“If you lost some weight you’d be pretty enough to be a model!” - Mom
WTF? That’s a real confidence booster. I’ll have her know that I could be a model right now. A Plus-Sized Model. No shame in that. Mom was also the one that got me started on the diet pills. (Me, Mom, Sister and my neighbor were all on them) Its not like I don’t eat very healthy, I’m a picky eater, but I do mostly live off pasta and chicken. Not to bad, and maybe I’ll have a few soda’s a week. But we don’t keep a lot of junk in the house and my favorite snack is a bowl of cereal or a banana.
Mom has made off hand comments about my weight never really intentionally trying to hurt me but it does. I guess she sees it as trying to do good, but when you tell your daughter she’s not pretty cause she’s not thin (even if its just implying it) it’ll hurt.
This is such an easy topic for me to go off about. Blah…
Funny thing was, when my husband (who lost 55lbs on the Body for Life plan) started dieting, it drove me bananas!
Here I am cooking the low-fat food for him that I’d been trying for YEARS to get him to eat (unsuccessfully), and he’d say “Can you buy fat free mayo? Did you know mayo has **grams of fat PER TSP??”
I’m like “no shit- that’s why I don’t eat it!” Finally after a week or two of “Do you know how many calories that has” I about lost it. I just had to say “no more!” I KNOW all about fat and calories- this is news to you, not me! The more you stress it, the more guilty I feel for having a tbsp of butter on my greenbeans. Bugger off!
He stopped finally, and continued to do great losing weight, letting me know when he hit a milestone. For a while there, I was going nuts with it, though.
No, I agree with you. “Damn bitch” was more of an afterthought to sum up my feelings. But it would be even worse to cheat on someone who was with you even when overweight, after losing weight.
Bleah, I agree with (and have lived) just about everything in this thread (except gobear’s comments - I know you’ve said that you don’t understand the relationship between women, weight and food - we don’t understand it ourselves; how could we expect you to? I’m certainly not holding it against you :))
I also have a mother who very unintentionally taught me to be adversarial with my body. She was always dieting, or at least saying she should diet. She raised four girls who have all fought with our weight all our lives. She still says she should diet; she’s now 59 years old, 5’4, and about 120 pounds. She looks PERFECT, and she’s still going on about how she shouldn’t eat this, and she has to go back on her diet, blah blah blah.
I’ve spent my adult life losing 30 pounds, and gaining it back again 2 years later. I made a decision not to ever diet again, about 5 years ago. I haven’t lost any weight, and I haven’t gained any weight, and I have had 5 wonderful years of enjoying food and eating and the socializing that goes with it. But still, 5 years later, I’ll try on clothes and feel like crying because I feel so ugly in them. I shocked my fiance when I came home and cried in his arms after trying to find a wedding dress. I think that was an eye-opening moment for him; he (like so many men - and I’m not blaming them) also doesn’t understand why women have such a hard time learning to love our bodies. He thinks I look great.
It’s a huge uphill battle for women to learn to love your body just the way it is, big thighs, flabby arms and all. And people like the dieting girl(s) mentioned in the OP, or the mean mother in belladonna’s post are not helping. And like Rachelle, talking about this always makes me defensive and angry, too. So much of my time and energy wasted on such a non-issue.
All my immediate family struggle with their weight constantly and are always dieting or thinking about dieting. Some of my other relatives don’t really have such serious problems. I was a small kid, but from about age 10-13ish I put on a lot of weight and got teased for it and all kinds of things by the other kids. (My boyfriend bugged me for pics for awhile, and when I finally sent one, he told me not to send any more photos from that age. :eek: ) Anyway, the point is that during this time, when I bought clothes, my parents would say stuff like, “Oh, that makes you look thinner!” or “You shouldn’t eat that, you need to lose weight.” For a signifigant portion of my childhood this went on… and now that I’m almost 22 and my body has balanced itself out for a few years, I seem to have gotten a freak “thin” gene (though I will put on weight if I overeat constantly, it’s nothing like what they deal with) and they constantly tell me I’m too skinny and that I shouldn’t lose any more weight. Um, I’m not even dieting. Anyway, with them I guess I can’t win.
My best memory of my family’s weird relationship with food was one time when I caught my brother, in the dark, in the laundry room with a couple of cookies because he didn’t want my dad to see him eating them.
I don’t care about him eating cookies, but that was /funny/.
Well, I can see where you’re coming from. I used to roll my eyes when people talked about “calories” and “fat content”. I have subsequently lost 100 lbs., and still have about 25 to go. Recently I sat down in the break room at work with a Diet Coke and pack of peanuts, and I girl who was not noticeably overweight said “Oh, you know those are sooo fattening.” Yeah thanks, lets see (looks at package) 300 calories. So for today that’s a total intake of, uhh, 300 calories! Out of the 2000 or so I’m going to eat today. So I still find this very annoying, and although I have to be aware of basically every calorie I put into my body, I never share this information with others unless they ask.
What’s even worse, is when you’re on a diet, and people know it, and watch every thing you eat like a hawk. “Say, what happened to the diet?” This especially happens with me, since I’m not on a “fad” type diet where you can only eat certain things {boiled grapefruit and toasted weasel spleens, or whatever} I can eat whatever I want as long as I keep the calorie count under calorie usage (a novel idea!). So, I’ll mind my diet myself thank you! I don’t need anyone elses input.
My boss kind of drove me nuts by doing the opposite of what the OP was dealing with. He’d remind ME about MY diet! Every now and then he’ll order pizza for the staff. On a couple of different occasions, the pizza would come and he’d be all “Come and get it!” and then he’d look at me and say, “Oh, sorry, man.” And I guess he was trying not to be insensitive, but all he was really accomplishing was making me a little self-conscious. I’m thinking, “Look, Dave, I’m not going to be reduced to a whimpering puddle simply by the aroma of pizza! I could even see myself having a slice and not feeling like scum over a minor indulgence! Relax!”
OH, that FUCKING BMI!!! Who came up with THIS fucking idea?
I’m 5’3". I weigh 150lbs. If I recall correctly, this gives me a BMI of 26 or 27, making me “borderline obese”. When folks hear this they look at me and say “huh?” I’m at 36-28-38. They say “where do you put the weight?”
I think I look great. My husband thinks I look great. My guy friends think I look great. The only people nattering at me “you need to lose weight you need to lose weight you need to lose weight” are stick-thin losers who have lost all capacity to enjoy food. Fuck them.
Oh, and supplements – a simple multivitamin isn’t going to hurt anyone. It will probably help. But people should eat FOOD not PILLS. What really pisses me off are those “stress pack” or “daily pack” items at checkout counters with 5-8 pills of various colors. They’re expensive, and the packaging implies you should fork over for one a day (at least). Cripers - get 300 generic multivitamins, nearly a year’s worth, for the price of two of these price-gougers. Same shit, smaller package.
Other supplements? Well, yeah, they have their uses but puh-LEEZE! Just because it’s natural doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you!
And if one more person tries to force Echaneaca on my during the cold/flu season I am going to go apeshit. I do not need my immune system “stimulated”. It is already in overdrive, that’s why I have the fucking allergies. It does not need encouragement, thank you very much.
