Today my coworkers decided to order out for lunch.  I can rarely resist a good hot lunch even when I have tasty food of my own to eat - my defenses are much weaker still on days like today, when my intended lunch plans were to assemble a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from its individual components, which was all I had time to grab in my hasty flight out the door of our home this morning. 

Usually, when my office orders out, we get Hong Kong Cafe, or Canestaro's, or College Pizza.  Sometimes Thai, if they feel like humoring me.  Today, my coworkers wanted to order from a heretofore unknown to me "healthy fast food" place, the cutely named B.Good .  Get it?  B Good = be good, by eating "healthy", which makes you not bad!  It's clever!

Anyway.

The stuff on the menu - mostly burgers, and a few sandwiches - looked tasty, so I was down.  I called my husband (who happens to work at the same institution I do, and with whom I have lunch most days) and asked if he wanted in.  He did.  I alighted on the El Guapo, which, according to the menu, consisted of a "house-ground burger with lean, all-natural bacon, jalapeno-ranch sauce, lettuce, tomato, and red onion on a toasted whole wheat bun".  My husband wanted the buffalo chicken sandwich: "oven-crisped chicken breast topped with buffalo sauce, homemade blue cheese dressing and crisp lettuce on a toasted whole wheat bun."  Also, some of the bafflingly-named "real fries", which are "hand-cut, oven-crisped... never fried!"  (Frying, it seems, removes the reality of other fries!  Exclamation point!)  It all sounded pretty good, notwithstanding the meticulous accounting of fat grams for each sandwich on the menu.  I thought to myself, "Self, this looks suspiciously like some kind of specifically low-fat restaurant."  But I squelched my reluctance and handed over our order.

Forty minutes later, my husband and I were sitting in the lunchroom, and I took the first bite of my burger and chewed.

I feel like a talk a lot here about my Dieting History.  I don't, in daily life, talk about it much at all anymore, having made what peace I can with the decisions both I and my parents made regarding my size and my eating habits while I was growing up.  For whatever reason, here I find myself talking about it a lot, and the enormous, irreversible effect it had on my life, my relationship with my body, and my relationship with food.  It had such repercussions that even though I stopped dieting in 1995, it still affects me, however slightly, almost on a daily basis.

Today, however, it had a somewhat more dramatic effect.

I bit into that burger and chewed and I had a flashback - for the sake of this story, we'll pretend it was just like in the movies.  The camera zoomed in and the screen went blurry and suddenly, suddenly I was fourteen, and fat, and standing in front of the big corner cupboard in the kitchen in my father's house, staring at the dozens of boxes of Jenny Craig food inside, their silver-blue packaging like an ocean of misery before me.  I was standing there thinking, fuck, everything in here tastes horrible.  No matter how pretty the picture on the box, no matter how enticing the description - it tastes horrible.  I'd rather not eat, than eat this.

Back in the lunchroom with my husband, I had to resist the urge to spit the burger out.  I swallowed with difficulty and exclaimed, loudly, mortified and disgusted, "This tastes like DIET FOOD."

Something happens to food that's had the fat sucked out of it.  It has a certain flavor, a certain texture.  It's not quite like normal food.  It's not quite satisfying - you can eat it and eat it and still not feel like you've consumed anything with substance.  I imagine that to folks who eat this stuff all the time, it's probably normal; it's probably - dare I say it? - an acquired taste.  But even my husband, who has no catastrophic Dieting History to influence him, observed that the sandwiches tasted a bit like cardboard. 

I had to stop eating mine.  The meat was tasteless and the texture was all wrong; the bun was oddly stiff and ponderous to bite through; the ranch sauce was disturbingly runny and tasted nothing like ranch-flavored anything.  Only the bacon, which I quickly liberated from the sandwich's unholy fat-free hell, tasted like the food it resembled, albeit an extremely malnourished version of its kin.

It's been many years since I've tasted diet food, but this "burger" (hey there, disgusted use of scare quotes!) brought it all back to me.  Personally, my own philosophy of food and Healthy Eating is rooted in moderation and common sense.  To me, Healthy Eating means whole foods, fruits and vegetables and whole grains, good meat, stuff with a minimum of processing, as close to its natural origins as possible.  To me, Healthy Eating means eating when I'm hungry and stopping when I'm full, and primarily consuming food with ingredients that I can recognize and pronounce.  And yes, Healthy Eating also means allowing myself to eat without elaborate rules, so on those occasions when I want a horrible-for-me, greasy, nitrate-ridden hot dog, I'm going to have one.

