What holds you back from reaching weight loss goals? Why is it easy to start diet or exercise regimens, yet so hard to maintain them? For me, part of it is because when I got close to where I thought I wanted to be, I looked around and realized that the grass was not as green on the other side as I'd expected. And that can be demoralizing. "I did all of X, Y, Z, and still A and B haven't changed?"

Following the path to happiness through weight loss. Is there any bigger fairy tale fantasy out there?

I bought in to the Fantasy of Being Thin from an early age. It's an idea I'm working hard to let go of, with some difficulty, because no matter how rational or logical I try to be about it, the idea that being thin or losing weight is the solution to all your problems is reinforced left, right, and centre. See, we're sold on the idea that life will begin when. You will be good enough, worthy enough, WHEN. When you lose enough weight. When you are thin enough. When you are strong enough, healthy enough, fit enough. So, weight loss and/or the body becomes the focus, and if that happens, you often tend to put your life on hold. Waiting. Just waiting until.

Weight Stigma is about buying the magic beans. Believing that, if you can just lose enough weight, you'll climb your beanstalk to find whatever it is you're lacking. Happiness, love, acceptance, health, money, fame, revenge. So, you work and you work, and you climb that beanstalk, and all you find is yourself, in the clouds. Without having enjoyed the view on the way up, at all.

It is a pervasive sentiment. And it's not just in the obvious places like media or industries which stand to profit from people feeling bad about themselves. It's, well, everywhere. In fact, years ago when I was in counselling - clearly talking about body image as a direct connection to low (damn near non-existent) self esteem - the therapist suggested that perhaps I would be happier if I lost some weight. Yeah. This happens in real life. The fantasy was reinforced by a professional: the key to accepting yourself is ... to change yourself? "Most healthcare providers and therapists want nothing more than to relieve suffering and enhance the health of our patients.  Both patient and provider may think the obvious solution is to try to leave the stigmatized group and try to lose weight. But participating in the illusion that weight loss is possible, desirable, and the only way to have a good life, is to perpetrate weight stigma." 

The topic of Weight Stigma and Psychotherapy was addressed as part of Weight Stigma Awareness Week. The article called "Surprises when you venture off the eating disorders island" is about how so deeply ingrained the belief is that weight loss leads to happiness, that even well-trained psychotherapists recommend it, despite evidence that such a suggestion (or judgement) has the opposite effect. In other words, the fairy tale is retold; the therapist is selling magic beans.

And, I think, buying in to this fantasy that weight loss is the solution to all of life's problems leads to self-sabotage. I mean, there are lots of reasons that we take ourselves down, when we go against what we think we really want. (It's called cognitive dissonance, and I've written about it before). Maybe it's an esteem or confidence issue, when you really think you're not good enough. But, more often, I think it's because we have internalized a message that is so ubiquitous that it is reinforced and repeated in all areas of our lives: that getting thin is the answer. What happens when you get there, or when it becomes within view, and you all of a sudden realize that it is NOT the answer to all of life's problems? It's only the answer to some health issues.

One of the best pieces I've come across that helps me to combat those kinds of suggestions, one I go back to often, is Kate Harding's post on The Fantasy of Being Thin. It's what I need to remind myself of often. It's even more honest than the generic "love your body, love yourself" message that abounds in marketing campaigns and women's magazines. She lays it on the line: focusing on weight loss as the answer to life's problems (ie: the things we don't like about ourselves) only masks those problems. 
"All of those concrete things you’ve been putting off? Just fucking do them, now, because this IS your life,
happening as we speak. But exhortations like that don’t take into account magical thinking about thinness, which I suspect  is really quite common. Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, “When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit”; it’s "When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.”
Changing your weight in the hopes of changing your identity? Doesn't work. It's magical thinking at its beanstalk best. Or worst, really.

So, self-acceptance - acknowledging who you REALLY are, and what you REALLY want - is more than body acceptance, even though the two often intersect. And this is a hard pill to swallow. The magic beans of "change your weight, change your identity," where all your hopes are pinned on weight loss, they're much more palatable. Because, when you buy the magic beans, you don't have to examine your true self.

There are some things about me that aren't going to change, no matter what size I am. Losing weight will not make me any better at math. Being thin isn't going to magically make me more creative than I already am. Gaining weight isn't going to make me any less pragmatic, or funny, or caring, or control-freak-ish. The things I like about myself? They exist at every weight. So, too, will the things I don't like about myself. Rather than putting all of my eggs into the "lose weight, feel better" basket, I'm trying to separate out the things that I can change from the things that I can't, and work on getting healthy only for the sake of health. This yellow-brick-road journey is long, but worth it.

