As mother of a daughter, and as a woman myself, I suppose, I’ve become really sensitive about the way everyone is obsessed with weight. However a person wants to live, you know, fine, but my god, everywhere you turn there’s something. There are ads for diets and diet products EVERYWHERE and people commenting on food and losing weight EVERYWHERE. It’s so ingrained, I think some people don’t even realize they do it, or they think they’re being amusing or something.
I was reading a blog the other day, a woman writing a somewhat catch-all entry, some about her kids, some about cooking, some about just stuff she was thinking. In a medium-length blog entry, she mentioned her weight in a joking, derogatory way four times. And this woman, she’s not fat by any standard. But she made jokes about the food she’d cooked was going right to her hips, some comment about how she “got fat” after her babies were born, another crack about how she’d do some activity when her thighs weren’t the size of the state where she lives. I don’t mean to pick on this one woman, because I read crap like that everywhere.
The thing is, however much people talk about fat being unhealthy, they don’t really mean it most of the time. They mean fat is ugly. Truth is, fat in itself is not the health risk and skinny people can die of heart disease and have diabetes and blah blah blah, if you’re interested in the facts, you can find them. I highly recommend Health At Any Size. But all this smack talk about food being bad and fat being ugly, it doesn’t help anyone. All it does is create an environment where no one can love who they are, where little girls like my daughter grow up thinking they have to conform to a certain body type in order to be pretty and if they fail, there’s a lifetime of diet ads everywhere they turn to remind them of their failure. They can hop on the diet train and do more damage to themselves than is done by the original fat. It’s horrible and now that I have a daughter, I hate it even more. Even without a television in the house, that mindset of fat is bad, food is bad, fat is ugly, it seeps in anyway.
Rebecca and I recently shopped for jeans for her. She’s not a skinny kid, she’s sturdy and strong, she’s not slender. 90% of the jeans we found at the store were “skinny” jeans and even the ones that technically fit on her (meaning she could pull them up and zip them), were all wrong, were uncomfortable or just didn’t fit right. It was so frustrating for her. The problem was, my beautiful little girl thought something was wrong with HER because all the stupid low-rise skinny jeans didn’t fit her body. I wanted to burn the store down.
