My first reaction was, did you just call me a man? My first thought was, damn I have really let myself disintegrate into nothingness. I guess I have accepted my fat so much that I am not seeing myself as I really am; my body image is hella distorted and right now my self-esteem is really fu@ked up. I really just stopped caring once I got to a certain level of obesity; I assumed I would be this way for the rest of my life and being invisible to the world wasn’t that bad. Except, you are not really invisible…hey, someone just thought I was a man.

My heart is breaking and I must do something. I have to change my trajectory, find another life path because this one is no longer working for me. I mean come on, he called me “SIR” twice and didn’t really realize the mistake until I said something. My ego can’t handle that; I used to look like this (pic on left) and now I look like this (pic on right). It’s tragic!

As always, be well
CF

Here we go again; another Brit with a dumb ass television show to make fat women feel unworthy of love. This charming UK-based television show is called, Three Fat Brides, One Thin Dress.

In each episodes of Three Fat Brides, One Thin Dress, three brides-to-be have just eight weeks to transform their appearance and well-being, with the prize of the wedding dress of her dreams for the bride who has the greatest success.

But how will they cope with the added pressure of Gillian McKeith (show host) on the wedding scene? Will they make it to their big day a few sizes smaller? Or will they want to call the whole thing off?

Of course women would rather call their wedding off than be fat. Of course fat women don’t deserve love. Of course this is a bunch of bullshit and it really pisses me off. I am so tired of society telling me that because I am fat, I am not worthy of the same love and happiness as a skinny person. I’ve got news for you idiots, there are a lot of skinny women out there who are seriously miserable being thin for a variety of reasons. And what does it say about the self-esteem of the women who go on these shows? Because it seems to me, if you don’t already love yourself, losing weight to fit into a wedding dress is not going to do the trick.

Love and beauty are in the eye of the beholder; love isn’t real nor does it last when it is based solely on the way a person looks. Being admired for your looks is flattering, but if it’s the only reason you love me, that’s a complete turnoff. If you can’t love me for everything that I am, then you simply don’t love me.

If you can’t love every curve and bulge on my body, then I don’t want you. Fat women, and women in general need to stop waiting to be chosen and go out there and choose. And once you’ve made your choice, then go on some dumb ass television show to compete for the wedding dress of your dreams in the size that you are, not some size that society thinks you should be.

As always, be well
CF

As always, be well
CF
Barack the Vote!…and keep your reproductive rights

Here is a great post about Sarah Palin from our friend Ta-Nehisi Coates over at TheAtlantic.com

Sarah, we are not that different, you and I

26 Sep 2008 10:13 am

I think Rod basically nails it:

I remember the morning I woke up in my college dorm room and went in to take my final exam in my Formal Logic class. I knew I was unready. Massively unready. And now I was going to be put to the ultimate test. I sat down in Dr. Sarkar’s class and resolved to wing it. Of course I failed the exam and failed the class, because I had no idea what I was talking about. I wasn’t a bad kid, or even a stupid kid. I was just badly unprepared, and in way over my head. Seeing the Palin interview on CBS, I thought of myself in Dr. Sarkar’s exam. But see, I was a college undergraduate who had the chance to take the class again, which I did, and passed (barely). I wasn’t running for vice president of the United States.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this nomination and rewatching the videos of Palin’s interview. Honestly, it’s all made me tremendously sad. There are lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly from occasional interview to occasional interview. I may have been one of them. But I’m out of that group now. 

The Palin pick was the most crassest, most bigoted decision that I’ve seen in national electoral politics, in my–admittedly short–lifetime. There can be no doubt that they picked Palin strictly as a stick to drum up the victimhood narrative–small town, hunters, big families and most importantly, women. Had Barack Obama picked Hillary Clinton, there simply is no way they would have picked Sarah Palin. To the McCain camp, Palin isn’t important as a politician, or even as a person. Her moose-hunting, her sprawling fam, her hockey momdom, her impending grandmother status are a symbol of some vague, possibly endangered American thing, one last chance to yell from the rafters “We wuz robbed.” Lineup all your instances of national politicians using white victimhood to get into offices–Willie Horton, White Hands, Sista Souljah, Reagan in Philadelphia etc.–they were all awful no doubt. But I have never seen a politician subject an alleged ally to something like this. 

