So fat acceptance (and thus the OMG-OBESITY-IS-TAKING-OVER-THE-WORLD) has come to Sweden, much thanks to the blog Kroppsbilder, I think. The title means “body images” in both senses of the word, and if you scroll far enough you’ll find my picture among the others. There’s been two newspaper articles about it so far, and my pic has been requested for both. Very exciting, although not the only one, obviously.

And now, since people are realising that there are actually people that are fine with being fat, they’re coming out of the woodwork to tell us exactly what they think about it. So far in the last two, three days?

Oh, let me count the ways.

1. A WebMD type site posted a news article saying that “all fat people” wishes that their doctors would bring up their weight and how they could learn how to maintain it (read: get it down to a good number). The source? A study in a Swedish city. No mention of size of the sample, how representative it was or even a link to the study in this case. As a fat person who LOVES not being berated for my size when I have a problem with my physical health this is far from a great idea, I have to say.

2. A Swedish columnist of the type that looooves stirring things up and has as of late written some crap about both people with mental illnesses and non cisgendered people (and when there was a bit of ranting about that last one she blogged “HAHA, A FEMINIST IS CRANKY WITH ME!”), wrote a piece about there being a thin person in every fat woman, waiting to get out. Yes, that old cliché got to came out to play. She concluded her column with that we’re too nice to the fatties because some doctors (see above) don’t dare to hound their patients about their weight. (Okay, she didn’t use “hound”. But still.)

3. A Swedish journalist and blogger who used to be quite sane but turned thirty, had children, became a conservative (politically speaking) and started lecturing teens everywhere about buckling up and doing what’s good for them blogged the above piece and added that she couldn’t see why encouraging somebody to “become thin” (as if it happens magically) is any different than encouraging them to playing some sport, so they could be really good at it. The last piece of hers I read before this one was about her lamenting that her seven-year-old daughter had quit gymnastics because the other kids were mean to her, and she didn’t want HER daughter to become like she was when she was a teenager, unfit and shy and without social skills. Um. Yes.

4. One of THOSE blogs, with huge font and some philosophical tag line posted about fat and how bad it is and recommending appetite supressant medicines among other things. I replied with a link to Shapely Prose and he mansplained to me about how fat is BAD and to choose my sources carefully and not believe everything such a website, that twists the truth says. I laughed at him and walked away. (And can I say, as somebody who has friends that used to take illegally imported non-FDA approved drugs of this kind, mimicking the effects of amphetamine, only… marginally less bad, this one made me go on a raaaaaage. Though I still didn’t award him a second comment.)

And on top of it I had to endure ANOTHER fucking diet talk at weaving last night, which actually made me so cranky that I had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom. It’s just so awful to sit there and see the forced smile on the face of the biggest of these women as the others go off on this particular subject.

On the upside: new word, coined by me and another Swedish FA blogger, regarding people who tell you that you don’t know what you’re talking about because you’re not fat, and it’s really like THIS?

“Fatsplaining”.

There’s mansplaining, so why the hell not fatsplaining? Although that might be explaining to the fatties that it’s bad for them to be fat…

Ahem. Will stop ranting now.

Okay, time for some meta-blogging.

For some time now I have thought about going back and making certain posts private, because the more I blog under my real name the more I feel uncomfortable with my over-sharing. I have in recent months pulled back on the amount of private stuff (mostly involving my mental health) that I share, and it has been a conscious decision. I just don’t like putting it all out there. It’s weird meeting people who know everything about me when I don’t know shit about them and their lives. I’m okay with my closest friends and family knowing these things, but random people on the street? Not so much.

It’s been hard to make that decision, by the way, because I know that when I was at my worst it really, really helped to read Dooce and how her mental health was affected by her pregnancies, and I always hoped that my posts would help other people in the same situation, but… no. It stopped feeling raw and honest and started feeling like, as I heard someone describe it, “känsloporr”. That means, well, something like over-sharing emotions to the point of the reader feeling like she’s reading pornography. Only, you know, the clothed, emo-variety, which makes you feel like you’re actually their therapist.

I will still share some stuff, I’m sure, but less than before. And I will go back and protect some older entries, a bit at a time. I spent about three hours doing exactly that, and it only took me back to October of 2009. Damn, I’m wordy.

