on weight loss surgery

I have multiple issues with this article about a 13-year-old who had gastric banding done in Tijuana (His parents had it done there, too. Weight loss surgery vacay in Mexico: Fun for the whole family!) and this follow-up about teens getting weight loss surgery.* But mostly I'm bothered by the treatment of teenagers--barely teens, in some of the cases discussed in these articles--having weight loss surgery as something that's a) normal and b) to be encouraged. Sure, the article talks about risks, but pretend you're a fat 16-year-old reading the second article. Do you walk away from it remembering that the suicide rate among adults doubles after weight loss surgery, or that one out of every [insert some much larger number that makes the overall rate sound pretty insignificant here] of patients dies? Or do you walk away remembering how happy the teens who were interviewed sounded?

I've done a lot of research on weight loss surgery. The protagonist in my prospective NaNoWriMo novel is a post-op roux-en-y patient. (It's not a novel about weight loss surgery per se, but issues related to weight loss surgery as well as fat acceptance are rampant.) I have multiple friends who have had a variety of types of weight loss surgery, all very successfully, with no major complications to date. I have considered--and continue to consider--having it myself.

That said, I have huge, fundamental issues with this surgery. Obviously I don't buy into the myth that fat automatically equals unhealthy. Inasmuch as I'll acknowledge that obesity can exacerbate certain physical conditions, weight loss surgery seems like a cutting off the nose to spite the face kind of solution. I'm also not sold on the whole improved quality of life argument, despite the fact that every aquaintance of mine who's had the surgery--some who were very heavy pre-op, and some who barely made the BMI cut-off--swears up and down that her quality of life is vastly improved. But for me personally, if I really wanted to improve my quality of life--or at least my perception of my quality of life--I'd probably be better off getting a lobotomy. I'm only sort of kidding.

I'm disturbed by how few long-term studies have been done on weight loss surgery. The possible physical complications are daunting, but even more so are the possible psychological complications: the idea that if I was one of the lucky people, if I had no major complications and lost all of my excess weight, then I'd have to deal with the fact that my fantasy of being thin didn't come true and I'm still insecure and clumsy and socially awkward and a clinical depressive with a dysfunctional family.

Of course, the part of me that really wants to be thin--either through Weight Watchers or through surgery if this fails--says, No, you'd be beautiful and graceful and have men falling at your feet! And then I turn on my TV, and commercials like this one say the same thing. I can never decide if the whole world is conspiring to make me hate myself (at least my body), or if I'm just using that as an excuse.

* Huge blinking Las Vegas-style stupid warning applies to the comments. Seriously. Don't even go there.

dumb news stories, tactless comments, and other staples of the fa blogosphere

Comic relief, from Overheard in New York:
Adorable little boy: Mommy, can I have a Hershey bar?
Mom: Yes.
Adorable little boy: I want this big one.
Mom: You can't have a candy bar that big...you might catch the obesity virus.

I've concluded that the bright side of this story is that it breaks the "fatties are dumb" stereotype once and for all. We're fat because we think TOO much! If we would just stop thinking and walk three to hours a day, we'd all be thin! Good to know!

Also, as a recovering social scientist, I'm confounded by the fact that a study with an n of 14 has hit so many of the major news outlets.

My company had its annual meeting this week.* The dress code is normally business casual, so this Wednesday and Thursday as the two days out of the year I actually wear a suit and high heels. And today, an elderly man in the elevator compared me to a giant. To make matters worse, he did like I wasn't even there, saying: "She looks like one of those big, tall women! Like the tallest woman in the world!" (In fairness, he also compared my petite coworker to a midget. WTF is wrong with people?) I thought, This is precisely why I have terrible posture and avoid wearing heels. Well, that and the fact that when I was in high school I became convinced, as so many kids who are bullied do, that if I slouched, no one would notice me. (To all kids reading this, at the risk of sounding like my mother: This doesn't work and will just give you back pain later in life. Stand up straight.)