Let us take this story seriously for a moment. I have watched this whole Palin thing with some twinge of personal recognition. I come from a family of seven kids by four women. As I’ve said before, I’ve got brothers born in the same year, and brothers born to best friends. My father was a high-school drop-out. I am a college drop-out. I was a father by 24–my father had kids when he was 22. I come to books and learned things in a hard, organic way. I was watching Palin explain to Couric how it could be that she just got a passport last year, and I was thinking, “Shit, I don’t have a passport now.” What can I say? Azeroth was always a foreign country to me. 

My point is that, Sarah Palin never struck me as stupid. When she talked about not backpacking across Europe and working her whole life, beneath the dumb anti-intellectual dig, I saw a gem of truth. I wish she had have mined it, instead of trying to score a cheap point. Rambling aside, she simply isn’t ready. Maybe she would be eight years from now, but she isn’t ready now, any campaign worth its salt would have known this.

In election season, there is a price for being turned into a symbol. When actual journalists, with a rep to protect, show up, they are going to do their job. Which brings me to the sexism of John McCain. He knew full well what Sarah Palin was going to face if he nominated her. He knew that reporters would go through her past, that they’d quizz her on the present, that she would need to be ready, and he shunted concern aside, and tossed her to the wolves. Think on that for a mement. For one last run at the White House, he risked a future star of the party he claims to call home. How do you do that? I don’t meant to rob Palin of agency, certainly she is also a victim of her own calculations and ambitions. But where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you’ve gone too far, when your head has gotten too big.

Of course the irony of all this is how conservatives have, for years, lampooned the liberal pursuit of multiculturalism/identity politics. But here’s the thing, even when done haphazardly, awkwardly, and imprudently, the fight against bigotry and ignorance has rewards. But when you decide to not be a leader in the fight against sexism/racism and simply criticize those who do, you rob yourself of political experience. Put differently, there is a price–bigger than the black vote–to be paid for disengagement. You become ignorant of a growing sector of the world. They expected Hillary. And if it were a black man, they never even knew it could be someone like Barack Obama. So these guys go to the well one more time, and ressurect the old spectres of “Us against Them.” But the fools haven’t been paying attention–the”Us” has changed. This isn’t Alabama, and it ain’t 1968. There is a whole class of educated, working women, themselves, the children of educated working women. And this is what McCain has to say to them, “I don’t care if you know a thing about foreign policy. I don’t care if you know a damn thing about the economy. Here is what you are to me–breasts, hair and a lovely smile.” 

Turns out it helps to actually care about the fate of women, to know something about them, beyond your own lust, when going for their votes. Who’da thunk it?

I just put a new page on the menu bar called Obesity Side Effects. If you have any crazy effects you want to share, just comment on this post or send me an email at chaoticfat@gmail.com. I’ll review and if it cracks me up, I’ll publish it on the list.

As always, be well

CF

Remember when you were a child and saw a fat lady in the mall and you turned to your mom and said, “Hey mommy where did her ankles go?” Your mom dutifully says to you, “Shh…it is not polite to point and we’ll discuss this when we get home.”

Well, I’m sure there are many little girls out there pointing and asking their moms where my ankles have gone; I never wanted to be a person with cankles, but here I am. I have always loved wearing beautiful shoes and admiring my calves, ankles and feet nicely arched in a pair of pumps. Now, all I have are cankles…ugh! They are not attractive at all and they hurt. It feels like my skin is pulling all the time and when I eat something particularly salty, and sit at my computer all night, my feet and ankles seem to balloon up to abnormal proportions. It’s maddening.

