i ate nothing but craptastic junk when i was waify skinny (and at my most unstable too — no coincidence there, huh?), but everyone pretty much said “good for you, you look awesome!” our culture’s obsession with “thin=healthy” is messed. the. hell. up.

I am constantly amazed (I find that I spend a great deal of my life in awe; “How can that BE?”)at the number of people (particularly women) that I encounter who “Don’t eat carbs”, or “white after five” (I don’t even know wtf that is…I think it has something to do with the refusal to eat pasta…), or who are constantly “watching” what they eat. It’s a damn national past time.

My little sister, she’s eleven, said at Christmas dinner a year ago, WHEN SHE WAS TEN, that she couldn’t eat butter because “she didn’t want to get fat.”

WHAT. THE. HELL? What happened to being happy with how we are? And if we want to make changes, making them because we want to be stronger, and more capable? Not to fit some stupid, fucking model of cultural plastic perfection?

Ruth — the feeling is entirely mutual. And I grew up reading fat-acceptance literature, so it always surprises me that “dieting = weight gain” isn’t universally known, but I’m a narrow-sighted idealist that way.

Broodmother — it’s actually about as hard for thin people to gain weight as it is for fat people to lose it (really, they should just diet, they’d get there eventually :p ). Although our set-points are changeable (such as via starvation), it’s pretty clear we have them to start with. And “eat a lot/eat very little” and “fat/thin” are two different spectrums (spectra?), with people falling along every possible combination. So a skinny eats-a-lot (hi Korin! ;-} ) makes just as much sense at a fattie lives-on-nothing. Except to our fatphobic kyriarchal culture, of course, but since when does mainstream culture pay attention to silly things like evidence? :p

You are totally right… yes! I am fat *because I dieted*… hell yeah! You know, I hadn’t even thought of it that way. But yeah, of course!

so says the skinny girl who eats more than most grown men.