fat, with a dollop of pointless anecdote

You'll remember a couple entries ago, I told you all that on any given day there's a good chance that I might possibly agree that I'm too fat. Well, clicking on links off links off links from other people's blogs today, I came across someone's "fat acceptance" site. Thoughts occur to me. More blogging ensues.

When I was in massage school, during a class in which we were discussing terminating a client whom you felt you were no longer helping, my (gay male) instructor told us a story about his own practice. A regular female client of his had reached a point where he felt he was no longer doing therapeutic work, but rather just relaxation massage, and since that was not his preference, he had thought about referring her elsewhere. However, he was loathe to do so, because he felt she had bonded with him and because, since she was a large woman, he felt she probably wasn't getting any pleasurable touch anywhere else. Excuse me?

I can't even tell you how much I wanted to whip a pointy-cornered folder at his head. Because the woman was obese that meant she wasn't gettin' any? It meant no one wanted anything to do with her and she had to pay $80 an hour for someone to touch her without shuddering? WTF? At the time I was taking that class, I knew several fat people who were getting--I was going to say "twice as much" but 2x0=0, so let's go with--way way more sex than I was.

So, yeah, I'm down with the fat acceptance stuff. I know from personal experience that there are plenty of fat people who are attractive, are loved by their partners, have lots of sex (sometimes with multiple people), exercise regularly and strenuously, eat a far more healthy diet than I do, and have perfect blood tests. Saying that all fat people are ugly, unloved, not desired, lazy, undisciplined, and unhealthy is obviously stoopid, and that anyone should have low self-esteem, or have to listen to crap, because of their BMI makes me sad.

Now, how do we reconcile that statement with the fact that I myself have only a very narrow range of weight/size at which I feel I am acceptable and attractive? How do we reconcile it with the fact that if I am ten pounds over my self-imposed acceptable range I absolutely loathe my body? We don't.

You people don't come here to read dispatches from the mentally sound. You come here to share in my dysfunction. And this particular dysfunction is the feeling that being over what some BMI chart says is normal is absolutely fine for other people, but horrific for me.

xoxo