Thanksgiving

It's 5:00 AM and I've got nervous energy. I think it's 'cause I volunteered Astrid and I to make the stuffing for the holiday feast, which will commence in about 11 hours. I'm sure it will turn out okay, but as a friend called it yesterday, "You're making THE side dish!" The pressure is on!

Before looking at any recipes, I decided that these ingredients would be essential, and I went and bought them in mass quantities:

whole chestnuts
celery
onions and shallots
mushrooms
fresh parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme (which I failed to write in that order on the grocery list.)
veggie broth

Then, on scoping a few recipes for making stuffing from scratch, we went and got three huge loaves of sourdough which we'll toast in the oven to begin the process. We'll roast the chestnuts, sautée the veggies, combine everything, then bake the stuffing. It seems pretty straightforward and easy.

Another friend yesterday assured me that only three things could possibly go wrong:

1. The stuffing is too bland.
2. The stuffing is too dry.
3. The stuffing is too soggy.

The first two will be remedied automatically by dousing the stuff in gravy, so really aren't problems at all. The third means we're shit outta luck. I think I can handle this.

Another anxiety about the day ahead, though this is not what's keeping me up, is the probability that I will eat way too much food. I've been doing pretty well lately with "portion control," as the diet gurus might say, but Thanksgiving is a notorious rule-breaking event, and the entirety of the meal, aside from the turkey, is carbs, glorious carbs. I'm really glad I never went in for the Atkins diet. Not to malign it, because there are some sound scientific grounds for why it works, but I just don't think substantially reducing carbs and sugar over my lifetime is a sustainable strategy for me. I'm not much for sugar, anyway (it's really the easiest thing for me to control) but definitely decreasing highly refined carbs and increasing complex carbs like whole grains and veggies is something I've been focused on and continue to tackle. Anyway, today won't be a whole grain kinda day, but still, eating til I'm done and not keeling over from a gorged gut will be my modest health-conscious goal. That, and Astrid and I are planning to start the day, even before preparing the stuffing, by going to the gym and doing some cardio. She checked, and 24-hour is indeed open for business today. It'll be really interesting to see how many other people will be at the gym on a major eating-oriented holiday.

Gonna try to go back to bed now.

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

For the Occasion of Astrid's Birthday...

I am planning the following luxurious meal for this evening:

Salad with arugula and hand-chosen lettuce mix with lemon vinaigrette dressing * Swiss chard and herb tart with two cheeses, fresh thyme and oregano * Greek gigantes white beans in a tomato/garlic/olive oil sauce * Tzatziki made with Greek yogurt, cucumber, garlic, and fresh mint *

My stomach just flipped from thinking about it. Maybe this meal will be a little too rich? And then the drinking will commence. It might be a Tums night. Maybe I'll save the tzatziki for another time.

Good Eats

Been eating pretty healthy the last couple weeks. Lots of veggies, no fried food ('cept tortilla chips, which are mandatory when eating at a taqueria!) and the most important thing: I've been stopping when satisfied instead of busting my gut. If I can just get this one thing down and stick to it: I never have to overeat. Just because food is there doesn't mean I've gotta eat it. It's like listening to really bad lesbian folk music: just because they're dykes doesn't mean I need to support 'em. It's a nasty habit, indeed. So, I dunno how I got up to 224 - maybe it was water weight - but I'm back at 220. Already my pants feel less constricting.

Progress Report # 3ish

So, not surprisingly, with outbursts like last weekend's fried food extravaganza, and owing to my slacking off from gym and bike alike (my brand new bike is broken at the moment), I've gained more weight in the last couple months. I'm now 224, four pounds more of me since I started this here blog. All in all, up 9 pounds from where I was about a year ago, which is roughly about 20 to 30 pounds more than I'd ultimately like to weigh. I'm telling you, the goal here is not to be thin, the goal is to feel physically and emotionally better about my relationship with food and excercize, take some weight off my bad knee, and eat more healthfully (and ecologically-friendly).

So how have I not been accomplishing these goals? I'm overeating, per yooszh, dining out too frequently, and not exercizing nearly enough. I was getting really consistent with the gym for about three months there, but as school wound down and my brief summer break and subsequent two-month job search began, I lost focus. Then, sometime in August, I got a new bike and I think getting back on it distracted me further from the additional exercize regimen of gymming. So I'm looking forward to building in a routine where I'm both biking and gymming, as well as getting more of a handle on the food situation. It's a lifelong process. I'm hoping at the very least to get back down to 215 and then see what happens from there.

