And whales.

Last night I tweeted that I was wanting to head to the pottery studio so I could start work on making a whale in a bikini. I came home to this:

Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing.

We need a fat art gallery at this point, y/y?

I think there are things we all want to say – things we’d tell the people we love – or the people who hurt us – if we only had the opportunity.

What would you say today? To whom would you say it?

And what’s stopping you?

I had a different entry I was planning to write today – maybe I’ll even still write it. But as I read over the comments to a painful journal entry posted by a dear friend, I knew I had to say something else.

Just stop.

Stop justifying your fat because it is muscular. Stop justifying your fat because you are “curvy.” Stop justifying your fat because you have a tiny waist and an hourglass figure.

Just stop.

You aren’t actually helping.

In fact, all you’re doing is continuing to reinforce the idea that only SOME bodies, only CERTAIN bodies, only bodies that meet a vague and indistinct criteria set are acceptable.

That’s not how it is. So just stop.

Your fat doesn’t need justification. It’s just fat. You don’t need a list of why your fat in particular – different from OTHER people’s fat, is the implication – is just fucking fine. You just need to say: Hey, I am fat and that is okay.

Your body is acceptable. You don’t need to justify it, especially not in ways that exclude other bodies.

And when you do? When you make comments about how you’re all muscle or how women are supposed to be voluptuous (explicit or implicit mention of “skinny bitches” required), you’re just perpetuating the problem of societally mandated acceptability – of our culture thinking women’s bodies are public property, to be weighed and measured and ranked like livestock.

Just stop it.

I know some of you are still finding ways to make peace with your body – not even at a point where you can think about loving it but still learning not to actively hate it, still learning how to stop actively harming yourself as punishment for your body. If saying, “hey, my body is muscular,” helps you form a more healthful relationship with your body, that is awesome and amazing and you should absolutely cling to that. However, that’s different from using “I’m fat but it’s okay because I’m muscular” as a justification.

The first (”I like my body because it is muscular”) is a really positive statement. I can get behind that a hundred thousand percent. “I like my tiny waist,” is the same kind of statement. It’s when you set those things in opposition to fat – as though it is somehow that quality that makes fat as a concept okay – that I start to physically cringe and restrain myself from commenting back to you (because it’s neither the time nor the place) that my waist is not tiny and my fat is still okay.

We have to learn a whole new way to talk about bodies, particularly fat and thin bodies, if we want to move past this obsession with thinness and fatness and bodies that meet a ridiculously stringent set of aesthetic standards. We have to stop, on the level of our very language and word choice, cease to perpetuate the idea that fat must be justified, must be logically judged based on a list of pros and cons. Fat just is, like brown hair or being short.

Excluding other bodies just adds to the layers of cultural body hate that we need to be unpacking. Remember, the goal isn’t to just expand the restrictive beauty paradigm – it’s the bust the whole thing up into little bitty pieces so we can build a new and different paradigm. Our words are how we shape the world. Let’s use them, consciously and powerfully, to swing some sledgehammers around in here and make the world we really want – where fat is just fat and bodies belong to individuals and you don’t have to justify your existence and dignity and sense of self worth.

Love,
M.

Ahem.

Anyway, no muss, no fuss, as my doctor is about as stress free with these things as it is possible to be. They took my blood at the end and I went on my merry way.

I am often asked what would happen if my doctor recommended weight loss to me. My answer is usually that I would talk with her about WHY that was being suggested. Because I trust my doctor and I believe she is actually looking out for my health. And in my head, I’m pretty sure she’s never going to come out with “lose weight, fatty” as a prescription. Still, it’s one of those things I’ve considered, what my response would be.

Today I got the phone call about my bloodwork. “Looks great,” the nurse says. “But your cholesterol is a little higher than it was last time, and the same for your triglycerides. The doctor wants you to do about a half hour of activity every day and maybe try a lower carb diet. We’ll recheck it in six months.”

