I’m not so crazed by mainstream norms that I’ve done a Lindsay Lohan.
This week, I reached my Weight Watchers goal weight. I’ve lost 40.7 pounds since July.
Last Christmas, after an extremely ill-considered decision to weigh myself in the bathroom while visiting relatives, I resolved that the grad school pound-packing had gone on long enough, and by god I was going to do something about it. I started going to the gym in January, and in the next couple of months I lost about 10 pounds, and converted some weight into muscle, but then I pretty much plateaued.
Then, in July, in the throes of desperate prelim studying, I signed up for Online Weight Watchers. I’d been reading Jeremy’s posts about it for awhile, and it was working well for him, and several other sociologists had gone on it, too.
I’d been resisting the whole idea of a “diet” for some time. This is sort of ridiculous, since the answer to the question “How did I gain so much weight?!” seems to be pretty obviously a combination of having moved somewhere where I did less walking, and, also, eating huge amounts of spaghetti and cheese, not to mention all the beer. So yeah, exercise helped, but it could only go so far.
One reason I waited so long to do something about my weight gain, even just going to the gym, was just good old fear of failure: what if I try to lose weight and I can’t, then I’ll be a big fat FAILURE… I do think a big part of my success with Weight Watchers was my natural fear of failure/competitive streak, not that I was actually competing against anybody in particular, but it helped to have the online tools (especially the points tracker) and the accountability of having to log my weight every week.* It’s definitely a good feeling to have taken control of my weight; I don’t feel like it’s some mysterious external thing that just somehow happened to me anymore.
But the main problem was really in the whole cultural concept of the “diet,” and why people do them, and what they mean. It’s bad enough to live in a mainstream culture that constantly bombards you with images of tiny, preadolescent boy-looking stick women as the physical ideal (despite the fact that none of us can imagine finding Lindsay Lohan more attractive in her present famine victim mode than when she had, like, breasts). But when you move in social circles that are, for the most part, consciously opposed to those norms, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Being fat is a moral failing in the United States. Just like people who are poor, people who are fat have no one but themselves to blame. Moral people are not fat. And for a large subsection of the population, there’s the added complication that if you take steps to lose or maintain your weight, then you are vain or stupid or need your consciousness raised. So you end up feeling like good people aren’t fat, but good people don’t DO anything to control their weight, either, so if you were a good person, you wouldn’t be fat. But you are. So apparently you’re a lousy person, what are you gonna do. It doesn’t seem to matter that there are real health risks and problems associated with being overweight; the default assumption is that women only want to lose weight because they are slaves to the patriarchy.
I think it’s easier to lose weight if you’re a man–metabolically, perhaps; socially, definitely. People don’t assume that you’re some kind of hysterically vain fashion victim. And of course, being fat is less of a stigma for men than it is for women, I don’t think there’s any question about that. But it seems unfair that men are allowed to lose weight for health reasons and women are always, first and foremost, just “obsessed with weight.” My mother is a type two diabetic; it was not good for me to be obese according to the BMI website, which I was last Christmas.**
Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty vain. I’m wearing clothes that show off my lower back tattoo for the first time in over a year, and I’m enjoying it. (I am not enjoying being a nominally weird bra size now, but only because it is so hard to find bras in my new size that are not deathly dull.) I will even be posting a picture below from the last sociology karaoke a few weeks ago–sadly you can’t see my lower back tattoo in it, but the important thing is: I look good.
And I’m happy about that. Why shouldn’t I be? I’m not so crazed by mainstream norms that I’ve done a Lindsay Lohan. I don’t WANT to lose my breasts. I saw a woman at the gym the other day who I suspect probably was anorexic, and it was sobering–stick-like arms, face hanging. She was probably my age or younger, but she looked old. Obviously there are real problems in the world directly tied to how we think about bodies, and what gets presented as ideal. But those aren’t my ideals. I just wanted to look like I used to look before I got old and lazy and tired and sat on my ass reading theory all the time, except with more muscles (which I also have now–you should feel my bicep some time).
People rarely bring up my weight loss to me directly–and I know there are lots of reasons for that, and people don’t want to offend, and I can appreciate that, although god knows I didn’t lose 50 pounds in total this year just to hide my butt under a bushel. And they certainly do notice, and in fact sometimes comment on it to others, who sometimes report back to me.*** And those comments are all positive, although of course people are less likely to tell me if others are talking trash about me, I know.