Sigh.

Fried Food Frenzy

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. Except that I'm not Catholic, and my father is dead, so I don't think he would mind that I've had chicken strips, french fries, and breaded, fried cauliflower today (eating this last delicacy as I type before you now.) Yes, all in one day. Maybe this has to do with my vegetarian girlfriend being out of town, thus I'm eating to alleviate my missing her, and eating decadent meaty things 'cause, really, I just can. It feels wonderful momentarily and then feels awful, physically, not long after such binges. I should really be asleep now, but this cauliflower is fucking tasty.

Does it exonerate me when you know that I breaded the cauliflower in matzo meal?

Fat Queer Anthology - Call For Submissions

This anthology project is being advertised, with a submission deadline of December 1, 2008. I'm thinking of putting something together for it, but if others are interested, please read on! --Bree

A Call For Submissions

Working Title: Spilling Over: A Fat, Queer Anthology
Contact: spillingover@gmail.com
Submission Deadline: December 1, 2008

Despite the attention given by queer studies to the materiality of bodies and the cultural and social inscriptions that designate them, still a dearth of both scholarship and literature exists around intersections of gender, sexuality, and fatness. As fat studies begins to emerge as a viable academic location of inquiry, questions surface as to how fat bodies, deemed “excessive” in their trespasses of size and space, create even more complex subject positions when compounded by queer desires. This proposed anthology seeks contributions addressing junctions of “fat” and “queer” in pieces that consider the representations and resistances of non-normative corporeality and also writings considering the theoretical conceptions of these intricate subjectivities. Spilling Over will reflect the notions of excess, boundaries, and containment implied by the labels “fat” and “queer” both singularly and collectively. In the form of scholarly writing and creative non-fiction pieces, essay submissions might consider (but are not limited to):

* theorizing the concept of “excess” as it pertains to fatness and queerness
* fat and queer identities; personal narratives; reclaiming “fat” and “queer”
* notions of (in)visibility, hypervisibility, and passing and/or privilege
* intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, age, and religion
* the economics of the obesity “epidemic” and the diet industry
* fat, queer art and performance; performativity
* pleasure, sex-positivity, eroticizing non-normative bodies
* acceptance movements, political activism, resistance
* the engagement of feminism with fatness
* global, transnational, transcultural constructions of fat, queer bodies and lives
* critical reflections of fatness and queerness in media, literature, film, music, and visual arts
* the rhetoric of fat oppression, fatphobia, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, responding to and/or addressing hate speech

By December 1, 2008, please send your 2,000 – 6,000 word submission, along with your complete contact information and a 50-100 word biography, to spillingover@gmail.com with the subject line of “Spilling Over – Submission.” Submissions must be received in 12 point Times New Roman font and sent in via Word documents (PDFs will not be accepted). Pieces will be reviewed and decisions made by April 2009. Please note that accepted submissions will be approved on a tentative basis, pending editorial board approval once the anthology has secured a publisher.

Questions can be directed to spillingover@gmail.com or visit the MySpace page at www.myspace.com/spillingoveranthology

Please distribute widely.

Where Fat Meets Butch

I've always hated shopping for clothes. Even now that I really enjoy dressing up and looking all hot and shit, finding clothes that fit me, particularly button-down shirts, the staple for all my biz casual and dressy wardrobe needs, is elusive and irksome. The experience of finding a great shirt at a vintage store, a western style collar shirt, in worn cotton with mother-of-pearl buttons, say, is more often than not completely demoralizing, as I slide into the sleeves, noticing that the fit of the shoulders and collar and tits are perfect, but the lower two buttons, the ones situated over my distended belly, will not, no matter how I strain, fasten or stay closed. This happens over and over and over again.

My hatred of shopping is perhaps more deeply rooted in my gender nonconformity than it is in my fatness. When my mom and I went to the department store together, I loathed every moment of getting into the changing room with her to try on blouses and dresses and cute little girly shorts with matching flowery tank tops. "Butch" is a shorthand, and not a label I strongly identify with, but it gives you an idea. I've always been a tomboy, ever since before I can remember. I rode bikes on the creek path, played with Star Wars action figures, dug in the dirt, eschewed Barbie and make up and all things pink and purple. My favorite article of clothing when I was a kid was my precious Zoom shirt. A handsomely androgynous striped rugby, I wore it practically every day of my fourth and fifth years. At right, I am receiving the Zoom shirt on my fourth birthday. The eyes in the photo say it all: "I can't wait to get outta this cutsie sundress and into that shirt!"

