(She is doing great, by the way! Laughing and joking and hamming it up like she used to. She told me that it’s possible now to look in the mirror and not see a “distorted, fat creature.” She feels hunger regularly. She is beginning to enjoy food again.)

@MissaSoprano: thank you so much for sharing your experiences. I’m so glad for you that you were able to prevent a relapse. Knowing something about the hell my little sister was in for much of last year, I can’t tell you how hearing your doctor-anecdote infuriated me. Thank God my parents were able to find good help for my sister as soon as they found out, despite the fact that she was still on the higher end of the “normal” BMI range. (Which, at that stage in her starvation, was probably mostly due to our familial propensity toward high bone and muscle density, but hey, what good is a handy one-size-fits-all mathematical equation, if you have to take biological variation into account? …Oh. Right.)

Love this place!

One of the ways the Powers that Be block challenges to their power is by dilution and misrepresentation. Global warming, which is human-caused, gets turned into ‘climate change’, which sounds like a natural phenomenon. Everything changes, right?

And driving wedges into the opposition is another classic tactic, so the media picked a few feminists to quote and a few bumper-sticker phrases, ignoring all the context and reasoned arguments, and then got people to believe that the anointed feminist leaders were ignoring all causes except for ‘middle-class white women should get to have jobs’. Which they mostly do, now, so that’s taken care of, right?

The second wave fought for laws and law enforcement to stop men’s violence against women. (In an example of dilution, that term got changed, in the media, to ‘domestic violence’, which uses passive voice to hide the guilt.) Fought to make rape illegal even if he was married to you. Fought for cooking, cleaning, running errands, and child care to be considered valuable (if unpaid) work instead of valueless hobbies.

The second wave, as I read the primary material, was all about identifying systems of power and calling out the entrenched power differentials that treated men as real people and women as toys/props/property. That met with great resistance. A lot of the second wave’s goals (do away with mandatory sexuality and nuclear-family-normativity; make sure everyone can survive in comfort and develop their abilities without constraint; share the work of running households and taking care of the elderly and children equally instead of dumping it on almost-exclusively women) still have not been achieved. But I think they’re good goals. And every time the opposition succeeds in sweeping the previous generation’s work under the rug and making us start from scratch, they set our work back.

You might also try reading a bit of Andrea Dworkin’s work. Don’t read about her; she has been widely misquoted and libelled. Try something by her.

If by classes you mean groups of women, including various marginalised groups: equal pay for equal work does not apply to all classes of women at all.

Is that ok, if it is what I choose?

Maybe… move your elbows occasionally too? For variety? :p Seriously, though, word to what everyone else said. There’s no moral imperative to eat a particular way or do aerobics or whatever, just the consideration of what would be good for *you* to do (or not do.) I lived on packaged tortellini for 2 weeks straight a little while ago (I was veeery busy) and it wasn’t ideal but I didn’t freak out about it — eventually I was just like “I can’t eat another bite of microwaved cheese sauce to save my life” …so I switched to packaged ravioli in tomato sauce (I was still very busy.)

That doesn’t make me a bad person or anything, just one who has circumstances and makes decisions based on those circumstances.

Furthermore, I’m not the authority on FA or HAES or anything, but it doesn’t seem like there is a particular dogma or “pure” eating philosophy you have to adhere to. I’m baby-stepping towards intuitive eating, practicing saying “no” to stuff I don’t really want that much even if my first impulse is to say yes, for example, (or saying “yes” to things that look delicious when my first impulse is a demure “no”) — it’s not 100% intuitive eating yet, obviously, but it’s better than having my first thought be “what does the person offering me food *want* me to say?” and saying that.

Soo… I guess if you aren’t thrilled with your current diet *I* certainly don’t see any problem with pushing yourself to try new things and experimenting a bit, at least. It seems to me that it’s most important to do it in the spirit of finding out what you like rather than doing it as a chore, and then doing what you like once you know it. And if you’re happy with what you eat/do, then if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Rachel, you just blew my mind.

Pre-fucking-cise-ly.

It’s just that whether we’re fat by circumstances and nature, or by choices– we get bitched about it either way because the stupid society we live in just wants us to feel shitty about ourselves.

As it is, no woman is just plain fucking allowed to be happy with her body to begin with. Fat women get 5 million times the crucifixion.

I just want to grab these idiots and ask them “Really now, how does my being fat affect YOU? You don’t live in my body. You don’t make my choices for me, nor should you.”

And if they can even respond, they better not give me the “spiraling healthcare costs” BS– first off, we don’t even live in a country with universal healthcare. Nor am I on Medicaid or Medicare and even if I was, it STILL would be a weak argument. I already mentioned my friend whom although I love her dearly, between a mix of both choices and circumstances she’s in pretty bad shape health-wise and is on three forms of public assistance whereas I’ve never gotten a government check in my life nor been unable to work for that long. But hey, she’s beautiful and a size 6– therefore she must be healthier than the fat girl, right?

That and I pay for my own expenses out of pocket and rarely go to the doctor to begin with, and will probably do so even less now based on how I was treated during my last visit. And ironically, out of my family and close friends, I probably have the best health because of my outlook on life and I take better care of myself than these fat-hating douchehounds give me credit for. I namely attribute it to deep mistrust of the medical industry and refusing to take anything Rx unless I seriously have to.

And besides, my doctor said so– “You’re not unhealthy, you’re just fat.” I could’ve done without the infantalising attitude though.

Regardless, we’re fucking adults who make our own choices and bear the responsibility for them. If I have a high charge card bill, I take responsibility for it and just pay it. If I do poorly on one of my exams in school because I didn’t really study for it, opposed to just not understanding the material or not having a good teacher, I take responsibility for it and accept the lower grade; higher education itself let alone grades don’t dictate intelligence. I don’t play blame games. These morons are looking to do just that: playing blame games to no end. Hey, let’s go blame fat people for our fucking problems!

So let’s just make them feel like shit about themselves, shame them publicly and privately, and push dangerous and controversial products, services, and surgeries that more often than not don’t do shit…because this IS a society based on consumerism; not one of science and learning. And self-hate and shame are two free goods that will keep on producing and reproducing over and over again; they’re every economist’s wet dream.

You’d think that the FTC would crack down on that shit…but big business always wins in the end. Gee, where the “nanny state” complaints for that. Like repealing soda and junk food taxes because they didn’t want to risk losing the big business votes, or pulling out of the states in which they incorporated…it all comes down who can buy their way in.

The way I see it, if someone wants it that bad, they’ll pay the tax. It is one form of regressive taxation I am in favor of (I am usually opposed to them); the laws of economics have proven over and over again that if you want a behavior to decrease then you have to tax and regulate it. And the tax revenue collected could go towards something useful, like more forms of public healthcare options because of how unreliable private insurance is, and perhaps a decrease in income taxes.

But that supposedly makes me fascist for believing such a thing. Well, we all take responsibility for our choices. Now let’s do so without being infantilised for it.