Seriously, you guys, I got the chance to order some figs and, hey, I said to myself, I’ve never eaten a fig before. It was only after a bunch of them were delivered that I remembered I HAVE eaten them - once a few years ago at a tapas place in Vegas.

Which is where I got the idea to stuff them with feta cheese and wrap them in bacon.

Sometimes, I must admit, I have good ideas.

I broiled these for between 10 and 15 minutes in a baking dish I’d greased with a little olive oil.

There is plenty of room in Intuitive Eating for food adventures. I wasn’t specifically craving figs - I just knew I wanted something savory with a light flavor. This fit that bill, let me tell you, internets.

It would be easy, if I were still into punishing myself, to berate myself for RUINING fruit by wrapping it in bacon. And goat cheese? There is some small virtue in goat cheese but NOT ENOUGH TO JUSTIFY THE BACON. Instead of wasting my time and energy with that, I enjoyed my couple of figs (we made just a few for each of us and it was perfect). Guilt is no sort of sauce.

Whatever you had today, I hope it fed your body and your spirit.

The constant fight - both internally to overcome the messages we internalize about how bad it is to be fat and externally with people who hate fatties - gets tiring. There is absolutely no way of getting around that. A lot of people who find FA talk about how much easier it was, how much happier they were, before they started trying to accept themselves.

That’s a sad commentary on our world, isn’t it? It’s easier to hate yourself in silence than it is to come to a place of self-acceptance. Wow.

But it’s also true. Because, while I do believe we are making progress, that progress is not so much with the swift and all-encompassing. I think people run into this with any social justice movement. You get fired up, you work for change, but eventually you get a bit worn down.

In a siege situation, the people BEING besieged almost always have the advantage. All they have to do is wait it out. As long as the walls hold, they are protected. Given the strategic positioning of most fortresses, especially, they’ve even got the entrenched high ground.

Right now, in our culture, fat hate is kind of like that fortress. It’s been accepted - it’s GOOD for us to hate fatties, don’t you know. Otherwise they might get the idea that they are people, too, and start demanding that they be treated with some dignity and, maybe, they should be able to buy clothes like normal people as well. Hating us for our own good is an entrenched medical ideal.

Fortunately, FA has started to construct siege engines and towers and we’ve started using explosives to breach the walls. But, you know, it’s still a battle and it’s still damn tiring.

This is okay.

In fact, if we didn’t have bad days, days when we wanted to throw up our hands and just go on one last diet because maybe this one will really work for real this time and we won’t have to deal with all of this horse shit - well, if we didn’t have those days I’m not sure we’d be any use to other people who are feeling the same things, the same fatigue, the same urge to throw in the towel.

It’s important to acknowledge that we have these days, all of us. If I were Queen of Fat Acceptance, I would issue permission slips so that every time someone felt like this and then felt guilty about it, they could whip out their permission slip as a reminder that it happens.

Dear World,

Signed,
The Rotund

When I have bad days, days when I am simply overwhelmed, it really helps to engage my brain. Because I KNOW I’m having an emotional response to the way the world works, the way it treats me, and the way it treats other people around me. I can still feel like crap while knowing that I’m not being logical. And I can keep myself from making any big decisions. I am never going to rush the The Rotund in the middle of a bad day (or bad couple of days) and announce that everything I’ve ever stood for must be *handtoforehead* a lie! Because, you know, it isn’t a lie.

I had that story in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free and, after having tons of people yell at me about thermodynamics, I became really hyper conscious of my food. I went out that night and had some steak and two martinis AND desert and all I could hear in my head was the commenters crowing about how I obviously had no sense of control and I must do this way more often than I am admitting and blah blah blah Ginger.

When, in reality, there were a ton of people in a very packed restaurant and they all magically had different body types. There were fat people eating fish tacos and thin people eating giant slices of chocolate cake. There were middle of the road people eating things I couldn’t identify. They were, most of them, also eating stuffed mushrooms because this place makes AMAZING stuffed mushrooms.

And, watching them eat, there was no way to tell how they eat outside of that environment. Hell, you certainly couldn’t look at my meal and tell that I rarely (and by rarely I mean generally I only have a drink or two once every three months or so) drink.

