Blow Your Stack Saturday: How to Encourage (and Discourage) Exercise

 

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Heyyyy, ya wanna make sure people don't stick with their workout? Just make your exercise routines all about weight loss and having an arbitrarily "perfect" physique! Bingo-bango-bongo, those less-than-perfect types will drop away like flies, leaving you surrounded by only the kinds of hunks and hotties that a superior specimen like you deserves to be in the company of.

What, me, sarcastic? Surely not! This will totally happen and you completely deserve it! Being a body-shaming concern troll in no way means you should crawl back under your bridge. 

All right, I'm setting the Sarcasm Shaker aside now before I risk seasoning this post with too much of a bad thing. Anyway...

As Jennette McCurdy observed in her autobiography, I'm Glad My Mom Died:

People seem to assign thin with “good,” heavy with “bad,” and too thin also with “bad.” There’s such a small window of “good.”

https://amzn.to/3s1wVI1

Nobody deserves to be shamed into hating their body. I just did part of Jeanette DePatie’s Everybody Can Exercise video.

https://amzn.to/3CAEPgq

The participants in the video are real people of all sizes, not leotard-clad Stepford wives. I was only able to get through 15 minutes this time, but now that I’ve found something that I can tell myself to do at least 15 minutes of, and I’m not having to come up with the routines, I think I may be able to keep up with it. My endurance sucks, but I’m hoping to rebuild it.

Body shaming leads people to give up on exercising. I may not be a genius, but that seems pretty damn counter-intuitive to me. As Ragen Chastain of Dances With Fat (https://danceswithfat.wordpress.com) says, you are the boss of your own underpants. Therefore, if you wish to make weight loss the focus of your workout, you may do that. However, there are several reasons why I don’t recommend that approach. More importantly, you don’t have the right to tell anyone else that weight loss needs to be their focus for anything.

These are my realistic goals.

I have asthma and back problems and I’m almost 60 years old. I’ll never be able to run a marathon.

Did I mention that I hate running?

I like swimming. Unfortunately, there is no place to swim in this town. The nearest swimming pool or rec center is going to be a good 60 miles away.

I like walking, but I hate it when I go out in public and the public be there to attagirl me and treat me like I’m mentally deficient because I have physical problems. I don't want to be anyone's inspiration porn.

I also hate it when I encounter unleashed dogs because fuckers in this town think everyone should love their snarling mutt.

All that being said, I think videos like Jeanette’s are routines I can stick to.

I can do at least 15 minutes a day.

It doesn’t feel like a chore.

The routine is led by a compassionate, encouraging person.

One need not be in perfect shape to participate.

There is no fat shaming or thin praising.

It would make me feel proud of myself if I were to exercise regularly again. Hopefully, it will increase my stamina, flexibility, and strength. Perhaps it may even help lower my blood sugar.

What will exercising not do?

It will not make me a better person than people who don’t exercise.

A commitment to physical activity is not a measure of personal worth. I wish people would stop treating it like it was.

~Ornery Owl Has Spoken~

Fat and Ornery

Free use image from Open Clipart Vectors

FOAD Thursday: A Big Fat FOAD for Anytime Fitness

How about letting people of all sizes enjoy those things without implying that certain bodies are wrong @AnytimeFitness Exercise should be enjoyable. Making it about losing weight makes it more likely that people will quit. Thanks for contributing to eating disorders & self-hate.

Well, Mark, I think you should have fired his size-shaming ass. But the apology is appreciated. At least I don't have to tell you to FOAD.

Fat Friday #3: Eating Disorders Start Early

Here is my part in a thread about how to encourage children to have a healthy relationship with food. The rest of the thread is here.

I developed a bad relationship with food early on. When I was young my family was pretty poor, so we ate a lot of stuff like boiled soybeans and buckwheat groats. I still like buckwheat groats, but if I never see another boiled soybean, it can’t be too soon. So, food insecurity was a thing in my early life.

However, i also learned early on that the worst thing you can possibly be is fat. My parents made sweets a verboten thing, so I started sneaking candy whenever I could find it. I ended up shoplifting candy bars from the natural foods store my mother shopped at. My parents made me pay for the candy. The elderly lady that owned the store forgave me, but I still felt terrible.

My father was also insistent that we eat what was put in front of us whether we liked it or not. I hated liver with a blazing passion. I slipped my portion to the cat under the table and went hungry.

When my son came along I’d always insist that he eat some sort of reasonably nutritious food before having dessert, but I never forced him to eat anything he didn’t like. As it turns out, he’s high-functioning autistic, so food textures are a bigger thing with him than they are with non-autistic people. My family never understood this and scolded him for not eating what he was served and me for letting him be “spoiled.” 

I don’t think that forcing people to eat things they don’t want to eat is a good thing.

I also don’t think that teaching people that fat is the worst thing you can possibly be is a good thing.

I still have a really fucked-up relationship with food, and I’m now more than half a century old.

~Cie~

The Cheese Grates It: Holiday Size Shaming: Thanksgiving 2018 Version

Image from food52.com

Your holiday feast should not come with a side order of body shaming

The inevitable holiday size shaming.

Trigger warning for size shaming and a brief mention of weight.

Disappointed but not surprised.

