In medias res: Learning Fat Acceptance, Learning about My Relationship
21 December 2008Yes, I have been away from blogging for more than a year. Will maybe recap on another day. For the moment, let’s just establish that I am at my highest weight ever: somewhere around 200 pounds. I don’t know the exact weight because I’ve been taking the advice of Shapely Prose and other fat acceptance (FA) blogs and not weighing myself. I’ll leave the rest of the official catching up for some other day and just post something here I posted on an FA forum earlier today.
=======
Hi, I’m Sherri, I’m new to the forum and fairly new to FA — been reading Shapely Prose for a few months, and have been adding additional blogs from the fatosphere to my aggregator as I try to learn new habits of thinking about my body. I’m no longer trying to diet, and I’m VERY SLOWLY trying to wrap my brain around bringing exercise into my life and stemming my emotional eating in a way that fosters health but doesn’t trip me into all those old “must get thin” patterns.
I also have a longterm boyfriend, and we’ve been talking about whether we want to get married. Lots of family-of-origin stuff on both sides, so we’ve been working through some stuff before making that leap — not with the expectations that al our stuff needs to be worked out before we can marry, but perhaps with the hope of building a solid confidence that we know we’ll be ABLE to work through our stuff in partnership.
And so one of the things on the table is physical intimacy. In part because I have enough internalized fatophobia that I haven’t been comfortable being very sexual since my weight crept back up again during this year. I also have lots of fear that “Guy” doesn’t find me attractive now that I’m at my top range.
I’d been beating myself up about being so untrusting and projecting all my fatophobia out onto Guy, and then yesterday afternoon he admitted to me that when he’d seen me getting dressed yesterday morning, his first thought was “Man, she’s big.” And then he went on about how cute he thinks I am and how he thinks that reaction is just his own internalization of cultural messages about proper appearance and proper fitness.
Which makes sense. We both grew up in a white middle-class America that proscribes this insanely narrow range of appropriate female attractiveness — I’m wrestling with all the internalized programming from that telling me what I “should” look like, and it makes total sense that he has internalized his share of messages as well about the kind of woman he “should” want.
That makes sense in my head.
In my heart, I’m just kind of reeling, because this is (of COURSE) ammunition for the internal fat/self-hating voice to go “Aha, you see? You ARE a big disgusting unattractive blob of a thing…”
So here’s what I’m wondering — are there any good tools or resources that are helpful for someone learning fat acceptance in/as a couple? I’ve seen books mentioned that I could use to help address my own internalized self-hatred and fatophobia, but what’s out there for guys who want to un-brainwash the ways they look at/think about female beauty? And when I ask “what’s out there,” shared wisdom and experience is as valuable (perhaps MORE valuable) than a link to something on amazon.com.
Thanks for any wisdom folks have to share.
======
Stepping back into this evening: I’m not necessarily reposting the thing here as a way of asking for more advice. More just putting it out there as initial practice in finding my own voice and telling my stories again….
on June 26th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Hi, Sherry – came over here via your comment on SP to express my condolences on the loss of your father. I’m losing my dad, too, although by a slower & more sinister process (a series of small strokes; we’re just bracing ourselves for The Big One). But this post of yours really resonates w/me too – I’m still carrying mucho mucho baggage from my fat-hating ex-husband’s legacy…