By The Bad Advisor

“My wife and I are on a friendly basis with a couple who have two children under the age of 10.

Both of these adults are seriously overweight. The mother has stated, in fact, that she knows she is a ‘big girl,’ which (of course) is her business.

The problem is that the bad eating habits of the parents are beginning to affect the children. Both of the youngsters are now also overweight, though not yet obese.

We are very close to the grandparents, who are trying to convince the overweight mom to be more careful when feeding the children, but their efforts have been in vain. The overweight mom tells them simply to mind their own business.

I’m inclined to tell the obese parents that they must help the children to keep their weight down. Such a remark will cause a major kerfuffle, but I don’t care. What do you think?”

— From “Want to Intervene” via “Ask Amy,” Washington Post, 7 January 2018

Dear Want to Intervene,

Fat people are always an unsightly bother to those who have the upstanding moral judgment and good sense to be thin, but a fat person who is not sufficiently ashamed of their size is a problem of another order. Your problem — and all fat people are everyone else’s problem — is twofold: First, this fat lady has failed to apologize profusely and constantly to you personally and the world at large for the size of her body, which you have no choice but to look at, contemplate, and analyze during every waking moment.

Second, this fat lady has already resisted her loved ones’ generous offers of assistance in developing shame around her body. So you’re fighting an uphill battle to begin with — luckily, you’re not fat, which means you can succeed at anything because you do not occupy more than an arbitrarily and culturally designated acceptable quantity of mass on earth, and are therefore a capable and good person.

Probably what’s happened is that this fat lady hasn’t been demeaned and degraded by the right people yet, and you’re just the person to bring a little big-boned beration into her life. She may not realize that if she is left to raise her children as she sees fit, they may turn out to be a size which displeases you, a fate that can only be avoided by your swift interference. It is essential that these children maintain a weight that is acceptable to a person who they may or may not know exists, lest they fail to maintain a weight that is acceptable to a person who they may or may not know exists.

You’re right not to mind causing a kerfuffle — shame and judgment is a 100% sure path to forcing fat people into thinness, and thin people never have any problems, experience heartache, fall ill, or die. If you don’t tell this family how fat they are, who will? The world at large? An annually cyclical litany of New Year-related diet panics touted as essential tools of self-care? A beauty mandate driven by culturally obligatory fat hatred, reinforced in almost every iteration of any public portrayal of a human body? Kerfuff away! If these people insist on being fat, you can at least insist on your god-given right to spend your eternal thin life mad about it.

Bad Advice On The Etiquette Of Boning Your Daughter’s Best Friend

“A few years ago, my husband planted a fig tree and cared for it like a baby through the cold Philadelphia winters. Finally, there is bounty! Every day, he brings in ripe figs and places them on the windowsill. But the crop is much bigger than our needs. When the figs begin to rot and I ask him if he’s going to throw them away, he looks heartsick. May I throw them out and pretend we ate them?”

—From “ANONYMOUS” via “Social Q’s,” New York Times, 19 October 2017

Dear Anonymous,

Throw the figs out and pretend you ate them! It’s literally the only thing to do with extra food, a strange and confusing phenomenon for which humanity has not yet developed a good solution. What a shame that there is nothing to do with fresh fruit besides just leaving it out on a windowsill to rot. If only the techniques and technologies that exist in fantastical works of science fiction — refrigeration, preservation, literally just sharing your extra shit with other people who could use it — were not relegated to pages of incomprehensible fancy.

“My wife and I are in our 60s. We have been married for some time and are very open-minded. She keeps insisting that she does not remember her first sexual experience. I would be curious to understand why in the world, unless someone was inebriated, the person would not recall this huge milestone.”

— From “BEWILDERED IN THE WEST” via “Dear Abby,” 3 January 2018

Dear Bewildered,

It’s difficult to say precisely, as it’s statistically unlikely that a writer of internet advice columns remembers your wife’s first sexual experience any better than she does. Best of luck getting to the bottom of this quandary, hope you someday manage to find the one of 7.44 billion people on earth who can help you answer it.

