Many people would look at me and tell me that my weight is a problem. I am 5’4″ and I weigh roughly 210 lbs.
When I was in High School, and in my peak physical condition (from playing sports and training for said sports). I was the same height and I weighed 165 lbs. The height-weight chart that my pediatrician would check when I came in for check-ups said that my healthy weight for my height was 135 lbs. The doctor told me that I was over-weight. He tried to be gentle about it, which I appreciate, but it was clear that he believed that I was not healthy because of my weight. Therefore, I believed the same.
When I got to college, I took my first Women’s and Gender Studies class and learned about fat bias, or fat hatred. Fat bias is weight-based prejudice and discrimination. It is pervasive in our culture and we are enculturated to it with no awareness that it is happening. Fat bias manifests itself in so many ways, I will not attempt to list them all here, but here are two primary ways that fat bias manifests itself:
- fat = bad / thin = good beliefs
- weight-based definitions of health
(For more information, check out Marilyn Wann’s book, “FAT!SO?” or her website or this CNN article about Marilyn Wann’s activism around fat bias.)
For me, this new knowledge helped me to stop hating my body, to stop hating myself for eating food and to stop seeing food as the enemy! This slowly revolutionized my self-worth and the way that I behaved around food. I still have some issues in this area that I am working on, but I can now get creative with food (enjoy food, even!) without feeling like I’m being “bad” for eating more that some celery and carrots because LORD knows I’m too fat to eat anything but that!
Food is fun, not an enemy! We are made to eat, we have to eat to survive! So now, I am asking myself, what is the food I am eating doing to my body? How is the food I am eating connected to my mood, to my cravings, to my emotions? Does one cause the other? Why do I just WANT ice cream sometimes and not other times? What need, social, emotional or mental, is food filling for me? And why do I get more food-focused when I tell myself I’m going to try not to eat “x” food.
This last question is a crucial one because my skin issues and my gut issues seem to be intimately connected to what foods I am eating. I have been experimenting, with myself the “guinea pig” over the past few months and I have begun to see some connections between dairy, wheat and white sugar and my skin/gut issues. When I am not eating those things, my skin begins to clear up and I have less gut gurgling and other issues. So, those are the three things I am for CERTAIN cutting out of my diet. Overall, these are the foods & food like products I am cutting out:
AVOID THESE FOODS:
Dairy
Wheat (anything with gluten–it won’t always say “wheat” on a package)
White Sugar
Eggs
MINIMIZE THESE FOODS:
Soy
Fried Food
Artificial Sweeteners
In avoiding and minimizing such foods, I may loose some weight. I fear this. I fear I will focus on the weight loss, become fixated on that, and forget the real reason for changing my food habits. The real reason for all of this is to find healing for my skin and my gut through food, which I believe can be done, at least partly, if not fully. Being transparent about this fear, of losing my true purpose, will hopefully help keep me on the healthy track.
In addition to being transparent about this fear in this blog entry, I will keep my focus on healing through food by cataloging how my skin and gut symptoms are doing at the end of each blog entry. I will also write a summary of what foods I’ve eaten that day. In this way, my purpose for cutting out certain foods will always be before me and if my body changes, then it changes, but I won’t focus on that so that I can steer clear of the temptation to fall back into believing that I am not good because I am fat.
SKIN: redness remains, but no itchy sensations. raised patches of dry skin minimizing, not as intense as yesterday.
GUT: minimal gurgling, less gas than yesterday.
FOOD: Homemade (no sugar) BBQ Pork with Blue Corn Chips (Organic, Non-GMO); 1 large gala apple; leftover Matsa Man Curry with shrimp from Rose Thai; some cucumbers, carrots, sugar snap peas and red pepper humus; veggies (carrots, red pepper, yellow pepper) & rainbow fruit skewers (pineapple, oranges, blueberries, strawberries, kiwi, grapes)
Searching For Health And Healing Through Food 