Weight and Media

I’ve been thinking a lot about weight and media images lately, for a couple of reasons. One was seeing a magazine that had an article titled something like, “When Size 4 is Too Curvy”, and also seeing some articles about plus-size models – who are all of a size 12.

I’ve known that media images of women aren’t healthy for a long time (not that images of men necessarily are, either), but I didn’t always pay as close attention when I was heavier. I started to really notice it when I was losing weight, as I wrote in these couple of entries.

July 26, 2001; 7:51 p.m.

Well, I’ve finished reading the second of the Bridget Jones books…, and… I was rather depressed by Bridget being depressed at weighing 130, as that’s my goal – and I’m shorter than her character. Le sigh.

January 4, 2003

Then during lunch I finished Three To Get Deadly [one of the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich], which was, of course, amusing. But it bothers me in places in relation to weight and eating habits. For one, Stephanie Plum is 5’7”, around 130 pounds, and she seems to think she might need to lose weight. But then, looking at what she eats – primarily junk food and fast food – I fail to see how she could be 130, or complain about having a slow metabolism. I’m noting stuff like that more than ever these days, and it just bothers me at times, propagating media images of women.

But of course it’s most prevalent on TV. Last year, my friend David told me that the reason Deanna Troi’s character on Star Trek: The Next Generation initially wore that strange gray jumper was because she was too heavy for the regular uniforms! I wish I could say I didn’t believe it, but I did notice that her appearance changed later on, and I thought after she lost weight that she wasn’t as pretty, with her face looking more hollowed than rounded.

Which is also one of the reasons I’m depressed about the end of the most recent Joss Whedon series. That may sound strange, but in his two most recent TV ventures, Firefly and Dollhouse, he featured characters who looked like actual women. The actress who played Kaylee in Firefly purportedly gained 20 pounds for the role, and the actress who played Mellie in Dollhouse was quite curvaceous. What was wonderful about both roles is that they showed the women as being very desirable and attractive, as well as intelligent. Kaylee particularly was something of an engineering genius, and she ended up with the hot doctor.

With those shows gone, I’m hard-pressed to think of any current television series that shows women of a normal size in good roles. Admittedly, it’s hard to find good roles for women to begin with, but particularly ones who can give girls and other women some positive images of women with curves. I don’t know if any other series will fill that gap, but I hope that more young girls are realizing that stick-thin models aren’t necessarily the most attractive, or even the healthiest, and that being a size 4 (or smaller) is not the ultimate goal of life.

Doctors and Weight

I recently saw an article in CNN.com titled: “The surprising reason why being overweight isn’t healthy” (see http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/21/obesity.discrimination/index.html?hpt=Sbin). Of course my curiosity was piqued, and I felt a sense of vindication when I actually read the article. This was the first time I had ever seen anyone state that heavy people are discriminated against in doctor’s offices, and often receive poor treatment or misdiagnosis as a result.

The reason I felt vindicated is because I experienced this first-hand when I went to college. As I wrote in one of the early chapters in my book:

“[Just a month] after I started [college]I noticed a hard red bump swelling on my chest, literally the middle of the top of my breasts (but not on them). I was terrified, having just heard a woman talk about breast cancer. If it hadn’t been for that, I might have ignored it since it didn’t hurt too much, but as it was, when I went home for Columbus Day Weekend, I asked Mom to arrange an appointment for me with the family doctor.

“To his credit, he didn’t blame it on my weight, not that he was happy about my weight. He said it was a cyst, and he gave me a prescription that he hoped would bring the swelling down. If it didn’t, he said I’d have to get it drained in Boston. I was relieved on the cancer front but still nervous, and it turned out with good reason. The prescription did nothing for me, and so I had to go to the Lane Health Center (what we liked to call the Lane Death Center). They proceeded to send me to a hospital on Mission Hill, and due to the ride arrangements and time of day, I didn’t even have time to go home to pack a bag.

“It was a nightmare scenario. I was all alone in a strange city, checked into a hospital for the first time ever, with no friends to call to help me out. I was ale to get in touch with [one of my roommates], and she put a bag together for me that Jeremiah brought, but he wasn’t able to stay. At least he could tell Mom and Dad what was going on, but then I was alone again.

“What made it so much worse was my doctor’s bedside manner. The first thing he asked me was how long I had been overweight, as if my current problem was a direct result of my amount of stored fat. He definitely treated me as an inconvenience, an operation to get done and out of the way before the end of the day, hardly telling me what he was doing although I was conscious during all of it….