I was 18 the first time I met a fat sister-in-arms. It was my first semester of college, and we immediately gravitated toward one another, buoys in the choppy waters of an unfamiliar sea.

That year, we became closer than either of us expected. Both of us had been the fattest kids in our high school classes, held at a distance from classmates by virtue of our bodies. We’d both hoped college would be easier, but most of the time, it felt familiar: the desks that weren’t built for us. Classmates who stared openly at our bellies and thighs. The lengthy diet talk amongst classmates, bemoaning the fat on their slight frames, a hundred pounds lighter than our own. Professors’ penchant for using obesity as a metaphor for capitalism and excess. Our bodies were always unwelcome, a stand-in for some pandemic or a terrifying future.

In the face of all that, we made a radical decision: We decided to like each other, and we decided to like ourselves. We became two of the few fat people who no longer feared our own skin. There was such reckless joy in our time together, such fearlessness in our hearts. We learned of our thirst for understanding only as we slaked it.

Our bodies were always unwelcome, a stand-in for some pandemic or a terrifying future.
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This was when I learned to love and admire bright and shining fat people, the ones who vibrated with joy, who refused to reject their bodies as character flaws or moral failings. The ones who resisted diet talk, the conscientious objectors to bemoaning their thunder thighs and bingo wings, their rolling bellies and wide hips. The ones who wore clothing that was bright and tight, or billowing and dark — whatever they felt like wearing. The ones who happily, loudly loved their size. The ones we were becoming.

These, I learned, were my people.

When we returned for our sophomore year, she told me the pressure had become too much. She feared for her partners’ shame, feared for more bullying from her tough love parents, feared for the jeering her thinner friends had to endure when they spent time with her.

So she got weight loss surgery.

I told her I was happy for her, and I was. She’d made a decision about how to engage with her own body. We’d often talked about how often our bodies were taken from us — from unsolicited diet advice to fatcalling, unwelcome comments about our orders at restaurants to bullying in the name of “concern.” Thinness was the only way she could truly end all of that.

My Friends Would Rather Have Their Guts Cut Open Than Be Like Me
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But her body wasn’t the only thing that changed. As she lost weight, so much more fell away. She gushed over her new straight size clothing, and relished the femininity she was now allowed by those around her. Her attention drifted to thinner friends. She grew out her hair and dyed it. At her thinnest, she started talking about how much she hated her thighs, even at the smallest they’d ever been.

That was how I lost her. She disappeared into the warm sunlight of thinness. I returned to the role I knew best: the fattest student in class. And I learned the quiet heartbreak of losing someone who truly understood what it meant to live in a body like mine.

There’s a quiet adjustment of expectations that comes with being very fat. You learn that you’re unlikely to be welcomed where your body can be seen: in sports, acting, sales, communications, politics. You might apply for a restaurant job as a server and be offered one as a dishwasher. You might audition for a play and be redirected to join the crew.

Sometimes people tell you kindly, sometimes cruelly. Sometimes you find out by seeing another fat person rejected in public, sacrificed as an object lesson. But no matter where you go, someone is always there to teach you a mandatory lesson: that your success will always be contained by others’ willingness to see your body.

In recent years, a handful of fat people have slowly but surely chipped away at the stone walls faced by fat people who want to be seen, who want to ascend to the heights normally reserved for those who have earned visibility through thinness. As an adult, I’ve seen two women my size become household names: actor Gabourey Sidibe and plus size designer Ashley Nell Tipton.

As a fat woman, these two had not just been breaths of fresh air, but indicators that more might be possible. That people who look like me could find their way into places we weren’t expected, and often weren’t welcomed. That people who looked like me belonged in front of the camera just as much as behind it. It is extraordinarily rare to look up to someone with a body like mine. It is rarer still for those women to be lifted up in media. That moment — of seeing and knowing bodies like mine in media — became a fleeting one.