I had to deal with the cognitive dissonance of that voice versus my lived reality for several days. I sat down to have a breakfast with my husband this morning and still heard the lingering traces of it.

So, yeah, bad days happen and we have to have strategies to deal with them so they don’t pull us down. Giving ourselves permission, as indicated above, to have those days in the first place is a hugely important thing. Realizing that they won’t last forever is also important. Not wallowing, as much as is possible, is also also important. *grin*

Here are 3 things you can do, if you feel a bad day coming on or are in the middle of one:

1. Skip reading the comments on mainstream blogs that deal with body issues in any way. That means no Comment is Free, no Salon (or Broadsheet), or any other newspaper with a comments section. Read the articles, by all means. But if you can’t skip the comment section, you might want to skip the articles as well. You don’t need a bunch of hateful strangers to put an external voice on the internal struggle you are dealing with.

2. Read FA material. I don’t just mean my blog *grin* though feel absolutely free to come here and ask for support. Read everything you can find on the Fatosphere feed. Hang on in comments and talk to other people going through all sorts of different situations. Check out the Outfit of the Day posts on the Fatshionista livejournal community and check out all the amazing people who put together awesome outfits in all different types of styles. This will have the bonus impact of reminding you that their bodies are normal and *gasp* so is yours!

3. Treat yourself well. Don’t skip a meal, don’t wear clothes that you hate. Don’t deny yourself something you’d ordinarily allow yourself out of some misguided instinct to punish yourself. Do whatever helps you relax and feel good about yourself - I like to buy bath melts from Lush and sit in the tub with a romance novel for an hour or two (and I don’t spare the hot water when the bath starts to get a little tepid). Do something active to help take your mind out of itself and back into your body.

You’ll feel ready to rejoin the fight a lot sooner than you think, I’ll bet.

I actually saw this justified, recently, by someone who told the thin woman that she must just be more active than she realized, as in she must fidget and move around a lot.

*headdesk*

The absolute conviction of the people to support “calories in/calories out” as the be-all, end-all of weight loss baffles me. It’s as if they view the body as a pure math equation.

Except, the body is infinitely more complex than that. All of nature is, which is why we have all sorts of special theories and quantum physics and, hell, imaginary numbers. It’s why constants are used in math even when they aren’t understood. Thermodynamics is awesome. And I think it is a good starting point for a lot of discussions about how the body uses fuel.

But expecting it to work like clockwork in every single body in exactly the same fashion when it doesn’t even work that way in nature?

How does that make any sense? We don’t understand everything about the body. It’s okay to admit that, be baffled by it, and do our best to work with it.

Please go check out her piece at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free, in response to some British politicians being total asshats about fat folks.

Also, woo hoo! Look at Marianne in the Guardian! Congrats, lady!

As you were.

Which means I can talk about fatty fat stuff again, which is awesome because I have hella missed talking about the fat, let me tell you.

Last weekend, I got to be loudly, proudly fat with a friend of mine at an event called Convergence, which is a gathering of net goths. A couple hundred goths ran all around Ybor City and shared a hotel with a convention of body builders. The similarities in how people attending neither convention responded to the goths and the body builders was pretty damn telling.

Difference, y’all, it’s what’s for hatin’.

Which is a damn shame because diversity makes us better - in a whole host of ways. It widens our perspective, spreads out the vista of what is possible, opens up new ways of seeing the world. It’s also challenging for some people to respect other people’s preferences when they are vastly different from their own, I get that, but that challenge is one of the most worthwhile things ever.

Dude, sometimes I am just a big damn hippy and I have been a big fat bag of sappy love since I got back from C14. It’s awesome.

The point is, bodies come in all different shapes and sizes. That is AWESOME. If you have a hard time accepting that, do the work. Open your eyes and accept it and you might be surprised by how many more people seem like awesome people to you. This doesn’t mean you have to fuck fatties. Or body builders. It just means you have to acknowledge that we’re here, we’re sphere, and, uh, we’re not going anywhere.

Now, obviously I cannot represent every level of fatness, though I can continue to assert that there is no point at which fat stops being acceptable. Because there really, truly is no point at which fat stops being acceptable. And there is, similarly, no magical cut off point for attractiveness, if that is your thing. Nor is there a magical cut off point for health.

