Welcome

This September I took a short trip to Paris, after having spent three weeks in the south of France working on an organic farm. While in Paris, I spent quite a lot of time walking around the city. Nothing unusual for me when I'm in Paris. It's a beautiful city and I've always found it most charming on foot, ever since I studied there for a semester in college and made it my mission to see as much of the city as I could. One of my favorite places to go (and let's face it, probably the favorite place of every tourist who ever visited) is St. Michel, the area right around Notre Dame. It's always busy around there, with the cathedral right down the street and many shops lining the streets around the Boulevard Saint Michel. I used to go sit by the Seine and write in my journal when I lived there, watching couples holding hands and tourists taking pictures. Or I would browse the wares of the book sellers along the walk up above the river, looking for an interesting read..

When I was there in September this year, I only had a day or two to look around the city, but I felt leisurely about it after having been there the previous November on the way to a trip home and having hit most of the big tourist attractions when I studied abroad. It felt like I just was home for a bit and it was a pleasant if not terribly exciting place. I decided to go to the Saint Michel area and check out some of the bookstores, maybe search for a new journal or something. After having swung by Notre Dame to see if there was anything out of the ordinary going on there (there wasn't) I wandered over to Shakespeare and Company, one of the English language bookstores in Paris. It's a nice little shop, a little cramped but full of character and good books. When I lived in Paris during college, I visited the store with a friend, who showed me the small library on the upper floor that's open to the public. As I entered this time around, though, my interest was mainly in the books downstairs.

I wandered around the store for a few moments, basking in the fact of being in a bookstore after having spent two years in rural Mali for the Peace Corps. I had picked up and put back down a few books before my eye was drawn to a volume titled, in large pink lettering, Fat is a Feminist Issue. The title struck me as something that I might be interested in because for most of my life I've struggled with my weight, from being an obese teenager and losing most of the weight in college to constantly fighting to control my eating in the five years since I lost the weight. I've certainly had countless discussions and encounters with others trying to lose weight, people purporting to know the best way to lose weight, people wanting to know how I lost weight, people generally just as preoccupied as I seem to be with weight. However, none of them had ever, to my memory anyway, proposed anything about fat being a feminist issue. I picked the book up and browsed it for a few moments, before deciding that reading it would be a good leisurely way to pass the rest of my stay in Paris.

For the next few days in Paris, and then in Dublin where I stopped for a few days later on and finally back home in Milwaukee, I read through the book, intrigued by some of the ideas in it. While the idea of fat as a feminist issue, that it is something experienced by women in a certain way and holds meanings particular to women, struck me as true and important, the idea voiced in the title didn't seem to be the most revolutionary to me. What struck me as pertinent to my situation was two ideas that the author, Susie Orbach, puts forth in the book. First, the idea that for fat people and women in particular, fat serves a purpose. This purpose may be different for different people- maybe it serves as a comfort, a protection from having to deal with one's sexuality, a sign of rebellion against what society tells us we should be like, or anything else depending on the situation. The other idea that struck me is the certainty that the book exudes that it is possible for people for whom fat is a constant preoccupation and troubling issue to put this preoccupation behind them for good, and to not do it through dieting. Instead, the book condones approaching the fat thoughtfully and with sympathy for yourself. Orbach says that we should be learning to listen to our bodies' signals of physical hunger and simultaneously exploring the reasons why we haven't been doing that in the first place.

I think part of the reason that these ideas spoke to me was that for the weeks prior to picking up the book, I had found myself becoming increasingly self critical. It felt as if every time I noticed my reflection in a store window, every time I overate, every time I saw another woman who I felt was prettier than me, it unleashed a fury of self recriminations and feelings of self-hatred that I couldn't get to go away. At the point that I picked up Orbach's book, I was thoroughly tired of feeling shameful of being overweight. What was the use? Sure, if you're going to lose weight, motivation is important. When I lost the bulk of my extra weight in college, I used my desire to be at a more normal weight for my study abroad in Paris as a motivation. But the weight loss was sustainable and successful also because I began to treat myself better by exercising and eating a reasonable amount of food. It wasn't fueled by the feeling that I often tended to concentrate on disdain for myself and my seeming incapability to fix my problems.

I had encountered the ideas that Orbach puts forth in the book before, of course. One who diets is aware of those who do not diet, and of those who say that dieting doesn't work. In particular, when I was in high school, at the peak of my weight issues and in the midst of some adolescent growing pains, I saw a psychologist for a number of years who worked with people with eating disorders. Stacey was an ardent anti-dieter who wanted to help women improve their body image. She was the first person who said to me “don't diet.” She thought I needed to try to work through emotional issues first. She introduced the idea of intuitive eating to me, and tried to get me to exercise according to my abilities. I don't think that everything that she was trying to tell me completely penetrated during the time that I saw her. Some things did, however. I generally became skeptical of the idea of deprivation diets, a number of which I tried while still seeing her, such as the three months or so I managed to get myself to eat 900 calories a day and lost about fifty pounds, only to gain it all and more back shortly thereafter. Stacey also condoned exercising for enjoyment and not just as a means to lose weight, an attitude that I had never taken towards physical activity.