What It Means To Become The ‘Fat Friend’
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Sidibe and Tipton both announced this year that they’d had weight loss surgery. Some — mostly thin body positivity activists — have congratulated Sidibe and Tipton for what they see as positive choices to benefit their health. Others — mostly fat activists — have responded with frustration or anger at losing two of the very few, very fat people who have ascended such great heights. These losses cut deep — not because of their individual decisions about their own bodies, but because it reminds fat people of how we’re seen, and often, how we’re forced to see ourselves. The ways in which we are expected to sacrifice our bodies for the comfort of those around us.

I am reminded of all of that, and of what it means to lose someone you’ve loved and looked up to — the familiar drift of formerly fat friends into thinness. I’m bracing myself for the crash.

But the longer I sit with the reality of losing two icons that have bodies like mine, the more I think of my college friend. I think of the ways in which her mother’s cutting remarks whittled away at her sense of self, the fear of facing an airplane full of disdainful passengers, the exhaustion of fending off strangers’ comments on her groceries at the store. She was constantly pitted against her body, made to choose between cutting out a vital organ, or continuing to live the tiresome life of a very fat person.

Her decisions are her own, as all of ours are. But often, weight loss was posited as the only way out of the heavy rainfall that eroded her sense of self: first topsoil, then clay, then bedrock. In the face of unrelenting bullying and rejection from all sides, fat people are told our only option is to forsake the only bodies we have.

I wonder about my friend, and what her body looks like now. Whether it has found its way back to its old shape, as so many do, or if she has stayed thin. I wonder if her mother still speaks to her so dismissively and unkindly. I wonder if she still feels the warmth of thinness on her shrinking skin, slipping into a new life like a witness under protection. I wonder if she found love with those who used to hate her. I wonder if she is happy. I wonder if she’s found the acceptance she was looking for.

What is so often lost in conversations about weight loss surgery is the untold story of the constant pressure fat people are under to lose weight. Not just some weight, but as much weight as possible, as quickly as possible. And then we’re expected to lose more. For fat people in the spotlight — especially very fat people, very fat women, and triply for very fat women of color — that pressure warps and magnifies, fortified by so many people’s beliefs that we are entitled to others’ bodies, especially fat bodies, women’s bodies, and bodies of color.

Of course, all of us should be able to make whatever decisions we like with regard to our own bodies. And of course, I’m here for all of those choices. But for some of us, only one option is made available. And we are taught that it’s the only way to reclaim our own bodies, to succeed in our careers, to stem the tide of rejection visited upon us, and to gain the love and acceptance of those around us.

What Happens When One Fat Patient Sees A Doctor
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I cannot claim to know the intricacies of Gabourey Sidibe or Ashley Nell Tipton’s life decisions. I cannot know how many jobs they lost for being too fat to be seen, and how that shifted their expectations over time. I cannot know how many colleagues spoke to them with syrupy concern or outright rejection. I cannot know the diagnoses or conversations with doctors that shaped their decisions. And I cannot — and will not — judge their decisions.

But I do know that the deck is stacked against fat people staying fat, keeping the bodies that have cared for us all this time. Our character, will, strength, worth, and health are all judged on the size of our skin. We are told that others’ behavior hinges on our size — that if we resisted our own bodies, they wouldn’t be forced to treat us poorly, mock us openly, or disregard our most basic needs. The only path to respect, we are told clearly and repeatedly, isn’t to request it from those around us, but to transform our bodies completely and immediately. For some of us, the only affirmation we receive comes when we lose weight.

As people living in fat bodies, our choices about our bodies are never fully our own — always swayed or sunken by the pressures of media, family, friends, doctors, strangers on the street. Everyone has an opinion on our bodies, and those opinions are asserted freely at every turn.

For very fat people, weight loss surgery is never as simple as a matter of health, and is rarely a decision offered freely to us amongst an array of options. Yes, I support the choices fat people make to lose weight. I just wish it weren’t the only choice available.

It’s almost here. It happens every year. And every year it catches me off guard: “New Year, New You!” season . . . more commonly known as the first week of January.

