The Truth Will Out.

There is a person out there who, for the last few months has taken time to message me constantly across lots of social media imploring me to "come clean" about how my unintentional weight loss has miraculously changed my life.

Ahem.

So let me come clean and tell everyone about the miracles losing some pants sizes has created in my life.

#1.

My ass no longer fills out the ass parts of my pants. We all know that I long for a bigger rounder booty. At a size 16/18 I had a little bit of booty. When I walked I could feel it do that bounce jiggle thing and it made me very happy.

#2

My stomach looks weird to me. So do a few other parts of my body where my skin has not quite bounced back yet. People who have lost way more weight than I did can probably attest to that moment when you're just like, okay well fuck me running I have these hangy bits of empty skin and wtf do I do with them?

One of the things few people talk about when it comes to major weight loss is that your body will do some really strange things. If you can't afford something like a full body lift at some point you're just left with all this skin to deal with and nothing to do with it. It can be really traumatic.

Personally, I'd rather just be fat and fill my skin.

#3

Here is a big one are y'all ready?

Health.

I know that the lovingly held notion is that if you work hard, and eat less and everything, lose weight and stuff that you are bam HEALTHY.

The going anti wisdom is that when one loses any amount of weight, that everything will become great and golden. You will be physically healthy, you won't be a fat miserable asshole and you'll get to go to Paris or spin in meadows or whatever the diet commercials tell us.

When we lose any amount of weight for any reason, the expectation is joy. It is expected that yes even if we have cancer or got in a car wreck or just had a baby or changed something in our lives, or shit just happened- we are supposed to have the Glorious World of Thinness open up to us.

Here is the problem.

As many fat and formerly fat people will tell you, health isn't magic. It isn't only about your weight. Nor is it an either or binary thing.

Health is a multi-faceted very complicated very personal thing. How fat your ass is, won't necessarily make or break your entire health.

The other thing is that frankly, for a lot of people who lose a lot of weight it is just traumatic.

I'm talking about everything from feeling like your body isn't the body you know and having conflicting feelings about the praise you get vs how you really feel.

There is so much pressure to have the fat to thin redemption story, especially for women in general that there is little room for people to explore and talk about the reailties of weight loss.

People believe that all of a sudden, especially if you were deathfat and have become thin that you will be happy and able to navigate things like thin privilege without any backlash or potentially crappy feelings.

There is little room for people to process the real deal situation of finding yourself perambulating around the universe in essentially a body you have no idea how to operate in.

My point here, person who thinks I am hiding the truth about how I really feel about my weightloss and the miracle it has brought to my life, is that frankly shit is fucking hard.

For me personally not having my ass the size it was has been stressful. I have had to relearn how to buy clothes. My favorite pairs of make my ass look fantastic pants don't fit.

I am dealing with feeling and sometimes being told that I can't be a fat blogger anymore because I'm not all that fat. That shit hurts.

I am dealing with people like you who rather than listening to what I am really saying, only want me to reinforce the narrative that makes you feel comfortable.

I am dealing with the failure of medical professionals to care for me beyond telling me to be careful not to regain weight and to keep going.

I am dealing with relearning how to use my degree of thin privilege in a manner that is not destructive to fat acceptance, fat people and my personal sense of ethics.

I am dealing with the fact that people like you and some others who have contacted me, cannot understand or comprehend that beyond the size of my personal ass, I have not changed my mind about fatness.

I still do not believe that anyone in a certain BMI range regardless of anything else should be medicalized.

I do not believe that the only treatment for anything if you are fat, is to lose weight.

I do not believe that it is right or smart for clothing retailers to make it so difficult for fat people to clothe themselves.

I do not believe that body size is a moral issue.

I do not believe that my personal health or yours is the business of any other person.

I do not believe that only thin people can be or are fit or healthy.

I do not believe that a person has to be healthy in order to be respected as a human being.

I do not believe that the way to "treat/deal with obesity" is to bully, harass, legislate or otherwise involve myself or the government in people's lives.

I do not believe that it is in the best interest of humanity to abuse fat people because they are fat.

I do not believe that it should be tolerated that size based discrimination is thought to be part of the "solution".

I do not believe that shaming children into not being fat teens or adults is okay.

Here is what I do believe.

Weight loss is personal. For me personally, in my little slice of the universe it has been more problems than it is worth.

I would have preferred to stay the size I was.

For you? I dunno, maybe it is great and that is awesome.

I will not say unequivocally that no one should lose weight ever.

I will say that we need to stop forcing the Magical Weight loss Miracle narrative onto every experience.

The thing is, human experiences are diverse. That is how it is supposed to be. Different does not equal wrong or false it is just different.

Changing your body in any way means there is going to be a learning curve.

Some people will have a great and easy time and wind up as the gleeful after picture from a diet ad.

A lot of people will not.

I believe that in order for us to really start doing some damage to the diet/weight loss as moral redemption narrative we are all constantly subjected to, we need to listen to what people have to say about it even if it goes again our personal body politics.

If we don't listen to the real experiences of people who have done the thing, how can we ever combat the bullshit?

With that my homies and haters I don't want to talk further about the fluctuating size of my ass. It stresses me out and thinking about it upsets me.

In other news, I am hard at work on the new and improved self care book. It is V2.0 and we are GOING IN. It is for you. It is for me. It is for your Mom and everyone else.

Here is a tidbit:

Taking care of our bodies in this manner is not a moral attribute. It is simply because we deserve to survive and not be full of total misery.

And as I will say over and over again, regardless of how we are living in our bodies right this instant, we deserve to have them run as well as we can help them to.

Full. Stop.
~

To get a bigger taste if you have 2$ you can head over to my etsy shop and pick up my new essay on why I don't self identify as a feminist.

If that is not your jam there are some stories in there as well.

So now go forth my homies. I have work to do.

Homo Out.

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