Getting over slim

October 20, 2017

Getting over slim

The surprising things that can happen when a plus-size positive blogger turns up to a weight management class.

I have a happy job. Whether I’m writing brochure material for people choosing their next holiday or website content helping walkers to find the best baths and breathtaking views, the words that help make someone’s day brighter, also pay my mortgage.

Lucky as I am, there are gremlins in the tools of my trade: namely pet hate words. The first two on the list are ‘nice’ and ‘tasty’. Rather benign words and their bland nature is exactly why they rarely come across my keyboard.

Third on the list is the word ‘slim’.

Let me explain.

I’m a bit of a liberal feminist in that I believe the spirit of equal concern extends across all of humanity, not just womb-men but during my studies I was fascinated by texts by the likes of Jeanette Winterson, Susie Orbach and Michelle Boulous Walker. A vast area of reading, discovery and discussion, I was intrigued by how society tells us what our body means and how to use it.

For example, take the backlash against plus-size model Tess Holliday Instagramming pics of herself at the gym or blogger Callie Thorpe looking fabulous in her curvy, white wedding dress last year. These are women getting on with their lives, being creative, making waves. Why is their size the first thing people think about? Why do everyday people suddenly turn into metabolism consultants, all concerned about their health? Would people dream of giving feedback on any other aspect of someone’s life? Like high-profile people who drink, smoke or take drugs? What about shifty politicians who take away benefits from vulnerable people and call it austerity? All that cortisol can’t be good for them.

So, back to the word ‘slim’. What does that word mean?

A child of the 70’s, to me it conjures up slacks -beige, tailored polyester trousers with an invisible support panel. It’s rows of women on their backs in a church hall, raising their leotard clad legs in unison: “and lift, ladies, lift”.

Slim is the goal, slim is acceptable, slim is what women should be. The onus is on us to be slim – whether pushing a small child in a trolley around the supermarket or pulling a workbag on wheels into a conference room, valid women are slim. Why would anyone want to take a fat woman seriously? We’re mumsy, ill-disciplined and have clearly let ourselves go.

And this is my problem with slim. It’s a political word. It doesn’t just mean you’re lean – you’re also hard working, controlled, an achiever.

But where does that leave the rest of us?

Should those of us who’ve fought podge since childhood be left on the heap? I have a First Class Honours Degree – I earned this while I was a single parent to a toddler and holding down a part-time job in order to survive. I think I have self-discipline aplenty. I enjoy my job, have a happy family and now post-forty I’m more comfortable in my fat body than ever before.

But I’m not slim.

I have not achieved slim.

Not ever.

And the outrageous soul within doesn’t want me to conform. Even if I lost all the weight, I don’t think I’d ever want to be considered slim. It’s just not me.

So, when I found myself sat in a Slimming World class for the first time earlier this week, I thought “why am I here?”.

I thought I’d feel compromised but I didn’t.

I thought the inspirational chat at the beginning would make me run out through the community centre fire doors screaming but it didn’t.

I thought the terminology would annoy me (as so often jargon does) but it didn’t.

And now I’m left wondering why.

And I think it’s to do with my mate who brought me along. She’s a savvy lady. Seen a lot, done a lot. There’s little she doesn’t know about raising plants, nurturing children, crafting and ushering warm dishes to the table. But she’s also a trusting soul with a realistic view of the world – she knows where to place her cynicism, where to make compromises and she has a deep perspective that reaches out into the long-game.

And my childhood friend who made me feel a foot taller with one phone call earlier this week. This body is beautiful, it’s valid, I’m loved.

It’s also that the focus of the eating plan (‘diet’ is naturally my forth most hated word) is all about nourishment, not going hungry and realism: cocking up is not just tolerated, it’s expected.

I know that I have an intricately marvellous vessel (check out You Are Already Amazing) and it’s bumps and curves tell its story of survival. I believe that we all can feel good now. Right now. Not in some far-off future. And without this belief, you’ll make minor changes that bring temporary results but to make a lasting change, you have to be convinced of your value. Right here, in this moment.