Henceforth known as NYNY season, this not-so-magical time is marked by an onslaught of shaming headlines like:

Discover the Shortcut to Making More Money This Year!
25 Quick Ways To Improve Your Marriage!
Vow To Stick With The Gym!
Five Ways To Get Organized This Year!
Three Things You Should Do Every Day!
How To Finally Lose Those Pesky 10 lbs!
10 Ways To Improve Your Sex Life!
How Yoga Can Help You Finally Achieve Your Goals!
100 Ways To Improve Your Time Management!

Well, this year I’m using the underlying sentiment for good and doing things differently. In short, I have three words for the impending barrage of how-to’s and must-do’s: Fuck That Noise.

Over the past several years, three groups in particular have provided a valuable antidote to the surface-scratching, counter-productive, clickbait listicle genre that defines the dawn of every new year. Those groups? My pragmatic friends with chronic conditions, body acceptance activists, and comics.

I have three words for the impending barrage of how-to’s and must-do’s: Fuck That Noise.
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Thanks to these superior gurus, I am now into the idea of meeting yourself where you are + not having to necessarily LOVE yourself when you’re only at the like or fine with or pretty accepting overall stage + laughing and groaning at the things a lot of us do to sabotage ourselves.

All of these things drastically lessen the self-blame that fuels the NYNY season. And all have helped me fully embrace the fuck that noise sentiment.

On Meeting Yourself Where You Are

We wouldn’t expect someone who just bought their first pair of running shoes to enter a marathon next week; why do we expect to master everything we test out or take on the moment we begin? Meeting yourself where you are is deemed excuse-making in NYNY land, where you can’t ever make adjustments, have setbacks, or measure by sliding scale. Which is, of course, the very reason why so few people stick to new year advice.

My friends suffering from chronic conditions have taught me, thankfully, that I shouldn’t hold myself to impossible expectations — and giving myself a break has become the best anxiety-management strategy I’ve found so far.

“Have you eaten today?” is a question a group of my close girl friends and I drop on each other as a loving check-in. Most of us have anxiety or a condition with anxiety-related manifestations, like the “nervous stomach” that clenches and keeps you from feeling hungry. Because we work from home, we don’t have the reminder to eat that happens at location-centric jobs where you would naturally see co-workers getting up and/or leaving for lunch. So we forget to eat and then crash midday, or have even more trouble focusing than usual.

My friend Amadi Aec Lovelace has perfected the loving, no pressure, self-care/health reminder:

It’s a busy day for many. Time for a #SelfCare check. Have you eaten? Hydrated? Medicated? Need a break? #TakeCareOfYouFirst

???@amaditalks

Thanks to my perfection-required upbringing, I’d prefer to be the kind of person who’s mastered #adulting and doesn’t need friendly check-ins, behavior modification strategies, or reminders to tend my basic needs. But considering that I am learning how to source symptoms, whether or not the current treatment options are helping, and how to coordinate care with multiple doctors — and that I’m also coming out of the most stressful year of my life — I also know that I should take the help and work on getting OK with that.

What I’ve learned, basically, is that I have to meet myself where I am — and that place happens to be very early on in the diagnostic/treatment cycle for a bevy of life-long conditions.

On Being Just OK With Yourself

“We’ve got to help people survive before we can expect them to thrive.”

When I read those words from Melissa A. Fabello earlier this year, it was the start of a revelation. She was writing about a shift for the “body positive” movement, one that could create “an in-between stage for the folks who look at body love and feel daunted by the seemingly insurmountable task.” She called it “body neutrality.” Demanding that people love their bodies sounded unrealistic, “an unfair expectation.”

The parallel for those of us who are dealing with chronic illness or undiagnosed conditions, or who are recovering from abuse/assault — many of us for the first time thanks to finally having comprehensive health care — was striking for me. I can’t expect to love myself every day. I can’t expect anything from myself every day. But finding a way to be OK with myself sounded achievable and anxiety-relieving and a great way to reduce the paralyzing self-blame that I’ve struggled with for almost three decades.