Another example: I won't have margarine in the house, and this was my policy long before the big trans-fat controversy.  I use butter, because I know what it is, and I have the good fortune to be able to digest it easily, and frankly, I need to use less of it than I do margarine or its ilk - not to mention the obvious fact that it tastes better.  Butter, in all honesty, is amazing.  This is an indisputable fact.  Butter's excellence is beyond reproach.  I had it so rarely growing up - my childhood home was a margarine-only household - that I am still astonished at what even a small amount of butter can do for a recipe.  You can have my butter when you pry it from my cold dead fat hands.  The fact is, food tastes better with a little fat in it.  Fat is what makes you feel full and satisfied after you've eaten.  Fat enables your body to absorb certain vitamins - vitamins it can't absorb in the absence of dietary fat.   We need fat, in reasonable amounts, to be healthy and happy bodies.

My diet-food aversion is rooted in my experience, which leads me to connect diet food - that indescribable but wildly distinctive flavor that all diet food has in my mouth - with a period in my life when I was completely miserable with myself, with my body, and with food.  It sharply returns me to feelings and experiences I'd rather remember as a distant memory, than as a monstrous head always looking over my shoulder.  It took me years to repair my relationship with food to a point where I was capable of enjoying eating again.  That flavor reminds me of how far I've come, but also of how easy it would be, given the world in which I live, to fall back into those old destructive ways again.

Together, my husband and I threw away most of our lunch, realizing how disappointing it was, bemoaning the tragedy that is an unsatisfactory meal.  Why eat if the food is unpleasant?  Why bother?  I am of the opinion that eating and appreciating good food is one of the great joys of life, and still I struggle with the sense that I ought to eat food I've paid for, even if it's disgusting, simply because I've forked over money for it.  

Frankly, I think the money itself would have tasted better than this meal.

 And now, a question: What's your experience with diet food, versus real food?

(And does diet food really have a flavor, or is it just me?)

What can be said about Divine, really?

Every year, around the beginning of March, I get the Spring Anxiety.

In the interest of full disclosure, the concept of having a spring at all is still relatively novel to me - just like having a summer and a fall and a winter all as disparate yearly experiences.  I grew up in South Florida, a land in which seasons do not exist.  Or, at least, only one season exists: earmarked by continuous warmth and humidity, frequently punctuated by afternoon thunderstorms, this season is called "Florida".  It was 1995 when I moved to Boston and had my first full year of real seasons, the kind that always seemed somewhat impossible and fantastical to me as a kid growing up - like something that only happened in books, or in the movies. But lo!  Seasons were indeed real, and they were spectacular.  Back then I was partial to fall and winter, owing to their novelty.  These days I am more drawn to spring and summer, which I now appreciate only because I don't get them year-round.

Thus, in March, I get the Spring Anxiety.  Will spring ever come?  Will it ever?  Will the sun shine again?  Will I ever know warmth again before I die?  When when when? 

It's a rough month for me.  To mitigate my despair and to encourage hope that yes, at some point, it will Not Be Winter Any More, I embark upon the months-long and often-prone-to-failure process so many people despise: swimsuit shopping.

Regular readers have probably put it together by now that I don't like giving out advice, fatshionable or otherwise.  I have no idea what a busty gal should be wearing at the beach, because I'm not busty.  I cannot comment on what suit will flatter a large ass.  I'm not a fatshion expert and I don't want to be.  Thus, as usual, this is really all about me and my relationship with and understanding of my own body and shape, and how I try to survive the swimsuit shopping.

My swimsuit issues sound deceptively simple: I have a long torso and a small bust.  The long torso means most tankinis are out, as they never meet in the middle where they should; the small bust means NOTHING, NOTHING EVER FITS IN THE BUST, EVER, NEVER, EVER NEVER, NOTHING.  Clearly, this is my greater annoyance.

When I say that nothing fits in the bust, what I mean is that any suit that fits me everywhere else is positively cavernous in cup size.  Like I could fit three of my individual boobs in each cup.  It would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing.  I wear the elusive 44B in bra sizes.  And when I say I wear it, I mean that literally - I wear this size, but it's not my actual size, as the cup on the 44B is rather roomy, and frankly - though it's incredible to admit - an A cup would probably suit me much better.  This is, however,  the closest to a decent fit I can find that is both comfortable and easily accessible (i.e., Lane Bryant carries this size).  My point being, I have Small Boobs even by mainstream standards - but for someone who also wears a women's 26 in clothing, I have Remarkably Small Boobs Indeed.