I thanked them and that was pretty much that. Except then I got to thinking about how differently this conversation could have – and has in the past – played out. Because, as I suspected, it wasn’t “lose weight, fatty” – but it was, in a really gentle way, a reminder to get more exercise and eat less (well, less bread, anyway). And it was almost shocking to realize – it didn’t bother me at all.

See, I know that when my doctor says “lower carb diet” she isn’t talking about, like, Atkins. She’s saying, hey, see if reducing your carb intake at all has an impact on this. She’s not talking about weight-loss dieting and she’s not talking about something extreme and unmaintainable. She’s asking me to see what my body does if, like, I don’t eat pasta every single day.

That’s fair, I think.

In the past, I’ve had weight loss recommended to me as a cure-all for just about anything I went to see a doctor about. “You have allergies; you should lose some weight – have you tried eating less and exercising more?” “You have strep throat! You should try losing some weight so you won’t get this again!” “You’ve got asthma – have you tried a starvation diet coupled with intense physical exertion in order to lose some weight?”

Let me tell you, I am sensitive to that shit now. Possibly, because I am contrary and stubborn, I am MORE sensitive to it than many other people.

But when weight loss is removed as an imperative part of the “cure”, I don’t get that knee-jerk been-burnt-by-this-before kind of reaction. I trust my doctor. If she says a half hour of activity is going to help my cholesterol, I’ll give it an honest go – especially since I know my activity levels have been way lower this year than has been usual for me in the past. We’ve started relying on convenience foods a little more lately – a reminder to return to the way we eat when we’re cooking all the time is a useful reminder. Means all that stuff I usually do because it feels good actually DOES have an impact on my body. And it means it in ways that have nothing to do with my weight (which has, incidentally, remained exactly the same).

When weight loss is the goal, instead of some actual health metric, you (and your doctor) are buying into a system that doesn’t work. You try and you try and you fail – and then though your general health is actually improved, you feel like a failure and give it all up. When weight loss is the goal, even if you say you’re doing it for your health, chances are reeeeeeeeeeeeally high you don’t actually give a shit about that cholesterol number. You’re too busy monitoring the number on the scale, the number on the tag in your pants.

Remove weight loss as a goal, and you’re more likely to actually stick to changes that you make in order to physically feel better (and the more those changes are likely to work for you as an individual with the entirety of your body and mind being taken into consideration). Remove weight loss as a goal, and you get to measure things that are actually meaningful, that actually provide valuable information about the inner workings of your body!

It’s kind of fascinating to me that doctors scream about your health and then seem to do everything in their power to turn folks off of actually being connected to what is going on in their bodies. That’s some kind of counterproductive, yo. Pursuing health at every size means being so much more involved, so much more knowledgeable about your body than the usual – just equating weight and health and leaving it at that. People are always telling fatties to take personal responsibility. Well, I’d argue that I’m WAY more personally invested in my health and responsible for the things I put into my body than someone who is just not thinking about it because they fit into the mainstream cultural idea of what a body should weigh.

This is what personal responsibility looks like. And this is what it looks like when the medical profession gets it RIGHT – I’ll be dancing around my living room tonight (or possibly my bedroom) to get in some more activity and I’ll be ramping up our veggie intake again. I’ll also – because I’ve been under a lot of stress and stress can contribute to higher cholesterol as well – keep going to therapy and taking melatonin to help me sleep. And in six months, we’ll see what happens. I trust my doctor to help me figure it all out.

When I got home yesterday, I was in such a mood. You know the kind of mood. Where you feel fine, where there’s nothing particularly wrong, but where you know your fuse is extra short – where there are mean things in your mouth that want saying even if you don’t actually want to say them. I looked at my husband and our dog (our puppy, really – she’s only 6 months old), and I knew I couldn’t subject them to that sort of thing.

The city of Orlando runs a pottery studio at deep deep discount for their open studio time. I’ve been playing with clay for about two months now and, I have to say, there’s something very therapeutic about sticking your hands in and making a mess.