A huge part of health and fitness, to me, is working on letting go of the idea that losing weight will somehow change you into someone you're not already, and on accepting who you are right at this moment. Frankly, it's the reason I insist on getting pictures of myself doing active, fun, adventurous things. I still don't love how I look in them, but I need the proof, the reminders, that I summited a mountain, went rock climbing, white water rafted, worked at camp, travelled the world, and I did it while being varying degrees of fat. That comes directly from having read The Fantasy of Being Thin. Not waiting until the end of my weight loss journey for my life to start.

Is something holding YOU back? What Fantasy have you bought into, that thing that you're waiting until, before you feel whole? What's at the top of your imaginary beanstalk? Because, if it's keeping you stuck where you are, it may be time to chop that thing down.

Taking ownership over your own actions and not playing the victim, it's a little bit like throwing away the magic beans, picking up a rake and a hoe, and tending to the garden you have.

Given how much I write about body and beauty image, it should come as no surprise that I'm no fan of beauty pageants. I don't care how you defend them, or whether there are similar competitions for men, to me they're just gross. Based solely on looks, and a pretty racist and narrow standard of beauty, you can't convince me that there is any kind of skill or talent truly involved in someone winning such a pageant. At least bodybuilding requires a ton of effort and physical tranformation, and it's the most comparable looks-based kind of competition I can think of. Beauty pageants reward people who have already won the genetic lottery. What's the point?

So, when John Oliver tackled the topic, you can imagine the little happy dance I did. Not only did he say what I've been wondering for years (it's 2014, "how the fuck is this still happening?"), he went further and targeted the usual defenses made in favour of the pageant. The scholarships, the 20-second interview with ridiculously complex questions, the "inexplicable ventriloquism."

Watch as what probably started out as a snarky puff-piece turns into some incredible investigative reporting about how much scholarship money actually gets awarded by Miss America.

Miss America markets itself heavily as a scholarship pageant.

John Oliver: "Right. Yeah. Right. You need to see them in bathing suits because as we all know, the intelligence portion of the brain is located somewhere on the upper thigh. In fact, Miss America trades on their scholarship claims so much, if you call the Miss America headquarters, this is what you hear: Thank you for calling the Miss America Organization, the world's largest provider of scholarships for women. If it is actually true that Miss America is the world's largest provider of scholarships for women, that's a little bit weird, because Miss America does not offer scholarships to all women, only those who compete in its pageants. So to qualify for a scholarship, you'll need to certify not just that you've never been married, but also that you are not now pregnant and never have been, which of course makes sense. Miss America is supposed to be a role model for children. How can she be that if she's got a child in tow who's constantly looking up to her? And those are just the official rules you need to abide by. If you want a shot at winning one of their scholarships, you're also going to need access to a can of butt glue, a spray adhesive essential for keeping those bikini bottoms on their bottoms."

It's 2014. It's hard to believe that something as outdated and misogynistic and purely beauty-based is still going on. It's hard to believe that they can claim to provide $45 Million in scholarships when it's actually $500,000 directly, maybe $4 Million indirectly. But thank goodness for guys like John Oliver who are willing to go to great investigative lengths to point out the absurdity of it all.

"Miss America gives out way less than 45 million dollars in scholarships and yet, whatever the number is, one thing does still seem to be troublingly true. The Miss America Organization IS actually the largest provider
of scholarships to women in the world. Yeah, because even their lowest number is more than any other women-only scholarship that we could find, more than the Society of Women Engineers whose website is here, more than the Patsy Mink Foundation here, and more than the Jeanette Rankin Women's Scholarship Fund here, all of which you can donate to if you want to change the fact that currently the biggest scholarship program exclusively for women in America requires you to be unmarried with a mint condition uterus and also rewards working knowledge of buttock adhesive technology, which is just a little bit unsettling."

I got an email from CRC Health Group, "a national behavioral health care company. CRC recently created a graphic which I believe helps to illustrate "almost" anorexia. I thought I would send this over to you in case you felt your readers would benefit from it. A copy of the graphic is embedded which you are free to publish as you see fit. Thanks for your time and all that you do to educate your readers about eating disorders."

Well. This is kind of cool. The information is coming to ME, now.

While Anorexia has not been part of my own journey or Binge Eating experience, I'm obviously pretty aware of the complexities of eating disorders, and even how some symptoms and behaviours can have cross-over between the official diagnoses. In fact, I've already written about the prevalence of "almost" disorders, because when those are factored in, it makes one ask "is disordered eating the new normal?"

This graphic is based on a book by Jenni Schaefer, called Almost Anorexic.

