I can't even be fat correctly, Part II

On bodies, feminism, and what personal agency might actually look like

{Note, this is the second half of a very long essay. The first half is behind a paywall; this is not. I’m not trying to manipulate or be cute here, I actually think the pieces can stand alone or be read together, and I like this half better, so I opened it to all subscribers.}

A few years ago, I went to a diet center. Not just any diet center. I went to one of those starvation diet centers where they feed you soup and tell you not to walk too much lest you pass out from overexertion.

Perhaps that isn’t exactly what they said. They said it was a medically managed weight loss center where you eat shakes for two meals a day plus one very low-carb meal and in between you drink chicken broth to not die. Or, “curb your hunger.”

Attending such a diet center is, of course, a cardinal sin and wholly unenlightened (probably full of republicans). Consequently, I slinked against a back wall from my car to the building and entered through the fire escape.

What I’m saying is, I knew it wasn’t the pinnacle of wellness. It wasn’t even at the halfway point of wellness. I definitely didn’t put that shit on Instagram. I felt all of this deeply while sitting in the beige conference room with my little binder, reading about my new life of vanilla shakes, chicken bouillon, ketosis, and weekly meetings with the other fatties.

And yet, I still believed this choice was the right one. I was well past what I lovingly referred to as the “kinda fun fat stage,” which is when you get to eat mostly what you want but you’re still comfortable and able to run with kids and squat down at the beach.

I can hear the world now: You can be fat, Janelle, and do all these things. Yes, I could. But I wasn’t. And I was tired, and worn out, and in an unbearable amount of back pain due to bulging discs pinching nerves. My doctors suggested I could reduce this misery and avoid back surgery by losing weight. Seemed plausible.

Still, the horror of the suggestion.

***

When my brother or I would bring home a stellar report card, our mom would congratulate us and suggest we celebrate at our favorite hamburger joint on Higuera Street in San Luis Obispo, California, and order cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate malts. When our Mormon sensibilities had to face that my non-Mormon stepfather had started smoking cigarettes, again, for the tenth time - or that their marriage is definitely not going to work so we’re moving out for good, again, for the fifth time - we’d go to a hamburger joint on Higuera Street in San Luis Obispo and order cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate malts.

My mother owned and published a small tourist guide for our beach area and she would trade advertising for restaurant credit at the hamburger joint, a Mexican restaurant, and occasionally a magnificent fried-fish place in Morro Bay.

I suppose in the larger picture this is how food should be: Celebratory, comforting. There’s nothing wrong with getting together at a restaurant with people you love to feel more alive on a Wednesday. I suppose in the larger picture it was the small, daily choices we made that taught me about food as an emotional handler. When we were “feeling down,” for any reason, the potato chips would go into the grocery cart. We deserved them. We were feeling down.

We indulged when we were down, and when we were up, and didn’t hide that we were eating for effect. It was as if we deserved the burrito because we felt bad, the not-too-buried implication being, of course, that burritos have the capacity to make you feel not bad. And this is true, until it isn’t.

The problem with eating to celebrate being up and eating to fix being down is that most days are somewhere on this spectrum and it can change hourly. The “eating while down” thing is particularly tricky because one must define “down.” There is “down” like the day my grandmother was murdered by my mentally ill cousin and then there is the daily “down,” of “I thought I’d be further along at this point in my life.”

Or, “Fuck me, corporate elites still run America.” The down that lives in the bones, just sort of swimming around, whispering malaise into the cracks of my skeleton. The boredom, the exhaustion. The existential down.

Do we eat to fix that too?

Yes, yes we do.

***

I went to fat camp because I saw all this history and wanted a reset button. I called the diet center “fat camp” because I laugh when I’m vaguely humiliated, which we’ve already gone over with elevator guy. I wanted a washed-clean food slate–a fast, so to speak, a chance to demolish and rebuild my relationship with food.

