That’s what I get for having multiple tabs open… sorry… should I cross post it to the place it’s supposed to go?!

Despite the hugenormous strides I’ve made thanks to all of you wonderful people, if I had the choice, and someone offered me that wand and said, “we can make you 110, heck, 120, with zero negative side effects, also, you won’t have to starve yourself to maintain it the way you used to have to,” I’d take it. I’d give them an entire paycheck for it. Even if they left the slight chubbiness in my face and thighs and upper arms and would only take away my not-at-all-slightly chubby stomach, I would do it. I don’t even know if I’d hesitate.

That was an embarrassing realization for me to come to. I still have such a long way to go. But at least I’m getting somewhere! YAY! Six months ago I’d be talking about how disgusting I am. Am I still disgusted? Yes, more often than I care to admit. But now I finally am able to understand that that is the result of social training. I as a physical being am NOT inherently disgusting.

And now sometimes I can look in the mirror and preen, and like what I see, and tell people without irony or shame that I am pretty. I could not do that when I was socially-acceptably thin and convinced I was horribly fat, and not only that but fat was the worst thing I could be looks-wise. But I can do it now.

To all the people who say “size 14 is average and if you’re a 14 you’re not fat (implication: you’re faking it you whiner),” I want to scream and hit my head against the wall in their general direction, and then show them a picture of me and let them decide how “NOT fat” I am. The people at work who tell me how I’m not fat when I say I am? Drives me nuts. I’m not putting myself down, I’m stating a fact. Don’t tell me you got sudden onset blindness just because I’m in this dumpy apron. My gut is completely unmistakable.

I want to show them a full-on side-view in my undies pic, maybe even seated. My stomach, compared to the rest of me, looks like one of those Highlights “what does not belong in this picture?” puzzles. I’m five feet and an inch or two (depending on which doctor’s office measures me) and not built particularly heavy. Yeah, a size 14 that sits mostly on one’s tummy is pretty freaking fat at that height and build. My body is not put together in a shape that warrants accolades or hell, even an acceptance pass, let alone clothes that fit.

But I want to yell at the whole world (including me) to GET OVER IT. It’s harder when people keep denying it to me like that, as if my experience as a fat person is invalid. Or, like some of the people in my family, who act like it’s such a huge deal and something bad that I MUST FIX AS I AM BROKEN. Either way, it treats my fat like something of great shame. I wish it could just be something that IS, with no qualifiers. Not “you’re fat BUT,” or “you’re fat AND,” just, “you’re fat.” No. Big. Deal.

Maybe someday we’ll get there. Maybe someday.

In the meantime, this is literally the ONLY place I can go where anyone but me wants that or even remotely understands that.

I felt like I’d been slapped.

In spite of being 300 pounds it was a horrific admission for me to say I was “fat” out loud to another person, because to me I was not commenting on my size but on my worth as a human being. When he came back with “I can see you are fat” I was devestated by the thought that it was so obvious that I was such a bad, worthless person!

It took several minutes of me shaking with shame and humiliation to realise that he meant that my size was visible, but not on it’s own an answer to the question, and that he was not commenting on my value ut seeking more information about my motivation.

That was a realy turning point for me in how I felt about being fat: I’ve earned that it is a fair and reasonable adjective when used to describe mass/fat/size – and that the harm comes from linking this one little word to every morally and socially reprehensible stigma.

Now I am able to say that I am fat and only be describing one aspect of my physical appearance, instead of it being a confession of every character flaw… I’m even able to identify what I don’t like about being fat (physical limitations) more honestly and specifically instead of it being a big evil blanket term for all that is less than perfect in me.

Several years later a much happier more confident person. I lost 50 pounds, which means I am still fat, but got me back a lot of mobility.

First of all… and I have to get this part over with, because it’s making me feel nervous to write it… first of all, if you’re fat, I’m fat. I’m a few inches taller than you, but so close in weight and proportion that we could probably wear each other’s clothes. That’s a ‘twin’ part. A ‘reverse’ part is… I’m the one constantly telling myself I’m “not fat”, and, yes, using many of the …rationalizations? Euphemisms? You mention above. I am ‘voluptuous’.. ‘curvy’. Not ‘fat’.