From the CRC Health website:
We created the above infographic to generate awareness about a phenomenon that recently came to our attention called “almost anorexic.” There are a lot of gray areas around the diagnosis and treatment of anorexia(and all eating disorders), and these disorders are becoming more prevalent in the United States (and around the world).

While only 1 in 200 adults meet the clinical diagnosis of anorexia, 1 in 20 people meet the criteria to be considered almost anorexic. The percentage is much higher for teen girls.  Since eating disorders are among the deadliest of all mental disorders, our treatment community is urgently reaching out to improve awareness about the symptoms and warning signs of anorexia.

Awareness and information is crucial and can save lives. It's not just the librarian in me saying that. If you see yourself or a loved one in these descriptions, check out crchealth.com for suggestions on how to find help.

Ruh Roh. There's a horrifying monster terrifying kids in the latest Scooby Doo movie: a fat Daphne.

In Scooby Doo! Frankencreepy, the newest movie just released, each member of the gang gets cursed. And Daphne, the supermodel-thin "pretty one" goes from a size 2 to a size 8. She doesn't grow fangs, or tentacles, or get warts in weird places. Her skin doesn't ooze or change colour. Nope. In order to make her transform into the most horrifying thing she can imagine, Warner Brothers made her fat. Size 8.

Should I even bother to point out that the average woman is a size 12 these days? Or that those of us who are truly overweight are fighting like hell to ever SEE a size 8? Or that their version of Daphne going up 4 sizes actually makes her look like a size 26? Setting aside the fact that the animators clearly have no concept of sizes, what seems to be the most problematic is Daphne's reaction to her change. She looks in the mirror and recoils in horror.

Full disclaimer: I haven't seen the movie. It was just released this week. But, in case you think "what's the big deal, it's just a direct-to-DVD kids' release" I can tell you what I know about Scooby Doo movies. They're popular. Insanely so. We are routinely pulling them for our holds list at the library, including from our holiday collection. Kids and parents don't care if they're watching a Christmas or Easter or Hallowe'en-specific version if it's the only one available. We have a lot of copies and versions and still people are hard-pressed to find a Scooby Doo on the shelf when they come in to the library, because they circulate so much. Of the 9 copies of Frankencreepy that the library has, 7 are currently out or on hold. The paperback book version of the movie is on order. It's popular. It's going to be seen.

It's going to be seen by both little girls and little boys. For the girls, it will reinforce that getting fat is just about the worst thing that can happen to you. For the boys, it will reinforce that fat girls are monsters, and that if your worst fear is to become ugly, then it means you'll be fat. Are there really no other ways in which someone could be ugly? Is fat always going to be equated with ugliness?

I was alerted to this specific example of fat shaming via the Dances With Fat blog post, Scooby Dooby Don't. She does a great breakdown of the various issues. An even better analysis is at The Good Men Project. They both point out the problems with the movie itself, and Warner Brothers' response to public outrage. (Outrage which hasn't been overly loud, but it's there in Amazon reviews, and IMDB. People noticed right away, enough that they had to issue a statement).

Not only is Warner Brothers defending the movie and claiming that they are sensitive to obesity and self image, in their statement they actually perpetuate some rather gross gender gaffes. The defense of "but her boyfriend, Fred, doesn't even notice the difference" is meant to be charming and heart-warming. I can see how it may be, if her friends truly see her and not just her appearance. Dances With Fat offers a different interpretation:

"Another great lesson girls, if you want to know if you’re ok – ask a boy. You should always judge yourself by whether or not boys think you’re attractive. If the way you look changes substantially – even instantaneously – you should not be creeped out if that boy says that he didn’t notice.  All that matters is if he thinks you’re pretty. (Boys, girls should base their self-worth on what you think of them!)"

I don't really know what the creators were thinking, but an animated movie like this is not made by a small group of people. It had to then pass through Standards and Practices. That means that a LOT of people saw it and nobody questioned the messages that were being sent by making Daphne a caricature of morbid obesity and calling it Size 8. Nobody thought about the potential impact on their target audience, or the people buying the movie.

“Fat Daphne” is drawn like she’s Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka, like she’s puffed up like a balloon. You know, like all of those horribly misshapen size-eight freaks out there in the real world, those social outcasts who are forced to live their lives like… normal women. Like professionals and artists and aunts and sisters and mothers WHO BUY THEIR CHILDREN SCOOBY DOO DVDs. [The creators] said “How can we make Daphne into something truly ugly? How can we make her the opposite of pretty?” And their answer was… let’s make her overweight. Let’s make her look like people’s friends and sisters and moms. Let’s make her look, not like a supermodel, but rather more like a normal girl you’d see on a normal street, and then let’s have her look in a mirror and RECOIL IN HORROR, just to make sure that all the kids watching at home know that being fat makes you into a monster.

