Working on my Dissertation Proposal

What it LOOKS like

What it FEELS like

Social Stigma and Weight Loss

For years I have been “working on” my weight. In large part this is because my favorite things in life are chocolate, television and not moving around very much. What are you going to do? 

Now when you are overweight, it becomes very important to not be seen doing things that fat people do. Much like I think that people who are broke are careful not to slip over the line and start doing things that poor people do. Get your first government cheese, and people start looking at you differently. 

So as an Overweight American, or as I prefer, Person of Extra Fluffiness, I have always been particularly sensitive to making sure that I am not positioning myself as a Fat Person. For years this desire has kept me from doing many things that I perceived as “things that fat people do.” Now, this list may now seem insane, but it has haunted me since my youth. 

A man after my own heart.

1)      Fat people exercise. When I was a kid, I thought that exercise was for fat people. Okay, so this one was pretty quickly broken, and you might say, “Where did you get that crazy idea little 10-year- old Jennifer?” Why from television of course. Where on television do you see people exercising? (and this was particularly true in the 80s and 90s) On bow flex commercials. Exercise was for fat people to lose weight (usually in just 8 minutes a day), not for thin people to stay thin. You might see thin people on TV jumping around in a leotard or having a smoothy, but really that's just so that they can wear a leotard. They're already thin. But if lazy, fat people would only get on some Suzanne Somers treadmill of death, they would have this problem no longer. 

      I remember being shocked when I saw a thin, pretty girl my age weight lifting at the YMCA in middle school. That was the first time that I realized that people who have phenomenal bodies also exercise. It honestly had never occurred to me before that point. I really thought that exercise was for fat people. 

2)      Fat people drink diet coke. This one took me years to get over. Now, if you are thin and you have a diet soda, that means that you are health conscious. If you are overweight with a diet soda, this means that you are trying to fix your sad life. This is truth. Actions are not just what they are, they are how people perceive them. The meaning that people put on your actions. 

3)      Fat people join weight watchers. So two weeks ago, I joined weight watchers. My mom has been bugging me to do this for YEARS, and I have avoided this day because I honestly did not want to deal with the social stigma that this evokes in my mind.

Now I have done some extreme things to “get healthy” (how non-fat people say lose weight). I have done yoga in a 108 degree room. I have run a half marathon. I have eaten a clean diet with only nuts and veggies and lean protein (see the week I went literally insane for chocolate). My next step was going to be a juice cleanse. A juice cleanse, people.  I considered purposefully drinking my food, my chunky green food through an extra-large straw, before I even considered joining weight watchers. And why?  Because skinny people juice cleanse too.

But you know what I found out at my first weight watchers meeting? There are some skinny bitches up in that joint. What? Who knew people who are trying to lose like 5 pounds are doing this stuff too. Just another example of the man trying to keep me down.

So, reader beware. I love it. I have taken a big, long, cooling drink of the (sugar free) kool-aid, and you are going to be hearing all about it.

Dance Moms and the Culture of Success

The American Dream. Kind of.

Anyone can make it to the top. They just need to have drive and determination and someone to verbally abuse them for four to six hours a day. This is a key component of the American myth and of the popular reality TV show Dance Moms.

If you are not familiar, the show is not really about the dance moms, but about the dance teacher. The star of this particular reality fiasco is Abby, a large woman who screams and yells at 6- to 10-year-old girls trying to make them better dancers. She is never satisfied, and will often critique even first-place performances. She is a firm believer in Ricky Bobby’s belief that if you’re not first, you’re last. Every week, she rates the girls on a pyramid from top to bottom. She even yells at the girls for crying when they can’t take it anymore. And to top it all off, she thinks up cray cray routines in which the girls are wielding pistols or dressed as showgirls. Seven-year-old showgirls people. 

