A toddler takes off across a park/snatches a toy off a fellow playgroup attendee/refuses her favourite dinner.
From a young age, we’re taught that this, the tiniest of expressions of non-conformity is a negative thing. Something that shuts things down, creates havoc, ruins plans.
No is just not welcome.
But I turned 40 a couple of years ago and in a wonderful revelation, discovered a new side to these naughty little digits.
10 ways no opens up new possibilities:
Rejecting an idea creates space for new perspectives and new ways of thinking.
Rejecting a way of doing something can stimulate the acquisition of new skills, exploring the way other people do things and can bring about better procedures.
Unpicking the things that people hold on to as ‘common sense’, gives an opportunity to hold core values up to scrutiny. Are they really sensible? Are they common?
It stimulates conversation – rather than shutting it down: a collaboration to find new ideas and new common ground.
It brings about ‘what if’ – exploring scenarios and creating new combinations of ideas.
Things can’t always go to plan – but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Alternative solutions are often better ones in hindsight.
No one is perfect – rejecting a behaviour or pattern of behaviours creates an opportunity for growth, for everyone.
Healthy relationships rely on well-communicated boundaries. It’s a constant negotiation, of course but it needs to be balanced on both sides. Telling someone when they’ve strayed off-side is an important part of this.
Deciding to change direction is often upsetting: we’re creatures of habit. When one path is blocked by an obstruction, working around it is an invaluable learning opportunity and it inevitably opens up new paths, new experiences and new ways of thinking.
The experience of parting company with someone you’ve worked with/lived with/spent time with sits somewhere on a sliding scale from elation to utter devastation. But it also opens up the chance to meet new people. The person who’ll be a major player in your life in ten years, you may not have even met yet.
It’s not easy – I struggle with boundaries on a daily basis but what I have learned is that I own this word. It’s mine. I can use it when I see fit – it’s just a matter of having the belief that I can deal with the consequences.
And there are times when, no matter how empowered I feel, I’m just not brave enough. But I know that if I stay true to my core principles, in whatever way I can, things will work out for the best in the end.
Please let me know how you get on with your own ‘no’ projects. I’d be delighted to hear all about them.
Because sometimes saying no is answering in the positive
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.
Big cost to tax payers, massive cost to individuals, not to mention embarrassment for politicians. Clearly, some tough talking is going to have to take place in order to bring the problem under control.
We all know the adage about how much a picture can say, so this is the kind of image the media choose to accompany articles about the obesity crisis. This gem came from the Guardian:
A pie eater? A 24-hour a day carer? Someone who has already lost 4 stone? On his way back from the gym? How could we know?
Now the NHS burden can be placed quite firmly on this chap’s shoulders and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t turn around and talk to you about why he’s overweight and even if he could move, his head has been chopped off so he physically has no mouth and therefore no voice.
Well, not on this platform anyway.
Being a morbidly obese vegetarian runner, I’m a regular visitor to on-line forums for the overly podgy and let me tell you about the conversations they’re having:
I’ve run out of points this week and I’m panicking about what to have for dinner because I’ve come off a twelve hour shift and I’m hungry – any suggestions?
It’s weigh in tonight, I’m having pizza afterwards and there’s a whole week to make up for it
My diet isn’t working any more. I’m fat/stupid/lazy/a slob/confused (cue reams of suggestions in reply, some genuinely helpful, some shamefully judgemental)
I haven’t lost enough weight for my wedding/my daughter’s wedding/my holiday
My eating has gone so off track since my mother died. It’s been six months and you would have thought I could have pulled it together by now
Some stranger told me today that fat people shouldn’t travel on trains/have tattoos/wear leggings
All paraphrased but all genuinely posted.
And then I came across a group for plus sized ladies with a complete ban on weight loss chat. What do they talk about?
How does this top look with these leggings? Should I wear heels?
Which chaffing shorts work the best?
Which bikinis fit best?
What I’m wearing to work today
My new hair colour
I’m going swimming today! Something I wouldn’t have done without the support of this group!