That's the bra issue in a nutshell.  Now couple that with the fact that most plus-size swimsuits in a 26 are cut to fit at minimum a C-cup, and more frequently a D-cup, and you can imagine my frustration when shopping for a suit that doesn't gape comically over my chest, leaving room enough in the bust portion to hide a selection of produce, or in which a family of squirrels might reside.  I have, over time and out of necessity, developed a perfectly ridiculous trick for dealing with my small bust issue in swimwear.  I resent it deeply, but it works.  Essentially, I take an older, well-padded push-up bra, and sew it into whatever oversized-cup swimsuit I've chosen.  It's time-consuming and insulting, but it solves my problem and allows me to wear standard swimsuits and have them (mostly) fit.

I still dream of a suit I can wear off-the-rack, though - one that fits all my parts correctly without alteration.  Which is, no doubt, why I was seduced into giving Lands' End Women's Custom Bandeau Tank Swimsuit a shot.  "Hey, it's on sale!" I thought.  "And you can order by cup size!  What could go wrong?"  Sure, it's not a spectacularly fancy suit, but hell, if it fits, I would be completely willing to deal with the dullness cheerfully.

I'm a huge advocate of Lands' End swimwear, ever since this suit (that's the hideously named "Tummy Control Solid Surplice Tank Swimsuit" - hideous because I tend to be of the opinion that no one over the age of 12 should refer to their "tummy", and because, on my body anyway, that area is very much not in need of Discipline By Spandex), changed my life.  Easily, this is the greatest swimsuit I have ever owned, and I have owned a lot of swimsuits.  It fits perfectly (bra-insertion aside), it's wildly comfortable (IMAGINE THAT) and it looks great. 

Given this experience, I trusted Lands' End's Custom Bandeau Tank Swimsuit to not suck.  The Custom Sizing part here means that one can select the bra type and the cup size of their suit, as well as the size of the suit itself.  Now, admittedly, the cup sizes start with C, but the size chart on the website actually lists 44B as an option, and recommends going with the combination of a size 24 suit and a C-cup bra as the right combination to hit that magical 44B sweet spot.  So that is what I ordered.

Well, I am disappointed.

The bust on this suit is huge.  Huger even than the many non-custom-sized suits I have tried.  I have no idea in what bizarro universe this would qualify as a B cup.  Smallish watermelons would fit in the boobs of this suit.  The size chart lies, which is hardly unheard-of, but I had hoped for more from Lands' End.  Even the 44 part is a stretch, as the top band is extremely tight and does not feel like your standard 44.  So back it goes, and back I go to sewing bras into standard suits, until another option presents itself.

To sum up, I don't really expect plus-size manufacturers to somehow accomodate all the dramatic and stunning variety of fat figures - just as there are fat people like me with the small-boob issue, there are also fat people with boobs too big for standard plus sizes.  I realize that these companies are going to cater to the average figure, and that is hardly surprising.  However, I still feel as though I should be able to find a swimsuit to, well, suit me, and my figure, as it is, rather than leading me down the dark road of believing that there is something wrong with my body when these items don't fit.  It's not my body - my body is the size and shape it's meant to be, and even slender bodies don't come in standardized proportions, let alone fatter bodies.  It's the swimsuits - or, it's the clothes - that are flawed, not me.  But it's hardly any wonder that so many people feel otherwise, when their clothes they wear every day are telling them their shapes are abnormal or defective.  The bigger problem here is that it's difficult to feel confident in your own skin when you're constantly having to compromise to fit your clothes, whether than having them fit you.

For the time being, though, I'm just trying to focus on surviving to see the spring.

I have been radically busy lately and have thus not been paying as much attention to blogging as I should be.

Until I manage to finish one of the handful of Real Posts I have languishing in varying stages of completeness, enjoy a bit of silly fluff - or as I call it "If I had $360 To Spend On A Single Outfit Right Now".

The jacket is from Lane Bryant, the dress is Donna Ricco (only goes to a 24, for some stupid reason), and the shoes, which I am particularly coveting, are Camper.

Yes, I would totally wear all of this together, at the same time.  It's not everyone's style, I know.