This is my round about way of getting to the topic of self care.

It’s an accurate term, self care, but it has always sounded a little… I don’t know. A little clinical, maybe. Not there there’s anything wrong with clinical terms but self care, while technically entirely accurate, doesn’t convey the depth and breadth of everything that swirls around the issue, especially for women.

Women are, quite frequently, kind of culturally trained to put the needs of others before their own. So a lot of women fall into the trap of not just putting their own needs on the bottom of the list but, because the reality of time is that there’s only so much of it in a day, not tending to their own needs because other things take precedence.

When we talk about self care, that’s always part of the context for me – this concept that so many people have put it off and put it off until they are in kind of crisis over it. If I don’t watch out, and consciously make myself take care of things, this happens to me. It’s such an easy pattern of benign neglect.

But it’s still neglect.

One of the most common bits of advice re: self care is to treat yourself to something nice. Whether that’s a dress or a double-decaf-latte or whatever. But I want to talk about some nonconsumery options as well because it can be really powerful to separate yourself from the constant grind of our economy but also because that’s where I find the really meaningful actions we can perform.

That’s why I mention the pottery studio (well, actually, that’s the first of three reasons I mention it) – I am learning something new when I go there which is, for me, one of the most powerful things I can do for myself to take care of myself. It gives me perspective. It broadens my world and makes it bigger. Learning new things gives me new skills/knowledge I can apply in other areas. It’s an interesting world – staying connected to it by learning new stuff is a vital part of my self care routine.

I had a job, at one point, where I worked, every day, at least 10 hours. By the time I got home, I was too tired, or so I thought at the time, to be interested in the things around me. It was miserable. I feel like I spent that whole year with my brain turned off. That didn’t help the depression I was dealing with at the time either.

If I’d been paying attention to myself, I’d have figured out a lot sooner what I was missing from my life – where I’d fallen down on taking care of myself. I’d have had to make some changes – because if I don’t put taking caring of myself pretty high up on my list of things to do, it shows.

The second thing that happens for me at the pottery studio is that I get to create something. Generative efforts make us feel something – I could try to articulate it but I’m afraid I’d sound like a cross between a children’s book of fairy tales and a pretentious art student who dates an English major. Here, I will try anyway: when we create something, we’re tapping into a part of human history that has not yet been explored, something that seems magical when we stop to think about it because where does creativity come from? How do we DO that? How do we use our hands to create something new out of the same old materials?

Cooking is, in a lot of ways, like alchemy to me because of this. It’s transformative – physical and chemical reactions changing states and textures and flavors and then at the end of it you’ve got something edible (well, hopefully). That’s an amazing creative process.

I kind of suck at maintaining interest in cooking – it isn’t the creative venture for me, not really. But I can make things out of clay! I’m still learning but I’m making things, useful things, and that is a potent reminder that everyone has this spark in some way. It’s very life affirming, y’all. It nurtures something in us, I think, to spend time being creative – in whatever way counts as creative for you.

The third thing that happens to me at pottery that counts towards self care for me is the very physical act of working the clay. It gives me something outside of myself, something inanimate, on which to concentrate. The clay just sits there. It doesn’t need me to do anything for it. And so I stick my hands in it and focus on what I want to make instead of on all the hundred other things about which I’m usually worrying. It gives my brain a break – a much-needed break; it’s a chance to just turn off the overthinking and focus on something else for a while. When I get back to the thinking – because it isn’t going anywhere – I find I’m usually much more clear-headed and better able to look at whatever is causing me worry. Stepping outside of the problem in order to give myself a rest is a highly effective strategy.

The same thing happens to me when I sew buttons on things. Actually, maybe it’s just a button thing. I made this button table and, I gotta tell you, it got meditative, gluing all those buttons in place.

It’s probably related to an actual technique that involves mindless repetitive tasks. That’s something like vacuuming, where you don’t have to actually pay attention to the thing that you are doing; you can simply zone out. Sometimes our brains just need that break. Let yourself have it.

