Sly Speaks + Fat Friday + Friday Flashback: Diet Culture Rhetoric Is Not Poetry

This poignant gem was originally published on 17 January 2010 on my now-retired poetry blog.

life It would be far easier to diet if I didn't like food.

This, apparently, was the entire-ass poem.

A year later, I would finally take the long-needed step of ditching diet culture for good.

That is a terrible statement, let alone being a terrible poem. 

It isn't even a poem, it's a blurb. A very stupid and brainwashed blurb. It's a tweet that shouldn't have been tweeted. It is a lot of things, none of them good. A poem it is not. 

The Chili Bean Tanka is a better poem, and it is not a good poem. In fact, it is close to Vogon poetry in its poetic injustice.

It goes a little bit something like this.

I ate the chili

between the beans and the spice

digestive horror

beneath the cover of night

noxious eruptions take place

As I mentioned previously, I struggled over the holidays. My abusive partner ED (Eating Disorder) reared his ugly head and I relapsed into my old restrictive eating and self-loathing patterns. Which, by the way, never made me thin, they just fucked my metabolism over and made me hate myself even more. 

However, reading this micro-poem that should not be, I could see where I'd been myopic in my criticism of a poet whose book I reviewed recently. I gave the book overall high praise, but I stated that her "poem" which read as follows, and I quote:

love ends but calories are forever

was not so much a poem as unfortunate diet culture rhetoric, and I wouldn't want to read it as a tweet, let alone in a book of poetry.

Given the unseemly evidence above, that critique was hypocritical of me.

However, there is a lesson to be learned.

Next time you think publishing a pithy pearl of poignant perspicacity such as this...

Go to the kitchen and grab yourself a snack. Or at least have something to drink. Your blood sugar may be low because if you think that's worth publishing, you obviously haven't been thinking clearly. Step out for a breath of air and clear your head of the Diet Culture nonsense. You've obviously bitten off more of it than you can chew.

That being said, Words Written in the Dark is, overall, a thoughtful and thought-provoking volume of modern poetry, and I recommend it highly.

Fat and Ornery

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Ornery Literary Services

Sly and Snarky

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Blow Your Stack Saturday: Feminism That Turns Against Our Fat Sisters is Not Feminist

I'm still discouraged by the use of the term "promoting obesity" regarding plus-size Instagram models by a feminist activist whose work I've long respected. Regardless of whether one feels these (generally young) women are exploiting themselves or seeking attention by posing in skimpy outfits, they are not, in fact, "promoting obesity.' 

I've heard the dismaying argument that feminism should not support size activism on numerous occasions. To believe this is to believe that a person's size is "a choice" and that everyone could "easily lose weight" if they'd just "eat less and exercise more." If this grossly oversimplified belief were true, there would be virtually no fat people because everyone who could do it would do it. If this oversimplified belief were true, I would have been a willowy twig during the years that I starved myself and engaged in orthorexia. I never was.

The woman above was Ellen Maud Bennett, a 64-year-old Canadian who died from ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer is highly treatable if detected during the early stages. 

Ellen had complained to doctors of feeling poorly for years. Their response was to tell her that if she lost weight, she'd feel better. When one of them finally decided to take her seriously, it was discovered that she had stage 4 ovarian cancer. She died a short time later.

Ellen did not want her death to be in vain, so she had her family include a letter in her obituary. I hope that everyone will take the time to read it, especially those "feminists" who believe that there is a certain weight at which your sisters should be disowned.

Here is Ellen's obituary.

For evidence-based arguments against current size-shaming medical treatment and societal prejudices against larger people, I recommend these three blogs.

Big Fat Science

Dances With Fat

Heavyweight Heart

Heavyweight Heart, in particular, has discussed the racism that was instrumental in forging our adherence to the hateful and unhealthy belief that a woman can never be too rich or too thin. All of these blogs are rich with scientific evidence against the currently held beliefs that fat is the very worst thing a person can possibly be. 

