Weighty Thoughts

I've been thinking about this post for some time.

I'm going to reference the BMI chart here, so for those of you who don't know and don't want to google it, this is how it works. There's one for men and one for women. Along the side are heights in inch increments, and across the top are weights in like 3-4 pound increments (and I'm sure there's one in normal units for each, but I live in the USA so I get to use old-fashioned units except at work). For your height, there's a block of weights, usually about 50-60 pounds wide, where you are considered "normal" weight. More and you're overweight; less and you're underweight. Since I don't particularly want to share my height and weight with the world, I'm going to use the BMI chart instead.

I think the chart is biased, and so do a lot of people. That the part considered overweight is lower than it should be. It also does not take into account physical fitness. I personally know someone overweight by the BMI chart, a woman, who is far more physically fit than I am.

Back when I was growing up, literally, I was at the lower fourth of the BMI for normal weight when I reached my final height. So, since I wasn't eating unhealthy (I thought), and I wasn't chugging sodas or eating a ton of junk food, I thought this was probably a good weight to be. And it was, don't get me wrong.

Over the next decade or so, my weight slowly crept upwards, due to a variety of factors: the metabolism slowdown that happens to everyone in their late twenties, a pair of drugs (for different conditions) that had weight gain as a side effect, and then I moved to a house with no stairs when I had been living in a house where my bedroom and the working bathrooms were on different floors.

As I wasn't in the habit of weighing myself, I didn't really notice. Oh, sure, I had to get a new pair of pants once that were the next size up. But for the most part, I like wearing loose clothing, so the fact that my shirts were less loose than before, but not tight by any means yet, didn't really register.

Until my workplace started doing insurance discounts for BMI and no-smoking, and one year I weighed in the overweight range. Sort of. Remember how I said the weights were in ~3 pound increments? Well, I weighed in the middle between the last "normal" weight and the first "overweight" weight.

So--and this is important--when I refer to myself as fat, I'm not claiming the kind of weight that most people think about as a fat person. I believe most people who were trying to be nice might have thought of me as chubby, or padded, or plush. Just a little overweight.

Well, I was horrified. Really??? How did this happen? I set about trying to lose the weight. I targeted the middle of the normal range of BMI, although I would have liked to be back at the fourth that I'd been originally ... I just didn't think it was possible.

I lost weight by eating less and exercising more. Actually that part came about a few years later, when I started walking 3 miles every morning, and it wasn't to lose weight that I did that; making me exercise required more motivation than my weight. That's a story for another day. But I didn't mind that it helped.

And I was miserable. I was hungry all the time. The weight did come off, but it crept off, in slow, agonizingly slow, increments. It took years. I struggled so hard to lose weight, and while it was working, it was so slow. I'd gotten into range where I was about 3/4 of the way to the top of the BMI normal range ... That was two years ago.

Then Pippin died. And I stopped eating. I didn't want to eat anything. I felt nauseous all the time. I wasn't interested in eating. My stomach hurt dully constantly, but eating made it worse. I did eat. I know that to function, you have to eat. So I made myself eat what I could stand to get down. Mostly comfort food like macaroni and cheese or cookies or potato soup. And not much of that.

(And two months after Pippin passed away, my dad had a seizure, forcing me to face his mortality as well, even though he was fine.)

The weight fell off. I lost almost ten pounds in the first three days after Pippin's passing, and they never came back. As time passed, and I found a place for the grief in my life and my emotions and my mind, I did find the nausea receding. I could eat a little more.

But still the weight kept falling. I blasted past the halfway mark I'd been aiming for. Flew past the idealistic quarter mark of my first grown-up weight. Finally it started slowing down as I reached the bottom of the normal range of the BMI chart.

And then things got worse, as I started being a tad alarmed at the weight loss at this point and tried to eat more. But what I ate, was more cookies, more sugar and fat and things like that.

My poor metabolism, already confused, decided to go completely wonky.

Then my uncle passed away. At that point I started eating really unhealthily, and started gaining weight again. That was last November/December. On the last day of the year I came across an ad on my Facebook feed for an app called myfitnesspal. It was free. You could find out not only how many calories you were eating, but also where those calories were coming from (fat, protein, carbs, etc).  You could even enter in your recipes and have it calculate all that information for your own food. Since I bake a lot, this is important to me.

I was curious, really. Just how badly was I eating, anyway. I tracked my food for a week and found all kinds of things. My sodium was way high. My protein was extremely low. Both of these were big surprises to me. That the fat and sugar were way high was not a surprise.

I've been using the app ever since, and modifying my eating patterns to increase my protein, decrease the sodium (given my family's heart health history), and, lately, also to decrease the glycemic load of what I eat ...since I've noticed I feel better when I don't spike my blood sugar.

And if you got this far you're wondering why I'm writing this. Well, I'm writing this because I've noticed some very strange social things involving weight.

See, now you know I've had the appearance of normal, fat, and thin.

I've noticed people are far more willing to make comments about your weight, both negative and positive, if you're thin than fat. And there's an astonishing number of negative comments to a thin person. They would never dream of making the same kind of comment to a fat person.

And the assumptions are astonishing. I've run into assumptions that even I made, all unknowing.

People assume that a thin person was always thin.
People assume that a thin person can eat whatever they want to, whenever they want to.
Or they assume that a thin person has an eating disorder and can be shamed into eating more, as if that solves any type of eating disorder. Notice that most people do not assume that a fat person got that way because of an eating disorder. It's always assumed that it's just a lack of self control, eating too much. And while they will silently / behind their back condemn a fat person for this perceived lack of self control -- they will rarely do it it to their face.

I got one comment about being fat. One. During the whole time, which amounted to more than a decade, of being overweight or very close to it.

During the year and a half of being thin, I've gotten more negative comments than I can count. To my face.

When I checked the calorie count on a cookie before deciding to eat it or not, I got "Just eat the d*mn cookie. It's not like it's going to hurt you." (From a person who is decidedly overweight.) (I decided against the cookie, as it was almost four hundred calories and that would really restrict what I could eat for supper and I don't particularly like going to bed hungry.)

People assume if you're thin you need to eat more. Um, no, some of us are eating just enough, thank you. There is such a thing as maintenance weight. Which is, by the way, harder than losing or gaining weight.

I get the concerned comments "are you all right?". I get the critical comments. And I also get the "looking good" comments. Talk about mixed messages.

The point is, why do people feel free to discuss a thin person's weight in front of them but get all awkward about a fat person's weight? Yes, double standards exist, they aren't fair, I get all that. I just didn't realize about this one. And I really don't understand why this one exists.

I was taught (I had to be taught it, because otherwise I wouldn't have known on my own) that you don't discuss a person's weight. Yet, that's what I was taught. Not, "it's okay to discuss a thin person's weight but not a fat person's weight." Since I was never thin before, I never ran into this.

It seems very odd to me.