This is the sort of example of fat shaming that will get briefly discussed in small circles and then dismissed. The movie will prosper, circulate, and be purchased. It's not going to traumatize kids directly, or scare the pants off of them the way some of the monsters and villains might. No, it will have a much more passive impact. Kids and adults will see it and think little of it, because it's so in line with what we already believe: that fat is bad, and ugly is the same as being overweight, and it doesn't matter anyway as long as your boyfriend doesn't notice and still thinks you're pretty. They'll internalize it. They'll accept it. Because they already see it everywhere else, this movie just reinforces the message.

And that's the most horrifyingly scary plot line of all.

Tosca Reno is singin' my song, in a recent Huffington Post article called "The Pornographication of Fitness needs to stop." Reno is the queen of Clean Eating, and is currently promoting a sugar detox with a Strike Sugar Challenge. But this article speaks to a much more balanced approach to fitness than what she has experienced from the belly of the beast. (Pun intended). She has been a "bikini girl, clad in what was essentially panties and bra, standing on a fitness booth, hawking fitness gear and the lifestyle, exposing my well-toned thighs and abdomen to the general public." And from her inside vantage point, fitness was far more about sex than it was about strength or health.

Mat and I have disagreed about how motivating or negative "fitspiration" can be. I see it as using highly sexualized images of women to promote fitness, often with quotes attached which seem motivating until you deconstruct what they're really saying. He sees it from the body builder's perspective, because he knows how hard the people in the photos have worked to get themselves to fitness-model levels of preparedness. Tosca Reno's argument about how fitness is portrayed in the media covers both angles, addressing head-on the issue of making fitness into something sexual. 

Gazing at images of caricatured breasts, buttocks and biceps gives you the impression this is how a fit body should look, that every fit body needs to be shaped in the same vein. Fitness magazines use exactly these images to "inspire" women to look this way. Yet most of us can't identify with what we are looking at because we don't believe ordinary us could ever be them.

What we don't realize is that when we are looking at the faces and bodies of women in these physique magazines, is that most of them have dieted for months to look that way. Or most of them are just days prior to a contest where they have put themselves through rigorous training and dieting to get lean enough.  Or they have just competed and won't look the same in a few days time.

In other words, she is acknowledging both Mat's view and mine: those bodies were hard-earned. They are not fake, they are real people. AND they are simultaneously not realistic expectations, even for the women who live in those bodies, because they represent one very specific moment in time. A moment which is often well lit, professionally photographed, perfectly posed and positioned, and oiled to highlight every bulge and fibre line. When those women take off the high heels, go home and relax hours later, do they even look as fit or as buff as they do in the photos? Yet these are the images that are ubiquitously used for inspiration.

Perhaps from my vantage point of 55 years of age, one willingly accepts that there is more to fitness than pornography. Somehow the butt-baring image just doesn't work after a time. So what then is the new direction of fitness? If you ask me, the key to fitness is being able to move your body in the way it was meant to move.

It means you can run, jump, swim, play, bend, walk and lift with all parts of your body from joints, muscles and bones to hands and feet, all body parts working in unison. It means that if you had to run 5K to get away from danger, if you had to swim for 20 minutes to save yourself in a flood, if you had to lift a heavy weight out of the way to free yourself, something or someone else, you could do it. 

The new fitness trend is not about prostituting yourself but about doing the hard work measured in reps, sets and sweat to create a body, an entire organism engineered to sustain itself in this brave new world. It means you can help yourself -- not be dependent on someone else. It means you train differently, think intelligently, respect powerfully, sensing a new strength in yourself that comes not from the desire to have a cutie booty but a strong one that can move when it has to, along with the rest of the magnificent machine called YOU. 

Being fit in a functional rather than sexual way means you are entirely capable of being powerful no matter what your height, bust size, shoe size or hair color. You are empowered from the depths of your DNA because you did the work, you earned your place and you walk confidently because of it. A functionally fit You welcomes all sizes, shapes and colors, your boobs and butt are incidental.  What we really need to build in the gym is a sense of self and what we are capable of. Believe it!

She concludes that the pursuit of sexiness stops being important. Her definition of fitness - something functional, based on what your body can do - is in line with what I'm trying hard to believe 100% of the time. I believe it about 85% ... but when I am surrounded by so many images of sexiness, it's hard not to aspire to look like them. It's the 15% of me that still buys in to fitness-as-synonym-for-sex that stands up and applauds Tosca Reno for voicing her philosophy so eloquently.

