This morning, half listening to the news, I heard some story claiming, "Women with hip fat may be at greater risk for Alzheimer's." And first I wondered if I heard it right - after all, for years they said that women who were heavier in the hips were better off than apple-shapes, healthwise. And second, I thought, Well, if that's true, then we're all just screwed.
I looked it up online. Yeah, there's some claim that being "hippy" makes you slightly more at risk for Alzheimer's.
And I gave in to a moment (well, more than a few) of despair. I loathe the way health news gets reported, I loathe the constant doom-and-gloom and we-will-dance-on-your-graves, fatties attitude that seems to pervade a certain amount of it.
And I also feel frustrated. Because I'm kind of fat. I've been "big" since I went through puberty. Both my grandmothers were heavy women. My father is heavy-set. All the old photographs of the German forebears seem to show heavier people. Attempts to lose weight have been mostly unsuccessful, unless I become dangerously obsessive and do stuff like write down every food I eat and restrict the portions to the point where I'm consuming 1250 calories a day (I actually did that, for a short while, in college. It was MISERABLE. I was miserable. I made the people around me miserable).
And I realized this morning, thinking about it: this is another perfectionism thing for me. And this is another part of my tendency to 'awfulize' things (as the counselor I went briefly to in college put it.) I tend sometimes towards all-or-nothing thinking. I do this in my work: "If I'm not getting 100% positive evaluation comments, it must be that I am no good as a teacher." And I do this in my life: "I must not be working out hard enough or eating the right way if I'm not thinner." And then I start to feel like a failure.
And I do think it's because I'm still somewhat of a perfectionist - it's hard for me to look at my life and go, "You strive to get a couple servings of fruit and vegetables every day, you don't eat fried food, you work out an hour most days of the week. That should be good enough." Instead, I look at my life and go, "You're not what they're telling you you should be. You need to work harder."
And you know? I'm too TIRED to work harder. The thought of doing an extra half-hour of exercise a day makes me want to weep. The thought of, I don't know, eating plain Bran Flakes without sugar on them instead of the Chocolate Cheerios I've been eating for breakfast kind of makes me want to weep. On the one hand, I feel like I need to work harder to be more...I don't know, "perfect"? On the other hand, I feel like what I'm doing should be ENOUGH, dammit.
(It doesn't help that I know skinny people who eat pretty much what they want and don't exercise to the point where they are so bored by it they could scream)
But I do think a big part of it is that I'm a perfectionist. And some of the stress I used to put on other areas of my life has somehow got transferred to health and body size. Not an improvement.
I think the other thing with my perfectionist, all-or-nothing thinking, is that I don't always remind myself that there might be a difference between "fat" size-16-me and a fat person who weighs 500 pounds or something. Or someone who's overweight but never exercises and doesn't strive to eat a healthful diet. But I just lump myself into the "fat" category when I hear these news stories and kind of come to believe that people hate me and judge me and all of that bad stuff, because I'm not a size 8.
(Shameful confession: when I go to the grocery store, if I want to buy cookies? I make sure I also buy fruit or vegetables - canned, if I already have enough fresh on hand I know that I wouldn't, for example, be able to use up another bag of spinach before it went bad - just because I don't like to think of people looking in my cart and going "Oh. Fat chick. Buying cookies. Typical." And I KNOW that's stupid and awful and I should feel free to buy whatever damn food I want, but that's just something I've done for a long time. And it's very hard for me to just walk into a Braum's and get an ice cream cone, even if I really want an ice cream cone. Because I feel judged. Because I KNOW there are people out there who look at fatter people eating and judge them negatively. And I know - I should just judge those people myself, judge them as jerks, but I can't, quite. I tend to be too likely to listen to other people's opinions, even when I should not.)
Recognizing this won't make it go away, but at least it'll help me maybe step back once in a while.
I also need to be less good at blaming myself for things that are not 100% under my control. Like genetics. And body frame.
5 comments:
Extra pounds are beautiful. I wanted to say something about that on my blog but never got around to it.
Begin rant:
I read articles like this and have the same worries, but then I also get angry at them.
You know what these health watchers don't seem to understand?
We live once and then we die. Yep, folks, sorry to break it to ya, folks, but we're mortal and everyone dies of something, in the end.
What we DO with our lives between the span of birth and death, how we conduct ourselves, how we treat others, how we make use of our skills and talents, all of these things and FAR more important than size.
The screaming over weight and size is about reductionism and control. Reduce a person to a number, like pounds or BMI and then declare them as having less worth than someone else is a con game calculated to make good people feel like crap about themselves and enables the unscrupulous and greedy to make money off the unhappiness of others.
Agh!
/conclude rant
Yeah, Lynn, but note the ad-links on that site: how to get a "celebrity six pack." How to "still" have a "bikini bod" even though summer's half over.
Sometimes I hate society.
Next time I'm in town, we're going to Braum's.
(1) Alzheimer's: my mom did just about everything "right" -- ate right, exercised, etc. -- and still got it. Whatever they are touting now as the latest "thing" is still only one factor. And since no one really knows what causes it, we're still, in large part, guessing. All we have to go on is statistics, and there's no guarantee of being right.
(2) Negative thinking, especially "all or nothing" -- a book called _Feeling Good_ by David Burns has been a tremendous help to me. It points out not only that fallacy, but a bunch of other things we tell ourselves that are Simply Not True -- the problem is, for the most part, no one has ever sat us down and pointed out exactly HOW and WHY they are not true, so we still fall into them.
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