My mom had a theory about why I didn't like to wear pretty clothes, which she didn't hesitate to share with me during my adolescence. She said she thought I would like wearing dresses if I lost weight. I told her to shove it, but politely. The theory doesn't wash, considering I was a tomboy before I became fat, but it fits nicely into my mom's ideas about my sexuality, and into her self-hating narrative about her own fatness. So much precious life could be lived if fat women could love their bodies instead of being eaten alive by self-hatred.

But being fat certainly contributes to my dread about shopping, my anger that "plus-sized" clothing for women is usually feminine, and often so fucking ugly besides. And the problem with shopping in the men's department is that the cuts are not tailored for womanly curves, not to mention the big ol' belly. There is a fucking gold mine awaiting the clothing designer who will create an inexpensive butch clothing line, with ample size options, and there are rumblings about this online, but scarce proof of anything out there yet. The cutest plus-sized clothes I've seen online are from Torrid, but the products are still overwhelmingly girlie. I have no problem shopping in the men's department, and feel pretty safe and unharassed about it since I live in the Bay Area. But the belly conspires to keep me wearing stretchy polyester for the long haul.

Overheard at the gym

Two thin women were talking at the gym about how they need to lose weight, and one of them was lamenting that she can't buy ice cream anymore, because she'll eat the whole carton if it's there. I was doing stretches nearby and trying to focus on my routine; I couldn't help but listen and muse about their conversation a bit.

It made me tap into the pain of being a fat woman at the gym, the incarnation of the "unsightly" fat body these women are avoiding like the Plague. And while I'm sure they're working out because they want to be "healthy," on another level, they're working out because they don't want to look like me. Hell, I'm working out 'cause I don't wanna look like me, if we're in the business of being honest here. My goal is not to be skinny - that's just not my body type. But I do want to lose some weight, and it's for health reasons, sure, and it's so I can continue to be more effective and physically active, yes, but it's also so that I can squeeze my tummy into cute shirts I wanna wear, so that it doesn't droop downward so very much, so that I may be able to possess one chin instead of the multitude I've lived with for years. I, too, am a product of a fatphobic culture. And even though I love my body at times, and have lovers who love my body, and wouldn't change who I am internally, I do want to weigh less.

It is so fucked up that almost every day, I hear people casually bemoaning their weight, making derisive comments about fat people, and equating fatness with poor health and ugliness. My asshole psychopharmacology professor once said in class that extra weight around the stomach was both unhealthy and "unattractive." The assumption that fat people aren't healthy, and aren't sexy, and conversely, that a thin person is naturally in better health and obviously better looking, is just plain unfounded and subjective. Thin people get heart disease and diabetes too. Thin people can be ugly motherfuckers. I've got normal blood pressure, I've never smoked cigarettes, and I exercise regularly. How many fucking thin people do you know who've got three strikes on those counts?

Fuck you and your fucking carton of ice cream. You don't know what it's like to have entire You Tube channels devoted to making fun of you for being fat.

Banning Fast Food in LA?

In L.A., a town where you're just as likely to catch someone eating a small salad with a lemon wedge as you are a Big Mac and Super Sized fries, city council members are looking to put a moratorium on fast food chain construction. This issue cuts to the juicy center of the controversy that conflates personal responsibility and choice with governmental paternalism and corporate domination over our lives. Where does responsibility lie in the obesitization (my word!) of these United States of Consumption? There is some wisdom in this sort of legislative ban. In urban areas across the country, healthy food options are limited, and there is a widely-acknowledged "grocery gap" in many cities where shopping for raw, healthy, and less processed foods has become a hardship. In South L.A., where the ban is being considered, 30% of adults are obese compared to 21% in the rest of the city, and in addition to being an area already dense with fast food chains, it's also a grocery store impoverished area.

It's really easy for privileged folks to decry that the government should stay out of the way of free enterprise, and that we have no business regulating what corporations do. After all, there is clearly a huge demand for fast food, so much so that South L.A. is already sustaining the highest concentration of fast food outlets in all of L.A. county. But really, don't we need to start somewhere in order to create demand for healthy food? Maybe the government should start subsidizing organic and natural food outlets so that the prices at stores like Whole Foods can come into the range where poor and working class people can actually afford to buy it. That's an intervention I'd like to see.

