MotoPresse

Via ModernHepburn.

Let’s talk about disordered eating. God knows I’ve had enough conversations about food lately. New year, new resolutions for everyone, and I get so excited about people talking about changing their lives for the better. I love it. Except…

To paraphrase the frequently reblogged quote: “be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It’s true, especially with women, who with everything we still deal with in this day and age should be supporting each other far more than we do. Obvious example: the odds are good that no matter who you are -especially if you’re a woman- you have something you don’t like about your physical self, a belief that you are somehow “in progress”, a work yet unfinished and requiring constant vigilance and evaluation. You may not even think about it that consciously, but I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t have it to some degree. Everything in our environment feeds this, even the “health”-focused publications, which have their own agenda. They have investors to feed too, you know. {Poor pun, sorry.} I feel like the women I know {including myself} walk around so isolated in their issues -job, relationship, body, health, weight… it all seems to come down to weight. A personal example is that I’m trying to get healthy again after three months of total inactivity and while facing limited weight bearing movement for the next year or so. I’m not happy with where my body’s at – who would be, after playing couch potato for any extended amount of time? It sucks, because it’s my body, and it’s a damn good one, thank you very much. It’s just not responding the way it was, and since I know it can be better, and was so recently – I push for that.

Of course, I’m screwed. {Socially.} We’re all walking around wrapped up in our own stuff, bumping into each other long enough to look up, startled, and make a snap judgement of the person in front of us. I’m lucky: I have an awesome metabolism, and beautiful parents. I’ve been told many times since I became an adult that I look like a perfect 50/50 mix of the two of them. I am my mother in miniature, with my dad’s jaw, and I got the Japanese legs from his side of the family, but stretched out to a 35″ inseam, which I proudly declared to so many people before I realized one day that it really pisses them off.

In fact, I think that I piss a lot of people off. Because I’m wrapped up in my own stuff. I assume like so many women I meet do that when people see me, they not only see who I am physically in front of them but also that I’m slightly over the weight I usually carry, and that I’m tired because I stay up too late stressing over the same things they do. I assume they see that I’m human, existing in the same waking dream we all walk around in. I assume that they will understand any blunders in whatever I say because they know that when I’m looking at them, I only see a beautiful woman who’s wearing boots that I totally want, and who has gorgeous posture, and because I can’t possibly know what their personal issues are at that moment unless they tell me, which they haven’t. {Yet; you know you will eventually.} Because I’m too wrapped up in what’s wrong with me by comparison to think about what’s going on with them. I know this sounds incredibly self absorbed, because it is. I blindly join joyous conversations about food that we all like; the food blogs that I read, the recipes I love that call for three sticks of butter, my unabashed love for the Top Pot Maple Bar.

But women, no fewer than, and probably a few more than twenty in my life have made cracks about how “cute” I am, because I talk too passionately about food “as though (I) actually eat it”. I’m sure they think they’re coming up with an original comment, because they all laugh so loudly at the hilarious joke they’ve just made. They wait for me to laugh too.

If I had a dollar…you know the rest.

It’s a snarky thing to say*. It’s wildly inappropriate at the best of times, and all it does is alienate and isolate me as “other” to whomever we were talking to, and the woman who made the comment. It puts them on one side of the line, and me squarely across from them. It makes me feel bad. On the one hand, I want to say to all of them, “Of course I fucking eat – you eat, she eats, we all eat. What the Fuck?”. What I find myself saying instead is something idiotic about how it’s true, and I do eat, and here, I’ll eat this, and that, and more of that, in front of them – just so they’ll welcome me back into the conversation.

I have a bonus: I’m allergic to a main commercial ingredient in about 98% of the shelf stable junk that breaks healthful dietary disciplines. Why is this relevant? Because my food choices can’t and aren’t fairly compared to those made by women who can eat everything in QFC without dying. One woman I worked with actually decided that this was an “allergy” – quotations to mean that this was bogus, just a loophole out of the skinny target she’d painted on me early on in the office gossip. She subsequently tried to get me to eat something she swore was homemade but was actually Betty Crocker’s FD&C Yellow 6 Special to prove that I was lying about why I eat healthy. To prove that I was somehow anorexic for avoiding junk food. Seriously. Seriously? Am I so wrong in thinking that we should all be on the same side? The only courtesy I’m asking for in future is to let me join the conversation about food and that people take my love of it seriously. You’re missing out, as my friend Suzi would say, because most of her favorite dining choices are currently places I introduced her to.

What’s my point? I’m looking at this draft and trying to figure it out, because all of what I’ve written ought to fall into the “well duh” category, or the “she said what??” category, which is always validating to me, of course. But I keep finding myself in this same place, replaying the conversation at the end of the day and wondering what relationship/connection I’ve lost because I handled it wrong. Covering myself by joking that if they feel that way now, they’re really going to hate me in a few months when I get back to my healthy lifestyle only further entrenches me in the “other” category. I know, I know, smack me now – I already face-palmed when I got home and gave it more thought. I’ve had how long to get it right? What is the right comeback, anyway? I’m not capable of keeping quiet; not something I’m happy about – it’s one of those things I loathe pretty actively about myself. But I’ve heard this enough, and been nearly poisoned by an overzealous skeptic to boot.

I’d like to write more about food politics in this space, not quite like Marion Nestle, but maybe along the lines of Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. In any case, I’ll try to keep it more generally themed in the future. If anyone who has had the above conversation with me – or with anyone, for that matter – reads my blog: I really do know where you’re coming from. I understand. I was being a prat and you had to smack me around a little. What I’m trying to do here is change the conversation and start over. I promise not to rattle on about my “problems”, which are really only my business anyway, if you promise to talk about the food you love in the future without all those deprivation-mindset qualifiers. I want a more compassionate relationship for all of us, and I hope you understand.

♥ Momo

*Who’s said this to me? A family member, women I’ve worked with, friends of friends, former friends, girlfriends of boyfriends’ friends. Women in a store who overheard me talking to a friend in line at that store. I kid you not.