11:52am May 16, 2014

➸ Fat people and feeding tubes.

youneedacat:

alljustletters:

youneedacat:

This isn’t a post I like to write. The idea to write it always comes after someone, who is not communicating with me in good faith, approaches me and makes snide remarks about how I can possibly n…

Nope, didn’t want to write this one. But realized that for every asshole bully who says something like “You’re fat, why do you need a feeding tube?” there’s a bunch of non-assholes thinking they may be right. So I put as much information there as I could.

Because sizeism kills, and so does uninformed speculation if it reaches the wrong ears.

i might not be the best person to comment on this, being underweight, but there is one thing this post brings up that i can only stress so so much: rapid weight loss is always a sign of something being wrong. it’s always unhealthy. whether it’s a mental illness keeping you from eating, or a physical illness destroying your metabolism. malnutrition is dangerous for everyone. i’ve seen acquaintances of several sizes fall to eating disorders, or not visit a doctor over their uncommon weight loss and thus having an illness discovered much later than necessary because they were happy about getting thinner, no matter what price they were paying. don’t do that, don’t think weight loss is a sign of health. just don’t.

I think anyone can comment on this issue. After all, I was underweight for quite awhile myself, and if I ever become underweight again I’ll still know what I know now.

I agree though — any unexplained weight gain or weight loss is a big medical issue, and any doctor should check it out. On my other blog, someone has commented who had a huge unexplained weight gain which turned out to be dangerous levels of fluid buildup in their body, but they had real trouble getting a doctor to take it seriously because the doctors wanted to assume they were overeating. This delayed necessary medical treatment by quite a bit.

And unexplained weight loss is always bad.

I struggle a lot with this myself. I’m surrounded by the same culture as everyone else. This culture tells me that because I am fat, my duty is to lose weight by any means necessary. That because I am fat, something is terribly wrong with me already. And that the only way for me to ‘become healthy’ is to lose a lot of weight as fast as possible.

So I’ve been really freaked out about the fact that getting treated for the adrenal insufficiency might make my weight go up again. Even though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because dropping all this weight so fast is definitely not a good thing. But some part of me wishes I would just go on dropping weight until I was at least the big end of thin again. And I’m ashamed to even admit that I feel that way.

It’s discouraging when people respond to pictures of me about How Very Fat I Am and emphasize it in huge ways, because I’m 70 pounds lighter than I was a couple years ago and people act like there’s been no change at all, it’s like there’s no winning unless you’re absolutely thin, and maybe not even then.

I’m becoming increasingly aware of our culture’s toxic relationship to weight & peoples’ bodies; I always knew we were gross about glorifying extreme thinness, but it’s only been more recently that I’ve started to understand the damaging wrong-headedness of concern-trolling people about their size (which I wrote a bit about on my other blog a while back).

but I also have some insight into the medical dimensions of this issue, since I ended up losing about 20% of my body mass after a ruptured appendix/ensuing infection a few years ago. that put me at a weight I hadn’t been at since I was 12 (& I was 27 when this happened).

once I finally got healthy enough to go back to work, it was truly disturbing how much everyone oohed & ahhed over my weight loss—“oh, you’re so thin!” was a common refrain, even though the people saying it knew the awful ordeal behind the dropped pounds.

I’ve internalized the same shitty attitudes about weight that pervade our culture, & it makes me very conflicted when I look back at pictures of myself from that era—it’s the closest I’ll ever get to emulating the gaunt/underfed look that’s so prevalent in fashion spreads, & yet I know I look that way because I was, in fact, horribly unhealthy. it was also strange to adjust my thinking while I was recovering—to go from the “oh no, calories=weight gain=bad” mentality that’d been trained into me for years, to “calories=weight gain=GOOD, because that’s what my body needs.” the fact that I was getting such positive responses to my unnaturally thin body only further complicated things psychologically.

this is just my own personal experience, but it was certainly eye-opening for me. we need to disrupt the rhetoric that says weight loss is automatically good, that weight gain is automatically bad, & that anyone who’s not a medical professional has any business assessing someone’s health based on the size of their body (& even then, the medical field also needs to get its shit together in terms of knee-jerk reactions to “obesity” in the absence of other problems).

bodies are more than just vessels to be observed & assessed aesthetically: they’re hugely complicated machines that house all kinds of potentially flawed mechanisms. it’s hard enough to make peace with the relationship between mind & anatomy, & fielding external judgments on how one’s body “should” look only makes things worse.