Update

Maybe I haven't been blogging because I haven't been making any "progress," and by progress, I mean I haven't been eating more healthfully overall and haven't lost any weight. Generally, I've been less down on myself about these things, so that is a mark of progress I can be reasonably happy about. I've also been going to the gym: not as much as I ultimately want to, but I have gotten there several times. I'm up to ten minutes on the elliptical and another 30 minutes on the recumbent bike, so that's a decent aerobic workout, compared to my first couple times.

I'm doing crunches on this really fun thing where you climb up on a tall doohickey, rest against a back rest while holding onto these handles, legs swinging free off the ground, and then do leg lifts to work out the lower abdominal muscles. I can do about ten of these at present. I like the idea of getting stronger in my core - I want to be able to move more gracefully, have better stamina, be able to get up from sitting on the floor without grunting and straining, for god's sake. My out-of-shapeness makes me feel older than I am, and that's just silly. I've got lots of life to explore through movement, and I want to make it easier for myself not to automatically resist things like biking or hiking long distances, dancing with Ms. Astrid, and having long sessions of fantastic fucking. Core muscles help immensely with all that.

Getting Strong Now

Alright, so after a bit of research and much inner-struggle, I decided on the mega-corporate gym down the street, 'cause it was the cheapest membership fee I found (after haggling), and it's the closest gym to my house, which ostensibly provides less of a barrier to my getting there. On taking the tour of the place, I saw a good mix of men and women, a few other fat people, and numerous people of various ages and body shapes that would not be commonly viewed as "gym-bunny"-types. So I felt as comfortable as I possibly could being in such an environment. I've gone twice this week so far, and have actually enjoyed it. And after exercising each day, my body has felt much more relaxed and serene than it usually does when I'm just sitting around.

So far, I really like the recumbent bike. It's a good way to get the heart rate up and work up a good sweat while staying pretty comfortable. No stress on the back, and very little stress on the knees. I also like clocking the miles that I'm biking. It's less intense and less calorie-burning than the elliptical, but I'm finding it's a good starter machine for me. I tried the elliptical for the first time today, and I'm a bit baffled by it right now. I know the swooping leg motions and corresponding arm swinging will make more sense after I get more familiar with it, but it was a bit overwhelming on first try. I also started feeling a great deal of stress in my left calf muscle after only about five minutes on it, so I quit at that point and went back to the recumbent. Then I did some crunches and a bit of weight lifting. I also made sure to do some stretching both before and after the exercise.

My lovely friend G. showed me around the gym today, and introduced me to various workout equipment. That was pretty cool of him to do. It is so intimidating being a fat girl at the gym, and then on top of that, not having any idea how all these machines work. So tip of the hat to G. - thank you for being so supportive!

Just by way of logging what I'm doing at the gym, right now, it's just about 20 minutes of cardio and then as many crunches as I can do (maybe 10) and then 10 reps of very light weight lifting to tone each different arm muscle group. I expect I'll increase all these numbers as I progress, but I'm starting off very easy.

So I'm no longer a gym virgin. Woo-ha!

The Week in Food: The good, the not so good, the awful

After re-committing to the Regimen, I had an excellent week. I ate steel-cut oats and flaxmeal most mornings, ate lots of fresh fruit and veggies, big healthy salads, didn't overeat at all clear through Friday. I walked a lot during the week, too, and felt my gait pick up pace.

Then the family dinner for my birthday in San Jose happened. And I'm a sucker for corned beef, as we all know. But even though I piled on too much of the fatty, ridiculously tender meat on Friday night, I didn't eat myself to the point of belly-aching overkill. I ate til I was satisfied, and then had one more piece of corned beef beyond that. Dear readers: a year or two ago, I'd have eaten three or four pieces beyond that, so we're making progress here, okay?

But unfortunately, Friday night's dinner turned into the gateway drug for a major backslide on the Regimen. When Saturday rolled around, I intended to eat sensibly again, but I had class all day in Alameda starting at 9:00am, and couldn't pry myself out of bed early enough to prepare for the day before meeting my carpool at 8:30. So instead of the oatmeal I would've normally made for breakfast, I ended up eating a chocolate croissant supplied by a well-meaning classmate. Then for lunch, I did okay, ordering a grilled chicken and rice salad bowl from a nearby burrito/wraps kinda strip mall food outlet.