Like everyone, I forget this sometimes: and I think the word slim just doesn’t help.

But I also have diabetes peppered throughout my family – something I can’t afford to ignore.

So, because I love this body and I want it to continue, I’ll put up with the word slim. Perhaps I’ll reinvent it, make it mine, unload it. Who knows.

I’ll check back in and let you know about slim when I get there.

How do you feel about ‘slim’? How do you feel about ‘nice’ and ‘tasty’? Do you feel like you need to defend them? What are your pet hate words? I’d love you to share them.

And if I’ve made you think about what values are written on your body, check out some of my other ideas on being body positive like The Tibetan Proverb and What I’ve Been Doing Wrong All This Time and The Damaging Lack of Control that Could Sink the NHS.

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October 6, 2015

Women And Heart Health – Why We Need To Ignore The Doubters And Just Get Out There

I’m a plus size woman with a really bad running habit. I can’t stop. My shoes call to me from the hallway and I’m worried that I’ll get arrested for indecent exposure if I go out running in the rain one more time (an ample bust, combined with a lack of decent plus size breathable wear have too many times made for an impromptu wet t-shirt contest).

So, when the Daily Mail published an article last week about two running magazines which have chosen plus size women for their covers, I was delighted. US magazine, Running, featured Erica Schenk, a size 18 model, who is well known for her fitness habit and the UK title, Womens’s Running, pictured Lindsey Swift on their November issue. After being heckled by a van driver, Linsday’s open letter detailing why running is more important to her than what people think about the size of her body went viral, being shared over 26,000 times. To say I find her inspiring would be an understatement.

The Mail article was positive and inclusive, everything I like reading about but as usual, I was more interested in the comments section below. This is where it all started to get a bit muddy and a little less positive.

There are many obesity experts out there. Unfortunately, instead of spending their time doing research, pounding the streets or making themselves a salad, they litter perfectly healthy discussion forums with anecdotal, ill-informed soundbites about pie-hole stuffing and sofa surfing.

But what kind of message is this sending out? Should we really be discouraging women from exercising because it’s pointless if it’s not accompanied by a punishing diet and an unhealthy obsession with the tape measure or scales?

Thankfully, the real experts are out there reading books, crunching numbers and writing papers. I find their words far more helpful.

The Mail article lead to me doing a little digging around on the matter of fit but fat and I came across cardiologist C. Noel Bairey-Merz, well known in her field for investigating the differences between the ways that men and women develop and present heart disease. She wanted to explore why after years of research, mortality rates from cardio disease were decreasing in men but increasing in women. For her, this has been a matter of sexual politics as well as medicine.

From what I’ve read of her research, trends of where and how blockages and other operational problems arise in the heart are different between male and female subjects. That in mind, she published a study, examining the BMI, measurements and fitness levels of a sample of women with surprising results: “fitness may be more important than overweight or obesity for CV risk in women”.

Of course, she is only one voice amongst many and cardiovascular disease is only one area of risk reported to be higher for tubby people but it got me thinking. What if we took her research at face value? What if we just acknowledged that getting out and getting going is just good for you, whatever your weight?

The Heart Sisters blog by Carolyn Thomas, journalist and heart attack survivor, is a most excellent place to find out more about prevention, diagnosis and care of female heart disease and has a page dedicated to ‘Improving Your Odds’. I read it and realised that my running habit may be helping me to dodge the family heart disease bullet despite my weight.

Some of the major contributing factors to a higher risk of CV disease in women are:

Stress – running not only helps to readjust hormone levels, it also gets you out of the house from the kids/pets/spouse and allows thinking time or even not thinking time.
Type E-personality or being Everthing to Everyone – a study showed that women often put themselves last after house/kids/pet/spouse. This means that the more subtle symptoms of female heart disease can be easily missed or misdiagnosed. Running puts you first, even if it’s only for thirty minutes or so.
Sleep disorders – whether it’s through beneficial core body temperature changes, improvement in brain function or strengthening of the cardiovascular system (amongst a whole host of associated benefits) moderate exercise has been shown to promote better sleep habits.
Depression – you need only do a cursory search to find out how exercise can help with depression.
Smoking – a big no-no for women who want to keep their hearts healthy and it’s a bit hard to run with a fag in your mouth. I do know a few girls who’ll have a cup of tea and a ciggy after a run but they’re in the minority. At this point, I’ll add that I’ve never smoked – not because I inhabit some kind of moral high ground but because I cough, making me look like a spotty 13 year old behind the bikesheds.
Blood pressure and cholesterol – again, affected by activity levels as well as diet.
High fibre, heart-healthy diet – I have a strong body that responds well to how hard I push it – I just don’t feel like filling it full of rubbish after a run, it would just seem ungrateful. It’s all change when the fridge starts singing to me late in the evening, however, but that’s another blog post in itself.

So, what is my message to the fat but fit naysayers?

Your rhetoric is just too simple. Just as Bairey-Merz has done so much for female heart disease mortality rates just by pushing past what other physicians thought was obvious, I’m also keen to ask questions about whether exercise can inform healthier lifestyle choices, rather than just being something someone gets morally blackmailed into doing to lose weight for losing weight’s sake.

I’m calling for a change in thinking. I’m calling for an uprising of plus size people like me on the streets with their trainers on. I’m calling for a war cry of heart healthy people who are fed up with being labelled as pie-eating sofa surfers.

Let’s wobble away and damn those who’d have us believe we’re not healthy just because we’re heavy.

And now that the rain has stopped, I might just chance a run.

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May 21, 2015June 4, 2015

How to get the body you want this summer

Start loving the one you already have…

I’m feeling excited. Not just because summer is coming but because change is afoot and I like it.

After having seen the fun pictures of fashion blogger Callie Thorpe and friends at Evans’ #stylehasnosize launch last night, I felt something stir from within. It was a feeling of excitement: that a culture of not just body acceptance but body celebration is growing from within the fashion industry and it’s been a long time coming.

People Magazine have endorsed plus-sized Tess Holliday's status as the world's first supermodel to be a size 22 by putting her on their cover this week. Tess, 29, - who became the first size 22 model to sign with a major modelling agency in January this year - recently shot a campaign with Benefit Cosmetic and has appeared in Vogue Italy. — Tess causing a storm on the cover of People magazine this week

Add to this, plus size model Tess Holliday’s feature on the cover of People magazine published today. According to her Instagram post this morning, her remit to the magazine was “I wanted show my body off & they listened”. The result? A beautiful woman creatively captured by photographer James White at home in her own body. She was not an unwanted guest there – she was there by choice and it shows.

Like just about every woman I’ve spoken to, my body has never really felt like my own. Granted, I had some special circumstances to deal with – I grew up as part of a controlling religious organisation that dictated just about every aspect of our lives right down to what we thought and how we acted when we were alone. As young women, our bodies were already owned by our future husbands and children and by the congregation for acquiring new recruits and serving the elders. Man-made rules were handed down as the pronouncements of their god. It never quite rang true with me.

So, when I left at 24 and finally got the education I deserved, naturally I had a teensy bit of a leaning towards feminism.

There, I’ve said it. The dirty word that’s been spat out too many times with regard to body issues and obesity. It’s as though the title of Susie Orbach’s totem of a book ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’ has become an ignorantly misused sound bite for the fat shamers. The loving and taking control of our bodies has become a feminist issue and therefore all about man-hating – like we’re spiders seeking to eat the men that come anywhere near us.

Balls.

They’re our bodies and we want them back because we like them. Incidentally we like men too. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Now, I realise that not every woman has had the same prescribed and damaging upbringing as I had. But I do talk to a lot of women and the same issues keep coming up.

