Last night when talking to my mother, she told me that her cousin “now weighs 300 pounds and is on oxygen.”
My mother is a fatphobe, so I decided to steer her away from that line of thought by concentrating on the “oxygen” part.
“Does she have congestive heart failure?” I asked.
“Well, it’s something cardiovascular, but it’s also the obesity.”
“Having congestive heart failure can cause people to retain fluid, which causes weight gain,” I said. “But after all, most large people are not on oxygen.”
Keep in mind that she was talking to a person who at her heaviest weighed over 300 pounds and was not on oxygen, and currently weighs around 275 pounds. Nope. Not on oxygen.
My mother doesn’t give a damn that I fight to keep my tendency to starve myself in check every day, or that I’m food insecure. Oh yes, she only hints at my need to lose weight because she “cares” about me so much. The fact that I was always miserable when I was dieting--and, further, the fact that it never worked in the long term and I always ended up gaining back more weight, means nothing.
Diets don’t work, and neither does fat shaming.
Don’t be That Person.
The Cheese Hath Grated It
2 comments:
I am a clset water. I grew up poor and was always hungry because of lack of good nutrition. When I did get good food I hordes and horked it and gained weight. I eat like a starving dog now in my 40's because that is how i have always eaten. If I am not careful and people see me eat, they believe me having bad table manners. Therefore I eat in secret so no one looks at me like I am a rude overindulgent glutton. But it amazes me how people who have had full larders since childhood can throw food away and be picky about what they eat.
Hi Brandi,
Thanks for sharing your story. When I was a kid, my father was still in graduate school. We ate a lot of things like soybeans, barley and oatmeal. My father also decided that we shouldn't have anything with sugar, so I ended up craving a lot of "bad" foods. I didn't learn to enjoy them in moderation. I still have a tendency towards "feast or famine." It's an ongoing struggle.
Thanks to propaganda by the diet companies, people don't believe that obesity and poverty have a strong correlation. They believe that larger people must constantly be eating. This isn't the case. Many of us, like you and I, also end up developing an unhealthy relationship with food, on one hand feeling ashamed when we eat and on the other hand sometimes eating too much at a go because we aren't sure when our next meal will be.
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