But then happy hour arrived. When the carpool got back into the City, I got the mischievous yen for bloody marys, dragging E-dog and EDG to have cocktails with me at the Orbit Room (scroll way down to the March, 2008, reviews, and see my very own), and getting Astrid to meet up with us. The evening devolved from there into a gluttonous adventure of too many drinks of too many varieties of alcohol, and ordering in Chinese food, which is always pretty much the death knell on reasonable portions for me.

Which led me right into Sunday, a day supposed to be devoted to my thesis, which started on the doubly-wrong foot of leftover chou mein and pancakes made by the lovely Astrid (they were multi-grain, at least), followed by leftover hot and sour soup, then a thesis-related stress craving for a chocolate milkshake, fulfilled down the street at Burgermeister (mmmm...Mitchell's ice cream!), then DJ came over for Bad Movie Night and we ordered in from a pizza place that, god bless/damn them, also makes chicken strips. Sigh.

This morning: oats and flax. Yum.

Regimen Revisited

On almost a daily basis, Astrid and I declare, sometimes while we're eating a grossly unhealthy meal (like last night's chicken strips at Bagdad Café), that "tomorrow, we start the Regimen!" The Regimen, in our couple mind's eye, has something to do with exercising more (or at all!), keeping up on grocery shopping so we have healthy stuff to cook at home, and eating reasonably. It's not a big deal, and yet why is it so hard to stick to? So last night, we declared the Regimen to be on again, and so far today I feel renewed committment to it.

I weighed myself this morning, and I'm now 221. Given my bike situation, it's not shocking that I've plateaued and gained another pound, but the main culprit right now is the decadent eating. In light of not having a bike, and also wanting to get into a more disciplined exercise routine in general, I've been contemplating joining a gym for the first time in my life.

As a fat girl, I've always feared gyms: why would I want to invite public ridicule upon my bouncing flabby body sweating on the elliptical machine? It brings back the terror of adolescence, when kids would make fun of me in P.E. class, and invokes the present-day fatphobia I still receive from strangers in public, like whenever I get called "fat-ass" while riding my bike too slowly for some shithead driving behind me. So the terror is historic, and current, and all too real in my experience. I'm 100% positive that other fat people stay out of gyms for exactly this reason. It's part of why the gym franchise Curves was invented, but I can't support them, what with the founder being a right-winger and giving significant contributions to anti-choice organizations. The other thing is that, well, I'm pretty fucking poor at this point in my life, and paying $30 to $60/month on a gym membership that I may or may not utilize seems like a very risky idea.

I'm going to check out the membership options at a few gyms in the neighborhood, and I'll report on my findings. I'm curious not only about fees and the amenities I get with my money, but I'm also very interested to get a sense for how their staff treat fat people, and what other fat folks have experienced at these places. Any tips on SF upper-Market, Lower Haight, and Mission area gyms would be welcome feedback for me.

Onward Ho - the Regimen begins (again!)

Progress Report #1

The numbers:
So it's been two months since I launched this site, and I still weigh exactly what I did when I started, 220 pounds.

The physical feeling behind the numbers:
I feel somewhat sluggish physically, haven't been riding my bike enough, and haven't been drinking enough water. This less than ideal physical state is counterbalanced somewhat by feeling emotionally uplifted by the end of the school term and other reasons you can read about at toothpicklabeling. So, all in all, my body and stress levels are feeling pretty decent.

The emotions behind the numbers:
On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being least concerned or stressed about my weight and 10 being red alert-level anxiety and self-flagellation, I'd say I'm holding steady at about 4. I'd still like to lose some weight for overall bodily functioning, health, and to increase my physical fitness/stamina/mobility. But I'm not too upset with myself right now. It's been a really stressful several months with the school situation, and my crazy schedule has contributed to a lot of difficulty, beyond my regular resistance and bad habits, to preparing healthy meals and getting on my bike. I think now that I'm acclimated to the new schedule, and Spring/Summer is upon us, it bodes well for being more active and planning meals better.