I have a friend who said that she thought it was insidious how people say “You look great!” when they mean “You’ve lost weight!” I don’t know. As noted, I feel like I’ve put a lot of work into losing weight AND getting in better shape, and I do think I look better, and I appreciate it when people indicate that they’ve noticed. And it seems to be a much more delicate thing, to actually say, “You’ve lost weight.” So I agree, there are norms about what looks good in a woman at work here, and I’m definitely not arguing that you should be “skinny” to look good (and I can prove it with my woman-dating history, too), but there’s also the touchiness of the whole subject. It’s complicated.
Anyway, I just wanted to get all that out there. Here I am at karaoke:
I think that’s Michelle darting behind me to put in more songs. It was a good night.
—
*I definitely think you can take this too far. I did the online version specifically so that I wouldn’t have to go to meetings with strangers. Ew.
**I know there are problems with the BMI, but it’s not like much of that weight was muscle or anything.
***If anyone has recently commented to you about my weight loss, you should report back to me, because it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
December 17th, 2005 at 9:17 am
The avoidance of commenting on weight-loss seems to me to stem from what you’ve already commented on, that your weight is somehow linked to the type of person you are and your worth as a person. A good example of it is years ago, when Oprah first lost a lot of weight, some of her over-weight fans became angry at her for abandoning them. She was no longer “one of us” she was “one of them”, no longer understanding or sympathetic to those people. But she was still the same person, obviously, but she’d lost her acceptance into that club when she lost her weight.
The reverse is true for you. Where Oprah had acceptance for being over-weight you were suddenly acceptable to the person who hit on you after you’d lost weight. I’m sure you remember what I’m talking about (I hope HTML tags work in this thing).
I can completely understand how you feel. I was teased in highschool for being a freak and years later I hadn’t changed all that much but suddenly one of the girls who had teased me decided that whatever I was, was now acceptable and she hit on me. There was a period of time where I began to question the loyalties of people who I’d met since. Do these people like me or do they like me because being “freaky” is now mainstream? Should I bother giving people a chance if they wouldn’t accept me if I was something else?
I’m sure a lot of people go through the same thing. So the issue seems to be people’s inability to think of people existing in the same frame of mind once their bodies have been drastically altered.
I guess saying “Hey, you’ve lost weight and you look good!” may make people uncomfortable because acknowledging that you’ve changed and praising that may be like admitting that this new person who is disassociated from the old person is better. But people are intelligent enough to understand that some part of the old person still exists. And yet, it’s hard for people to grasp. Maybe all this talk on weight-loss commercials of “a new way of life” makes people believe that they’ve got some kind of Stepford Wife in place of the original.
If you will remember, when you first started this diet thing I told you that I would be happy for you no matter what you did as long as you were healthy and happy. I meant that. But you’re still the same person I’ve always known. The only thing about your weight-loss that matters to me is that it makes you happy. I would still like and respect you if you hadn’t lost the weight. So you can’t exist as a Stepford-Cabell in my mind because I know you’re the same person. So good for you for losing the weight.
I suppose I could have over-complicated the reasons though. If you look at it another way “Hey you lost weight and you look good” could also make people feel like they’re saying “You were fat before and you didn’t look good”. Which is probably not the case for most people, but polite people would avoid even that implication. Or maybe it’s both. I prefer the argument that involves robot/clone women, ideals and images of skinny little things in aprons and such, dammit! :p
December 19th, 2005 at 9:55 am
HOT
December 19th, 2005 at 10:05 am
Wow, Matt, that could have been your own blog entry. :p It’s true that people who avoid complimenting weight loss are probably at least partially motivated by a desire not to imply that I used to be hideous, as is supported by the formulation of many compliments I do receive, i.e. “Not that you didn’t look good before,” or “You look even better!”
The Oprah example is interesting, and I think it does apply here–it’s almost like you lose feminist credibility when you lose weight, in some circles.
Ian: Um, thanks. :p
December 21st, 2005 at 4:08 pm
Cabell, in case I haven’t said it bluntly - your weight loss is amazing and has made you look even better than you looked before (see, it really is one of those I-don’t-want-to-imply-that-you-used-to-look-hideous things). I find it incredibly motivational and WW should use you as a role model for the online thing (which is also the only way I could imagine doing it) Congratulations. Anything that has made you so happy (and isn’t illeagal…) makes me happy for you.
=)
Andrea