I've always thought it would be easier, as a girl, to be short and fat. I feel like being tall and fat further contributes to the defeminization I mentioned in my fantasy of being thin entry. I'm only 5"8 in flats--a height that hardly fits into "giant" proportions--but it's rare that I encounter people, even men, who are taller than I am. Most of the guys I've dated have been shorter than me. The last guy I dated was 5"4 and was insecure about being short and fat.

* Amount Barclays Paid for a Lehman Unit: $1.75 billion

Amount Bank of America Paid for Merrill Lynch: $50.3 billion

Government cost to bail out AIG: $85 billion

Having the annual Very Important Meeting for your company and all of their financial services and technology clients during the worst week of the year for Wall Street? Priceless.

My Fantasy of Being Thin

Yet another of the three (four? five? two?) fat acceptance blogs written by young, single people closed this weekend. It reminded me that I should update.

Only a little less than a year ago, I wrote a response in my personal journal to Kate Harding's fantasy of being thin post.

I'm not saying that any of what I wrote in response to that is "right," by any means--by which I mean true, or logical to anyone other than me--but it is what I think.

To start, an excerpt from the original post:

Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person– one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has. It’s not just, “When I’m thin, I’ll look good in a bathing suit”; it’s “When I’m thin, I will be the kind of person who struts down the beach in a bikini, making men weep.”

So here's mine:

If I were thin, I would become a Boyfriend Girl. You know, one of those girls who always has a boyfriend and is never single for longer than five seconds until the next guy picks her up. I have never met a Boyfriend Girl who was not thin. They aren't even necessarily all that attractive, but they are always thin.

If I were thin, I would meet the perfect man. Fat guys only want to date skinny girls. If I was a skinny girl who liked fat guys, fat guys would be all over me, and eventually I'd have to stumble upon the perfect one.

If I were thin, I would learn how to flirt. Because flirting is something that all thin people automatically know how to do. Have you ever met a really thin girl who didn't know how to flirt? Think hard. Have you?

If I were thin, all of the bizarre, contradicting facets of my personality would automatically mesh together and I would become a whole person for once, not just a disconnected jigsaw puzzle of a human being. I would stop playing World of Warcraft, for one. Skinny girls never play World of Warcraft, because they are too busy dating the dozens of men who want to date them. The fact that I play World of Warcraft is a major outlier in my personality. I would also no longer want to be a writer, because the appeal of writing, for me, has always lied in its ability to transport me somewhere else, and if I were thin, I wouldn't need to be transported anywhere else. I probably wouldn't have any desire whatsoever to be an academic, either, because thin, attractive, non-socially awkward people do not being academics. Thin, attractive, non-socially awkward people become...lawyers, or journalists, or bankers or something. I don't know, but if I were thin I would. Really, all of the outlying aspects of my personality are the result of the fact that I've been fat my whole life and have developed multiple weird attributes as a result, like ticks. Sort of like how people who are raised in solitary confinement never learn to talk like a normal person.

If I were thin, my mother would love me and approve of me. At the very least, if I were thin she would respect me, because if I could get thin that would mean that I was capable of running my own life. And if I was thin enough to finally gain my mother's approval, she would stop being such a bitch. Her changed personality would in turn cause my father to stop being an alcoholic, and voila, I would suddenly have the happy family I've always wanted.

If I were thin, I would be graceful and never bump into anything (people, chairs, cacti*) ever again. I am convinced that if I were really thin I would stop being such a klutz.

If I were thin, I would be feminine. Fat women are emasculated. Fat men are feminized. Men--the men for whom I'm not invisible--perceive me as being, at best, "one of the guys," and at worst, entirely asexual. This is exacerbated by the fact that I play World of Warcraft, which, as we've established, I would no longer do if I were thin. (Someone wrote in the comments of the original post, "If I lost weight, I thought, I’ll look like a girl, and then maybe I’ll actually feel like a girl. After years and years of feeling this way, I eventually just got a sex change.")