More updates like this one whenever the muse strikes.

xo
Bree

My Belly, Part One

The first time I became aware that I was "fat" was on the playground in first grade. Some kid came up to me and said something like, "I know why you and Kenny play together all the time: 'cause you're both fat!" Kenny was a kid who lived in my neighborhood. We rode bikes together and killed snails and ate snacks at his house after school. His mother would make us cinnamon toast and Tang (the beverage of the astronauts!) The revelation that I was fat had never consciously occurred to me before, but it doesn't strike me as surprising that my fatness was first named by another person. It does seem from that moment onward, my body image was sculpted by many an "other," whether it was a kid on the playground, a TV show, a movie, various doctors, fatphobia in the cultural ether, or, not insignificantly, my mom. I'll share more about my mom and fatness in another post.

For now, let's turn our attention to my belly. The belly that, in first grade, wasn't all that big, but over the years, and particularly by my senior year of high school, began to protrude and spill over my middle section thanks to weight gain and gravity. I'd had chicken pox over the summer of 1989, and a scar remained on my stomach to the left of my belly button. Later that year, the scar began to blur and dimple: the origin point of my first stretch mark, and with it, a deeper hatred of my body(self.)

It is a curious thing, growing up fat. No one notices you and yet everyone notices you. Particularly in the heteronormative realm of the sexual or romantic: the boys I'd had crushes on in junior high and high school were nice boys; they just thought of me as "one of the guys." It may have had something to do with my gender presentation, having been a tomboy, but I think the real reason was 'cause of the belly: this large, lumbering body that seemed, for all its obviousness, to be invisible.

Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't

We did a check-in during class tonight, in which we were supposed to share something about self-care: where it's at for us right now, what we want to be mindful of for ourselves as we engage in our clinical work and return to classes after the ordeal we've been through (see the other blog if you don't know the ordeal to which I refer.) I talked about how I'm taking multi-vitamins and fish oil supplements now, which I'm truly happy about. But it was a veneer to mask the real thing I'm not doing to care for myself: I'm nowhere near where I want to be in terms of eating healthfully. That couple-week stretch of eating well has given way to the usual pattern of eating satisfying but non-nutritive crap and eating too much of it. Sigh. Then my amazing new teacher told us she recently joined Weight Watchers. I didn't have a negative reaction to this because, A., my teacher is fierce and serene in the best combination of those qualities, and even said she could facilitate WW meetings better than their group leaders, fat and all! and B., WW is actually the one diet plan in the whole universe of the $40 billion diet industry that doesn't turn my stomach, so to speak, because it's actually a way for people to learn how to eat balanced, healthy meals and change their eating habits. So anyway, this isn't an ad for WW, but it's just to say that, damn, I didn't use that opportunity to be "out" about my contemplation of losing weight and my struggle to eat healthier.

On the flip side, I was the only one in class who commuted by bike, and that's something I can be pretty proud of, even if I ate a can of Chicken and Stars soup upon arriving home. ;)

Bad Week with Food

The stress has let up somewhat, though I've got a lot of clinic work right now, and school starting up. So there's that. And the fact that I just ate a whole mini cheesecake, even though I wasn't hungry in the slightest. It looks like one serving, but it's really two, or maybe even three. Sigh. It was really fucking tasty, though. Like some of the best cheesecake ever, all velvety and lemony, with a bottom graham crust that tasted more like carmelized butter and sugar than a box of stale crackers.

I had some time to kill tonight before Dax's birthday celebration, so I ducked into a wifi café in Berkeley before heading to the pub, and there's a problem with me and cafés, see: I love 'em, but I don't drink coffee. So here I am with this gorgeous display of pastries and confections in a curved glass case in front of me, and these beautiful tiny cheesecakes staring up at me, needing a tummy to fill. Okay, you know it's bad when I start anthropomorphizing food. So, yeah, I bought it, I ate it, and now I feel really yucky. And now I'm on my way to drink beer on top of it.

I feel shitty.

Comfort Food

Some folks eat mac'n'cheese, others prefer pork chops and apple sauce, and then there's me. When I'm stressed out, I crave Chinese food. The subject deserves several entries, but suffice it for right now, I'm an American Jew, just one generation removed from the Lower East Side, where the Jewish neighborhood rubbed up against Chinatown and Jews began eating Chinese food as early as the late 1800s. It's essentially in the makeup of my cultural genetics. If you're interested in the subject, check out the article Safe Treyf by Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine.

It's a fascinating account of the socio-cultural phenomenon of intergenerational Jewish appreciation of Chinese food, and it addresses the history of the phenomenon, as well as the complexities of the race/ethnicity, economic, and religious dynamics at play.

Duck sauce and gefilte fish, like ebony and ivory, they live together on the shelf at Safeway.