But alas, I have a confession to make, I am still buying beautiful pumps and stuffing my fat cankle laden feet into them and admiring the view in my head of ankles of old, where there was a beautiful ankle bone protruding that made the area from the back of your ankle to your heal look fabulous. I put them on and reminisce; I don’t dare walk in them (that’s excruciating) but I do like imagining. Now all I see are these ugly fat cankles.

Cankles, cankles, cankles. Can you tell I’m obsessed with cankles right now. I find that at night in bed if I elevate my feet with pillows I get some relief.

Obesity Side Effect: CANKLES

As always, be well

CF

I started this blog a year ago to talk about my weight loss struggles and I will continue to do that, but I also have stuff to say about other topics and I am going to “mix it up a bit” on this blog from now on. I will talk about everything from stuffing my feelings with food to regurgitating my opinion about the politics of the day. You may not like my opinions, but they’re just like…well you know, everybody has one and I need to express mine.

Don’t worry, I will still talk a lot about the fat that has found a profound comfort on my body and unfortunately on my soul. I will still talk about the trials and tribulations of trying to deal with the affects this fat is having on my body and self-esteem. As a matter of fact, my next post will be about the dreaded cankle phenomenon and how that is currently blowing my mind.

So bare with me and come along for the ride, I think you’ll enjoy it.

As always, be well

CF

“Kindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in feeling creates love.” — Lao Tzu

www.chaoticfat.com

So far this year, I have been exploring my inner being and who I really am, or at least who I think I am and how my fat plays a part in that. I am trying to figure out where my hunger, greed and need for more started and how my ego is a part of those needs. I am trying to figure out how my ego feeds my need to never feel inferior to anyone, but my ego relishes my ability to feel superior when it’s necessary to save myself from my perceived notion of inferiority. 

I know this all sounds like this woman maybe sliding off the roof or something, but I want to truly understand why I got fat in the first place so that I never have to worry about this again. The statistics for regaining weight are very high and I don’t want to be a part of that statistic.

I always thought I had a healthy self esteem and I am finding out that maybe it wasn’t so healthy, but was a mask for feelings of inferiority. My mask was my way of getting through this life relatively unscathed by life’s harsher dimensions and eating and getting fat helped me hide because when you’re fat you become mostly invisible to the rest of the world.

I won’t say here, but I believe I know the exact series of events that helped me lose the inherent confidence I had as a child. It’s unfortunate that we don’t recognize the point at which we help to change the human being a child was to become and instead of appreciating children for who they are we want to make them who we think they should be. Once the process has begun the rest of the world recognizes the child’s vulnerability and pounces on it.

Now I am left to clean up this mess and it is turning out to be quite a clean up job. Learning to really be responsible for who you are, what you feel and how you react to the world is hard, but extremely liberating. I am freeing myself from the wounds, real or perceived that I have been carrying around and covering up with food for many many years.

I am still a Non-Smoker

As always, be well

CF

“Kindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in feeling creates love.” — Lao Tzu

www.chaoticfat.com

I have been decluttering my bedroom by rearranging some furniture and I have a vanity w/mirror that was previously in a position where I couldn’t see my torso. The other day I was walking to the bathroom and just happened to catch a glimpse of myself in that mirror in it’s new location. I haven’t really looked at my body in a long time; I had forgotten how I used to love it and that little glimpse led to me taking my clothes off and really looking at every nook and cranny of my body; I even caught a glimpse of my soul. I surprised myself with feelings of love and a bit of admiration; I don’t hate my body at all, I sincerely love every bulge and fold, every dimple and stretch mark. I recommend that everyone go to the mirror and take a long hard look; you might be surprised by what you find.

I’m still a non-smoker, I can actually take in a full strong breath now…yea me!

Be well, CF 

“Kindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in feeling creates love.” — Lao Tzu

www.chaoticfat.com