tylik

So I have been thinking at times about various sorts of posts. Like, for instance, a basic post saying something like "Well, I think I've lost the 2.5ish kg I gained while travelling... but then in the last two days I'm back up again. OTOH, it's my period, and my back has been grumpy, so I'm guessing water x 2."

Or, perhaps, on a more meta level, posting about how I do track my weight fairly closely these days. And I used to not. And I suspect that for a lot of that time, not tracking it was a really good decision - weight was a symptom of things that were wrong with me, but it wasn't the problem itself, and tracking it would only depress me. (I don't have a history of disordered eating, but both of my siblings do, and for a long time I saw myself as potentially at elevated risk - as one is likely to be when one's mother spend a lot of time obsessing over personal attractiveness generally and how fat one is in particular.)

But just as much, these days, I feel like it is a fairly useful tool for me, when used reasonably. My body is generally working a lot better. I also weigh a lot less. (As it happens, I generically tend to see the second as a result of the first instead of the other way around. Note this, this is important.) When I don't have more pressing issues in my face, say, my spine going through a bout of major crankiness, tracking my weight somewhat closely gives me a bit of insight to what is going on with me. For instance, if my weight is going up, I might think about what I've been eating... but I'm just as likely to think about how energetic I've been feeling, how much pain, and how I've been sleeping. And to pay attention to the contours of my body. I mean, I try to do the others anyway, but I'm busy, and multiple checks are good.

And seriously? I'd love to hear what other people's experiences are. Do they find that they have different modes, where one form of goals and/or monitoring is really helpful under some circumstances - and something entirely to be avoided under others? What has worked for them when?

Ahem. The problem is that it's really hard to know where or how to make some of these posts. See, this is the thing. By the BMI, I'm technically overweight - but considering my build and musculature, I'm not, in the general realm of things. I'm also not at I would consider a fitness optimum even just in terms of fat storage. I tend to see this in terms of my body optimizing too much towards holding on to fat... which can be about not being active enough or eating too much junk, but in my experience is even more likely to be about my body being fruck about something and going into hunkering in the bunker mode. (Right now? Probably some of both. I'd prefer to be in less pain and other sorts of stress - and doing more vigorous exercise. I'd definitely prefer both of the former to eating fewer apple fritters, about the only indulgence of note in my diet, and not that frequent of one. Mm. Apple fritter.)

So I could put this into the fairly generic health and fitness context, except, frankly, I find that context to be a little too narrow. Yeah, most of my friends who spend time there do so in a pretty enlightened way... and yet there is this terrible gravitational pull back towards diet, weight and beauty.

I could try to post about it in a health at any size context. Though I'm frankly worried about how much I'd be welcome. I am pretty darned active. I am not particularly fat. And frankly, I do think that I, personally, am likely to be less fat when I am more healthy. In my experience, despite the name health at any size tends pretty heavily towards fat acceptance plus exercise and reasonable nutrition. And let me be clear. I am all for that. I think that's a great place to be, for many people.

And yet, and yet... For years, I felt unhealthy. I was also fat. It's far too easy to conflate these two, and that's not what I wanted. And I certainly had people telling telling me that if I wanted to be more healthy, I had to become less fat.

I resisted. Really hard. I'd seen my sibs dancing with disordered eating. I knew, deeply, that there was this weight / beauty / fitness thing out there that was likely to hurt me. Really hurt me. Long before I could express it I had a visceral sense of something really bad being over there. And I was getting on towards expressing it pretty well before the car accident, and Microsoft, and my marriage, and the weight gain, and all of that.

And there were a lot of times where I was fat, but also active and healthy in most measurable ways. And yet, also, not, in a lot of ways. And I had this lingering sense that *for me* the fat was not healthy. Or rather, the fat, or a lot of the fat, was a symptom of not being healthy. I never tried to lose the fat, exactly, but I did start paying attention to it both in terms of weight and in terms of bulk, as one indicator (of many) of whether I was being healthy.

And, uh, eventually I lost kind of a lot of weight. I'm still trying to figure that one out - I mean, a lot started working better for my body, but why then, and not earlier? Huh? I have this kind of vague working model in my head wherein there's this complex multi-variant equation in which exercise and diet are met equally around things like how much pain I'm in, whether I'm getting enough sleep, whether my diurnal cycle is being well maintained, whether my allergies are managed well, whether I am eating food I can digest... and so on. Meanwhile, of course, I lost more than a quarter of my total body weight, and it's stayed gone for going on five years now, which just by itself is enough to have some people decide that I'm some kind of statistical anomaly and I should just shut up because my experience means nothing. (Er, I don't think it means anything particularly generalizable. But it is, well, my experience and no less meaningful than anyone else's.)

This is just me.

I'm being pretty incoherent here, but I'd like there to be more room to have conversations that don't suppose that healthy has to look a certain way, or that certain standards of weight and beauty are the most important things ever... but at the same time leaves room for deciding that yeah, for me, individually, fat (or at least, some fat) is a symptom of my body not being happy. That I like running. That I want to get back into doing more of it.

I feel like figuring out what is going on with our bodies, and what makes us happier and healthier and working better is a lot more interesting than just what we eat, how much we work out and what we weigh. I'd like to spend more time in spaces where saying "I think my body is happiest fat, with moderate exercise and a vegan diet" is supported equally with statements like "I think my body is happiest when I'm carrying a lot of muscle, no gluten, and working out at like 90 minutes a day", or "what works for me s being very mindful of my body's needs, whether in terms of food, rest, activity, or whatever".

And for that matter, where it's seen equally intrusive and judgemental to try to convince a friend that they violate whatever dietary guidelines they've chosen for them self and eat that cake, anyway diets are evil, as it would be to tell them they that maybe they shouldn't eat that cake, because it's fattening and frankly? you're kind of too much that way already. I mean, we've mostly worked out that it's rude to tell people they either should or shouldn't eat meat right? Even though most of us talk about our eating or not eating meat experiences, at least from time to time.

I'd love to talk more about the complex ways a lot of different health things combine. I know a lot of people whose bodies changed drastically when they realized they had a particular allergy and started not eating the thing they were allergic to. There's a fair bit of evidence that changes in artificial lighting and dysregulation of diurnal cycle might have as much to do with population level shifts towards more weight as compared to height as changes in diet and exercise. (And certainly there are strong correlations between diurnal dysregulation and things like cancer occurrence. And mood, memory, energy, etc. etc.) Pain, OMG, pain, pain has everything to do with what my metabolism is up to.

And... feh. The awkward. I do understand that there's a lot of societal grief. I do understand that some of the weirdness directed towards people who are thinner, or are adopting intentional changes in diet, or whatever, are people trying to compensate for those societal messages. And I understand that these are issues that are tied up with all kinds of emotions and weirdness for many of us, and it's important for people to keep their own boundaries.

But darn, I'd also really like to be able to talk about these things with more of these friends. Without people deciding that what's going on with my body is a judgement on what's going on with their bodies.

Thoughts?