I've been mulling over how to write about the dichotomy between finding balance and losing weight. What I've been stuck on is the angle from which to approach the topic. Can I re-lose the weight I've put back on, and continue to lose, while still aiming for a balanced approach to health?

It doesn't feel like it. And I wasn't sure why. But I think it's because for binge eaters, there IS no balance. Just as an alcoholic can't have "just one drink", there are some foods which I can't have just a little of. There is no such thing as "just one bite" when you're not able to stop, so cheat meals or occasional indulgences don't work the way they do for most people. Which, y'know, could be fine except that I can't stop eating altogether and go "dry" to sober up.

But maybe I'm not as alone as I thought. Diet talk is everywhere. Mixed messages are everywhere. Confusion is, well, everywhere. An article I've been holding on to brought the point to the forefront: Diet talk has become inescapable. "Many of the behaviors that today’s diet books and food trends promote are straight out of the DSM Diagnostic Criteria for Eating Disorders. Preoccupation with food and eating, making excuses for not eating, elimination of large categories of food, rigid food rules and rituals, guilt and shame associated with food and eating, avoidance of social activities because of anxiety about food, isolating oneself from friends and loved ones because of dietary ideology, the list goes on. These are not normal or healthy behaviors, they are hallmarks of disordered eating, and they are PROMOTED in diet books and blogs and between friends, with distressing and escalating regularity."
She concludes that we are, as a culture, developing a collective eating disorder. What started as a desire to improve the quality of our diets has turned into a national obsession.

It makes it pretty difficult to distinguish between truly disordered eating habits, and healthy habits. Where do you draw the line? How do we recognize in ourselves or others when it has become a problem? Another recent article attempts to shed light on "the most common eating disorder you've never heard of." The problem is that they've taken the designation of Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder - which is a catch-all category used to diagnose anything other than anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder - and called it "the most common." That part doesn't make sense, but what is striking from the article are the statistics. It sheds light on how many people fall on the eating disorder spectrum. Most often, the focus is only on those who are at the farthest end.

Consider some of these statistics:

• One in 68 adults will develop clinical anorexia, bulimia, or binge eating disorder, but at least one in 20 have demonstrated symptoms of these disorders.
• 74.5 percent of women said concerns related to shape and weight interfered with their happiness.
• In one study on adolescent boys and young men, 17.9 percent reported becoming “extremely concerned” with their weight and physique by adulthood.
• One in 20 adults exhibits symptoms of an eating disorder, and the prevalence of dieting and disordered eating behaviors among male and female young adults is particularly high.
• Among women ages 25 to 45 without a history of anorexia nervosa or binge eating, 31 percent reported having purged as a means of weight control.

Dieting and poor body image don't mean you have an eating disorder. But your behaviour doesn't have to be extreme in order to have one, either. The best way to consider whether there's a problem to address is to ask whether your relationship with food, shape, and weight is truly interfering with your life. Ultimately “the main feature that cuts across all eating disorders… is feeling like your shape and weight is one of the most important factors that determines how worthwhile you are as a person,” Dr. Thomas says.

When I lived out west, I met the clinical criteria for Binge Eating Disorder: "eating much more rapidly than normal; eating until feeling uncomfortably full; eating large amounts of food when not feeling physically hungry; eating alone because of being embarrassed by how much one is eating; feeling disgusted with oneself, depressed, or very guilty after overeating; a sense of lack of control over eating during the episode; at least two days a week for six months."

I no longer meet that criteria. The work I've been doing, on my own, with Mat, with doctors, by blogging, has helped tremendously. But I will probably always call myself a binge eater. I don't know what "recovery" looks like, or if there is such a thing. I really do think of it in terms of an alcoholic. It's always going to be there, under the surface. As evidenced by this weekend's near-binge, moments of relapse can happen without warning, at times that aren't obvious. That's kind of scary to me.

Which brings me back to my conundrum. All-or-nothing thinking is a big part of the problem that got me into this mess in the first place. If I can't be perfect at eating all the time, why bother? If I mess up a diet, then I give in and go overboard the other way. If I'm not good at an activity right away, then I must not be able to do it at all. You see where I'm going with this? All-or-Nothing is the hallmark of a lot of eating disorders. That's why I'm striving for balance. And, yet, I'm not sure that balance is really, truly, possible when it comes to eating. There ARE whole categories of foods I have to mentally eliminate and take off the table. I DO need to track what I'm eating and weigh myself and account for it all. There still is fear, for me, around food: there's something "bad" about everything, so nothing feels "safe"! And certain foods will likely always be triggers. Not exactly the definition of balanced.