The need to prescribe to a diet – low fat, low carb, no biscuits/cake/chocolate for a month diet. Are you in the Weight Watchers or Slimming World camp?
I’m dieting for my holiday. I’m dieting for my wedding. I’m dieting for my sister’s wedding. It doesn’t matter what the reason is, there is always some external force at work to change the way we look. Somehow this body won’t be acceptable for whatever we are working towards.
I have to lose my baby weight. As if pregnancy, childbirth and the endless sleep deprivation coupled with unbelievable pressure to breast feed isn’t enough (don’t get me started on breasts by the way), then the media is obsessed with dropping the fat ten minutes after you’ve left the labour ward.
A suspended disbelief that one size fits all. If it did, we’d all be wearing the same shoes.
The need to buy and consume what the dieting industry and media are offering, unaware of the irony that our bodies are bought and consumed by the dieting and media industries. Like Tyler Durden in Fight Club says – we are having our own fat sold back to us.

Good grief, this is all starting to sound a little political. Apologies if this isn’t your bag (but if it is, Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susan Orbach is not just a cracking good read, it’s also a practical approach to controlling your weight and The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf is also worth checking out).

We’ll return to the fashion bloggers and why what they are doing is so exciting.

I’ve read enough clinical papers, newspaper articles and media sound bites now to know that the medical community are worried about our health. We have a rising obesity problem in the West and the strain this will put on services is causing great concern.

In some minds, frocks to fit a full bust, bigger belts to cinch a waist over rounded hips and a bikini that celebrates rather than hides a gloriously chunky body are going to normalise fatness and make the problem worse.

But don’t they see? Rather than being part of the problem, beautiful, well cut and on-trend clothes are part of the solution.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that I believe we should normalise fatness and please don’t quote me out of context. I believe we should normalise people being comfortable with the aesthetics of their own body – in that they should take ownership of whether or not it is beautiful.

So whether you are fat, thin, dark skinned, pale skinned, male, female, short, stocky, tall, lean or whatever innumerable permutations of the human body apply to you, they are yours and no one should be making money out of telling you that they are ugly and you need to change them.

What about health? Improving health is part of this, it has to be.

So to this end, let’s do something radical and separate health from aesthetics and moral judgement. Lumping these things together is not just insulting it’s profoundly unhelpful.

As I’ve said before, a body that feels strong and cherished is worth taking care of. We can’t all be skinny but we can all tweak our lifestyles (or overhaul them if we chose) to make them happier and healthier. And this doesn’t necessarily have to involve giving our money and self-esteem to a multi-billion pound industry bent on getting us to spend more by hating what we already have.

I digress again.

Back to my excitement.

I am old enough to have lived through the fledgling but influential low-fat movement of the 1980s. Protein came under fire off the back of the food combining adherents of the 1990s and I’m now sitting back and watching the anti-sugar/anti-carb evangelists with some interest and maybe even a little cynical amusement now. As a seasoned 40-year old I can’t say I’ve seen it all but I’ve seen enough to know that things move in cycles, absolute truth doesn’t exist and prescriptive diets are not an effective long term solution for everyone.

My interests have lead me to read so many inspiring, insightful and sometimes utterly radical and frankly confusing books about the body. About how it is so much more than skin, bones and organs – about how society paints meaning onto it, how the image we see in the mirror is not always what’s there and how it is used as a tool to control our choices.

And I feel like we have reached a point where if we see enough images of fuller figured girls wearing bikinis, beautifully tailored clothes and red lipstick, proudly showing off shapely legs and glorious acres of creamy white bust, the aesthetics of this will no longer be wrong, evil and worthy of distaste. In a utopian future, self-body-hatred, which so often leads to a negative relationship with food will be gone, leaving us big bottomed girls to get on with riding our bikes, safe in the knowledge that each heartbeat will be a little stronger than the one before, even if we’re wearing size 20 Lycra. Perhaps next year we’ll be wearing size 18, maybe even a 16 but this will be a by-product rather than a focal point of a healthier lifestyle.

Perhaps this new aesthetic environment will bring a smile to the writers and theorists of my university days – who knows but I like to think that the girls in London this week are edging us closer to our utopia and having a massive amount of fun while they’re doing it.

Notes:

In the film The Full Monty, Gerald says “Fat, David is a feminist issue…I don’t bloody know (what it’s supposed to mean) do I? But it is”. Body dysmorphia and the male body is just as important and I’m sorry I haven’t had the space to include more about this in my blog post.