When I finally did lose weight, it was with a new perspective. The summer between freshman and sophomore year of college, unemployed and tired of sitting around eating and watching TV, I began exercising regularly, just twenty minutes at a time at first, and consistently eating a reasonable amount of food. Slowly, I lost weight and continued to lose weight through the following year and three months or so, right up until I left for study abroad in Paris, at which point I was only about twenty pounds overweight (which isn't too bad on my almost six foot frame). My blood pressure, which had been high since high school, decreased dramatically. I had dropped over 140 pounds. I felt like a new person, in a way, free of the embarrassments and sadness that had plagued me up until then. Living in Paris for three months wasn't a bad way to usher in this new era, either. I was very happy.

In the five years since I left for Paris, I have continued to exercise reguarly, and to keep much of the weight off. I feel that I have grown enormously as a person, and I think I am much more secure and confident than I used to be. But still, things are not perfect. I still feel preoccupied with food, going through periods where everything is fine and periods where I'm stressed or sad or bored and I binge and feel guilty afterward. I've gained back some of the weight that I lost and tend to go up and down within a ten or fifteen pound range. The more things change the more they stay the same.

About a year ago, however, I began to have some new ideas about my relationship with food and the nature of change in general. It happened in connection with my experience in the Peace Corps, which was frustrating to say the least. My first year in Peace Corps was very hard for me. I was constantly challenged with the situation I was in, from the standpoint of being a cultural outsider, of not knowing the language, of feeling lonely and bored, of not feeling like I knew what work I should be doing but knowing that I should be doing work. It lead to long periods of depression and a desire to quit and go home, which I almost did numerous times. I made it through the first year, though, went home for a visit after 16 months of having been away. When I had returned to Mali after my trip, I felt that I had gained a new perspective on Peace Corps and a better attitude. I was better able to deal with the difficult emotions that living in Mali prompted in me, and for some periods felt pretty happy living in my village.

I still had difficult times, however. For every month that I felt good about Mali and my life there, I had another week or two when I felt as miserable as I had the first year. During that time, a number of things occurred to me that seemed directly related to my ability to evolve in my relationship with food. First of all, it occurred to me that often when change is occurring, it can feel for long periods of time like nothing is going on. In Peace Corps, the first year that I was there I was constantly feeling as if nothing was changing. It was the same thing in high school when my weight just seemed to get worse and worse. However, looking back on both situations, I think that the struggles I experienced were preparing me to make measurable changes in my situation. Change had to occur on an internal level before it could occur on an external one.

My Peace Corps experience taught me the value of being patient, that if you wanted something to change, you had to put constant effort towards it and that eventually you would get results. It also taught me that some things are beyond your control. In both cases of struggling with my weight and with living in Mali, part of what made the situation difficult was that I was so self-critical. I struggled and I constantly put myself down for struggling. I think the acknowledgement that I could do everything to improve my situation and still fail and that it wasn't my fault was an important realization in helping me continue to live in Mali. I learned to tell myself that I was going to encounter difficult situations that might lead me to feel discouraged, but this didn't mean that it was all over. I learned to tell myself that if you fall down, pick yourself up again and keep trying. Falling down and then wasting your time beating yourself up for falling down wouldn't do anything. This realization lead me to be a bit more understanding towards myself about my weight issue. I stopped expecting it to be magically fixed, and instead tried to focus on the positive.

What all this means for the present time, I suppose, is yet to be completely uncovered. However, picking up Orbach's book in Paris felt important to me. Much of what she says about learning to live in your body and be patient and kind with yourself resonates with things I've been thinking about since I returned to Mali last year. I can't say that I've had any miraculous weight loss since I rediscovered the idea of intuitive eating, but I think the wheels are turning in my head. I've begun to observe more attentively the reasons that I overeat, and on the “good” days that I manage to eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full, I get more pleasure out of eating than I ever have before. I decided to begin this blog as a way to track my progress in whatever direction it goes. I also hope to write about some other topics that are important to me, poverty and hunger issues and the sustainable foods movement, issues which I think have a definite connection to what I've learned about personal change, except on more of a societal scale. I'm also planning to try and do some fictional writing, which I always wanted to do. I hope that through this process, something new will be revealed to me about my life and the lives of those around me. We'll just have to wait and see.