(no subject)
Jan. 31st, 2005 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
merchimerchI just wrote this comment in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sohrshah's journal and it seems apropos, so I'm posting it here for myself:
In a very rational part of my brain I recognize that my life would not be perfect if I dropped 100-150 lbs. I would not be better at things, more disciplined, and most of all I would be miserable because I would be STARVING!
You're an anthropologist, so I don't really have to say this, but I'm gonna. American culture constructs fat in a horribly malicious way. Fat is connected to laziness, lack of discipline, slovenliness, and undesirability in our culture and there is a multi-million dollar diet industry that wants to reinforce those concepts daily.
But even acknowledging that, everytime I look in the mirror, I see my physicality as representative of all my worst charachter traits - laziness, procrastination, selfishness, lack of control, being overbearing...well the list can go on. Becuase of the way that fat is constructed through womens magazines, dating websites, diet commercials, and really just about any media image involving women at all, most of the time I do believe that life would be better if I were just thin. Not even pretty, certainly not successful - just thin, because pretty and successful are all wrapped up in the idea of thin in our culture.
It is so deeply and pervasively wrong.
I've been wrangling with the weightloss demons a lot recently. Uzbekistan will do that do a girl. Plus I've been on a bunch of avoiding pregnancy with FAM sites that have a lot of women waiting to conceive before weightloss. I couldn't help wondering if there was a medical reason for this, or if it was all just aesthetics. It seems that there are studies out there which claim that pre-natal hypertension and incontinence have higher instances in obese women. Heart problems and depends do not sound like fun when already trying to deal with another human being in one's body. That seems like a pretty good reason to try and revise some of my eating habits. I am not going to set any sort of goal weight or size. I just want to be a healthier host for the baby we plan on conceiving in 2 years. I figure if I start now, I might have a chance of gradual success rather than yo-yo craziness.
So February looks like inner-cleaning-out month for R and I. He had already talked about going on something of an alchohol fast to try and re-normalize his body after all the guesting-induced binge drinking. I agreed with him and said we should also try to revamp what we're eating and the portions we have. At home I don't think it will be too much of a problem. Trying to be somewhat reasonable about eating/drinking while guesting under pressure is going to be much more difficult.
sohrshah's journal and it seems apropos, so I'm posting it here for myself: In a very rational part of my brain I recognize that my life would not be perfect if I dropped 100-150 lbs. I would not be better at things, more disciplined, and most of all I would be miserable because I would be STARVING!
You're an anthropologist, so I don't really have to say this, but I'm gonna. American culture constructs fat in a horribly malicious way. Fat is connected to laziness, lack of discipline, slovenliness, and undesirability in our culture and there is a multi-million dollar diet industry that wants to reinforce those concepts daily.
But even acknowledging that, everytime I look in the mirror, I see my physicality as representative of all my worst charachter traits - laziness, procrastination, selfishness, lack of control, being overbearing...well the list can go on. Becuase of the way that fat is constructed through womens magazines, dating websites, diet commercials, and really just about any media image involving women at all, most of the time I do believe that life would be better if I were just thin. Not even pretty, certainly not successful - just thin, because pretty and successful are all wrapped up in the idea of thin in our culture.
It is so deeply and pervasively wrong.
I've been wrangling with the weightloss demons a lot recently. Uzbekistan will do that do a girl. Plus I've been on a bunch of avoiding pregnancy with FAM sites that have a lot of women waiting to conceive before weightloss. I couldn't help wondering if there was a medical reason for this, or if it was all just aesthetics. It seems that there are studies out there which claim that pre-natal hypertension and incontinence have higher instances in obese women. Heart problems and depends do not sound like fun when already trying to deal with another human being in one's body. That seems like a pretty good reason to try and revise some of my eating habits. I am not going to set any sort of goal weight or size. I just want to be a healthier host for the baby we plan on conceiving in 2 years. I figure if I start now, I might have a chance of gradual success rather than yo-yo craziness.
So February looks like inner-cleaning-out month for R and I. He had already talked about going on something of an alchohol fast to try and re-normalize his body after all the guesting-induced binge drinking. I agreed with him and said we should also try to revamp what we're eating and the portions we have. At home I don't think it will be too much of a problem. Trying to be somewhat reasonable about eating/drinking while guesting under pressure is going to be much more difficult.
