I made a horrible mistake
[tw: fat shaming, diet and weight loss talk]
I recently moved back home for the summer where among my friends diet culture is pretty entrenched. We’re all very good friends, and everyone is very caring - no one fat shames anyone else (most of us are at least smallish fat), no one passively aggressively suggests dieting to anyone. Everyone is supportive of each other, whether they’re on a diet or not. But dieting strangely served as a nice social bonding activity. Me and one girlfriend would try out diets together, suggest tips and share stories, and I honestly found it fun back then. Ultimately we never lost any weight, but it made me feel girly and normal to be trying to lose weight, I guess.
I moved away about a year ago, and got really into social justice and discovered this blog which changed my entire perspective on food and my body. My focus now is just to get my disordered eating under control and figure out how to have a normal relationship with food. But now I’m back for the summer in this dieting culture. I often do things I’m not really into just to be social or get to hang out with friends. Watched a football game with a friend and enjoyed her company and some beer. Went out for karaoke and had a blast listening to my friends sing. So I didn’t really think too much about it when these friends invited me to join a game called “DietBet." Basically you pay around $30 and if you lose 4% of your body weight, you win some more money. I now felt pretty impervious to any diet schemes and knew from the beginning I wouldn’t be anywhere near capable of losing 4% of my weight. With that in mind, I thought I would join just to be social and have fun, and maybe I could be a good, fat activist influence on my friends. And then I got this email on the first day of the game:
Yes, looking at myself is just so painful. Every time I pass a mirror or an old photograph I get these awful piercing cramps that can only be explained by the pain of my fat. It hurts me to even exist.
I just can’t even– I should’ve known better. And knowing this is the same email all of my beautiful, fat friends got makes me cringe. I’ve requested my refund from the DietBet group, and I will never make such a naive mistake again.
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