There are arbitrary cut off points for clothing (which still irks me every single day), but that is not true for very many other things.

Still, I cannot speak for experiences that I have not had. It’s why I continue to point out that smaller fat people have different experiences from larger fat people who have different experiences than larger than them fat people and so on. And everyone can learn something from each other.

I weigh over 300 pounds. I wear anywhere from a 24 to a 30/32 (my ample bottom sometimes demands it). But my experiences, on the cusp of what stores consider the outer limit of plus size, is not the sole defining fat experience; it would be naive to think it was! This is why the Fatosphere is so valuable - there are so many different voices sharing their experiences. If there is not someone speaking about experiences that resonate with you, speak up! Your story needs telling as well. (In the meantime, I will continue to keep in mind that larger fat folks are feeling underrepresented and be as aware as I can when it comes to issues that impact their lives.)

On a slightly different topic, I also want to reiterate that many people involved in FA are not 100% super body positive 100% of the time. Everyone has bad days. And some people are just starting to accept themselves and their bodies. And other people still can’t give up dieting. That does not mean FA fails - it means FA is struggling against a lifetime of cultural indoctrination and a constant barrage of social messages telling us how bad it is to be fat.

And in other, other news, Julia (there are a couple of Julia’s I think but this is Julia from Fats.com) has an extremely awesometacular post up on Fats.com about Fatness and Uplight and I think everyone should read it.

It is very bare bones at the moment, but I was hoping to get some feedback from y’all before I went all out on improving it (though some improvements - like amount of content - will just take time). I’d like to know if there are any author sites you think are particularly good, any that you love to visit. Are there any that you hate to visit because of bad or clunky site design?

I’ll be writing there on a frequent basis and publishing book news as I hear it. And I’ll talk about other writing projects and writing in general, too. I do some of that here but, I promise, I really do try to stay on topic most of the time!

I just sent our completed draft off to our editor.

*dead*

We’ll have edits to work on, of course, once our editor gets it back to us but OMG I JUST DELIVERED OUR MANUSCRIPT TO OUR EDITOR!!!

(Our editor had casually mentioned that Monday would be fine since she works half-days on Fridays - I got the last of Kate’s stuff around 5pm, but I really wanted to go ahead and get this off my plate for the weekend.)

OMG, Y’ALL! This TOTALLY calls for a celebration.

Now, I know that the couple of people who are reading along with me will probably not have read Flashback yet, but I want to address both of these books at the same time.

Both of these books are part of the American Heroes: The Firefighters series. These books are set in Santa Rey, a charming California town where the firefighters are the hotness and an arson investigation is consuming lives.

In the first novel, Zach is a stereotypical fightfighting hottie and Brooke is the feisty EMT who is supposed to be our strong female character. I might argue with that portrayal (especially since the characterization of both Brooke and Zach is pretty weak in this one), but what really burns me is a passage toward the end of the tale. Zach has just been injured in a fire when we get to page 158.

Brooke and Dustin [the other EMT] were still unloading their patients at the E.R. when word came from the fire scene that they had the flames eighty percent contained, and the injured firefights had been evacuated safely.

Alive.

And on the way to the hospital.

Brooke took her first deep breath since she’d heard the words firefighter and down in the same sentence. She and Dustin tried to wait but an emergency call came in for them - a woman with chest pains needed assistance.

While Dustin drove, Brooke called Aidan [another firefighter].

“Blake’s in surgery,” Aidan said, sounding tense and stressed. “Badly broken leg.”

Omigod. “Zach?”

“A concussion, broken wrist and a few second-degree burns. I know that sounds bad, but he’s going to be okay, Brooke.”

Relief hit her like a tidal wave, but she couldn’t lose it because they’d arrived at their call, where she and Dustin found a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound woman stuck in her bed, needing assistance to the bathroom.

“You said you had chest pains,” Dustin said.

“Right. I do. But I think it’s heartburn.”

“Are the pains gone now?” Brooke asked.

“Yes. Completely.”

“Ma’am, we still need to bring you in to be checked-”

“Okay, so I never had chest pains. I called because you people won’t come out unless it’s serious.”

They were speechless.

“Would you hand me my TV remote?” she asked them. “Oh, and that box of doughtnuts?”

