Today I went to an online presence workshop, where the presenter told us that blogs that aren’t updated regularly are “disappointing,” and project a lack of commitment. At least there was free pizza.
When I was in college, I had a very, very skinny roommate. As in, so skinny sometimes I worried that she was unhealthy. If I didn’t watch her load up her food with butter and/or cupfuls of olive oil, I’d have been truly concerned. One day, after I sat down with a plate of something veggie-based for lunch, said roommate tore into me.
“I don’t understand why you are caving in to fascist beauty standards,” she seethed. “Be happy that you’re big! I have total fat envy. I wish I could be fat!”
I just stared at her mutely, munching on my cooking-spray-prepped lunch, realizing that the angry tirade building up behind my eyeballs about how the many things she didn’t know about sizeism and the experience of being a large person could fill multiple pairs of my plus-size jeans probably wouldn’t be particularly useful at the time and place.
All I said, at the time, was: “Beauty standards? Dude, I just want to be healthy.” Or something of the like.
Which brings me to a new phase, yet again. I’m still accepting of my current size, and am reveling in not-writing. It feels absolutely liberating. However, my statement proclaiming a need to regulate my consumption for health purposes no longer boasts that healthy glow of nonspecificity.
Unfortunately, I am at a crossroads. It’s not the same borderline sizeist type crap you read all over the place. I’m not facing diabetes, or a need for bariatric surgery, or what have you. But my problem that I’ve been having for over a year now has not abated, and for all my attempts at conservative treatment, I’ve been told it’s either live with extreme pain or get surgery that might have all sorts of unpleasant (but not life-threatening) complications.
I just don’t feel ready to take that risk. So I’m going to manage the pain with meds, and try my best to self-treat–seriously this time–through nutrition. I have no idea if this will work. But I am too scared of irreparable surgical what-have-you to not at least try to see if I can tame my body into cooperating through cleaner eating and drinking.
I made my own googledoc complete with amusing title so that it won’t feel as serious as “Daily Tracker” or “SQ’s Burdensome Diet List of Doom.” It loosely tracks what I’m eating, so I can see my veggie and fruit balance, and tracks how much water I’ve had, plus whether or not I’ve taken my fiber supplement for the day.
To be honest, sometimes it’s fun to deal with equations. That, and wow, pizza takes a chunk out of my vaguely defined daily total. Maybe I should take off that total, actually. It just seems too much like Dieting.
Part of me fears that this might lead back to obsession over intake. I’m trying to keep this in the frame of not being about weight, or weight loss. It’s just hard, when the associations are so damn strong. I have only been not-dieting for a year, after 14 years of either writing every bite or thinking about how I should be writing. I want to think I can find a way back to homeostasis, hopefully sooner rather than later.