There are certain conditions that are correlated with a larger body type. Correlation is not causation. Generally speaking, telling a fat patient to lose weight in order to resolve underlying health conditions is like telling a man with male pattern baldness to regrow his thinning hair in order to lessen his chances of developing prostate cancer. There is a correlation between male pattern baldness and an increased likelihood of developing prostate cancer. Thinning hair does not cause prostate cancer. The underlying issue, increased testosterone levels, increases the likelihood of developing prostate cancer.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment reveals what happens to the body and mind when a person engages in restrictive dieting behaviors. Diets do not work long-term in more than five percent of people who engage in dieting. Most people gain the weight they lost back and then some. After many years of weight loss attempts, the possibility of dieting bringing about significant weight loss sharply decreases.

I for one do not enjoy having every waking moment of my day focused on food because I am starving. I went through thirty-three years of yo-yo dieting, and all it brought me was "failure" and weight gain. Combining dieting behaviors with multiple endocrine conditions was a sure-fire recipe for a large body type. But neither I nor anyone else should be having to defend our right to exist and be treated with common decency in the bodies we have. 

If the majority of my sisters have decided to disown me and other women like me because we are fat, or to give lip service to supporting women of all sizes but then tearing down fat women as being lazy and "glorifying obesity" for not hiding our disgusting fat selves away from the view of decent people, then feminism has let me and my fat sisters down.

I will continue fighting for what's right, but I may no longer be able to identify as a feminist while doing so. I consider this a great loss. I first began identifying as a feminist in 1973 when I was eight years old and already tired as fuck of being told that I couldn't do anything interesting with my life because I was "just a girl."

Now I'm hearing "girls can do anything guys can do, but not if they're fat."

Fuck right off with that shit.

~Sly Has Spoken~

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Medium Is Becoming a Cesspit for TRA's

I used to find Medium an interesting and useful site. A lot of the size acceptance activists post there. These are the people who helped me move from being yet another person caught in the impossible trap of trying to hate myself thin (something I haven't been able to accomplish in a lifetime of trying) to knowing that the multi-billion dollar diet industry thrives on making people hate themselves for "failing" at diets which work long-term for only approximately five percent of people. A lot of mental health writers share their work at Medium as well.

Then Medium became a pay site. One can read three articles per month for free, or pay $5 a month. $5 per month doesn't sound like a lot, but it is when you're living below the poverty level. So, three articles a month it is.

However, these days the Medium Daily Digest email is filled with pretty much nothing but TRA rhetoric, and I have made a pact with myself. Anyone flinging the term TERF around is someone not worth wasting my time on. I was tired of wading through links to TRA posts to find anything good, so I unsubscribed.

TERF is Feminazi covered in glitter. Both are terms used to silence women who don't toe the line. 

TRA's want to erase women.

I will not be erased.

~Sly Has Spoken~

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Sly Says: Food Insecurity in America: What Can Employers Do?

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The United States needs to change a lot of things before we can have an overall healthy and happy population. Let's start with the absolute basics: food and shelter.

In this piece I'm going to focus on food, so I will address shelter in a cursory way. I work delivering food, which is ironic because I don't have enough money for adequate food. I drive past groups of homeless people, some of them in wheel chairs huddled together for warmth. This is so wrong. There's no excuse for it. I will address this problem in detail in another post.

Both lack of shelter and lack of adequate food lead to costly health problems that could be avoided. It would be less expensive in the long run to provide basic shelter, food, and health care to the public than it is to pay for medical crises and chronic health problems resulting from inadequate access to the necessities of life.

A while ago, a Facebook acquaintance who perpetually shares about her perpetual diets shared a picture of a fully stocked freezer. Granted, this freezer contained a lot of prepared foods, i.e. frozen dinners. Said acquaintance and her perpetually dieting cronies proceeded with the inevitable food shaming that happens when you live in a society which believes in size normativity rather than health at every size and which refuses to acknowledge that not everyone has access to the same resources. There were comments like "OMG, inflammation!" "OMG, diabetes!" and "OMG, teh OBEEEESITEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111!!!!!!!!!!" 