That’s not to say the other groups don’t have positive posts – they do. And that’s not to say that the weight loss free group doesn’t have posts about keeping healthy – I regularly seek feedback about running as a plus-sizer.
But the environment is so different, so energising, so self-affirming when the focus on how much weight you’re losing and how you’re doing it is taken away. My size is not the most important thing about me – I can write, sing, cook, draw. I make people laugh, I love my charity work and I’d challenge any overweight 40 year old woman to offroad on a bike like I do.
And this is the nub of the matter for me – everything is just so over-simplified and no wonder: do some digging and the advice is all so confusing. Back in the day, fat was to blame and now it’s sugar. We need to move fast food joints away from schools and teach kids how to cook. Even the school holidays are fattening. Measure these ideas against the material I was reading this morning about how the rise in obesity coincided with the rise in the anti-fat movement and a new study suggesting that a high fat diet can impair the function of a hormone that helps you to feel full. The NHS Eatwell plate still promotes ‘plenty of starchy foods’ in the face of the anti-carb movement.
But from what I’ve read recently, the cure to all our obesity problems apparently lies in:
Taxing sugary drinks and snacks
Closing/moving takeaways
Teaching people to cook
Making fat people go to the gym
Think about this for a moment. I’m overweight, so therefore I’m:
Gluttonous and weak minded
Ignorant about food and cooking
Lazy
Weak minded? Ignorant? Lazy?
Really?
Perhaps I’m a one off? I’ve read enough on-line to know that I’m not but let me tell you one thing I do know: I tend not to see fat people any more – I see survivors: survivors of bereavement, illness, depression, domestic violence and post-traumatic stress disorder. Not always but more often than not. I’m training for a 5k charity run in October, I haven’t eaten meat in nearly twenty years and I knock out a home-made from scratch dinner for four on a budget every night. Oh and I’ve survived years of depression.
Everyone has a back story which no one will get to hear if all they ever see is your headless back.
So I propose we start a real conversation – one that will work. Let’s get to the bottom of why people get fat and what they can actually do to reverse this. I’m not speaking about a silver bullet here – do this diet/take this pill/do this exercise. I’m talking about a proper strategy that uses the ingenuity and strength of the human spirit to overcome adversity and acknowledges that we are all individuals with our own metabolisms, hang-ups and personal circumstances.
The aerobics classes I took in my early twenties to lose weight couldn’t finish soon enough but feeling my strong but fat-suit hidden legs doing Zumba at the weekend made me feel completely different
– because what I was doing was utterly relevant. I’m getting fit for my health, not because being fat makes me somehow unworthy of being part of society or having a voice.
I don’t have diabetes, I don’t have any weight related illnesses but because I’m overweight there is this idea going round that I’m going to be expensive later in life, so the UK taxpayer already owns me along with the right to say what they please about me.
But I refuse to be one of The Obese.
I am not a blob with no head, with my back to the camera.
I am full frontal, full throttle and full volume.
I’m not celebrating or promoting obesity, I’m saying we have to completely re-think the way we talk about it because the conversations that are happening on a public and policy making level are not working.
So, yeah, let’s talk about obesity, it’s clear that it needs to happen – but for it to work, it’s got to be two-way. Because that’s what the word conversation means.
An obese person in trainers – a more helpful image?
Do you agree? Have I got it all wrong? How can we make things better? Drop me a line below, let me know. Perhaps I’ve missed something. And drop me a line if you’d like more information about the Facebook groups I visit.
I saw you through the gates. You had short, spiky hair in mauve or it might have been black, I don’t remember now. Inked on one shoulder was a huge Pegasus, its wings wide and green and on the other, the motif of a woman embracing a man: the image dreamlike and fantastic in muted, earthy blues and greys. With a bar in one eyebrow and a stud through your tongue, I noticed that when you smiled, you had a ring in the flesh above your top teeth, although I guess you must keep most of these in a treasured box by the bed now.