 (Image above compiled using polyvore.com, an addictive little toy, albeit one with a sketchy history of improperly attributing the origins of its images.)

Things have been quiet round here for a couple of reasons.  For one, my husband and I were out of town for a week beginning February 7th.  For two, late in the trip and then when we got back, I got myself a flu, which, thanks to my awesome asthma, turned into pneumonia, a trip I took once before as a teenager, and not one I care to repeat again.

Unsurprisingly, this has basically kicked my ass for the past two weeks.  I'm recovering briskly now, though it's been a hell of a month.

This illness, unsurprisingly, necessitated a trip to my doctor's office.  I like my doctor immensely, which is a huge gift, and one I especially appreciate considering every other doctor I've ever had in my entire life has been at best antagonistic and at worst downright abusive regarding my weight.

For most folks, a normal aspect of any doctor's visit is getting on the scale.  I don't get on the scale.  I kindly and firmly refuse, and have done so for several years.  My doctor and I have discussed this, and I have assured him I am open to any conversations he wants to have about my weight if he has reason to believe that it is negatively affecting my health.  I have also promised to tell him if I notice any sudden and unexplained changes in my size.  But I won't get on the scale.  Not backwards.  Not with eyes closed.  Not in a house, not with a mouse - the scale is the green eggs and ham I will not eat.

I have a few (totally individual and personal) reasons for this. 

One, the scale is bad for my head.  I started consciously dieting at nine years of age, and as a result my numbers obsession runs deep and robust through my psyche.  Getting on the scale is traumatic.  I spent years denying this to myself and trying to force a comfort with it, and it does not work - it just causes me to regress to that weight obsession.

Two, I strongly believe that the specificity of the number on the scale really doesn't tell my medical team anything more than they can easily see with their eyes: I'm fat.  Quite fat.  If my doctor thinks my fat is causing me harm, the precise number of pounds I'm carrying is really a moot point.   I also feel as though the scale can be a red herring.  More than once I've seen doctors' and nurses' treatment of me change simply because of the number a scale told them.  I refuse to allow that to be a distraction in my treatment.  Without regular weigh-ins, I feel as though my weight gets less emphasis when my overall wellness is being considered.  This may or may not be true; but it feels better to me.

Refusing the scale was a skill I had to learn.  It took years.  And many situations in which I'd work myself up to say "no", but then immediately comply when asked.  Blame white-coat-syndrome, I don't know.  But I always feel like it's a test, even now, that I am never even asked to be weighed anymore, since I presume there's a note to that effect in my file.

So I was a little surprised when I visited my doctor last week - owing to extreme high fevers, difficulty breathing, and my slow acceptance that yeah, this isn't just a cold - and the assistant who saw me in led me into a room and pointed at a scale, asking me to step up. 

Ordinarily, as I said, I have to psych myself up a bit to Refuse The Scale, even now, when I've been doing it for years.  I don't like having to explain why.  I don't like the moment of tension between me, the patient, and the assistant just trying to do her job.  I dread it.

But when this assistant asked me, me with my fever and my wheezing and my swollen vocal chords, I surprised myself - instead of freezing, or complying, or taking a moment to compose a response, I instantly croaked out, "Why?"  As though it were totally bizarre to me that I should get on a scale in the doctor's office.  It was a beautifully organic reaction.

The assistant looked at me blankly, and then mumbled something about "weight, temperature, blood pressure", which I understood to mean "Um, because it's what I'm supposed to do."

I just shook my head and said, simply, "No."

And that was that.  No explanation, no elaboration.  We moved on.

It was a nice surprise.  And it was nice to realize that after so many years, even when my defenses were weakest, I was able to know that this was a choice I could make, and that I could choose to say no.

I'll call that this silver lining to this otherwise-grotesque experience.

I should warn you that because this is a discussion of diet drugs, it will involve a discussion of dieting (below the cut), which may be triggering to some of you with ED issues.

This is a slightly revised version of something I posted on my personal blog a couple of months ago. I am posting it here because I keep seeing ads for this thing, and I need an outlet for my rage.

What is Alli (pronounced "ally")? You've probably seen ads for it on television, and maybe other places too. I'll save you the trouble of heading over to myalli.com, because you won't find the real answer there anyhow. Here is what you will find:

alli prevents your body from absorbing about a quarter of the fat you eat. Fat is more calorie-dense than carbs or protein. Just one gram of fat has more than double the calories of the same amount of protein or carbs. So if you eat a reduced-calorie, low-fat diet and use alli capsules, you can make a real difference in your weight as you limit the total number of calories that enter your system.