If I were thin, I would never be broke. I'd be with The Perfect Man and he would pay for everything. And if I was ever broke, I would just go out and prostitute myself like Jenn does.

If I were thin, I would be happy. If I had a boyfriend, and I was graceful and wealthy and a sensible human being and I had a normal family, well, of course I'd be happy. My unhappiness now is entirely the result of the fact that a) I'm single, b) I'm socially retarded, c) I can't figure out what I want to do with my life because I'm a disconnected jigsaw puzzle person, and d) my family is straight out of a Cheever story. All of these problems would inevitably be fixed if I were thin, so yes, of course that would make me happy.

When I wrote this, I wasn't actively trying to lose weight. Now that I am, rereading this, forcing myself to acknowledge the feelings behind it, is even more frustrating. I know that I scapegoat my weight for a million different things. I know that my present desire to lose weight has arisen out of a series of major life changes--I just started my first "real job" and moved across the country to a huge city where I know almost no one--and my wanting to control something.

In the past, when I had very different coping skills, these changes might have caused me to self-injure, or to lock myself in my bedroom and listen to Bright Eyes and cry for a few hours. Now they're prompting me to diet. I'm not sure if that's progress or not.

* Yes, this actually happened. My only excuse is that I lived in Arizona for two years, and there were cacti everywhere.

Alabama's New Policy

This would seem to throw a kink in my lifelong dream of working for the Alabama state government.

Thursday at work, a colleague of mine stumbled upon the news of this online and proclaimed its stupidity to the entire office. Said colleague is a) tiny and b) has a graduate degree in economics, and would thus be inclined to be view this as a rational economic policy. It was a relief to discover that even a reasonably intelligent non-fat person is aware of the stupidity of this.

The Obligatory "Why I Made This Blog" Post

My name is Diana. I'm a fat acceptance activist, a Weight Watchers member, a female fat admirer, a 20-something, a nonprofit researcher and consultant, a political science MA, a fiction writer, a recent New York City transplant, an elitist liberal, a recovering self-injurer, an agnostic, a shopaholic, a film and television addict, a bookworm, and a single white female. But it's the first three that are most relevant to this blog.

I've been an avid reader and commenter in the fatosphere since the days when it existed primarily on Big Fat Blog. But I put off forging my own public corner of the fatosphere for a long time because I didn't feel like I "fit in" with the other fat acceptance bloggers. I spend an embarrassing amount of my life in a state of self-flagellating cognitive dissonance over whether I should even be able to call myself a fat acceptance activist. I don't always love my body. I don't even always accept my fat. To make matters worse, I'm a female fat admirer in a community where fat admiration is often viewed with suspicion, and a single woman in a community that is dominated by bloggers in committed, long-term relationships.

Within the fatosphere, there's a lot of talk about "the journey to fat acceptance." But I've found very blogs that are actually written by people who aren't yet at the end of that journey. There's a lot of success stories out there. There's occasional admissions that the journey involves struggling, but there's not a lot of struggling to be seen on these blogs. I hope that this blog ultimately becomes a record of my transformation into the second coming of Kate Harding. But at this point in my journey, I'm having a hard time seeing the light at the end of this tunnel.

With few exceptions, the majority of fat acceptance bloggers hold that actively pursuing a weight loss plan is wholly antithetical to the goals of fat acceptance. "Real" fat acceptance activists, we're told, may pursue HAES, but never, ever with the end goal of weight loss. The best the rest of us can hope for is the dubious label of "fat acceptance lite". But I consider this blog a fat acceptance blog. I intend to blog about fat acceptance issues. I will not blog about weigh-ins or points. I am not a Weight Watchers member who pays lip service to fat acceptance. I am a fat acceptance blogger who happens to be a Weight Watchers member. And I think there's plenty of room in the movement for me.