy the good times, value the good people, stop ridiculously over-sweating the small stuff

They’re not fixed-point goals or numbers and they don’t carry the unspoken “or I’ll prove I’m a terrible person” rider that seems to be a regular feature.  They’re ideas for how I want to live my life anyway.  And they’re woo-y and personal and shit, but hey, my blog, my self-indulgence.

Have an awesome 2012, people.  May we all be as awesomely happy as Mo’Nique looks.

Things are still in holiday mode in the Large Pink Household, so enjoy a few Fat-o-sphere classics for a week or so till things get off the ground and/or I run out of holiday cheer.  By which I mean cider.

Must be haircut day

… because, until such time as I save my pennies for a GHD, the only time I get properly-straight hair is when I’ve had a haircut!

My hair’s been about this long for years, now, albeit not in the best condition.  All that has changed in the past year thanks to a payrise and finding a damn fine hairdresser, Katrina at GetFunkd on Lambton Quay. /shameless plug

But it’s not to last, gentlefolk.  I’ve exorcized the bad hair demons of my youth, and, in line with embracing the notion that we only have one life and we’re all made of meat and going to die some day so live it up now, sweetheart, I am going to take the plunge.

The plunge into barely-qualifying-as-short short hair.

I was also emboldened to do it now thanks to this post at Shakesville, wherein Melissa dares, dares I say, to be a fat woman with a pixie cut.

Pixie cuts are not in my own future, but I’m really happy to be able to say that that’s just because pixie cuts don’t fit with my own self-image, not because of any ZOMG ROUND FACE!!! rubbish (and this is a significant step, people).  But the point is relevant whether it’s a buzzcut or a mohawk; the fact is, fat women aren’t meant to have short/outlandish/stylish/loud/bright/noticeable hair.  The same way we’re not meant to wear outlandish/stylish/loud/bright clothing, because then people might notice our existence.  (Of course, we’re also expected to always look completely neat and well-put-together because otherwise we’re just proving to the world what lazy, uncaring slobs we are.)

Anyways, short it shall go, in a noticeably-above-the-shoulder way, with some chunky layers throughout.  The hope /expectation of lovely-hairdresser-Katrina and I is that once we lop a good amount off the bottom, the rest will bounce up into its natural, cruelly-suppressed curl and do awesome things.

And if it doesn’t work I’ll resort to cute hairclips and actually blowdrying the damn thing in the mornings until it grows out.  Because, and I only say this because it was actually a bit of a revelation when I really accepted this (vs snarking it at Next Top Model contestants during Makeover Week), it does grow back.

I’ll also be taking the brave step of letting a professional dye my hair, which is almost a complete novelty; beyond a set of highlights at about age 17 when an aunt tried to encourage me to start caring about my hair (she ultimately failed, but that’s a whole other crap-body-image-adolescence story) I’ve never had my hair “properly” dyed.  Much less – whisper it in case my mother hears – bleached.

I instinctively hasten to reassure you it isn’t going to be platinum, or bright pink (not that there’s anything wrong with dying your hair bright pink, or red, or purple if the mood takes you, like sleepydumpling) – so now I’m secondguessing why I’m doing any reassuring at all!

Point is, there is Change in the air.  And I’m almost a little nervous about it!  So farewell, lovely artificially-straightened hair; we shall probably meet again in a year or two.

For more awesome fat hair, I highly recommend the Fuck Yeah Fat Haircuts Tumblr.

Fat-o-sphere classics: Fat Nutritionist twofer

If ten words ever really changed my life, they were these:

Eat food.  Stuff you like.  As much as you want.

And they were uttered by the fabulous Michelle, aka The Fat Nutritionist.

So for today’s fat-o-sphere classic I’m linking to two of her classic posts:

The rules of nutrition

Now then.

Are there ways to eat which will (potentially) optimize your functioning while minimizing (your immediate and long-term risks of) certain diseases?

Probably.

Are there ways to eat which will (possibly) undermine your functioning while increasing (your risk of) disease?

Probably.

And why do I say probably instead of striking out with a sexy, definitive Yes?

Because, while these are likely results, they are not inevitabilities. They are not laws. This is not a² + b² = c².

It’s more like a² + b² = c ^{probably, maybe, if x, y, and z are also present}.

Because — let’s go back to being obvious again — people are different.

And the aforementioned Eat food.  Stuff you like.  As much as you want.

It should come as no surprise to anyone reading here that our culture views food as a moral issue. A potentially dangerous moral issue. And, setting aside the very-interesting-but-not-to-be-had-right-now discussion of ethical and religious foodways, food just…isn’t.

Food isn’t moral. It’s not immoral, either. It’s morally neutral.

But, sadly, we live in a time and a place where it seems Twinkies = Eternal Damnation. (Notice, here, how the supposed moral value of food pretty snugly overlaps its supposed nutritional value. This is not a coincidence.) And we tend to take the most pessimistic view of human nature.

So, when I say “Adult human beings are allowed to eat whatever, and however much they want,” what people actually hear is: “GO OUT AND CRAM YOUR FACE WITH BAD, BAD TWINKIES!!!!!!”

On the one hand I feel a bit trag just leaving other people’s words sitting there with no comment from myself; on the other, I just don’t see why you should be wasting any more time reading my mere mortal praise when you could be squee-gee-ing your third eye open at Michelle’s.