“Then [after a week or two] the wound got infected. The surgeon, still not winning any points for personality, implied that it was because I wasn’t hygienic; the further implication was that anyone as overweight as me must be completely negligent in taking care of her body at all. I was upset and ashamed, wondering if it was something I had done. It reminded me of why I hated going to doctors at all, and why many overweight people I’ve met avoid them at all costs.

“Mom was furious with him and consulted [our chiropractor] Dr. Norris, who said that was ridiculous; staff infections are common in hospitals. Feeling only marginally better, I nevertheless had to go on antibiotics. That cleared up the infection, and the wound healed. But it left an ugly scar, physical as well as emotional.

“I thought I was okay, but shortly after a lesion appeared on my right breast, a red swelling that started small but quickly grew to the size of a nickel, swollen and painful. I flipped out again. I went back on antibiotics, and it started to improve. As soon as I went off them, though, another appeared on my right knee. To make matters worse, all the antibiotics had resulted in a topical yeast infection on my chest…..

"I finally went to see a dermatologist, only to almost lose it yet again. He also said all this was happening because of my weight, that my skin was chafing against my clothes! Never mind that I had been overweight for years and never experienced anything like this. I was again humiliated and furious, but not surprised. Doctors are often this way, blaming everything they can on the obvious excuse of weight without bothering to look deeper.”

I did finally improve after following Dr. Norris's suggestion that I take Echinacea, but I found it incredibly ironic that it was my chiropractor, who was generally focused on the structure of my bones and muscles, who saved me in this case. Adding to the irony is the fact that I often hear about how much of a burden overweight people place on the medical system; I was in fact denied extra long-term health insurance because of my weight when I was 23. Yet I’ve visited doctors so much more after losing weight, due to hormone imbalances, problems with my knees (yes, those started post-weight loss), MRIs and mammograms, and just general check-ups that I never used to have. Admittedly, had I reached this age without having lost weight, I could have started having other problems, but I might never have done anything about it, being too ashamed to go to a doctor to begin with, even though I have health insurance (certainly not a given). And that would have been a true tragedy – one that is reality for too many people.

Unexpected Changes

Yesterday in church, in consideration of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday holiday, our minister talked about some of aspects of change that we don’t often consider. One of those things was the fact that you never know where change will take you, because you start to change in unexpected ways.

As I’ve read over my old journal entries, this is something that’s come really clear to me in my process of weight loss. When I set out, I was planning on losing weight; I didn’t really consider what else would happen. But here are a few entries that show my thoughts along the way, and how I began to notice other changes in myself. There are many more examples, but this gives you an idea.

August 10, 2001; 6:19 p.m.

Since Mom died, my personality has changed, though Mamere is the first to comment on it. It’s a terrible thing watching a loved one die, particularly knowing as I do that it’s something you yourself may face. It gives you a certain freedom, an ability to get past all the crap that most people carry around as baggage, and the understanding that time is precious. Well, I’d been lugging round a ton of baggage for over a decade, angst and depression and shame, things which made me very shy and withdrawn because I believed no one would want to talk to me, or touch me, or take any pleasure in my company- and a large part of that was because of my weight. Particularly around people like Mamere, whom I know has serious issues with people overweight – though the sad truth is I can’t claim to be any different. But I realized then, after Mom died, that all this crap I was carrying around was just that – crap. If people don’t want to talk to me or be around me, odds are that’s their problem as much as mine, and they’re probably not the sort of people I want to be around anyway.

July 27, 2002

But there’s something else I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, and that is my weight loss. I’ve been asked if I feel better or different by many people, and so I wanted to write a little about it because I may someday forget. Some things definitely are very different, both physically and otherwise. When I first started losing weight, I didn’t notice all that much – it took a while for me to lose enough to be aware of anything beyond the fit o my clothes. And in some ways it’s still hard to say exactly how different I feel, because it’s been so gradual. But the main thing is that I’ve become so much more aware of my body. I never used to think about or pay attention to how my body functioned; I suppose I took it for granted, such as it was.

But not anymore. As I’ve lost weight, I’ve started to notice the underlying structure – wrists and collarbones, the slowly emerging definition of muscles, the graceful play of tendons as my fingers move, the sense that beneath all the weight I have a body that is inherently as capable of beauty and grace as anyone else’s. Along with that, I’ve discovered thta I can now do some things I never was able to before – cross my legs, squat comfortably to look at something and then rise from that position, fold my arms beneath my breasts, walk through narrower spaces. It may sound a little silly, things most people take for granted, but for me it is a revelation, and so I enjoy doing them. This is something I once never would have thought possible – for me to take pleasure in my physicality. This pleasure of course spills into other things, and it even loops back and nourishes itself. I actually enjoy certain exercise now, so I make sure to do it every day, which in turn helps promote weight loss and increased enjoyment.