I stated that as a person who is food insecure, this refrigerator looked like the larder of Heaven to me, and that I did not believe in food policing.

Granted, it is ideal to eat fewer processed foods. However, time and money play a huge part in determining what people can and will eat. For instance, when I was making $40,000 per year and cooking for just two people (my son and me) I would order meal kits from services like Home Chef and Chef'd. The ingredients were fresh and minimally processed, and I enjoyed preparing them. When I lost my job due to health problems, all that went out the window.

I have diabetes and should eat at regular intervals to avoid blood sugar dips and spikes. This, however, does not happen. Because I'm rationing food (or simply don't have food) I tend to wait until I am close to passing out before I eat. Believe me, I am not thinking very much about carbohydrate content when I finally get my hands on food. I am thinking about getting some chow down the hatch so I don't end up doing a face-plant.

In spite of being a large person, which people have been conditioned to think means that I must eat 60 buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken every day, I actually don't have much of an appetite. I eat to ameliorate symptoms such as brain fog and dizziness. Sometimes I feel hunger, but I know the sensation will pass. My hunger cues have been messed up for years and will probably never be normal again. This is thanks to developing an eating disorder at twelve years old because society taught me that the worst thing a person could possibly be was fat.

You know, I wish I had the money to afford 60 buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on a daily basis. I wouldn't eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. I don't like it. The amount of MSG in it would make me wheeze for a week. However, if I had the money to buy 60 buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken every day, I'd be doing okay. That stuff ain't cheap!

Regarding the obesity and poverty connection, it isn't so much that poor people gorge themselves whenever they get their grubby mitts on food. The fact is, dieting destroys a person's metabolism and promotes weight gain. For all but a very small percentage of dieters, the weight temporarily lost through dieting returns with friends. People living in poverty are forced to be on a perpetual diet. The body goes into starvation mode and does what it was made to do: store fat for times of scarcity.

Instead of focusing on making everyone look like svelte supermodels, we as a society should be focusing on insuring that everyone has access to adequate food. Not because doing so will make everyone become a certain arbitrary kind of pretty, but because people who have access to adequate food, whatever size they may be, are healthier and happier.

I will now jump off my anti diet culture soapbox and onto my Everyday Socialism soapbox. 

You can call it "charity" if the word socialism is bothersome to you.

Since the GOP Clown Car will oppose doing the right thing for anyone but the one percent and corporations at every turn, it is up to We The People to do right by our neighbors. So, until we can vote the current mess out of office, what can we do?

When it comes to donating to non-profit organizations, you do better giving a monetary donation to a charity such as a homeless shelter rather than a non-perishable food donation. This is due to the fact that the people who work at shelters can order supplies in bulk. They are attempting to provide for multiple people. One can of corn isn't going to make that much difference.

However, in a smaller setting, individual items can make a difference.

I propose that employers set up donation boxes where people can leave food items for their co-workers to take, no questions asked. People can then give according to their means and take according to their needs. That can of corned beef hash could be a lifesaver for someone who wasn't able to afford to bring lunch. 

Employers could provide basic food items for their employees, i.e. bread, cheese, peanut butter, canned soup, crackers. They could leave a donation jar in the break room. Thus, if an employee had a little spare change, they could drop it into the donation jar to offset the cost of providing basic food items for the staff.

Restaurants and cafeterias could provide a low-cost food item free for employees who needed such, i.e. soup or a grilled cheese sandwich. 

Knowing they had access to food at work could reduce employee absences.

A person who is starving is not motivated to get up and go, particularly when they know that the more energy they expend, the hungrier they will get. Hunger doesn't inspire people to work hard. It inspires depression and demotivation. Food deprivation inspires obsession with food. People who can't think about anything but food are not going to be able to focus on other tasks.

Adequate food, adequate shelter, and adequate health care are three non-negotiables in a successful society. We need to demand these things and keep demanding them until we get them. 

Until our government stops failing us, We the People need to find ways to take care of one another as best we can.

~Sly Has Spoken~

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