I also removed the two entries I wrote about disabilities, simply because I’ve realised that I: a) shared too much from my past, b) said some not so thought-through crap, c) really don’t know what I’m talking about, d) I don’t want to start any new arguments, and I definitely don’t want people to get here belatedly, become upset and comment. That is, I don’t want to upset more people than I already have, so while I think those posts were important to write at the time, I’ll keep them to myself from now on.

(As a friend said: “It’s not necessarily a point you want to make a year from now”, and she is right.)

This became relevant to me because of the Amanda Palmer / Evelyn Evelyn disaster. Read her posts on it here and here. Basically, it’s a project with her and Jason Webley, in which they dress up as conjoined twins, as you can see on the pic above. The big error she made here was to explain their whole story in a blog post, pretending as if they were actual living people, not mentioning that it was an act (although, admittedly, considering her history of performing I so should’ve figured it out sooner), which came out as exploiting and using victims of sexual assault, disabled people and so forth, making them into a freak show. I’m not defending what was done, because it was very poorly executed, but yes. People were upset, blog posts were written, Amanda got over 800 emails about it in less than one day and in all… Shit storm deluxe.

(Note again: I am not defending her, despite loving the hell out of her music. Just stating the facts.)

But as we – me and a friend – read some posts about this we asked ourselves “do they have to be so… angry?”, and as soon as we’d said it out loud we realised that we in fact had done EXACTLY what certain people do every time we talk about feminism, and that when it’s done to us we caps lock the hell out of it. Or you know, mutter to ourselves for days. So, I’m going to try to get better about this specific thing, starting with not opening my mouth when I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Lesson learned.

In all, I hope this will not make my blog boring and shallow, but I doubt that is the case. Even when checking myself I share more than most people. So stay tuned. We shall see what happens next. Hopefully good things, but who knows? And sorry if your favourite posts are disappearing. You’ll have to live with it, I’m afraid.

PS. A reader told me to break up my looooong posts with some pictures. I think he was right about it, because having read back quite a bit I realised just how much text I can produce without even thinking about it, and will attempt to throw some images in as well. Let me know what you think about it. Does it make my posts easier to read? Maybe a question that can be answered once I’ve done it for a few posts…

So, today I was suitably humbled by my limits. Again. Nothing dramatic, really, but lately I’ve been feeling like I could maybe manage to work part time soon. Today I freaked out (inside my head) from being in the same waiting room as six other people, all silent, all keeping to themselves.

Not yet, in other words.

Anyway; it was a valuable lesson, and after that I went to the yarn shop next and was (as usual) frustrated by the lack of knowledge of foreign yarns, needles and other things. And then the woman ringing up my purchases was so new that she had to walk through the shop to find the prices on each type of yarn, and then didn’t know where they was, so I had to SHOW HER. No plus points there, sorry. Sadly this is the only yarn shop in town, so I have to keep my muttering to myself (and my blog).

Apparently I have managed to read 13 books in one month. That is a new record, I believe, which was made easier by the fact that some were children’s books (most notably Coraline) and YA (of which I liked the very emo-titled After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings and Flew Away the most). Best adult fiction of January goes to Udda by Sara Lövestam, no questions asked.

I promised my sister to send her some of my books, because I seriously have far too many that I have read and probably won’t read a second time. I will enjoy spreading the gospel of awesome books to all I can possibly reach.

A few links, since my project is calling my name and I’m so cutting this short:

A school in the U.S. is banning the complete version of Anne Frank’s Diary. Yes seriously. To be fair, I didn’t even know there was a censored version, which is the one I’ve read. But yes, it got pulled off the shelf for containing sexually graphic content. The passage that high school students shouldn’t be allowed to read? It goes as follows:

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

For shame! That is certainly not girls wonder every single day, and that would hurt their innocent eyes if they read about, am I right? Then again, this is also a few days after another parent got a DICTIONARY banned for containing the definition for “oral sex”.

Seriously, America, what is this accomplishing?

(For example, I remember being ten or so and wondering what the difference between the words “puss” och “kyss” was. Those two are both terms for kissing, one with closed mouth, and one with tongue, btw. It was beyond frustrating to discover that in my dictionary the definition for “puss” was “kyss”, and for “kyss” it was “puss”. And I must say, my life would not have been ruined had there actually been an explanation for such things in that damn book. There wasn’t. I guess it was elementary school-proofed.)