Suddenly, I had a self-talk that allowed me to celebrate something like putting on real clothes and getting to the post office or grocery store. I started giving myself awards for what I allowed our culture to tell me were “the basics” — things any adult should be able to handle. When I forget to do this, I pull up Anna Borges’s list, “19 Small Awards Anyone With Anxiety Deserves To Receive: Some days, you deserve a medal for getting out of bed” and award myself for doing that instead of giving up or checking out.

Fabello’s suggestion may seem narrowly-aimed, but actually hits a very broad target; her hope for creating this “in-between stage” or “base camp” works with nearly any word/issue you swap for “body”:

“And maybe if we propose this to people — if we give them the option to inch toward body love, rather than implying that the only way there is a catapult — they’ll (more comfortably, daringly, courageously!) feel empowered to leave their body hate behind.”

I’m here for it . . . and I’m totally waiting for you at base camp should you want to join me.

On Laughing At Life’s Woes

We are all masters of screwing things up beyond repair — it’s how the colloquialism “you’re only human” came about. The best way I’ve found to date for accepting my failures big and small is to laugh at them, so it’s no surprise that therapy through comedy has been my go-to strategy since I was a kid. Laughing at myself and others constantly gives me perspective and anxiety relief.

The most all-encompassing — and refreshingly cringe-free — source for laughing at life on my current reading/watching list is Josh Gondelman and Joe Berkowitz’s new book You Blew It: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You’ve Already Ruined Your Life. Because advice books are impossible to write without sounding like a pompous jerk bag, and sincere jerkiness is inherently unfunny and unapproachable, Gondelman and Berkowitz instead tell you how to best and most efficiently wreak havoc on your life.

We are all masters of screwing things up beyond repair.
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Considering I was starting to write the #ItsTotallyMe dating series as I opened You Blew It, it’s little wonder that the “Love and/or Sex” section hit me with full force. Frankly, they had me at the opening line: “It would be nice if you could bypass dating entirely.” Throughout the book, moments like that attributed what I thought were my off-putting idiosyncrasies to the Human Condition, and created a lot of relief laughter.

Amidst all the venting and self-deprecation, the book also delivers some very good life philosophy that’s a perfect combination of 1/ obvious observations we all miss and 2/ silliness.

For example, the authors ask, why do we treat dating so much differently than a burgeoning friendship?

“Remember making friends? It’s what we did when we were frightened children who hadn’t met other people yet. Try more of that . . . [A date is] less about impressing the other person with qualifications and secret clerical superpowers than it is about determining compatibility. It’s a night out. Have some good old-fashioned fun with your new friend.”

Right. Yes. The juxtaposition of admitting dating sucks and that it’s supposed to be fun had me all in.

By the time I finished “Relationships: The Champagne of Compromises,” the 40-page dating section conclusion, I physically felt better about the #adulting activity that has been my biggest source of self-blame and feelings of failure over the past 20 years. Laughing is mad powerful, y’all.

Gondelman and Berkowitz take on your family, your roommate, your boss, your co-workers, and the people you have to deal with when you leave your house: the general public. They also take you on in a way that makes your flaws digestible and, at times, borderline charming. And while I realize their style is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea (though I’m not sure I want to be friends with those people), sailing through a cathartic breakdown of all the major parts of life reminded me to incorporate humor into my day every day.

Laughing at life may not prevent you from crying at life, but it will feel damn good, and it’s something you can do both on your own and with others. The possibilities are endless.

Mark the end of the year in whatever way is satisfying to you — saying thanks or wishing it good riddance.

If you’re a resolution person, make the resolution most on your mind rather than the one that seems popular in listicles or Facebook groups. Tell New Year New You season to take a flying leap. Buy a guilty pleasure novel and put down the “self-help” book your mom proudly and expectantly put under the tree for you. Take up knitting instead of jogging if what you actually need is an excuse to relax.

In short: you do you instead of listening to others try to fix you.