Do you have a friend who is, like, WAY skinnier than you, but always complaining about her weight?
Is it me?
I have that friend, too, and was complaining about her to a friend who weighed more than me and realized… waaaaiiit. I am also her. She is legion. I suppose it’s because our culture doesn’t allow women to be happy with their weight.
I had a mini epiphany recently about my thinness privilege. Not about being liked more or fitting in movie theatre seats… about how easy it is for me to lose weight when I decide I need to.
Studies increasingly show that the old wisdom of “Calories in, Calories out” doesn’t actually work. It’s more than lipisome resistance or metabolism, too. It’s like some people have the difficulty turned up? It seems that what you can control with diet is really a small range, but for skinnier women, that small range is their entire range, and so they think, well, *I* can control my weight… if I have sufficient motivation and time and control over when and what I eat… yes, I can control that 10 or 15% of body weight that is controllable that way, and for me that’s all of it.
I was reading this article about the weirdness of weight loss science, and it mentioned hunger as a problem. For me, hunger has nothing to do with weight gain. If I only eat when I’m hungry, I’m a stick. I eat because I’m sad, or unfulfilled, or bored, or depressed or… you get the idea. Because I can choose not to eat emotionally, I was guilty of the same self-centered worldview that inhabits the closeted bisexuals who think sexuality is a choice because it is for them. Calorie counting worked for me, because I’m on that lucky “naturally skinny” side of things, not because I’m remotely disciplined. (I really, really am not.)
I weigh about the most I’ve ever weighed in my life right now, about 180 pounds… and I’m finally learning that I am skinny.