Also, there is another Amazon-fail going on. Yes, again. It doesn’t matter so much here in Sweden because we have our own online book shops and all, and I can’t say that I’ve ever used Amazon (since I moved back here, anyway), but I have to say that removing an entire publisher (Macmillan) from their website over some kind of disagreement is just stupid. Tansy has collected most of the links regarding this (here and here) and so I can provide you with my favourite links on the topic.

Scott Westerfeld says awesome things about it here (giving the best explanation to date), and concludes it with:

Hey, Amazon. When cutting off publishers, don’t start with the one that has the most science fiction writers. We will blog you dead!

He also likens the whole deal with Amazon spitting their pacifier across the room in anger. A lovely metaphor, I have to say.

Furthermore, John Scalzi says the second most awesome thing about the whole deal here, in which he points out why it’s so very dumb to try to stealth-delist a whole publisher. He even provides us with a way that Amazon could’ve gone about it all, but didn’t.

My favourite part of his post, though, is the following:

Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.

These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.

And I’m not just saying that because I’ve finally found a person that abuses italics more than I do. Though, to be fair, I think I’m actually more of a junkie of parantheses these days…

Anyway, I am so finishing this post up RIGHT NOW, cos seriously, writing to be done. Emo-ing to be had. By characters, not me, actually.

PS. Tomorrow I’m going to blog in my Swedish blog about the OMG SO STUPID person who went on TV and said that breast milk is as bad as carbonated drinks for a kid, because there is too much sugar in it. And yes, I am entirely seriously. She really said that. True story.

Seven books read so far this year. Not bad. I don’t think I can quite get up to ten per month, but maybe a total of hundred in a year would be doable. That comes out to seven per month, by the way, so I’m good to go!

There is another white-washed-cover-debacle going on. Others have said it much better than I have, so linkage is coming, but a short rundown: Bloomsbury has for the second time in less than a year put a white girl on the cover of a book about a black female. The first time they had to back up and rejacket the entire load, but this time the author is much less known, and either they figured a debut author wouldn’t make a fuss, or that nobody would pay attention.

Or maybe they noticed how much Liar sold after the last white-washing-crapola, and decided to pull that one again. And even if that’s not it, it’s hard to know what to do about it. You can’t support an author that has written a damn good book, and who needs the sales to keep writing, without also supporting a publisher that is not only blatantly misrepresenting their books, but also (however indirectly) also telling black teens that they don’t matter.

Either way it sucks for the author, and the readers. For Bloomsbury? It’s mostly a nuisance, I bet.

A few posts about it:

TansyRR writes a bunch about how much covers matter. Includes a pic of the offending cover too.

Ari from Reading in Color (so hard not to poke a U in there!) has an open letter to Bloomsbury.

Kate Harding writes about the white-washing-phenomenon at Salon.

That’s about the extent of my intelligent thinking today. Soon it’s game time, thank God, and I can pack my brain away for a good hour and a half.

I think I have to bake bread tomorrow, I miss my carbs, and can’t stop thinking about really good bread with butter and cheese on top. I’ve never baked bread in my life. Or rather, I have, but I can’t get anything but cornbread to WORK, so this will be an interesting endeavour.

I can also tell you about my orgasm-in-my-mouth gluten free dinner the other day.

First; properly marinated tofu. I think the marinade was olive oil, expensive tamari sauce (only kind without wheat), fresh grated ginger, two cloves of garlic and some chili powder. I soaked the tofu for about an hour, flipping over halfway through, and made what we can “hasslebackspotatis”. Except, of course, that I freestyled it some, so I’m not sure it’s called that anymore.

You peel potatoes, and then slice them thinly, but only halfway through, as per this picture before baking them in the oven. There’s not supposed to be anything on them but butter, salt and possibly bread crumbs, but I brushed the remaining marinade over them about three times during the thirty minutes they were in the oven, which made all the difference in the world.

Topped with honey mustard, which is a dressing, but I use it as sauce, as all my favourite kinds have wheat in them.

I hung out with Viola one day and other than that I’ve mostly spent time with kitten, who is extremely needy, and my book. And now it’s just half an hour until the game starts, hooray.

Okay. First off. I am a member of the LJ community Fatshionista, where women (and men) of the larger variety post outfits and fashion tips and what have you. I am so not fashion conscious (my sister claims that I am accessorily speaking a man, because I once uttered the phrase “but you already HAVE a black purse” when she wanted to buy a black bag while carrying one that admittedly looked nothing like it, save the colour), but I love to see what these people come up with. Because it’s usually amazing and just the attitude that comes with these posts make me feel better about myself.

