Friday, March 23, 2007

A Fat Rant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUTJQIBI1oA

Recovery from sizism is as much about getting over it ourselves as it is about society changing its views.

One thing this articulate and lovely woman urges us to do is not hide our weight. I remember in high school hearing a fat girl report herself as weighing 135 pounds. I myself was smaller than her and much shorter than her, and I was something like 150 pounds then. I thought somehow I had denser bones. I thought maybe she was fudging a little, but it didn't occur to me she lied.

Life is too short to spend so much of our life being miserable over food and over our weight. Health issues from self-hatred and insecurity far outweigh the health issues of the weight itself.

I will not lie. I weigh 317, as of my last visit to the doctor. I am a size 28, or (gasp) 4X or 5X. [see the video] It's not the weight that's the issue. I am healthy enough. I don't have diabetes. I don't have heart disease. I don't do drugs. I may not be able to run, but runners get injuries.

Want to introduce someone to fat acceptance? Show them this video.

3 comments:

SIMPLY ME said...

Wow Heidi, this is a great video for acceptance of the way we are. Thanks for sharing.

Anonymous said...

That's all fine and dandy, and you may consider yourself healthy, but try to find one honest doctor who will agree that you're healthy if you weight in at 317. Not gonna happen unless you have a mambly-pambly doctor feelgood.

Heidi said...

to anonymous:

if you go back and read more carefully, what i said is i am healthy enough. i know i'm not as healthy as i could be, but it would be far less healthy for me to guilt-trip every morsel of food that passes through my mouth. that, incidently, is what i had to overcome from the first 25 years of my life. that, incidently, is why i believe i now weigh as much as i do.

bad doctors treat weight. good doctors treat health issues. the issues are good nutrition and exercise. a good doctor knows i am vegetarian. she might even know that i have been vegetarian for nearly 2 decades. bad doctors miss important health problems because they blame the symptoms on the weight. bad doctors add to depression and poor health by obsessing over a patient's weight.

i met a large woman whose doctor would not give her a back surgery because he said she weighed too much, yet he was willing to do gastric bypass surgery, something that can be deadly. he was willing to have her walk around with a fractured bone because she did not want to have a gastric bypass surgery.

i wonder why you felt the need to be anonymous. if you know me, you know well enough i will accept criticism.

if you don't know me, why do you care to remain anonymous?