So Friday night, Astrid and I ate at Red Jade on Church Street, the only Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood. It's decent, inexpensive, and more "American-Chinese" fare than authentic, like many of the restaurants I've frequented in the City. It's not on my list of all-time favorites, but in a pinch, it's fine. The food is fresh, it's not too oily, and the dishes have some flavor. But the key factor this weekend was the stress and the relief of said stress through food. I've gone my two weeks of eating sensibly, and this weekend was the bounce-back binge, starting with Friday night's excursion to the Red Jade. We really enjoyed the spinach tofu soup with button mushrooms, a clear broth soup with a delicate flavor. Their prawns with Jade greens, which ended up being an uninspired glut of conventional broccoli, were just okay. I was hoping for bok choy or gai-lan (Chinese broccoli), which would have made the dish more distinctive and tasty. We also ordered their mango ostrich, which had a really nice, savory brown sauce that contrasted well with the sweet, firm mango slices. The ostrich meat itself was kind of beef-like and a little on the chewy side. Overall, I'd give the meal almost 3 stars, but despite the moderately enjoyable mediocrity, I continued to eat and eat until I was completely gorged.

The other major indulgence of the weekend was a Saturday night wee-hours trip to Mel's Diner for my ultimate indulgence: chicken strips. Many out there may know that chicken strips (embarrassingly enough, the Denny's version of the diner classic) were the first meat I ate after three years of vegetarianism in college. They have become a huge part of what Astrid lovingly calls "the lore of Bree."

So now you know that Chinese food and chicken strips are my total fat-girl kryptonite. What's nice about beginning the week after the weekend's indulgences is this: I'm not tripping out about it.

Back to the regimen!

Half a Corned Beef Sandwich

I could count the times I've eaten just half a sandwich on one hand. As a rule, I'm not good at leaving food on the plate. If there ever were a Jack Sprat's wife, she'd be me. Except for the being someone's wife thing. And the having no name except my husband's thing. And the being in a nursery rhyme thing.

You know what I mean; I can eat no lean.

So tonight, I ate at an old favorite in Berkeley, Saul's, a Jewish-style deli on Shattuck Avenue. It's a place N. and I used to go frequently, and I don't even remember whether I've been there since we broke up over three years ago. I went there after work at the clinic with my co-worker Devra. I ordered a cup of matzo ball soup and a "6-ounce" corned beef sandwich on rye. The sandwich came with a choice of cole slaw (yuck!), potato salad (meh), french fries (danger! danger!) or salad. I went with the salad. So the soup, salad, and half a sandwich were exactly enough food for me. I knew I didn't need to eat the second half, so I didn't.

I will make a minor complaint about the corned beef at Saul's: while I love that they use Niman Ranch sustainably raised, hormone-free beef, lending a very Berkeley feel to the New York style food, the truth is, and this is the kicker, it's too lean. Even Jack Sprat knows that corned beef should be juicy and fatty and lip-smackingly rich.

(*okay, so I am someone's wife. Sheesh, don't be such a stickler!)

I love my shrink

I've never blogged about my therapist before. I've mentioned being in therapy, but never anything specific about Mark, my dude. He is so light-hearted and takes my issues seriously but helps me create a relaxed, nonjudgmental space to contemplate them and start letting stuff go. Last week I went into therapy totally down on myself for how I've been eating lately. With everything going on with school, and the new bookkeeping job, I've been so fucking stressed out and eating everything in sight. I cried on the couch, feeling huge and awful and shitty. Mark basically told me to chill out and give myself some credit for coping with the stress. Since eating is one of my self-soothing strategies, it's not surprising that that's where I go when I'm freaked out. We talked about what I might do in the next week to stay grounded, and it totally calmed me down. I've been eating really healthfully all week, and feel bunches better. Just being reminded not to beat up on myself was really the key. Once I felt freer to cope by eating, and became more mindful of it and accepting of it, I wanted to do it less.

What It's About

By way of introduction, I am a fat dyke in my mid-30s, living a beautiful life in San Francisco. I'm shacked up with a really swell lady and I'm currently a grad student in clinical psychology. My academic and professional interests swim around such issues as death, sitting with the unknown, existential anxiety, body image issues, fatness, fat positivity, health and well-being, sexuality, queer/GLB identity, gender variance, genderqueer and transgender identity issues, spirituality, finding meaning in life, and yadda yadda. For fun, I like listening to music (mostly of the post-punk, folkie, political, artsy, nerdy-emo indie variety) riding my bike, lazing about, blogging, being social, drinking gorgeous cocktails, and more often than not, eating lots of yummy food.