Brooke stared at her. She’d missed being at Zach’s side for this, for a woman who couldn’t reach her damn remote so she’d called 911? She handed over the remote but not the doughnuts. “Ma’am, the 911 system is for real emergencies-”

“It was a real emergency.”

Dustin still couldn’t speak.

“Hey, I’m sorry, but Grey’s Anatomy is repeating and I missed it the first time around.”

“Medical emergencies,” Brooke said tightly.

The woman finally had the grace to look a little abashed. “I know, but who else am I going to call?”

“You could do it yourself.” No longer speechless, Dustin was clearly furious. “Consider it your daily exercise.”

They left there in silence, and it was several long moments before either could speak.

“That didn’t just happen,” Dustin finally said.

But unfortunately it had, and they had another call, and then another, and it was several hours before Brooke could get another status check on Zach. By that time he’d been released from the hostpital and was at his house, supposedly resting.

Jill Shalvis, you and I have a problem. And it is called your utter disregard for the humanity of fat people. Let’s examine what’s going on in this little passage.

1. The fat woman serves absolutely no purpose in this story other than as intended comic relief. She is solely intended to be an object of ridicule.

2. You aren’t supposed to empathize with her to any degree - no, she is set up as a hindrance to Brooke being at her lover’s side while he is in the hospital after being injured at a fire. You can go ahead and hate this fat person, getting in the way of things that are, you know, actually important.

3. Her remote? Seriously? AND DOUGHNUTS? Are you fucking kidding me? Can you play on any more fat stereotypes?

4. She’s immobile enough, at 350 pounds, that she can’t get her own damn remote/doughnuts? Ms. Shalvis, I weigh 300+ pounds and, I have to tell you, I am limber enough to kick some serious ass. You are obviously laboring under the misapprehension that you know something about what it is like to weigh 350 pounds. Somehow, though, I doubt you have ever knowingly talked to someone who weighs that and asked them what it was like.

5. Her daily exercise? Yeah, because EMTs should absolutely be portrayed as being snarky to the fat people who call them for help.

There is so much wrong with this passage that it completely overwhelms the way the rest of the book is entirely mediocre. I wouldn’t have complained about Flashpoint, however, if it hadn’t been for the absolutely blatant fat hate. It caught me completely off-guard when I was reading and - because I have been building up my defenses for a long time now - instead of making me feel bad it made me so mad that I yelled at the book and then literally threw it across the room. There are 55 pages left at the conclusion of this scene. It took me three days to read those 55 pages that would have ordinarily taken me under half an hour because I was just so incredibly livid. The only reason I finished it was to see if anything else cropped up.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson when I went to buy romance novels this month - you’d think I’d have seen Jill Shalvis’ name and put Flashback back on the shelf. But at this point I was curious. Was the one scene just a monumental fuck up on Jill Shalvis’ part or did she really have a general hate on for the fatties?

I am seriously curious whether or not Jill Shalvis was dieting while writing these books. Because Flashback, while it doesn’t feature the same overt ridiculing of fat people, still sends a very clear message that the fatties need to lay off the doughnuts.

Yeah, she mentions doughnuts again. A lot. Kenzie, our female lead, is a soap star. And, to achieve her Hollywood beauty, she normally follows a pretty strict regimen. However, since her brother’s death in a fire and everyone subsequently blaming him for all the arson, she’s LET HERSELF GO! She’s eating doughnuts! She is going to eat all the doughnuts in the world and get fat and no one will ever hire her to act again!

Kenzie, in this example, has just been blown up. She was on her brother’s boat when it exploded and Aidan, her long-lost love, rescued her from a firey yet still watery grave. Now she’s in the hospital.

God, she hated hospitals. They smelled like fear and pain and helplessness, and all of them combined reminded her of her own uncertain childhood. She wished she was back on the L.A. set of Hope’s Passion, acting the part of the victim instead of really being one. Comfort food would help. Maybe a box of donuts-

[The inconsistent spelling isn’t me - it’s what is published in the book itself. And, I mean, that is obviously the result of two different editors but come on? Isn’t there a style guide for this sort of thing?]

Her doughnut musing is interrupted by a visitor. But, you know? A whole box of doughnuts? I read that and, based on the previous book, winced. Then I went on. We come to a scene where Kenzie has driven out to the docks, to stare at the wreckage of her brother’s boat.