It tells me that there's still a long way to go. But also that it's possible and there is hope, even if that hope is to inch along the spectrum back towards the middle. I think I believed that I could jump from one end to the other - all-or-nothing - and that it could be like flicking a switch. Make the lifestyle changes, lose weight, get into shape, you're done, move on. It's not like that, at all. I don't know why I thought it would be. Like much of the population, I'm living in the grey areas, the always moving grey areas between the ends of the disordered eating spectrum.

When 1 out of 20 are also living there, at least I know I'm in good company.

Warning: rant ahead.

People need to learn to keep unsolicited opinions to themselves. Mutually-agreed-upon diet talk among friends is one thing, and even then should be kept to a minimum. But it's been awhile since I've had relative strangers make comments and assumptions about my body, and I forgot just how much it sucks.

When you work with the public, you never know what they're gonna say. I usually take it in stride, even when it's personal, because they don't really know me. Except for when they do. Some of our regulars DO know me a little bit. One lady brings the kids she babysits to my weekly story times and always wants to diet talk, usually right as I'm setting up and in front of the kids. I do my best to shut her down. She shames other staff who don't actively diet or exercise, and tells them all about what she does, but because I am able to say "why yes, I do work out" and she could see that I had lost weight, I just got the chitter chatter, I didn't get the shame.

Until today.

I was walking on my rounds, and she saw me, waved me over, started yammering about nothing that I cared about. I was trying to politely extract myself from the conversation because I was on my lunch break, and she was going on and on about which kind of bagels and bread her kids will eat, and how she prepares her spaghetti sauce, and how many calories in her brand of yogurt, when she looks at my belly and says, "so, you've quit the diet and exercise, eh?"

My jaw clenched.
Pretty sure my face went beet red.
"No," I snapped. "Still going to the gym. Every day. Bitch."
Okay, the "bitch" was silent, in my head, but I really wanted to say it.

Because body shame sucks, and it should never be okay to comment on people's bodies, and only assholes assume things about people, and unsolicited diet talk is never ever acceptable. If I hadn't been at work, if I didn't only know this lady in a professional capacity, I'd have likely launched into a "you can be fit and fat, you know" tirade or try to school her on why my weight loss has stalled and gone back up, or why it's none of her fucking business anyway. But I didn't. I clenched my smile, said, "well, I have to keep going" and got the hell out of there.

The worst of it is, I let her. I let her get away with it, and I let her get to me.
I'm sitting at my desk, staring at my lunch. My healthy, vegetables-and-chicken whole-foods lunch.

And I can't eat it.

Because I know how hard I work.
I know what I eat, and don't eat, and what I have given up, and what I feel deprived of.
And it's not enough. It may never be enough.

Those words, those unsolicited words based on one glance at my body and an assumption, those unsolicited words undid a few months' worth of work.

I know she's wrong.
I know she's wrong.
I know she's wrong.

But I am still staring at my lunch sitting on my desk.

"To all the haters out there..." I don't know why I woke up thinking about the concept of "haters" or enemies, other than it seems to have come up a few times recently in blogs I read. People addressing their haters specifically, or using their haters as motivation. And it only just occurred to me: I don't think I have any.

I mean, I'm sure that there are people who don't like me. It wouldn't be possible to exist in the world and not have people with whom you clash. I just mean that I am not particularly aware of it, and I've never had anyone actively bully or hate on me. Which, in retrospect, is odd for a fat girl. Especially a fat girl in grade school and high school. My dad even questioned me once on it: "don't the kids tease you at school?" It was something he just assumed happened.

It didn't.

The closest I can recall is in Grade 5, when most of the girls had recently gone through puberty, or were in the process of changing. Everyone was jockeying for social position and as a class we were figuring out the hierarchy. There were three of us who were in that "fat girl" category, and for some reason I avoided getting a nickname that stuck, like Whale and Thunder Thighs did, and while I knew I was fat and would be picked last for sports teams, I was never excluded from party invites or sleepovers and I played with the other kids at recess. I had friends. Even in high school, I was not part of the cool crowd, but I had my group of friends. Again, no active bullying or shunning or name calling. Near the end of high school, a new girl transferred, and she tried out different groups to see where she fit. One day, she pulled me aside to whisper confidentially, "I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I thought as your friend, you should know. This guy calls you Blubber Barb." Now, this guy to whom she was referring was someone with whom I barely interacted. I think we maybe had one class together, one year. That was it. Not a friend. Not a consequence. Not something I had to hear (he never said it to my face). The incident told me much more about her than it did about me or that guy: this was not someone who was really interested in being my friend, this was someone who used hurt as social currency. When it came to friendship, I was richer than she realized, so her tactic didn't work. 