It is stressful for my son to go over to visit my mother on holidays, but he agreed to it because my mother was worried that Denny's would be terribly crowded. (I had suggested that we just meet at Denny's so no-one has to cook.)

My mother bought a flannel shirt as a gift for my son. My son is a tall, burly fellow with a little bit of a belly, either an in-betweenie or possibly a small fat. My mother made a point of patting him on the belly and saying "you need to lose this gut."

I wasn't aware of this until my son brought it to my attention after we left. He said that the funny thing is, last time he was weighed at the doctor, he actually dropped seven pounds for reasons unknown because he hasn't been dieting. He said the technician was praising him and he told her it didn't really make a difference to him, to which she responded with a look of surprise.

My mother refuses to acknowledge that leaving his home environment can be difficult for my son, who is high functioning autistic and has issues with anxiety (including a degree of agoraphobia) and depression. He becomes overly stimulated with my mother's insistence on keeping the television on, to Dr. Phil or the news or such. The constant barrage of advertisements is even more distressing to him than it is to people who don't become overstimulated. He doesn't react to stimulus in any perceptible way, but he will become withdrawn for a time after the fact.

It makes me sad that my mother continually shoots herself in the foot when it comes to her relationship with my son. I guess she knows that I'll flip my bitch switch if she mentions my weight, so she has to inflict her opinion on somebody, and she thinks since my son is a guy, he should be "tough enough to take it" when someone is "being real" with him.

I don't know if it's even worth bringing it up with my mother, because she will be "terribly hurt" by my "attack" on her and ask me why I'm always so "angry" even when I am speaking in a perfectly even tone and not doing any name-calling or making accusations, none of which I can say about her past interactions with me.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

OctPoWriMo 2018: Day 14: Not Your Fat Joke

If

I

were

me

sooner

than

I

believed I could be

Then I would have

Followed my dreams

And believed in myself

In spite of people telling me

That people who look like me

Are only allowed to be

The butt of jokes

Fuck that shit

I refuse to

Disappear

~Cie~

Note:

I wasn't quite sure how to do it, but I think I made the basic shape of a certain gesture 

The Cheese Grates It: Not a Pretty Girl

Every now and then I think it would be cool to try and reconnect with a friend I had back in the day, but then I remember that said friend had a crush on me, and it becomes weird and awkward. I had a lot of these guys in my life.

It wasn't that I was stunningly attractive by any means. I have always been "too fat" to be conventionally attractive. Even when I was thin I had a chubby face. In fact, after having surgery on my chin, my boss pinched my cheek and said: "why didn't you have the doctor do something about these chipmunk cheeks?" So, yeah.

Anyway, I was the "troubled girl" trope. People, mostly guys, have always thought they could turn me, who, to be honest, resembles Miss Piggy more than any other celebrity, from a plain, troubled, chubby girl into a stunning swan who would then be grateful to them for life. However, people are not plot devices, and shit does not work that way. When you try to mold people into the image of what you think they should be, they resent the fuck out of it. 

The end is never pretty.

I always fear that if I try to contact some of my guy friends from the past, they will expect me to still be the vaguely cute, troubled girl that they can fix. I am not her. She is long gone. There were reasons why she existed. She doesn't need to exist anymore.

I'm not cute, and I don't care about being cute. I'm sick and tired of people who think I should care about it, and that includes fucking doctors who think I should care about whether or not people find me physically attractive. I don't care. I don't want to care. I don't want anything to fucking do with it. I want to be out of that game.

I am not a pretty girl. It isn't what I do.

So, this is why I don't contact some of the dudes from my past who I thought were cool, but I know they wanted to "save" me.

I don't want to be "saved," and I don't want anyone trying to turn me into something I'm not.

This rant is why I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a keyboard in the early hours of the morning.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

The Cheese Grates It: My Resolution to Minimize Body-Shaming Psychic Attacks

Per my resolution to minimize the amount of toxic, ignorant, psychic attacks negatively impacting my life, I kicked the radio station which had been my primary choice to the curb following an onslaught of weight loss surgery ads and the afternoon DJ making the inane remark that "exercising makes you feel thinner. This is especially true for women." 

I now have the radio in the Forester permanently tuned to the publicly funded jazz station. I have satellite radio in the Fusion, which tends to be on one of the 70's or 80's stations or the Underground Garage. They don't blather on and on about bullshit calculated to offend and shame people with non-optimal appearances: bigger people, older people, women who aren't conventionally attractive.

 It's a huge relief to be able to do my job and have some music to keep me from dying of boredom without some stupid advertisement or idiot remark from one of the DJ's raising my blood pressure multiple times during my shift. I've thought about writing a letter to the radio station, but I doubt it would do any good.  

I hope one day we will have a world where a radio station playing such toxic advertising would be flooded by emails rebuking them. 

People deserve to live their lives without being constantly reminded that they are seen as undesirable thanks to the constant brainwashing by mega-corporations hell-bent on taking their money.

Advertising is usually a form of attack rather than an informative medium.

It's time to stop kowtowing to the Frankenstein monster which was in no small part created by behaviorist John B. Watson. Watson was a bit of a shit in any case. He was unscrupulous in his experimentation on vulnerable subjects. 

We need to learn to think for ourselves rather than allowing advertisers to mold our beliefs.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~