February 2nd, 2009
I like that picture of me in the last post because in it I look thinner than I do in real life. And the tragedy is that I’m not overweight. I’m right in the middle of the normal weight range according to the BMI (I’m 5′3″ and 123lbs). But I’m out of shape and have always had a fat, tubby belly which endures despite my “normal” weight. I am fat passing for thin. In my clothes you might think I’m thin. And I am small in an absolute sense, but because I’m a lazy banana and never exercise, I have no tone and look sloppy and flabby. Anyway, my pleasure in that last photo is a holdover from the fat hating days.
I hated being fat. I really, really hated it. And even now I hate my fat belly – I like basically everything about my body, its shape and proportion and what have you, except that damn belly! I think this is sad because it represents a disproportionately enormous chunk of my energy and time spent in self hate. Isn’t that sad?
But I have this theory. I’m struggling with how to explain it. I think there’s this idea that women hate being fat because of societal standards of beauty and such, and to a point I’m sure that’s true. But in my case, I hate being fat because being fat is directly linked to overeating and I overeat when things are wrong emotionally. Not just as in having a bad day at work or what have you, but on a more insidious inner level to do with self-hate and -punishment and -neglect. I think I hate being fat because it really is part of a self-destructive inner process, which is not something I should ever accept and love and embrace. It would be impossible for me to embrace being fat unless the fat was divorced from that inner process (like, say, I got a disease or syndrome or something). It would be like saying you love bleeding and embrace your bleedingness while pretending the bleeding wasn’t due to stabbing yourself in the leg because you hate your thigh muscle.
Okay this is not making much sense. That analogy sucked. I am at a loss as to how to explain it better, probably because I’m not privy to my inner insidious process, whatever it is. I sense its presence but as with all things unconscious, can’t really put my finger on it. I think I only know it’s there because it’s started to go away in the last six months or so. And as it goes, I feel the liberating change. But it’s not totally gone – I can tell because of how I reacted to the zombie picture: “Oh good, I look thin.”
I wonder how many other women have experienced something similar?