And maybe that's it in a nutshell. I had friends. I had good friends, ones who saw past the fat, who weren't perfect themselves, who were smart and fun and kind. They were real. I learned how to make friends (thanks, summer camp!), to be nice, to get along, to find common ground. And kids who have friends don't get bullied. That's actually an important fact for parents and teachers to know. Everyone may get teased and picked on, but it is the kids who are isolated and have no support system who tend to get bullied in the truest sense of the term, and for whom the bullying carries a greater negative impact.

So, it begs the question, how did I end up with such a self-hating body image that it continues to affect me to this day? I don't have that easy answer to point to, that enemy number one who hurt me so bad it broke me. There was nobody who hurt me intentionally, maliciously, repeatedly. There are people by whom I got hurt, and some of those cuts run deeper because it was unintentional, because it was by people who cared about me or who I respected.

But I never had haters.

Life is not that black and white. Obesity and fat shame is not as simple as "I'm going to say something mean to you" because most of the time, it's easy to brush those attacks off. You understand that it says more about the person than it does about you. If a stranger calls me fat as an insult, I deduce that they lack creativity and imagination because - DUH - way to point out the obvious and go for the low blow. It's easy to defend yourself from the attacks you see coming.

It's the ones that you don't even realize are attacks that are the insidious ones. Fat shame is so intrinsic to social norms, we argue whether it actually exists. (It does). I internalized a lot of messages. I looked around and deduced things about myself that were not explicitly said. I saw who the pop idols were and what they looked like and figured out what was acceptable and what wasn't. I read teen magazines that told me what I should change about myself, and how to do it. I watched my mother and father and how they engaged with food and how they felt about their bodies, and I overheard comments from their friends and peers about what they were doing to change their bodies.

I may not have been teased, but I heard what my friends said about other people, and my brain concluded "if you feel that way about them, and I look like that, then you must feel the same way about me." I had a lot of male friends, boys who wanted advice or an 'in' with the girls I hung out with, so I heard a lot about what they were looking for and I learned that I wasn't it.

Messages are everywhere. We send them. We consume them. We pass them along.

It's important to acknowledge those subtle influences. Media studies teaches about advertising tactics, and even when you're aware of them, they still work! I think we focus too much on haters, on the people who make themselves the enemy because they're outwardly mean. For me, not having gone through that, it's the messages that seep into the collective social subconscious which are the far bigger threat. Fat shaming, stigmatization, unrealistic body expectations, and all of the systemic privileges that inherently go with fitting the narrow definition of being attractive.

I kind of wish I'd had some haters.
It would give me an enemy to mentally attack when I need that focus in workouts.
Someone to concentrate on, to have that "I'll show THEM" moment.

All I have is me.
Oh, my god. I'm my own hater.

Which means I'm fighting myself.
But, I'm also fighting FOR myself. There is no "them." I'm showing ME.

What's the take-away from this ramble?

• the messages we pick up as children stick with us because they are so deeply entrenched
• be careful about what you say and what you mean
• talk about and acknowledge bias by questioning everything
• life's a lot better when you have friends, so be nice to everyone you meet because "hurt" is an unstable social currency that will leave you broke in the long run
• and that includes being as nice to yourself as it does to others: don't be your own worst hater

It's official: one year until 40. Every year I get a little reflective and melancholy on my birthday, despite enjoying all the well wishes and social interactions and attention. It's a day full of reminders of how many good people I have in my life.

It's also a day that reminds me that time is one thing I can not control. The angst is often related somehow to my body.

I'm always a little weird about my birthday. I don't so much count down the days as dread them, and then I just accept the well wishes on the day of, and move on. Mostly, it's just another day. Birthdays used to bother me because they were a reminder of what I had not accomplished by certain ages and societal expectations. But, even though I haven't achieved the standard measure of success (marriage, kids, house), I've done a lot of things of which I'm proud. I'm happy with who I am. Birthdays in my mid-thirties were tough because they were reminders of the biological clock ticking down. I've pretty much come to terms with the thought that this body will not likely conceive, carry, or birth a child. There is a certain peace and acceptance that comes with aging.

Still, every year around this time, I start freaking out just a little about getting older. Why is that?

I think it's the feeling that I'm running out of time.

You know, I don't actually mind the physical signifiers of aging that we talk about. Sure, I point out the white hairs that need to be plucked, and I see the wrinkles around my eyes, and my teeth aren't as white as they used to be. I'm never gonna get carded again at the liquor store. It's easy to point to the aesthetics and complain, but that's just because we measure beauty in terms of youth. It's a battle most of us lose, and if I really cared I could cover up with dye and makeup and moisturizer and money. So, I'm really not so concerned with those things. They're just easy ways to give voice to the more deeply complex and troubling aspects of aging.

