April's CR Diary

Those of us who have started down the CR path are admitting that we fear death and disease, and we want to do everything in our power to avoid those things as long as possible. We are the fighters. Those who attack us are also afraid of death and disease. But instead of confronting those fears, they reach for anger and hatred - emotions that are apparently easier for them to feel than fear.

We are told to embrace ourselves and love ourselves. It's not such a
hard message when you like what you see in the mirror. The week I
turned 25, I did not like what I saw in the mirror. I started writing
down what I was eating every day and making better choices. I was at a
healthy weight, according to the numbers, but I wanted to see what I
could do to truly feel comfortable with my own body.

I realized, after telling one girl friend what I was up to, in what I
thought was a sympathetic "we're in this together" moment, that I had
made a mistake in advertising it to anyone. Although she was trying to
start a diet herself, she was aghast that I was trying to lose weight.
I realized if I told anyone else I would be met with that American
shriek of "you don't need to lose WEIGHT!" and immediate gossip about
an eating disorder. Even my father, who has been slowly and steadily
losing weight because of the same concerns as me, and has gone from 6'
and more than 200 pounds down to 175 over about the last year, joked,
"You aimin' for the double-digits?"

Oh, the cheap, sensationalist flourish of "eating disorders." As a
former teenage American girl, I only saw the eating disorder world
through my acquaintances and friends, not in my own life. The most
predominate eating disorder I saw was compulsive eating. I knew only
one true anoretic and one real combination anoretic/bulimic. And there
were some who claimed years after the fact, after having gained
massive weight, that when they were at normal weights it was only
because they had an eating disorder. Thereby making their obesity
healthy, because it meant they had escaped their so-called eating
disorder.

America has turned into a country where the merest flutter of hunger
is a discomfort on the level of heroin withdrawl. The 65 percent of
Americans who are overweight/obese can call themselves healthy
because they have "escaped" an eating disorder, something that affects
about one percent of adolescent girls. Yet as overweight people who
have come to grips about their relationships with food will tell you
(the authors of Body Clutter, for example), those 65 percent of
Americans are quite unhappy.

Ours is a country where depression is treated with macaroni and
cheese, chocolate, french fries, and 3-liter bottles of Coca Cola. Get
rid of that treatment and you have pain. Obesity is a way for people
to drug and shield themselves from jealousy, from attention, even from
- as in the case when I lived with two obese girls in college and was
expected to be the one to run upstairs and fetch things - expectation.

Much in the same way someone with a broken soul will approach the
pulpit to be saved at a Baptist service, being large is a way to tell
the world that you are in pain, a martyr. It is a way to get a husband
you don't really love not to want to reach out to you in bed. It is a
way to excuse lack of speed. Now, as this state of bodily affairs is
the majority, it is a way to disappear into the crowd.

American corporations, from the drive-through fast food establishments
to the burgeoning industry of plus-size clothiers, have discovered
that there's mad cash to be made off it. One has to have put forth the
effort to clean out their psyche, before one can attempt the simple
exercise of caloric investment banking. I don't have any debt, nor do
I want it. And I don't want to have any excess storage meant for
previous generations of humans' genetics.

It's January now, when the females in offices across America come in
during their lunch breaks, hands full of crinkly Wendy's and
Whataburger and McDonald's and Sonic bags, vats of
high-fructose corn syrup in their hands, and lament to each other
about should they try and sign up for Curves this year?

I remember what it was like to weigh 25 more pounds than I weigh now
and to be unhappy, heaviness causing the sadness as much as the other
caused the other, and it seems impossibly sad to watch people your own
age go down a totally avoidable path if they just would get straight
in their own heads.

Why do I think people are so virulently against CR? In a country where
the average American woman is a size 14, even adjusted for vanity
sizing, it's an easy target. While CR could easily put on a pious
front, it is, these days, the fat that reserve that for themselves.

Watch a taped performance from 25 years ago, one with frequent shots
of audience members enjoying the actors. Watch one today. The face of
America is changing. It has a double chin and the upper body of a
long-former linebacker. And if you're not with the expanding beltline,
you're against it.