November 17, 2002

[While visiting Melissa and Jamie, we went to Tweeter for me to get some new speakers.] I got my speakers without a problem, with the help of a cute guy. And it was weird because we were chatting a bit – he goes camping in Maine – and I realized that’s a newish sort of interaction for me, being able to chat with an attractive man and not feel totally self-conscious. It didn’t hurt that both Melissa and Jamie commented on my weight.

BeautifulPeople

I recently heard about the exclusive online dating site, BeautifulPeople.com, that ousted around 5,000 members because they had gained too much weight over the holidays and were no longer “beautiful”. I hadn’t even known such a site existed, and after a quick search I discovered that it’s far from alone. These sites say whole volumes about our society, much of it not good.

Now, I will be the first to admit that I definitely didn’t think of myself as beautiful when I was overweight, and I was quite convinced that no one else would, either. But I have to wonder, if I had been able to see what beauty I had, would others have seen it as well? How much of our perception is based off our own ideas of ourselves, and what other people actually think?

I particularly wonder this because it occurred to me that being considered “beautiful” was not actually part of my goal or plan for losing weight. That was never what it was about for me – it was about being able to do things I couldn’t otherwise. It was also because I realized that waiting until other people acknowledged my worth, despite my weight, wasn’t going to get me anywhere. The strange truth is, I still don’t know how to react when someone now tells me that I’m beautiful. I have to wonder if it’s just my body, or something else about me that they find lovely.

What worries me about all of this is that the images we’re fed of what’s beautiful are largely impossible to retain, although some people spend small fortunes trying. I actually feel rather sad for these people BeautifulPeople, wondering what will become of them as they age, how depressed and despairing they will be. After all, as Howard stated in What’s Up, Doc?: “Everybody gets wrinkled, lined and flabby.”

In the end, as we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just wish our society were a little less focused on making us believe that’s all that matters.

Reading Cookbooks

A friend recently asked for some good, gluten-free recipes, since she will shortly have a real kitchen to cook in, and when I realized how much I enjoyed going through my recipes, I was reminded of the first time I’d heard of someone enjoying reading cookbooks. It was in the late summer of 2004 when I was visiting my friends David and Fiona in Ireland, and one morning David and I were in the kitchen chatting about books. At some point I asked what Fiona liked to read for fun (as opposed to for her work as a professor). He answered that one thing she found really enjoyable and relaxing was reading cookbooks.

I didn’t say anything about it at the time, but I remember being completely baffled by the concept. This was about a year and a half after I’d finished losing weight, and while my relationship with food was better, I was only just starting to think about cooking more. The only cookbooks I had at the time, though, were Betty Crocker, a small vegetarian cookbook, and a compilation of recipes by my paternal grandmother’s side of the family, the Bickfords – whom, it must be said, were not the healthiest of eaters.

At the time, not having access to many other types of recipes, I found that going through cookbooks was actually quite depressing. All these things that I couldn’t eat, either because they were too high calorie or included cheese or both, and many that I wasn’t that interested in because they were just too fatty or greasy or sugary. It highlighted the fact that my relationship with food at that point was still somewhat antagonistic. Where was the fun in that?

As time passed, though, that began to change. I was exposed to different types of recipes and foods through friends, my book group, and church, but more than that, the way I thought about food began to change. I realized that I was limiting myself by thinking that all recipes fell into the categories of things I couldn’t or shouldn’t eat, and that food itself was not the enemy. Quite the opposite, since it’s something I do need to survive.

And so I began to experiment, branching out a little in my habits and routines. That was when I suddenly understood the joy of reading cookbooks and going through recipes. Opening before me were whole new possibilities of food, combinations and flavors and textures I had never considered, much of which could be done in a healthy way. I didn’t have to just eat raw vegetables, or the same type of stir-fry or soup, all the time.

It may seem strange to say that this was exciting, but it was. It made food a source of pleasure again, instead of just a collection of calories and fats and carbohydrates and proteins that I had to be conscious of. I began to take delight in cooking, and the Farmer’s Market suddenly seemed as enticing as the penny candy store of my childhood once had. Who would have thought? Certainly not I, but I’m glad of it all the same.