Exercising the Devil

(Yes, I know that it's 'exorcising'; it's a play on words. Stay with me, here.)

I was a very active child, as are the vast majority of children who are not naturally sickly. I loved to run around, skip, jump and occasionally crawl through the grass looking for garter snakes to keep as pets. In short, I was a fairly average child.

I began to lose my zest for activity when I was, oh, nine. That was, not entirely coincidentally, the year that I began menstruating and growing breasts and otherwise "filling out", as they call it. Looking back, it was mostly the fact that I no longer looked like my peers that made me loath to play with them; they knew it and I knew it and that isn't a good combination in any case. I had those big flappy arms; I had little nubs of breasts; I had... a belly and thighs. (Horror, the horror.)

In short, I was growing up - I was doing what all girls are destined to should they live long enough. Biology is destiny when you are talking about the biological process of puberty. But somehow, this message got lost; I was ashamed of my body... and frankly, I wanted nothing to do with it. Ever. Period. (Or, you know, preferably not.)

It wasn't so much that I was growing up as it was that I was growing up more quickly than my peers and was ostracised for it - not that I hadn't already been for my "weirdness", but now I could see the difference in my body and my peers' bodies. Now I was The Official Freak.

So I went to the computer and distracted myself, 'turtling' and divesting myself of anxiety and unhappiness through the internet (namely, Neopets).

This trend of avoiding exercise at all costs carried on through middle and some of high school for me. I remember that once, my middle school P.E. teacher forced us all to run/walk a mile on the track... and I was the last one in. It completely, utterly humiliated me, and that only made me more afraid and more ashamed of my body.

Angela Stokes is wrong. It isn't that fat people are ashamed of their bodies naturally, as she implies in her book Revealing the Hidden Changes - it's that other people, both thin and fat, make us feel ashamed of our bodies. To make fat people feel like exercising (and I say this as a stalwart anti-dieting activist, mind), we need to get rid of these prejudices that say that they have to exercise and make exercise feel like fun.

I am quite sure that is why I didn't voluntarily exercise for most of my pubescent and post-pubescent life: it wasn't fun for me. More than that, other people had made it not-fun for me because they used it to set me apart from my peers. Soccer I would always, always willingly participate in: we got to play soccer perhaps once a semester. Dancing, yes, that too, on occasion. But most of the time, things like running, jogging, walking, dancing, swimming, basketball, volleyball - all these things were constructed into my mind as activities that other people would use to humiliate me.

Exercise should not be humiliation.

And yet, when I was actively eating disordered, I would constantly exercise - twitch, twitch, twitch, how many calories can I burn by swinging my legs back and forth? twitch. So, as the diet credo has designed it in our minds, exercise is something necessary, not-fun, not-stress relieving, not-playful, not-happy. Exercise has been constructed as necessary toil.

And it's not. I have come to learn that, now, after having taken up running last year and this year and having made the breakthrough, using my raw food diet, of training my chest not to burn every time I run for more than two minutes. Now, running is fun for me - it just took a little while to get there, a little bit of learning how to again. The process was actually quite quick and the results enduring, given that I stopped running for about four months between last Tuesday and my last run of 2007.

So... I guess what I'm trying to say is, the world's fucked up. Don't let it get to you so much; find a physical activity (not including guns) and do it, and enjoy it. You'll love it, it'll pay off in mental health, peace and better sleep, and you will discover another way to love your body.

Food = Love

As much as some may want to deny it - with the whole "eat to live" mantra going around - food is associated in the minds of many animals (not just humans - think about dogs and cats, for example!) with love, comfort, and companionship. True story: my dog is so very polite when it comes to food that, even if she doesn't like the taste of the treat, she will take it, wait until whoever gave it to her walks away, and quietly deposit it in a corner. She knows that we, her pack/family, give her food because we love her. (If you're squeamish about the idea of animals knowing what love is, 1. get over it and 2. substitute "care for her" instead of "love her".) As such, she won't refuse it, because to her that would mean refusing our love - and dogs, like humans, are extremely social animals. (Cats are too, but that's a post for another day.) Only in the most extreme circumstances will we refuse love, i.e. food.

