I started off planning to write that post. I started to actually write that post, but it swerved off almost immediately when I started a sentence with a familiar lament and emerged at the end of that sentence with a tiny little epiphany that maybe won't startle you, but which startled the heck out of me.
It goes against everything the fat acceptance movement believes in, which makes me sad--because what they have to say is so, so important. But the thing is, what I have to tell you, and I am sorry, fat acceptance activists, I honestly am--but I like having lost the weight. I like being a smaller person, less remarkable. I like having a wider range of clothes to cry about in the dressing room, I like being able to fold over and touch my nose to my knees, I like fitting in chairs, and I really like not feeling like I have to apologize for my self, my size, for being a blight on the landscape. I hate that I ever had to feel that way, and don't think any one should. I wish I didn't have to have lost so much weight in order to finally feel a little more okay in my body. You're right, when you say no one should, that it is an evil.
When people talk about weight-loss surgery being the easy way out, what they're talking about is a very pro-skinny, yay losing weight! kind of mindset, in which people who have gotten surgery didn't have to do all the hard work of exercise or change the way they eat or become active or have to be strong-willed all the time, right? I will tell you, because I have to keep saying this: in every way, that idea is completely untrue and continues to make me mad because it sure as heck hasn't felt easy to me. I still have to exercise! I had to change my entire lifestyle and eating patterns! It was not easy! My daily struggle with what I eat, getting enough exercise, taking my vitamins, keeping up my protein and my water, it remains anything but easy, okay? I might be a little sensitive about this topic.
But here's the thing. I will admit this to you, this revelation that I've had--in one very real sense, it is absolutely the easy way out. Here's a showdown: between learning to love yourself and your body in the face of a world not built for larger people, which is frustrating and morale-destroying in so many tiny ways and the number of assholes who seem personally offended by fat, versus becoming thin. In this showdown, becoming thin will always win out as the easy way out of all the complicated, difficult work of breaking yourself of the habits of self-hate, buying into the cultural paradigm, struggling to find plus-size role models and positive messages and remaining positive in the face of a lot of crap that is thrown at us, day after day.
I took the easy way out, after all. It was too hard to love myself at 300 pounds. I wasn't healthy, sure, and I needed to be lighter for my knees, my heart, my blood sugar--but I also bought into everything that told me I was ugly, unpleasant to look at, not good enough. It's still frequently difficult to love myself at 140 pounds, to tell you the truth--nobody is immune to self-esteem issues, to insecurity and doubt, and it's not fair to suggest that a thin person is not allowed to feel as uncomfortable in her body as a fat person. They're just as subject to the pictures of flawless, Photoshopped bodies and taut thighs and sculpted abs maybe they'll never have. But it is entirely fair to suggest that they sure have it easier, in a million tiny ways.
I am glad I have it easier. I hate so very, very much that I had to--or felt like I had to. I hate the idea that I might be a rotten example, I hate having given up on myself--but finally, in the end, at the very heart of it all, it is true that I took the easy way out, and I am glad.
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