Sounds simple enough--it's a pill that lets you eat whatever you want with no consequences, right? Grand. When I heard that, years ago, I and the sad remnants of my self-esteem said, hey, sure, sign me up, doc.

Let me tell you about my Alli.

I would have put this up on Friday, but I'm going to be out of town, so this week your Musical Interlude comes on a Wednesday instead.

Many years ago in a former life, I was a film student and aspiring screenwriter.  This is actually the field in which I got my Bachelor's degree.

At the time, I'd had zero exposure to any kind of organized or established fat activism.  I knew that I was done dieting forever when I was 18, because not only did it not work, but the attendant obsession with food, and resentment over that obsession, made me a miserable and unpleasant person.  I knew that I needed to come to some kind of a truce with my body and with food.  That was the extent of my fat consciousness at the time.

I was taking a class on the films of Federico Fellini.  One of the films I had to watch for this class was, of course, the phenomenal 8 1/2, starring the preternaturally handsome Marcello Mastroianni, upon whom I will likely indulge a schoolgirl crush until I die.

I'm coming to the important part.

The important part is La Saraghina.

Saraghina represents the fat town prostitute who inspired some of Fellini's nascent sexual feelings in boyhood.  In the film, Saraghina is a literal cave-dwelling monster who emerges to dance suggestively on the beach for the young lads who offer her a coin or two.

Saraghina's overt, unbashed sexuality blew my freaking mind.  I'd never seen anything like it in a film before.  There is a definite element of humor in this scene, but it's not making Saraghina the butt of a joke.  Even the humor of it is deadly serious.

Lots of folks think Fellini is just weird.  And he is.  And his movies are not for everyone.  But for me, seeing Saraghina for the first time was a major turning point, in how I thought about myself, and how I thought about my body, and what my body represents, and how bodies like mine are represented in culture.

Edit: for comparison purposes, see also French & Saunders' comic take on the same scene:

I have these boots.  They're perfect boots.  They've got an intimidatingly high platform, but no heel to speak of, so I can run around in them for hours.  They lace, so the shaft circumference is forgiving, and unlike some lace-up boots I can manage to strap them around my fat calves with no gapping.  And they instantly punk up any outfit, not obnoxiously but just a little, which is something I feel I need right now because I'm almost 28 and my hair is a natural color for once and my clothes at the moment tend to be fairly staid black and gray.  I don't want to go all-out, but it's nice to have the option to wear something that will give an outfit just a little character.

Unfortunately, these boots are also pretty old. I think I bought them for myself for my 21st birthday, and I've expected a lot of them over the years.  Some of the eyelets are falling out.  Several of the speed-lace hooks have gotten mashed down -- I'm not sure how that happened -- so it's hard to hook a lace into them. One of the laces is almost frayed through, and laces for boots this tall can't be picked up in the CVS.  A couple years ago the heel came off the left boot, and I stuck it back on with Shoe Goo, and it came off again, so I put it back on with hot glue and drywall screws.  It's not going anywhere now, but it does testify to their condition.  The State of the Boots is not strong.

So I'd like to replace them.  Sadly, they no longer seem to exist.  I've found the one place on the internet that seems to have them (last one, if you're interested, or want to alert me to an extant boot with similar qualities), but they've only got a men's 10 and a men's 13. Barring a miracle of eBay, it appears I'm SOL.  

Fashion is, of course, not only for covering up our bodies (and our feet), but for declaring our allegiences.  These boots represent not only a subculture and an attitude, but a particular time period in my life, and being unable to replace them highlights the degree to which I can't go back.  And I don't want to go back, not wholesale, but I would like to keep reinventing myself out of pieces of past selves, instead of having to start with a clean slate.  Losing these boots would mean losing a sartorial anchor point, something that has helped define my style for the last seven years. It seems obvious that when a piece of clothing wears out, it's time to move on -- but when that piece of clothing has become iconic or identity-constitutive, your outfits and your self-presentation don't always make sense without it.  I can get other boots -- I have other boots -- but to a certain extent they're the boots of someone else.

What are your anchor points?  What are the items that transform your wardrobe into your wardrobe, instead of just a bunch of clothes? (I suggest you identify them and then buy extras while you can... just in case.)