A few days ago they changed their policy, deciding that only people with a US size of 14 or higher (that is a European 46 or a UK 18) will be allowed to post OOTD’s, that is Outfit of the Day type posts. And I understand why. Because when people that are smaller than me (and I am a 14 on top on a good day, while my bottom is firmly a 16 or, on occasion, an 18) post something I always always ALWAYS think “oh, I could look like that if I only lost… NO KAIA, BAD THINKING”. And really, compared to a person who is, say a 24, maybe a 14 sounds small. It may sound like that person is not fat and should be able to shop in regular shops.

It’s just that we can’t. Just last week I went to five shops, dismissed the plus size section in each shop for being old-lady-ish or boring or not for people with my boobage (pear shape ftw!), and wandered through the regular clothing, little by little. After five shops I had found ONE item of clothing that came in a size big enough for me – and even then I had to buy it knowing that I would not be able to button it all the way up.

What size was it, you may ask? What size was it that was SO AWFULLY BIG that I had to look through five shops before finding a cute skirt in it? Why, I’m glad you’re asking. It was a European 46, which, as I state above, translate to a US 14 or UK 18. There was literally not a single skirt in any of these shops in a size big enough for me to comfortably wear, so I went home with one that I have to wear unbuttoned. Because I needed something new to wear, damn it. And sure, there was stuff in the plus size sections that I could’ve tried on, but here’s the thing; it was either trousers or dresses. And putting aside that they were far from my taste I have the following problems…

I have a bit of an hour glass shape. That is, an hour glass that has gotten into a tragic accident and thus have all the sand collecting on the bottom. This means that I have both a waist and an arse. This should be normal, yeah? Considering that there are a lot of women in this world, many which come with amazing curves. But somehow this means that any trousers that fit my hips are way too big around the waist, or, if they fit my waist, the hip area makes me want to SET THEM ON FIRE. And no belt in this world will keep them up without making me look like, you know, I’m forty-seven years old. And really, I’m not ready for mum style clothing, just yet. So, after a whole life in jeans I am trying to get used to the idea of not wearing trousers.

Fine, you say. What about those dresses? Dresses are not trousers, stop complaining! Well, yes. It’s just that I cannot find a dress that fits my hip area without looking bloody awful around the chest. Because I may be a 14-16, but I still have a B-cup. Admittedly a bit more impressive of a B-cup than before I gained all this weight, but, yeah. I haven’t bought a dress in the last year that I didn’t have to alter majorly in the chest area. Sometimes I have to do it with regular tops to.

So, in essence: too big for regular sizes, too small for plus size. Also, this is very much subjective. Size, I mean. I am in Sweden, where the sizes are generally smaller. Another girl that used to regularly post to Fatshionista is from India, and a bit smaller than me. She once said that she’d never met a person as big as or bigger than herself. So… in our respective cultures we’d not be seen as FAT per se, but we’d be kind of big, and we’d have trouble finding clothing that fits.

And while I do get some of the privilege that comes with being on the smaller side of the fat scale, it’s fucking infuriating to have to alter every piece of clothing you buy, and hunt shop after shop after shop without finding anything that fits, yet, if you venture over to the plus size section, everything is too big. And then the only place online where you can find a bit of confidence (I know, I should find that in myself and not in a forum, but I’m still learning) decides that you are not fat enough for them. Oh, sure, I can still post other stuff; sales posts, random musings, political content, etc. But OOTD? No, thank you. For that we are referred to the community named Inbetweenies.

That makes me kind of sad, to tell you the truth, and I understand where the mods are coming from and why they’ve set this rule, but it still hurts.

====

Second, I am currently reading Bli Vän Med Kroppen och Maten, which can roughly be translated to Become Friends With Your Body and Your Food, by dietist Camilla Porsman. It’s about eating disorders, mostly, and is directed to people who have one or several eating disorders, but aren’t sick enough to be given professional counseling. That is enough to break your heart, really, but that’s how Swedish health care works. The queues are enormous and if you’re not in extremely bad shape you don’t get the help you need. Basically, unless you pass out from malnutrition or your liver or kidneys shut down, you have to go below a certain weight to even be considered for treatment, and a lot of the rehab units require you to eat five meals a day to even be eligible for treatments (though, you might argue that the inability to do exactly that is WHY YOU NEED TREATMENT). It’s awful, really fucking awful.

