Fattie, love thyself
I love this article by Laura Beck over at Huffington Post about Kirstie Alley and how she needs to wake up and just come to fat Jesus. Because yes, I can understand how being in the acting biz could be super stressful and make you turn any criticism inward, but at the end of the day Kirstie is just fine the way she is. She has, as Beck notes, a fantastic opportunity to be an inspiration to many fat women out there and show them how to live life as a fat, gorgeous badass, but she's squandering it with all of this self-loathing. Don't be a hater Kirstie!
Holy ow! | Geez America, why can't you be more like your sister Japan?
Posted by CarrieP on March 1, 2010
Man, that was fantastic!
I can feel myself getting some of my lost sanity points back! (The ones lost when she wrote a book subtitled "How to lose your ass and regain your life," or some such twaddle that implied until you are thin, you don't have a life; that fat people are just in some "holding pattern" until the "real" them emerges).
Ha ha, I've been thinking someone needs to stage an intervention with Ms Alley. If reports are to be believed, she's sometimes sounded as if the pressure of trying to be slim is really getting to her.
Which is a shame, because I've always thought of her as better and braver than that. I suppose she still hasn't adjusted to it yet.
It makes me sad to watch the video introduction to Kirstie's show. She is an amazing woman and clearly stuck in the fantasy-of-being-thin (as Kate Harding so eloquently talks about). She still wants to be thin, still clings to the belief that it is possible - and it's not any more possible for her than it is for anyone else.
It reminds me how I felt not so long ago. Sigh. If it were just easier to help people along the acceptance path...
How do people become so obsessed with this thin fantasy garbage? Is there one or even more shining examples out there of well adjusted people where were once OMZFat! and are now somehow so perfectly awesome that we should all bow our heads to their beauty and greatness? Because I haven't seen a single shred of evidence. It makes me sad, but then I just can't be anymore...everyone has their own lives to lead.
"Kind words are short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless." Mother Theresa
I think that when formerly fat people are able to stay thin, the effort of maintaining the weight loss often takes up so much mental space and emotional energy that it becomes hard for them to do much else. But who knows, maybe I'm just basing that on the loudest losers, who are often associated with the weight loss industry. Maybe there are people out there who do it quietly, on their own, and don't let it take over their lives. As far as I know, I've never met one.
You know what's full of beauty and greatness? Fat people who refuse to be shamed and dumped on by society.
DeeLeigh -- It's a boiling frog thing, I believe. When people first lose weight, they're passionate and enthusiastic and don't mind the commitment of time and mental real estate. The gushing we see at the end of Biggest Loser is real. They really do think they are "new" people and are so happy to have "taken control" of their lives and bodies. They are proud of spending two hours a day (or more) at the gym. They enjoy that time, even. They are delighted to plan their every bite, and to show you how you may too. This is real and uncynical on their part.
Slowly, however, the water heats as the passion fades (and this coincides with a decline in the praise and encouragement they have enjoyed during the weight-loss phase). As the passion fades, their volume and "enthusiasm" for promoting weight loss may, oddly, increase. They are fighting to re-energize, get their passion back (it looks a lot like Kim Benson in the video featured in the "Is it okay to be fat?" thread). Essentially, the subtext is, "I'm saying this loudly and passionately in order to convince myself as much as I'm trying to convince you."
Our society really has no model for quietly maintaining weight loss, because there is no honest road map. There's only jargon, such as "healthy lifestyle." Presumably there is some "lifestyle" that maintains a "healthy weight." But this starts to feel like a lie when you have to ask yourself whether it is "healthy" to exercise till your joints fail in order to maintain a particular weight? Is it "healthy" if you miss an important conversation point, because you were mentally counting the calories in an appetizer you just popped in your mouth? Instead of asking weighty questions, for a while it is easier to adopt the jargon and join the fray. For a while (months or more), people do not think you are tedious doing this.
It is a rude surprise one day to discover you are NOT a "new" person, who has "taken control." You cannot let up, not even a little bit. You cannot take a rejuvenating vacation (even a few days) from exercise, as the naturally trim gym rats can, without suffering weight consequences. And weight regained doesn't "come right off" as the know-it-alls love to pontificate. Weight regained from below your body's natural weight range requires Herculean effort to relose.
The water is boiling when you recognize that you are still a fat person who merely doesn't look fat because you live a life that is radically more active than most people's and you are radically more scrupulous about the quantity and quality of the food you eat than most people. You suddenly realize you are not in "control"; your weight loss maintenance has taken control of you. For a while you try to convince yourself and others that this is "healthy," this is what you have always wanted.
Your choice: stay in the water and keep up the regimen, acknowledging that it may be obsessive or disordered, or jump out of the water. But if you do jump, if you live a more relaxed life, even one that is genuinely "healthy," you may be sure that it will lead to regaining the weight -- all of it. It is not my experience that people go on diets expecting to "go back to their old ways," as the pontificators say. Most dieters enter with the best of intentions -- to live "new" lives forever. And when they relax their diets and moderate their exercise, they still try nobly to be healthier than they were in their fat days, but the physical evidence defies them.
Many people pooh-pooh the idea of set point, but I think it's amazing that most people's body will almost magically return you to their former weight (sometimes plus about ten pounds) then, just as magically, it stops.
Sadly, at this point, society shakes its head -- she's "let herself go," they say.
Truer words were never spoken, Dee, than yours: "You know what's full of beauty and greatness? Fat people who refuse to be shamed." (They can't stop the dumping itself, I'm afraid.)
Kirstie Alley wont be seeing the light anytime soon. She has her own line of diet food now. She was on teh Oprah giving it a kick off.
I suspect you're right, Oprah's another one who cannot get off the diet trip, or should I say cannot break the investment she's made in 'controlling' her weight, like anorexics have been telling us about for donkey's years.
She and Oprah make quite a pair of co dependent enabling delusionists.
Oprah. What a missed opportunity. She could be doing so much to change the cultural attitudes toward fat people, and instead she reinforces them. She's a poster child for yo-yo dieting. I hope that some of her viewers can see how she's fine the way she is naturally, and how her preoccupation with her weight diminishes her, personally. (And not always literally)