You’ll notice the bevy of beauties I’m referring to in my post are pretty young women with luscious, bouncing curls, milky skin and wickedly long eyelashes. I realise that some critics, with some justification, will point out that in this they are as much buying into the beauty myth as the rest of the industry but – one step at a time eh?

Weight Watchers, Slimming World and the dieting industry as a whole: prescriptive diets work wonders for some people – they take the weight off and keep it off. For these people, I can only feel joy, it must feel wonderful to feel the benefits of their hard work. It doesn’t work for me and it doesn’t work for others like me – we must find our own way of taking control of our weight. Shaming and name calling isn’t likely to work either.

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March 12, 2015March 16, 2015

International Women’s Day – as viewed from my sofa

Sunday 9th March was International Women’s Day. Aside from the double spread in the Independent on Sunday showing the world’s most powerful women and the BBC’s World Service’s post on the BBC website simply titled ’50 Women Who Made it Happen’ (well worth making time for) there were several things of note that popped their heads above the parapet.

Sat on the sofa on the Andrew Marr show, Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor, Sunday Times, expressed her delight over India Knights’ article in the same paper on why the best spies are middle aged Mums – “inconspicuous and able to shuffle around with shopping bags”, equipped with unrivalled powers of tickling. I have thought exactly the same thing myself many, many times. It’s why female suicide bombers are such a valuable weapon – the fairytale of woman’s innocence vs. man’s wickedness is a well-established tactical tool.

Two dollies — The cost of raising standards in Early Years care has to be met by someone – so think these happy dollies in the sun.

Reference was made at some point to the recently published Family and Childcare Trust’s Childcare Costs Survey. Reading the report for myself, I was shocked but not entirely surprised in the rise in cost of childcare but in particular, the statistic that part-time care from a childminder has risen by 4.3 per cent in the past year. I have many friends who are childminders and the rise in this cost is clear: the government continues to raise the bar in terms of standards of care whilst cutting funding. Mandatory training courses, which used to be free, are no longer funded and in my area, free to access Sure Start run playgroups and the like are now off limits to childminders – the costs of these have to be met somewhere and childminders already earn very little for doing a very demanding job. This in the face of the House of Lords Committee on Affordable Childcare asserting that more money needs to be spent on bringing more graduates into the private, voluntary and independent sector and that Government funded 2-year old places should be in settings that are rated as Good or Outstanding by Ofsted. More for less seems to be the way of things across the board these days but I can’t help thinking of the damage this is doing not just to working parents and the private childcare industry but also the small people who have no say in these things.

Then, a little later in the morning, the last item on Nicky Campbell’s Big Questions (BBC1) asked: is it more important for Christians to do good than God? This prompted some often heated but well-reasoned discussion between several female academics and writers. Interesting stuff, I thought, sat on the sofa in my pjs and slippers, cup of tea in one hand, six year old daughter on my knee. The issues raised included the man-made nature of doctrine and whether women were historically excluded from the process. Perfectly good points, I felt – perhaps even pivotal to the whole discussion. Bravo, I thought as I quaffed more tea.

That was until Peter Hitchens, columnist for the Daily Mail, opened his pie hole and dismissed the previous ten minutes’ discussion as “bureaucratic, theological flim flam” and continued to sum up his opinion thus:

“There has to be something in your mind which stops you from doing a wicked thing when the temptation is there to do it. If you have no doctrine, you will do that wicked thing because there will nothing to stop you. That’s why our society, each year, kills 180 thousand babies in the womb and thinks it’s good.”

And boom! We all whiz back fifty years and the women may as well have not bothered turning up (or going to school for that matter).

Butter pie — All dinosaurs love butter pie

So, this is where the room for growth lies. Yes it’s in speech, yes it’s in education and yes, it’s in giving women the mobility to get into positions where they can bring balance to the important decisions we make as a society but it will take a while for the dinosaurs who choose to adhere to the old ways to die out. For now, we must keep them happy with pie and wait for their ideas to fade with them.

Any suggestions on pie fillings?

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