You were tall, distinguished and cocksure amongst the jostling bodies.
You looked up to the sky and beyond the high fence at the clouds gathering with a look of rain on your face and with open arms ushered the children in your care through the school doors to the sound of the wet play bell.
That was eight, maybe nine years ago now. I’d just moved a million miles from where I grew up to live with a wonderful but distant man and having cried my way around the bored housewives tutting at the quality of slacks in department stores too many times, I decided what I needed was a friend. Always one to wear the wrong brand of flip flops, my skin was too natural a colour and my clothes too close to plus size for me to fit in well with the other mums at my son’s school at the time but something about you spoke of interest, life and excitement.
Lifting me out of my delirious melancholy, something about the fact that you were the most unconventional dinner lady ever woke me up.
And now up you go: in the belly of the helicopter, rising with your future.
Because living on the seesaw isn’t easy. It’s isolating. I know that.
Do you remember the time I picked you up and we went shopping? It took no longer than passing by the chicken wings to realise that it was a bad day for you. There were issues with the joints of pork and you thrust a jar of pasta sauce at me: shortly afterwards you shouted at some special offers on an aisle end and told off a mother with a howling child. My cupboards remained empty until later that night but I knew that I had to usher you out of the supermarket before something permanent happened.
Thinking back, we found out not long after I saw you in the playground, that although our children went to different schools, they were the same age: tendays difference, in fact. It was meeting you at Scouts that secured the notion that we were somehow meant to be a pair of caped crusaders: less Batman and Robin and more Morecombe and Wise or perhaps even Laurel and Hardy.
It took some time for your past to catch up with us. I remember as a child, letting go of my mother’s hand while walking to town and jumping a small wall to rescue a bear left out in the rain. She was horrified and came in to the stranger’s garden to catch hold of me once more but having seen the bear’s damp, limp ears her face softened and together we rang the doorbell and handed it over. I’d often seen toys left outside at night in my neighbours’ gardens and it unsettled something deep inside, like my heart and lungs had changed places or something. Things made to be treasured should be just that.
And since your childhood, you had been left out in the rain too many times.
So now, camera in hand, near-adult son at your side, you soar for the first time ever: up to the mighty fighter planes, the giant jumbos and the angular magic of your favourite fixed wing jet. I’ve been smiling at the thought for days.
Then there was the time you hid for months. Neck pain and a faulty MRI scanner meant you stayed the safe side of your coffee table, piled high with ignored bills, tv remotes and old teacups until you felt safe to come out again. It was the rain again. I could tell because your ears hung down.
I have a rich collection of snapshots. Your face around the back gate when I was heavily pregnant and deathly tired: you had lunch in one hand and a duster in the other. Then there was my wedding: you wore a trouser suit and a smile. With a glass of bubbly in one hand and my cake topper in the other, I could tell that something bright was laying quietly dormant, waiting for longer days and brighter skies.
Perhaps one of the things that I am most grateful for are the times you can engage with my husband on the nature of gaming, cricket and sixteenth century military maneuverers on my behalf. I am more than happy to move down the bench. Sunny days follow dark nights but always there are the totems of childhood joys stolen through the gaps of adult anguish.
And having delighted in sharing my family with you for so long, since I spied you through the gates, every time I go to lift your soggy fabric body off the lawn lately, I’m intrigued to find another pair of hands there first. This man makes your eyes bright. Your manic bounce quietens into a gentle undulation, like an ocean under swell and you fit into the cup of his hands as if you were always there.
Courtesy of those magnificent men (and woman) in their flying machines. Gotta love a bit of Red Arrows magic.
And this is where he has led you: the steps, the upward draught of the blades and a weightless lifting off. He’s the other side of the world but money flies and I almost hope that his Airshow gift soars you up into the clouds, into the skies above and then out beyond the atmosphere.
Then in eight, maybe nine years’ time I’ll think of the friend I haven’t seen in a long while and I’ll smile about the thought of her flying around the sun.