Ultimately, I think we all fear death, but perhaps even more so we fear frailty. (Or is that just me?) And the older you get, the more realistic it becomes. It's human nature. When you are young, you are invincible. You can ignore and deny that it will happen to you. If it does, you can bounce back. We tell ourselves that good nutrition and exercise will keep the wolves of old age at bay. If I just do the right things, I can out-smart time and evolution. Yeah, right.

I'm not alone in this. A great blog post at stumptuous.com called "the winter of our content" pointed out how unreasonable some of our thinking really is: "In my vision of my 40s, I’d be one of those women who murmurs through still-full lips that Why no, she hasn’t noticed any changes to her body, thanks to perfect nutrition and regular exercise and by the way yoga and Swiss chard juice is quite magical! I’d keep patiently adding, say, 10-20 lb to my lifts per year. You know, reasonable expectations. Modest. Do-able. By the time I was 90, I’d be deadlifting 1500 lb. Of course. I’d say shit like Age is just a number! I have the body of a 20-year-old!  (Well, not my 20-year-old body, which was saturated in alcohol, 50 lb overweight, and usually parked in front of a daytime talk show.) Somewhere along the way, the memo to my body about How This All Works must have gotten confused."

True, dat.

This year, in particular, I think I am struggling with getting old because I am starting to feel it. It's not an abstract idea anymore. I feel it in my knees. My back. My shoulders. My eyes aren't what they used to be. I don't have the same stamina to stay up to all hours of the night. I don't have the ability to sleep through the entire night, either. And, for the first time in my life, I want to be able to DO things I never imagined I'd want to do. I came to this fitness thing pretty recently, when you look at the big picture. I struggled with weight from a pretty early age, and was never really active. The fear and anxiety around getting older is that I won't be able to do the things I want to try. It's not just that losing weight gets exponentially harder the older you get (most people tend to put weight on as they age, so losing fat is also a bigger battle). You start to lose strength, flexibility, and agility, too.

All of a sudden, the mantra "it's about health, not vanity; I want to be fit, even if I'm not thin" becomes much easier to say with conviction. Because the chances of something breaking, becoming diseased, or no longer working increase with every passing year. And that is a sombre reality.

Except.
Except.
Except.

Except that it could all be in my head. I'm not dead yet. I'm buying myself some time by making the changes I've made. I have no way of knowing how many years I've added by swimming and lifting weights, nor do I know how many I've taken off with every binge. It's all unknown. That's the reason to keep going. If I buy myself one more day of feeling healthy, happy, and strong, isn't that worth it?

As she says in her Stumptuous post, I'm still here (and, really, if you didn't read the link above, stop what you're doing and go read it NOW: http://www.stumptuous.com/rant-69-the-winter-of-our-content). I'm here. Showing up. Still fighting for health, still fighting the urge to give in or give up. "I’m still here. Breathe. Move. Rep. Creak. Still here. Because this is it. It doesn’t get better than this. This is how it works. It’s all the road. It’s all part of the journey."

Today's training session with Mat was killer. He came in, smiling, and said, "Happy Birthday. I was going to make today fun ... but I changed my mind. It's gonna be HARD." Insert evil grin. It was what I was expecting and, predictably, he had me do 39 of everything. Started with 39 push ups. Then 39 squats with weights on the barbell on my back (in the squat rack). 9 to warm up, with just the bar (which weighs 45 lbs). Then 3 rounds of 10 squats. I looked at the weights he was adding on each side. "Getting as close to 39 as we can," he said. So ... 37.5 lbs on each side of the 45 lb bar. 120 lbs - the most he's ever had me do. Same story with the leg press: 9 to warm up, then 3 rounds of 10. And so on. That was just the first half of the hour.

They say you're only as old as you feel. I guess if my knees feel 80 and my soul feels 10, then 40 is about the right average. I know the reality, that this gets harder the older I get. I also know that there are some bad-ass 50, 60, and 70 year olds out there who are as strong and as fit as they come. I watched American Ninja Warrior earlier this week, and while most of the contestants were in their 20's, there were a few who are older than I. Age isn't an excuse. It's a reason to keep going, to keep working hard.

It's not going to get easier.

On my 39th birthday I squatted and pressed the heaviest weights I've ever done. Age had little to do with it. Of course, it may have something to do with how I feel tomorrow, and whether I require a nap later on today! But, despite facing 40, I still showed up. I'm still here.

And I'm not ready to act old just yet.

There's not really much more to say. Watch the video.

She pretty much covers it all.
These are facts I've come across time and time again.
And it's sad that they're true.

But it's why, despite a focus on my own weight, and exercise, and nutrition, I'll continue to include body image related content on this blog.

Because.