And the thing you can’t quite believe is that these mothers actually sign their daughters up for this abuse. I mean what could possibly be worth all of this? And then you see them dance. They are ridiculously good. Best in the country good. And suddenly you find yourself wishing that you had had some horrible, horrible person screaming at you for your entire childhood. Because that’s what we think it takes in America to be fantastic. That’s why this woman can get away with all of her awful shenanigans. We really believe that an emotional beatdown is part of the formula for success. 

Future Olympian

Am I wrong? Because a part of me certainly believes that all of these people who are really, really amazing at something, have in some way suffered for that success. They practiced that piano for hours on end, and somewhere there was a stern taskmaster smacking them on the knuckles with a ruler. Don’t lie. When you imagine Steve Jobs in that garage creating Apple, don’t you imagine some sort of Russian nursemaid shouting that he’s inadequate the whole time? I attribute a good portion of my academic success to my first grade teacher, Sister William Francis who scared the ever loving crap out of me and taught me to read like nobody’s business. To this day I am really unclear how it is that people can manage not to do their homework. I was always terrified not to. 

And I’m pretty sure I internalized some of that crazy. Or maybe some of us just have an inner Eastern European. The fact that I am even slightly well balanced is due to the fact that my parents are wacky hippy types. I remember my freshman year of high school when I told my dad I was in the top 10 (sixth in my class at that point). My dad said “don’t forget to have fun,” and I thought to myself, well screw you. But, I keep coming back to that idea. Is my life fun? Am I having a good time? Am I going to look back in 30 years and wish that I had thought more about enjoying life and not just tackling it?

I wish we could put that idea back into American schools, like in the 80s and 90s when we decided to bolster students’ self-esteem and make learning fun. Someone somewhere decided that shouting in kids’ faces and literally hitting them with sticks was not the way to create the kind of people we wanted around. I mean, how many psychologically scarred and freaked out geniuses can one country stand? Maybe soon people will remember that we don’t get that excited by people who can bubble things in either.

I would kill for some chocolate

Ah, do I have a tale to tell you. So three weeks ago, I tried to entirely give up sugar and artificial sweeteners cold turkey. I felt very proud of myself, and not a little superior. Oh yes, and I was cutting back on caffeine and unhealthy fats too. No more diet soda even. While at first this only created in my life sad headaches and general malaise, in the end, this combination of unmet desires led to the perfect storm… chocolate cravings that made me want to rip people’s faces off. 

Since you are all still alive my precious, precious friends, you know what has happened. I sacrificed my plan for healthy living in order to save all of your lives. I continued to eat my healthy diet which precluded fat, caffeine and sugar, and then I would eat a truly disturbing amount of chocolate, which replaced all the fat, caffeine and sugar I had so humbly been trying to avoid. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I fought it off for a while. I made it ten days where the sweetest thing I had was an apple slice. My dad had to recently reform his diet, and after a few weeks of no artificial sweeteners and very little sugar, he described an orange as “nectar of the gods.” I too wanted to reach this transcendental place where I might start crying when I had a little honey. And I really did eat “clean” for a week and a half. I ate a lot of grapes and grilled chicken, egg whites and fennel. 

And then, I remembered that I was made of people and needed some people food. Like an f-ing twinkie. We as a people did not thwart god’s will and create plastic and aspartame and late night television so that I could muddle about with organic vegetables and lean proteins. 

But I wasn’t giving up that easily. Oh no. I certainly wasn’t going to admit defeat and BUY chocolate. But then I happened upon a bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips hidden in my freezer. Those made it a day and a half. And then it was truly on. Oh was it ever. I ate every chocolate thing in my apartment. I made chocolate frosting. I poured hershey’s syrup on peanut butter (protein!). I made family-sized brownies and didn’t share. I found another bag of chocolate chips. And all the while eating lean protein and healthily prepared vegetables. 

Tina gets it.

Moral of the story? If I was in that Stephen King story Quitters Inc. and it was about chocolate instead of cigarettes, my whole family would be missing their pinky toes. 

But I live to fight another day. And I have learned my lesson. I think that lesson is something about… um. Yeah.