In six months, I lost forty pounds. Though still “overweight” according to the BMI Table of Death, nothing was the same. Okay, fine. My pain was barely reduced, but I could move better in my body. I could sit and squat and get up and run at the beach, and it didn’t feel impossible. I didn’t feel like my body was the stranger it was before.

“So what’s going on with you, Janelle?” A friend asked, genuinely interested.

“Well, I’m going to this diet center. I’ve lost forty pounds. I want to lose twenty more.”

“What do you mean, ‘diet center.’”

“I know. I should be shoved off a tall bridge. But it’s a good choice for me.”

“No,” She looked at me earnestly. “You’ve just internalized patriarchal narratives.”

“Actually,” I said. “My fucking back just hurts.”

She wasn’t the first or only feminist to explain that my choice to go to fat camp was a result of a failing on my part as a feminist and woman, that I was merely a victim of misogynistic conditioning. Weird, because I felt like a free agent, a self-aware, critically thinking adult. Sure, I grew up saying “Does this outfit make me look fat?” just like the rest of us, but I feel bad about it now. Doesn’t that count? And I try not to say it anymore, and when I say something negative about my body, at least 50% of my kids yell “DO NOT FAT SHAME, MOTHER!”

How strange to do something that felt oddly, though imperfectly, empowering, a sort of reclaiming something that was lost, or trying to find something I never had, then find myself shamed by people who call themselves bastions of female empowerment.

I had done my own internal work on the issue and come to a conclusion only to find myself told by other women that the patriarchy had simply taught me to hate myself. This is of course unequivocally true, but their words reduced me to a mere container for misogyny, my efforts, however imperfect, nothing more than symptoms of a sad little thing unable to see that she just can’t love herself properly.

“Look,” I told my friend, “paying a group of doctors to reduce calories and carbohydrates as low as they can without your body beginning to eat its own muscle is a bullshit solution. It’s gimmicky and I know this, and it probably won’t even work. But I still want to try it.”

Some things are like that. Nuanced, you know? Nuanced.

After the third fat activist feminist friend raised her eyebrow at me, stating I was “perpetuating diet culture,” I stopped mentioning it in their presence. I’d tell my close friends, and I’d tell my conservative family, since they tend to not worry much about self-love among fatties. But I kept my mouth shut around “body positivity” friends.

I never mentioned my weight loss online, in social media, anywhere. Not even my blog, where people were accustomed to my deviant ways. I backed far into the diet closet. But over time, people started noticing the weight loss in photos, and they’d suddenly appear in my private messages: You’ve obviously lost weight. How did you do it? I can’t talk about this openly because dieting is bad but holy shit I have to do something. Don’t tell anyone, but what are you doing?

Oh, so there’s a dark underworld of closeted, liberal women guilt-dieting. Fascinating.

For decades we’ve fought for a woman’s right to be fat. We rally against fat shaming. We share photos of curvy Renaissance women and imagine the days when bellies were revered.

“Stop telling women they have to be thin! Stop telling them how to eat and live in their own goddamn bodies! BODY AUTONOMY!”

And then we turn around and tell women to be happy while fat. To not lose weight. To not “diet.”

So we are in fact still telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies. It’s not “Don’t be fat” anymore. Now it’s “Don’t try to get thin.” And if you must try to get thin, do it in a way we’ve deemed socially acceptable.

The confines. The walls of femininity. The walls of acceptable body choices are so clearly built and passionately reinforced. We are still policing a woman’s management of her own body. Is it possible to both recognize that narratives of “fat always equals unhealthy” are false and damaging while also recognizing that some women prefer their bodies at a certain weight? And that it’s also possible that people could make more beneficial food choices? Are we even allowed to say that an apple is healthier than a bag of Doritos?

Now hear me out here, but what if we altogether stopped telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies?

Are we going for freedom or are we going for better management of the female body? Are we going for autonomy or are we going for a new version of societal acceptability? Are we working for individual liberation or are we fighting for conformity to shared ideology? Because truly, at its core, the message is this: We know better than you what you should be doing with your body in the context of your own life.

