Weight

I never know quite how to react when people tell me they're losing weight. Sure, if they're going to bring it up and seem happy about it, I'll congratulate them. Seems only polite.

But I'd feel odd being too enthusiastic about it. It seems like an implied criticism of their previous weight and a reinforcement of society's tendency to pass harsh moral judgment on weight in excess of an ideal that hardly anyone can live up to. Which is rich, considering that this is the same society that glories in supersized junk food and sodas, ever on the hunt for the faster, cheaper bite.

Indeed, as Ellinorianne writes at DailyKos, the food most Americans commonly eat has often been designed to increase our calorie intake on purpose. The book she's talking about is David Kessler's, The End of Overeating:

... The most stunning thing about the book is the food industry's push to make more highly palatable, cheaply made foods to make sure we can eat more calories in less time. I don't even frequent many of the places mentioned in the book and when I do, I tend to stay away from the fried foods, etc. (I have a soft spot for California Pizza Kitchen's Japanese eggplant pizza with the whole wheat crust) and usually eat half of what's put in front of me, it's just so much food.

So not only are we eating larger portion sizes but consuming foods that are easier to eat, less chewing (I'm serious, they do this on purpose) so that every bite is more calorie dense and unfortunately much lower in nutritional density. It's the trade off and it's killing us. And these foods are convenient and cheap for many families. ...

Then she talks about how she doesn't want to lose the weight she's struggling with out of shame or insecurity, but broadly, because she wants to have a healthy relationship with food and her environment. That, I can wholeheartedly congratulate.

Though losing weight for its own sake ... I'm a medium sized person, 5'6", a little squidgier than I was as a teen and about 20 lbs heavier. I usually wear a medium, or ladies' size 6 or 8, depending, though in a store where the sizes run smaller than the department stores I normally shop, a 10.

At 34, I feel that while it would certainly behoove me to exercise more so my deskbound job doesn't land me in a cardiac unit at 50 (which feels alarmingly close, I must say), I'm a perfectly reasonable size for a person to be.

Last year, I ended up on a shopping trip with a 12 year old cheerleader who's slight and small, with a slightly convex stomach. She was worried that everything made her look fat and her stomach look huge. Nonetheless, she could have been wearing a muumuu without anyone thinking she was doing so because she had anything to hide.

After a mere 20 minutes of this, I felt hideous. While I remember that, as a child, adults looked different enough that it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that we were all one species, and I know she didn't mean anything by it, it was making me and all the adult women around me squirm. What a monster I must be, what a behemoth, I thought.

All the progressive humanism in the world wasn't enough to keep my self-esteem up during this temporary, entirely oblique onslaught that wasn't even directed at me.

I shook it off, leaving me with only a niggling, residual feeling of stupidity. But I'm still totally baffled by the fact that we've managed to create a world where a very fit 12 year old, a cheerleader who also runs track and probably wouldn't weigh 100 pounds in soaking wet denim, can look in a mirror and see only FAT! That is just so unbelievably frakked up that I don't think I have the words for it. It's an outrage.

It's particularly awful in light of the fact that heavyset women face significant pay discrimination because it's been completely normalized to say nasty things about overweight women and assume their incompetence, their unworthiness to even be seen in public. It's so bad that it was relatively easy to document shopping discrimination against larger women, which is economically foolhardy behavior, considering that it turns away potentially paying customers.

After all, women are supposed to be 'lovely' and to smile and to be pleasing, visually and otherwise. At all times, all ages.

For women, beauty is also explicitly equated with virtue in the popular stories that l and every other little girl grows up with. If you think 'ugly stepsister' is a meaningless turn of phrase, think again. Goodness means beauty and beauty means being thin, but not too thin, and fit, but not muscular, because that's gross. So stay away from the free weights, missy.

In the US, fat is the universal sin of our era. It's one of the main reasons why it's so hard to have a sensible public conversation about food that doesn't end up making everyone feel as terrible about themselves as being compared with a 12 year old athlete.

I don't know how to fix any of that, so I suspect I'm just going to keep feeling extremely awkward when people brag to me about losing weight and I worry that they're doing it so others will know that if they're fallen, they're at least trying to be righteous. And I just, I mean, come on, people, it's a little extra weight. You'd think they'd done something horrible, maybe tanked the world economy like those vile SOBs at Goldman Sachs, but let me tell you, those bastiches don't feel sorry about that at all.

On the scale of sin, we spend too much time worrying about the petty imperfections of ordinary people, while thieves, mass murderers, poisoners, defrauders, greedheads and blackmailers get to run our major societal institutions with near impunity. Why do we let them do that? Adding insult to injury, not only is nothing ever done about it, they don't even get a tenth the disapproval directed at them as a person does for being seen eating a dessert while overweight?

Wtf is wrong with us? I submit that it is not principally the size of our buttocks.