The word challenges me. It really does. I’ve never used it with the idea that it could apply to me… or, well, not recently. Once upon a time, I was 125 pounds, and THEN, yes, then I thought I was fat. At that weight, my weight defined my life, was a label for all my insecurity. It was my biggest problem, the biggest thing looming in my consciousness. I don’t think I was ever more than 125 in that incarnation, but I was terrifed of having the numbers creep up toward 130. Conversely, I thought that if I got below 120, I wouldn’t be ‘fat’ anymore, I wouldn’t have this problem anymore. And, eventually, through a lucky coincidence of falling in love, riding my bike eveyrwhere, and having three jobs and no time for meals, I did become 117 pounds, and then, yes, it was like an enormous weight was lifted (no pun), and I wasn’t fat anymore.

And then, some years later, after… oh, having a baby, after my partner dying, all sorts of life changes.. I ditched the scale, gained about fifty…. 50…. five zero… still can’t believe it… pounds more or less without noticing, and then, for some odd reason, I did not feel myself to be ‘fat’. I felt less fat at 175 lbs than at 125.

I’m still a bit confused about that, you know. Even after all the reading I’ve done here and elsewhere in the past couple of weeks.

I think I developed a weird reverse kind of body dysmorphia. I actually thought I was smaller than I really was… unlike my previous existance where I did the more typical female thing and thought I was way bigger than I was. I don’t know. I think my … gauge… got irredeemably messed up at some point. Or maybe I just want to keep it … vague. Because then I don’t have to say that I’m fat.

But, maybe I AM fat, maybe it is just the most accurate descriptor, and maybe it can be, in my life, a neutral term. I’m not sure. These are all just potentialities to me right now.

A friend said something interesting to me about that one time…. she said that, maybe, all those years that I was around 120 pounds, maybe I was actually (her words) radically underweight. And maybe how I am right now is how I am ‘meant’ to be.

I thought she was just being ridiculously, excessively supportive, and seeing me through rose-colored glasses, as she sometimes tends to do. But could she be right?

It is true that I never ate three full meals when I was that weight. And, in fact, one time I took a nutrition class where I had to write down everything I ate, and I found myself adding things to the list that I hadn’t actually eaten, because … well, because it was ridiculous, otherwise. Ridiculously little, compared to what the nutrition charts said. That’s when I was about 130 pounds, nursing a baby, walking obsessively, and my weight was all in my boobs. I was wearing jeans my 12 year old sister had outgrown. Still, I was 130 pounds. Could I have been underweight, for me, at that weight? Is such a thing possible? That really would prove the ridiculousity of the BMI. (Oh, I’m 5″4, btw.)

And now, after about a decade of scale-ignoring and my own brand of reverse-dysmorphia-denial, I am roughly 180 pounds, a size 14 or, lately, 16, and… well, this is what happened when I started eating …. no, not excessively, just… just the way I always wanted to eat. The way one would eat if weight wasn’t an issue. I went ahead and started doing that, at some mysterious point about ten years ago.

So now I feel like it’s time for my brain to catch up with my body, and you all, and this blog and all the pictures and links and everything in it, are helping. But I realize I’m still more confused and mindblown than I thought I was before I started writing this silly rambling self-indulgent post.

Am I fat? And could ‘fat’ be just my neutral descriptor word, not a problem to be solved, not a put-down, not an obstacle, just the simplest, most accurate description, the shortest path between fact and understanding?

Maybe…

Oh, I had stuff to say about yoga too, but I must stop.. I’ll save it.

Sorry if I’m being annoying. I’m just letting out some of the things that have been percolating around my spinny little mind about this. Two months ago, I had never heard of fat acceptance or HAES or any of it.

And I wanted to say thank you. Thank you, Kate, and everyone else.

This blog does the exact same thing with all my fucked up body image thoughts on a daily basis. You three (and your faithful commenters) flip the world on its head. And for that, I am grateful. Thanks, thanks, thanks. I needed this today.