My Earlobes Still Feel Fat

This past year, and especially the past two months, has/have been crazy for me: exciting, surreal, stressful, surreal, and extremely busy.  I mentioned surreal twice because that's the feeling that comes through the strongest whenever amazing things happen to me – this is probably because I spent so much of my life thinking I'd be content just to hit 'average' on the excitement/pleasure scale of life (no pun intended).  Whatever the reason, it's a serious issue of mine; when something wonderful happens to me, I'm so blindsided and disbelieving that it's actually hard for me to enjoy it.  It took me a year and a half to relax into my relationship with my boyfriend; I went through the entire book publishing process in a fog of disbelief, and I'm still not sure I believe it; and now I have something else to convince myself is true: I'm engaged . Yes, my boyfriend is now my fiancé.  I won't give you any proposal or ring details, because I'd...

Something weird has been happening… through the publicity process, through all the interview questions I’ve been answering and short-form pieces I’ve been writing and conversations I’ve been having with strangers who have read my book, I’ve come to understand myself a little better, and maybe cut myself some slack.   It’s been a long time since I’ve had a body meltdown – for the past six+ months my nerves have been too overloaded with book stuff and work to even consider making room for self-image – and I’ve even begun to realize that a lot of the things I talk about aiming for in the book are already beginning to happen, some in more pronounced ways than others.   Most notable: I think I’m starting to have a normal relationship with food. Now, of course, the first thing we have to do is define our terms, right?   By a ‘normal’ relationship with food, I mean that I’m not obsessed with it, and it doesn’t control me.   The GB has done its job ...

This post is just a quickie as I'm dying from a chest cold and swamped with admin stuff, but I had to share this super weird tidbit with you guys: according to The Independent , the inventor of the Segway has applied for a patent for a new invention that essentially sucks food out of your stomach after you've eaten it, before you can digest it.  The article claims this is an alternative to gastric bypass, to which I say: not only is it GROSS but it's totally opposite the point of weight loss surgery!  It basically encourages people to stuff their faces without consequence, while the point of GB and its ilk is to impose harsh consequences on the patient, thereby (at least theoretically) changing his/her behavior through conditioning.  Ugh.  Gross.  And how very dehumanizing of fat people to think this is what we need.

The news has been so full of body-image- and obesity- and weight-related articles lately, to the point that I just haven't been able to keep up!  So in the spirit of the new year, and because the media interest in bodies/weight/health doesn't seem to be waning (so I'm sure I'll have plenty more material in the future), I'm cleaning house: here are all the articles I saved up in my email account in 2012 to write individual posts on, which I'm going to share instead through one big link-filled post.  I hope you find these links as interesting as I did (and still do)! This astoundingly brave young woman is doing a similar thing with a photo series to what I'm trying to achieve with the book – I can only hope I've produced something half as affecting and powerful as what she has created. Months ago I stumbled across this website with images of real women's bodies, sometimes accompanied by a paragraph or two about how these women feel about their ...

Today is my 28th birthday.  That seems both really old and really familiar, due to my habit of saying I'm older than I am for a couple of months before my birthday makes it so.  Anyway, whether I'm old, young, or a 'spring chicken', as my BF calls me when I lament our age difference every year on his birthday (he just turned 25), I'm definitely exhausted.  The past couple of months have been manic: I started a new position at work, at essentially the exact same time that book publicity began in earnest, which meant interviews and photo shoots* and writing and tweeting and generally being much more involved in the world than usual, and on top of that came personal dramas and Thanksgiving and Christmas shopping and the general year-end pressures we all face every year around this time.   Suffice it to say, my body and my heart and especially my brain are all knackered. So all I want for my birthday is a break, and for once in my life I'm doing my bes...

I've been thinking a lot about the gym lately, and not just because my body is falling apart and I know that lethargy is helping it along – the gym has been on my mind in part because of this article , in which Lindy West claims that to be a fat person at the gym takes courage.  Not only do fat gym-goers have to fight their own (possible) sluggishness, they also have to be prepared to defy the judgment of other gym-goers, who (West claims) look at their fat colleagues as motivational at best and disgusting at worst. I have to admit, I feel this way at certain gyms – usually disgusting rather than motivation, though – and it's one of the reasons I don't belong to a gym here in London (the other reason being that I straight-up can't afford it).  It's hard to find gyms where normal people make up the majority; almost every gym near me (Virgin, LA Fitness, etc) is very expensive and caters to a clientele that's image-obsessed, as a rule.  I'm hard-pressed to f...

I just watched an hour and a half long TV show on BBC called ' I Want to Change My Body ', which follows 30 young people who have different things about their bodies that they want to change, from their weight (obviously, since that's usually the #1 complaint), to their boobs or noses or skin or receding hairlines.  It basically validated what I've become more and more sure of in the past ten years: that nearly everyone has issues about something to do with his/her appearance, and a lot of us are tormented enough to take extreme measures (define extreme any way you like: surgery, juice fasts, obsessive makeup use) to try to 'fix' ourselves. The show was fascinating, of course (I'm convinced that learning about people's deepest insecurities is far more voyeuristically stimulating than watching them have sex), but it was also really sad to watch.  I feel like our society is getting more image-obsessive and more neurotic by the year – I'm certainly n...