I guess it's fat day

[firecat]

I made this comment in janetmiles's journal. She linked to an interesting article about self-image written by a professor who considers himself fat.

He wrote: Weight loss is usually presented as some kind of road to personal fulfillment and salvation through self-control. But the thinner I get, the angrier I feel. The more I conform to the morality of slimness, the more I want to lash out at people.

I completely relate to this, and it's one of the most important reasons I won't focus on weight loss. I don't like being angry all the time.

"They" say that being fat is bad for your health. "They" don't usually say much about stress hormones being bad for your health, but whenever I am severely stressed, I can feel those hormones destroying my body. So I think avoiding stress is the best thing I can do for my health - better than undergoing the stress I feel when I try to achieve a lower weight. But if I'm wrong, and fatness is worse for my health than stress, then you know what? I really would rather live a shorter, more contented life than a longer, angrier one.

So I win either way by not buying into the game.

Sometimes I see people looking at me angrily and the only reason I can figure for their doing so is because I'm fat and that offends them, because maybe they make efforts not to be fat and they don't like it that some people don't bother to make those efforts. I feel sorry for them.

Note: You probably know that I have opinions about weight loss in general, but I'm not discussing them in this post. This post discusses my feelings and choices about my own life (and some speculations I have about strangers who act angry with me for no reason).

Comments

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

Anger is stored in fat. It degrades with time, but if there's a lot of it in the environment, you can have a surprising amount in your body. When you diet, it comes out and makes you miserable, manifesting as a colored ooze that seeps from your pores and gives you flashbacks to nightmarish childhood memories and hallucinations.

People who are naturally fat but who diet a lot have removed their bodies' natural buffer against the ravages of anger. If not properly channeled, it gets colored ooze on everything.

The body's natural response to anger is to create fat tissue to store it. Every time you yell at a random fat person in the store, or send them nasty email, they get fatter.

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

Wait, there's too much "natural" in that. Oh, well. La.

[firecat]

hehehehe!

[snippy]

Funny, my yoga teacher told me anger was stored in my thighs.

Of course, they're fat, too.