What really gets to me about this book is two things:

a) I’m so much more affected by my former eating disorder than I thought. There are many, many things that she states as symptoms that I still do. I don’t diet and I don’t purge, I don’t binge eat or exercise in an obsessive manner. But yeah. Some things? Still there.

b) There is a chapter in this book about binge eating disorder, BED. This basically means that you eat much like a bulemic, but you don’t purge afterwards. You are ashamed of it, but you still do it, rather a lot. And in this chapter comes the same old fucking reasoning: even if you have gotten fat through BED, or have been fat your whole life and just have gained MORE through this disorder, you can still lose weight if you are prepared to do some lifestyle changes… Really. You can. Just don’t be too hard on yourself and put up small, achievable weightloss goals and you can do it.

This in a book about eating disorders and eating in a normal manner.

And I just want to quote Kate Harding my heroine and maker of my babies (okay, not really, but wouldn’t that be awesome?):

Said usual shit can be summed up thusly: “Diets don’t work, but…” Fill in the blank with any of the following–or make up your own!

* Diets don’t work, but Weight Watchers, which is not a diet, works.
* Diets don’t work, but “lifestyle changes,” which are not diets, work.
* Diets don’t work, but restricting calories for the rest of your life, which is not a diet, works.
* Diets don’t work, but cutting out carbs, which is not a diet, works.
* Diets don’t work, but eating only whole foods, which is not a diet, works.
* Diets don’t work, but reducing fat intake, which is not a diet, works.
* Diets don’t work, but “portion control,” which is not a diet, works.
* Diets don’t work, but eating right and exercising, which is not a diet (and clearly not something anyone’s ever thought of before!), works.

Gosh, there’s so much conflicting information here! However to synthesize it? Do you suppose there’s, like, a single element common to all those statements?

Ooh! Ooh! I see it! DIETS DON’T WORK.

Read the full thing here.

The chapter titled Become Friends With Your Food puts up a suggestion of a food plan to follow, and it’s so utterly depressing to read that I can’t even bring myself to read the last part of the book, called Healthy Body Image. This is what she suggests that a person who, judging from BMI, is overweight and needs to lose weight to become HEALTHY AND NOT DEATH FAT, should eat…

Ahem. Sorry about the caps. I’m feeling shouty.

Because a book that is supposed to teach somebody to eat normally uses BMI to judge level of fatness. And I realise that this is for people with BED, that needs to learn to eat healthy and stop when they’re full, but it still makes me so sad. And angry. Definitely angry.

Anyway. Food suggestions?

1/2 a plate of vegetables. 1/4 of a plate of protein and 1/4 plate of carbs. Drink only water, sugarfree lemonade, fat free milk. That’s lunch and dinner. Breakfast? One portion of oatmeal without sweetener, tea without sweetener, one fresh fruit or frozen unsweetened berries. Snacks? A fruit.

There are also a model for people that do not need to lose weight, that is, THIN people or people that exercise at least 3-4 times a week. It’s pretty much the same as the one above, but you are allowed to divide your plate into thirds instead, 1/3 each of vegetables, carbs and protein. You are allowed 1.5 portions of oatmeal for breakfast, rather than one, and for snacks you are allowed a container of yoghurt to accompany your two miserable fruits.

This is what a lifestyle change looks like. So before you say that lifestyle changes aren’t dieting, tell me this – would YOU eat like this? Every single day? And if you did, would you be healthier than somebody with a “proper” eating disorder? Would you? Rrrrrrreally?

I call bullshit.

And I get what the author is going for but I don’t care. I’m still not reading the last chapter of this book.

I removed this post.

Why? Because I’ve realised that I: a) shared too much from my past, b) said some not so thought-through crap, c) really don’t know what I’m talking about, d) I don’t want to start any new arguments, and I definitely don’t want people to get here belatedly, become upset and comment. That is, I don’t want to upset more people than I already have, so while I think those posts were important to write at the time, I’ll keep them to myself from now on.

(As a friend said: “It’s not necessarily a point you want to make a year from now”, and she is right.)

I removed this post.

Why? Because I’ve realised that I: a) shared too much from my past, b) said some not so thought-through crap, c) really don’t know what I’m talking about, d) I don’t want to start any new arguments, and I definitely don’t want people to get here belatedly, become upset and comment. That is, I don’t want to upset more people than I already have, so while I think those posts were important to write at the time, I’ll keep them to myself from now on.

(As a friend said: “It’s not necessarily a point you want to make a year from now”, and she is right.)