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DemonKia -> RE: Kinksters & Their Body Size, Diet, & Fitness (11/10/2009 7:17:33 PM)
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FR, after read thru
Wow!!!! You guys rock!!
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I got kinda busy & then it took me some time to work thru this thread as its page count bumped up, but I've been meaning to come post stuff on here. I have a number of essay-ish bits I wanna write & post in this thread, & newspaper articles I wanna post. I'm probably gonna have more time after Turkey Day, until sometime in the new year.
Anyways, y'all are so beautiful inside, & that's what profoundly impacts the external in the long run.
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There's a bunch of stuff I wanna share on the topics of fitness, fatness, & eating & body-identity disordered stuff, but I'm gonna break it up & parcel it out. Mostly cuz I gotta (a) ruminate & (b) overcome my inhibitions about discussing this stuff. I have a lot of covert stuff hooked up to my weight & body image stuff. & my weight & body image stuff hooks up to all kinds of other, significant stuff. Like, ya know, kink & stuff . . . .
I also wanna preface everything I have to say in this thread with this giant caveat: if you do not see yourself in what I share, okay, sorry my experiences & knowings are of no use to you. I am posting this mostly for those who can take something useful from any of it, & because it's what I know. Jus' so we're clear about all that. I probably coulda dispersed more 'in my opinion's & 'I think's & 'to me's throughout this, but that gets kinda tedious, so please try to take it as largely a given . .. . .
I guess the best place to start stems from my tabloid jones. Not one of my more noble pursuits, but I've got a bit of junky thing for the yellower forms of journalism. So, anyways, one day, probably early- to mid-'90s, I'm standing in line at the grocery store, scanning all the scandal sheets' front pages. There's one that says something along the lines of "Oprah's 3 Easy Steps to Weight Loss". I bite, I'm curious, my very full cart is several very full carts away from the cashier on a busy grocery day. I quickly thumb thru & find the list, which I may be paraphrasing slightly, tho' it's so bare there's not much leeway:
- Deal with one's emotional stuff;
- Eat less;
- Exercise more.
Yep. I've been infinitely amused by that one ever since. It's succinct, to the point, & yet less than helpful in an amusingly sanctimonious & snarky way. Watch that first step, it's a doozy. I've wanted to write a novel titled "3 EZ Steps 2 Lose Weight" ever since; 3 sections -- Emotional Baggage, Eating, & Exercise. So on & so forth, it slowly unfolds in my head.
I've been reading about my body (& other peoples' incidentally) since my initial adult awareness, roughly 10-ish / 12-ish (three decades, now). I've studied quite a lot about diet, exercise, & the aforementioned 'baggage' from various angles .... . . That tabloid headline was absolutely right, for most overweight people it's about adjusting the head stuff to allow the space to eat less & exercise more.
One of the very firstiest of first things I wanna share is this book, it was one of the most important factors in my understanding of eating-related issues. I'm also trying to work into these posts many of the crucial perspectives I've developed for looking at these issues, sorta 'cognitive tricks' for helping to flip my mind around about these issues . . . .. .
"Diets Don't Work" (by Bob Schwartz) is the book that changed my relationship with my body, eating, food, etc, in a powerful & effective manner. I've bought a coupla copies of it over the years (probably due for a new copy, lol) since my mom gave me the first one when I was 18 . . . . .
It's a workbook full of questions & blanks to be filled in by the reader with their own specific details. It's a process for helping the reader to work on resolving their own issues with food, eating, body size, & etc . . . . .
There are other workbook kinds of approaches, & there are many paths to getting healthier, fitter, eating better, few or none of which work for everyone, as far as I can determine. Each person, to some degree or another, has to experiment & research & figure out what works for that particular individual, with a fair chance that it will be a particular & unique approach in its details . . . . .
One of the author's basic theses is that 'being fat' can have all kinds of 'positive' benefits for the fat & / or eating disordered person, & that these (less than recognized) 'good' aspects of struggling with body size & eating issues can impede one's ability to change one's body size.
One of the easiest 'benefits' of a 'weight problem' to observe is the way it can focus other people's attention on oneself, whether that is socially or topically appropriate or not, & etc variation on that theme . . . . . It gives one a subject of conversation, one's diets, exercise regimes, etc . . . .