And once again, how can we recognize the insidious, systemic nature of misogynistic messaging, the profound subtlety, the slick and wily ways of the male gaze, then fault women for acting accordingly?

LET ME FIND MY FUCKIN PATH, Super Feminist.

Not only am I fat, I can’t even be fat correctly. Not only can I not be fat correctly, I can’t want to be thin because it’s antifeminist and if I want to get thin, I can’t do it the way I want because that’s also antifeminist.

I wonder what it would be like to be a man, where the world is celebrating your dad bod and your weight loss and you aren’t responsible for the raising of the next generation of feminists, so even if you keto those pounds off in the most non-body-positive diet center on the block, nobody cares. Nobody is telling you you’re perpetuating diet culture, because as a man, you’re an autonomous being who gets to just try shit and if it doesn’t work, you get to try something else. You aren’t responsible for representing the entire male population. You’re just a dude, working toward a revered dad bod. Good for you, sir, taking care of yourself.

Of course the fucking diet didn’t work. Do they ever? And only one fat activist friend called it. My friend Miranda, who is nuanced and real and grounded, said “My concern is that dieting usually doesn’t work.” I nodded as she spoke and appreciated her directness and reason.

I gained it all back in one year.

So it turns out my path to wellness won’t be through shakes and bouillon, and it didn’t rewrite my relationship with food. Fat camp simply put it all on hold. I should have known this would happen since it’s called “fat camp.” What do you do at camp? You stay for a while, and then you come home.

I won’t do that again. I won’t show up and sit in a circle with my shame binder and tell people what it was like to go through Thanksgiving as a no-carb fatty. I had a spinal surgery that took my chronic back pain away. Now I don’t walk properly from permanent nerve damage in my left leg. Perhaps if my doctors hadn’t told me for years that the pain was because I was fat, that if I’d just lose weight it would be “fixed,” my disc would not have blown into my spinal column, crushing my nerves, leaving me with permanent mobility issues. Now I’ll really never run again, or jump. Or be fully out of pain.

As a lovely metaphor for all of this, the pain simply relocated. Old story in a new packaging.

Perhaps someday we’ll meet women where they are: fat, thin, dieting, not. Perhaps the doctors will help me even though I can’t seem to lose the weight. Perhaps they’ll see fat women as still deserving the surgery. Perhaps my body will wholly be mine.

I’ve been thinking lately I’d like to be strong.

***

A few days ago, I found a piece of paper my nine-year-old child, George, had dropped on the ground. She had drawn three human figures doing exercises: sit-ups, push-ups, and jumping jacks. I flipped it over and saw a little graph. Each day of the week was listed, with three columns to the right, presumably to record how many repetitions of each exercise she’d do. How cute, I thought.

At the bottom of the page, in all capital letters, she had written herself a note, in her crooked, child script: DO NOT GET FAT.

I dropped into a chair at our kitchen table and held her little words. I saw her in my mind, her belly, the softness of her cheeks, the little roll under her chin. My baby. I saw her and I saw my Mom pulling her shirt away in disgust and I saw us all eating hamburgers in joy and I saw us eating crawdads on our road trip to British Columbia under a tarp in the rain and I saw myself shrinking into the back of the elevator wishing I could be less.

And I saw myself a few days before I gave birth to my last child, Arlo, thirteen years after I birthed my first and stood gazing at my strange new body—I saw my belly huge and round in the mirror as I was getting into the shower and I saw my enormous tits almost resting on the damn thing and I saw my soaring hips and thighs in great round swells and for the first time in my life, I felt sexy. I saw it. I saw the sweaty, steamy kind of sex. I saw the warmth of a body soft and full of heat and curves and life and power, 70 pounds “overweight,” stretch-marked and cellulite dimpled. For some reason, in that moment, I was the most beautiful I had ever been. And I saw it, not from you, but from me.

I laughed at the thirteen years. I laughed at you, and at me.

Now, I try to remember, but it only comes in waves.