Saturday, July 26, 2008

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.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

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.

Friday, July 4, 2008

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.