One of those circumstances is when we have been told that we are so loathsome that we do not deserve love i.e. food. That, my friends, is what fat bigotry, sizeism, etc., is all about - it's about starving the fatties of food/love so badly that they end up "acceptable".

It's rather cruel, when you think about it. (Okay, even if you don't think about it.) We'd call doing that to average-sized kids abuse - and yet we think that doing it to fat kids and fat adults is a-okay! Amazing what you can justify if you just blame even a tiny portion of society's ills on a particular group, even if that group has done nothing in particular to warrant it - other than being born into a body with the wrong genetic codes. (Fat people, women, the mentally ill, animals, etc.) No matter who it is, we'll find a way to punish them for being born into the wrong body.

And you want to know the really funny part? It was dieting that made me permanently (?) fat, just as it was for many other people. My mother put me on diets, starting with Weight Watchers, since I was 11 (or 12, can't remember precisely) out of worry from my medicinally-induced BED. I'll admit that she was right to be worried: it's not healthy to gain a large amount of weight in a short time - and I gained about 70-100 lbs. in six months. Still, if she wanted me to be "acceptably thin" - and if this planet were more reasonable about fat people (but wouldn't that rule out the concept of being "acceptably thin"?) - she wouldn't have put me on a diet. The diet was what made the weight gain "stick", so to speak.

But, as I've mentioned before, my mother is (covertly) eating disordered; not a day didn't go by when she saw me eating something tasty and said something along the lines of, "Ooooh, that's bad." So I grew up with the concept of "tasty" foods being "bad". (Fortunately, that's one of her neuroses that I've never really internalized. I'm a complete and utter hedonist at heart, and usually on the outside, too.) My mother has been a chronic dieter - I know, this is really starting to look like the classic eating-disordered family, isn't it? Well, my dad's not eating disordered, though he does have low self-esteem from being 30 lbs. over the recommended weight (note, not "overweight"), so you won't ever hear me talking about how men aren't affected by fat hatred at all.

Thing is, I normally didn't start diets on my own - they were a family effort and one that I usually managed to cheat (note: "cheat" as in "cheating death") by, well, sneaking money to school and buying lots of treats. It wasn't hard; at my middle school, they regularly sold pizza and foot-long hot dogs. (Which, you must admit, is a bad idea if you're trying to get a well-behaved set of students ready and willing to learn, as the additives and animal products themselves directly hinder concentration and clarity of thought - ever felt that "sedated" feeling after a meal of animal products, where you just want to sit and stare? Yeah.)

I remember, quite clearly, sneaking home some Li'l Debbie's brownies when my entire family was "supposed" to be on Atkins and gobbling them because I just could not stand it anymore. I lost a bit of weight on that, then gained it all back and more. And the really fucked up part was that I felt so guilty for it - like I was... well, cheating.

That's the essence of binge disorders, I think, and also a large factor in binge/purge cycles and disorders. It's where you feel so guilty about eating that first bite - because again, you believe that you aren't worthy of love i.e. food - that you say, "fuck it" and start binging because if you're going to be corrupt and guilty, you might as well be fully corrupt and guilty. (It's the eating disorder's equivalent of "foot in the door syndrome". Actual psychological term!) Then, if you decide to purge, it's because you either feel so sick or you feel so unworthy that you have to reject it. All of it. Purging is, in religious language, penance for your sins. Purging says, "I didn't deserve that food! I'm sorry. I wasted it on me already, but that doesn't mean I have to benefit from it." (A lot of anorectics, when they binge and then purge, purge out of fear. Exchange "benefit" for "use" and/or the entire sentence with "I don't need it, really!")

That's fucked up.

All I have left to say, really, is that we punish ourselves and our bodies in ways that we do not and that no one could ever deserve by engaging in eating disorders and eating disordered behavior - and it's because we feel we do not deserve love i.e. food if we are not "good enough". "Good enough", for a person with an eating disorder, can and will be anything - usually whatever they feel they're not "good enough" in or for will provide the immediate reason for the eating disordered behavior. And it's because we're told that, if we don't please everyone, we're not good enough.

It's so, so sad that we don't realize that we need only please ourselves and those who would be pleased by us anyways.