Then she sat in the parking lot nursing a hot chocolate and a blessed box of donuts, staring at the charred remains of Blake’s boat.

She was alone, except for the occasional car. One was a light-gray sedan that slowed as it passed her, the windows so dark she couldn’t see in. Probably another looky-loo like herself, except… except she’d seen a car like it before, somewhere…

She ate a donut.

Until a couple of weeks ago, before Blake’s death, she hadn’t had chocolate or donuts in months. Maybe years. She’d been on a strict eighteen-hundred-calorie diet, combined with a workout every single day, without fail. All to look good.

That’s what TV stars did. They looked good. She was paid to.

Except she no longer had a TV show to look good for. Back in L.A., she knew the job-finding frenzy had already begun. All her co-stars were busy auditioning, and what was she doing? Eating donuts instead of facing the fact that she was unemployed.

Do I really have to explain what is wrong with our heroine sitting in a car eating doughnuts and thinking about how she USED to look good. Throughout this book she is presented as being the hottest thing Aidan has ever had the privilege of touching. But, you know, she’s had a week of eating doughnuts and now that is all over.

“What did you send him?”

She lifted a shoulder. “Rough drafts of stuff.”

“Stuff?”

“I’ve been writing. Scripts.” Another life of her shoulder. “For the day I finally ate too many donuts and didn’t get asked to audition anymore.”

Seriously, I’m ready to cry now. Her constant harping on doughnuts at first made me want a doughnut and then it made me never want to think about doughnuts ever again. Because, OMG, can there possibly be any more angst associated with a snack food?

“And, anyway, it no longer matters.” She turned back to the screen. “It’s over.”

“What do you mean?”

“My soap got cancelled.”

“It did?”

“Yeah, and there are auditions for new parts but I’ve been eating too many donuts, so…”

“So… what?”

“So I’m going to get fat.”

He let out a low laugh. “You look great, Kenzie. So great I haven’t been able to keep my hands off you, as you might have noticed. But I’m very sorry about your job.” He couldn’t believe he was about to say this. “You could always stay in Santa Rey.”

“I thought about it.” She sighed and faced him again. “But staying seems like a comfort thing. You know, like going back to the last place where I was happy. It’s a cop-out. And I was only happy here because of Blake.”

He held his breath. He’d made her happy, too. Until he hadn’t. “Maybe it was more than that.”

“I don’t know.” She sighed without giving away her exact feelings on the matter, although he suspected she didn’t know her exact feelings. “I wouldn’t be able to get a job here.”

“I know they don’t film TV or movies anywhere close, but you could do something other than act.”

She scoffed, then looked at him with heart-breaking hope. “Like what?”

“You know what. You could write. And eat all the damn donuts you want.”

Okay, I’d like to first, and most simply, address the idea that going back to the place you were last happy is a cop-out. What the shit kind of crack rock logic is that? You can’t ever go back to the places where you were happy? The hell? What makes it a cop-out, exactly? If she doesn’t want to go back to L.A., then what is she supposed to do to NOT be a cop-out? Move to Wichita (which may be a very lovely place, I’ve never been) just because she has never lived there?

And now let’s talk about the idea that her career is over because she has eaten some doughnuts. She has eaten some doughnuts and so she is going to get fat. She’s going to get fat and look horrible and be miserable and wah wah wah wah wah.

I don’t see how this can be, in any way, shape, or form, friendly to fat readers. And, you know, it isn’t like everyone sitting there reading a romance novel is a fat lady, but with over 50% of American women wearing a size 14 or larger, it’s a pretty good bet that at least some of them are. Is this really the message that Jill Shalvis wants to send? That being fat is the end of a person’s life?

And is she really trying to tell us that a woman who has kept herself in shape for daytime dramas for something like 6 years (even dieting and working out) is going to turn into a fat woman overnight just because she ate some doughnuts?

I think that is exactly what Jill Shalvis believes - it is what her fictional, imaginary world that she created tells us. I don’t think I’ll be buying any more novels by this woman. I might thumb through them in the bookstore, to see if she continues to exhibit such disdain and disregard for fat people, but there are better books on which to spend my dollars.