If one has fear of success in other aspects of one's life, overweight can be that comfortable failure wallow that distracts from pursuing the painful, risky possibilities of new, unfamiliar failures, of putting core self at risk by going after true desire, etc, etc, etc . .... I can riff that one all day long cuz it's one of my intimate familiars .. .. .
(If I say something harsh, insightful, disturbing, in all likelihood it's cuz I've done that to me, first. & we are generally so much harder on ourselves than others are, I'm no exception to that . . . . )
One of the most significant of these 'benefits of fat', for me, is the issue of safety: fat people are less desirable as sexual objects & etc targets. & my fat says 'no' for me in a broadcast method that's helped me avoid dealing with learning to say 'no' more specifically with my mouth. 240 pound me is a lot tougher to drag into the bushes than some 120 pounder, so there's also that particular safety aspect.
There's also significant 'emotional infill' stuff that goes on for me: food is comfort, pleasure, satiety. & if I'm not getting other comfort, pleasure, & satiation needs met ( [;)] ) then food can be (& has been) a very reliable substitute . . . .. .
& there's more; I'd hazard a guess that each & every person who goes thru an 'honest accounting' process about any problematic behavior will bring unique reasons, perspectives, methods, & etc to the tabulation . . . . .
I'm gonna give away the 'secret' in "Diets Don't Work", his four things that naturally slender people do that everyone else does not do (& I actually dug a copy out & typed up his exact words, aren't y'all special):
- The 'naturally slender'* hardly ever eat unless their body is hungry**;
- They eat exactly what they want to eat;
- They stay conscious of what they're eating and the effect it's having on their body;
- They stop eating when their body's hunger goes away.
* 'Naturally slender' is defined as persons who take no notice of calories, diets, et alia, & make no special effort to be any particular way other than just being, that sorta thing . . .. . .
**The author's got a bunch of stuff around how to work to restore those signals, & I've got some additional thoughts I'll write up one of these days about the subject of feeling hungry .. . . .
That last plumpness bennie, that emotional infill concept, that's a place with a relatively clear connection to my weight / eating / body image issues & BDSM . . . . . & for me, they are intertwined in exactly the ways that weight, et al, & BDSM are intertwined throughout all of my life -- quite a bit, that is . .. . .
I've recently, in the last few years, been increasingly aware of the connection between my self-destructive, masochistic, & over-eating-&-sugar-binging issues, a distinctive triangle of factors . . . . They are very much connected. I'm hopefully gonna do a separate post on that topic.
There's a note about will-power that connects to the following subject of awareness that's worth specifying.
As an over-eater-&-sugar-binger I know that it's my head that wants to eat the food, not my body. If I allow myself to feel / hear / etc my body, it protests on all kinds of levels the abuse I impose thru my over-eating. The over-eating-&-etc over-weight, in my book, have enormous will-power, the will-power to over-ride their own bodies, to suppress / ignore / etc the discomfort, the metabolic, kinesthetic, aesthetic, physiological, & etc consequences of continuing to stuff more food into ones body than it needs for fuel. & foods of the wrong kinds & other complicating factors . . .
So, along that chain, for instance, I found that there was a rather absolute correlation between my over-eating-&-sugar-binging issues & my acid-indigestion-&-reflux stuff. Knock off the over-eating & sugar-binging & voila, 99% of my acid tummy stuff goes away. The next step was understanding that my use of calcium antacids was a co-dependent enabling thing, which I've mostly given up . .. . .
I think I wanna conclude this initial post in this thread I started with:
For me, the number one tool I bring to changing any habit is increasing self-awareness. Paying more & more attention. Staying crisply conscious of the behavior, the feelings, the contexts, the everything I can manage. I am firmly of the belief that much of my bad habit continuation has been maximally facilitated by lapsing of conscious awareness of the activity & all its consequences. & as I increase my awareness & sensitivity to all of that, my desire to continue the behavior easily falls away to a great deal.
For instance, tobacco use. Eventually, I got to the place where every drag tasted awful & I felt every pain in my chest, every wheeze, every bit of my shortness of breath, smelled the rank stale smell I exuded & permeated my possessions & home & etc. It was a relief to release the hold on my life I'd given to the tobacco in the end.
It's not an easy, quick way to make life change, but I'm not really interested in being the hare (despite my bunny fursuit), I've always allied with the tortoise.
More to follow . .. .
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& mucho mucho mucho gracias por la participacion, chiquitas y muchachos!!!!
Y'all are makin' this thread a beautiful thing, I'm all teary eyed & choked up . . ...
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