I've been fat my whole life. I'm 5'4" and I currently weigh around 220 pounds. I've weighed as much as 235, but in the last few years, I've stayed pretty consistently between 210 and 220, most often lingering at exactly 215. I weighed 210 at the end of high school, so my weight's been fairly steady over the last 18 years.

My feelings about my weight yo-yo a bit more than that, to be true, thus with the "ambivalence." After growing up with a lot of anxiety and unhappiness about my weight, in an unforgiving fatphobic culture, with a mom (whom I adore, by the way) who constantly dieted and modeled body self-hatred for me, coming into my own sensibility about my weight involved everything from internalizing the self-hatred to rejecting the paradigm and refusing to get on a scale for more than ten years. Back in high school, I ate like absolute shit. Taco Bell, Denny's, everything fried, crispy and golden brown. I still love me some chicken strips. Moving my body as little as possible was a matter of true slacker pride. In college I went vegetarian for three years and lost a bit of weight that way, but I can't say I was eating much healthier, really. It wasn't until about five years ago that I started exercising, and now I totally dig getting myself around by bike. I actually enjoy working up a sweat, even. So since biking entered my life, and a new consciousness around healthy eating has crept slowly into my routine, things have shifted for me a bit. I'm still a chronic overeater, and tend to indulge my cravings too often, so despite an overall healthier lifestyle, I really haven't experienced a significant net weight loss. Sometimes I feel okay about that, and sometimes I don't.

I experience some health problems which I feel to be related to my weight and to overeating. My knees are stressed and weak, and I had a bad case of patello-femoral syndrome for a couple years, which still affects me, but has lessened some since doing physical therapy and getting more exercise. I can't squat or spend too much time kneeling, or else the knees crack and pop in a very unpleasant way. I've had a low-grade but chronic struggle with acid reflux, which I'm quite sure is caused mainly by overeating, and has diminished some since quitting coffee about four years ago or so. My overall and long-term health would be much improved if I were to dramatically cut back on saturated fats (main culprits: red meat and all things fried) and if I were to make a habit out of eating til satisfied and not until utterly stuffed. Though I'm a fan of salty snacks which carry their own kinds of risks (raising blood pressure and water retention) I will say I'm not much of a sweet tooth. A small square of chocolate is a totally doable limit for me, but get me near a bowl of briny green olives, and the lot of 'em will be gone before you can say "bowl of briny green olives."

It's also noteworthy that since getting into biking, I realize that if I weighed less, I would actually have more endurance and be able to bike faster and farther. Climbing the San Francisco hills is a painful and slow undertaking for me, and if I weighed even twenty pounds less, I think my biking efficiency would be vastly improved, not to mention my stamina and energy for lots of other fun stuff like sex and walking and um, sex.

So I'm inaugurating this here blog with an admission that I'm making quite public. I'm interested in losing some weight. Even as a fat-positive feminist anti-establishment dyke, I have come to understand that for my own body, for my own lifestyle, and for my own long-term health goals, this makes sense for me. I don't know if I'll be successful. I don't know if I'll be any "happier" if I weigh less. I don't know whether, even if I lose a significant amount of weight, I will keep it off or not. I just dunno. But I want to blog the progress, the literal ups & downs, and mostly the fleeting thoughts, feelings, fears, and myopic obsessions that run through this noggin when anything related to these topics floats on through. Welcome to the contradictory journey.

You can also check out my main blog which covers a broader range of topics, including popculture, politics, grad school angst, love, and the occasional wild night of karaoke.

Please feel free to leave comments, but if you flame me for being a "fat hater" I will have to lash you roundly. Also, if you leave inane fatphobic comments like, "Oh my god, you'll look so much better when you're skinny!" I'll also have to lash you. My feelings about this subject are ambivalent for very complex personal, political, cultural and healh-related reasons. In this blog, I am attempting to be as honest as I can about my mixed feelings on weight loss, what is at stake for me emotionally, how I've been conditioned to hate myself and other fat people, and how wanting to lose weight is mired in all kinds of problematic socio-cultural ideologies, prejudices, and power relationships. In other words, I know. Don't judge me for being human, please.

Peace, y'all.

Bree