The recap, thus far! Learning new things, being creative, turning off the overthinky brain. Check, check, check.

I use pottery as my example because I’m kind of obsessed with it at the moment (seriously, don’t even ask me about the coconuts, okay?) but getting this self care fix doesn’t have to involve anything nearly so intensive. It can be taking the time to draw something, it can be fixing a seam on a shirt, it can be learning a new recipe – it can be reading a book in a quiet corner of your living space. Self care is that which nourishes you and makes you feel ready to deal with the world again.

It’s kind of like a blanket, to keep you warm against those winds of requirements, shoulds, woulds, coulds, dids, and did nots.

While those are, for me, the big three components of really taking care of myself, they can manifest in super simple ways, too. Some days I am so overwhelmed – what I really need is to step back from the overstimulus instead of adding to it with new stuff. That’s when I’ll sit in the bathtub with a book I’ve read a hundred time before or a bottle of nail polish so I can paint my nails. Maybe I’ll listen to music but sometimes even that’s too much.

I don’t have kids so that one is a little easier for me. But, if you have someone who can help you, don’t feel like it’s a shameful thing to ask for a little time to yourself. Remember, you need to be on your priority list as well.

Here’s something else I like to do: In the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep, I mentally play dress up. It doesn’t require shopping for new clothes – not even fantasy shopping. This might not work if your closet is one of the things that is giving you grief. But for me it’s an opportunity to envision how things might look when they are paired together,

Other times I mean to play mental dress up and it segues into me sitting around and just enjoying the nighttime quiet of the house.

Self care is, at its best, an intensely personal thing. At the base of it, it’s being as caring and kind to yourself as you would be to someone whom you loved – that so many women put it off so long is a sad illustration of our national disconnect with our own value as human beings.

One must, in practice, set boundaries in order to practice self care. One must reserve something of one’s self for yourself – which we’re told is a selfish act; we’re told that to be selfless is a virtue of the highest order.

But at the end of the day, if you don’t take care of you, no one else will either. Treat yourself with care because that’s how you deserve to be treated. Whether that means blocking out the time to prepare yourself a dinner from fresh ingredients that you prefer or simply commandeering the radio so you can belt out 80s New Wave in the car, it’s important to do SOMETHING that revitalizes you. Self care isn’t just indulgences – it’s making sure your basic needs are covered just as well as anyone else’s needs; it’s making sure you are cared for in the same way you are caring for others.

Self care does not have to participate in our consumer culture. In fact, as much as I’m a fan of a new eyeshadow on a bad day, the most meaningful self care for me doesn’t involve buying anything. It involves making sure I eat three meals a day and get enough sleep and stretch and move and, hell, wash my hair on a regular basis.

Take care of you.

Last night, oh, we chatted. Lesley and I had slated an hour for the chat – I kept the room open almost two hours past our target end time because it was so great to chat with readers and listeners and cover topics ranging from Forever Knight to thrift culture to how to ease into wearing your own style with confidence.

Basically, it rocked. And we’re totally doing it again.

I AM glad we capped it at 15 – it’s hard to follow all the conversational threads going on when you’ve got more than a dozen people talking at once. *grin*

But everyone talking at once, that was one fo the really great things about it, for me. That we were all coming at this with different perspectives but having conversations we might not be able to have in the same way outside of an explicitly fat-accepting community.

I’m all about community. It’s why I love it when you all comment here and to each other and it’s why I love doing stuff in different media formats. So many ways to have a conversation, you know?”

It might not seem like a big deal, but being able to sit down and actually talk to someone – and not in a delayed format like a blog post or a one-sided format like a podcast – is a really huge thing. It helps to normalize a lot of the stuff we’re told to be ashamed of, whether that’s chaffing or the word vulva.

Yes, we discussed the word vulva. It’s a good word.

How are you? How do you build community? How do you think we can better build our FA community here? (And at Fatcast and so on. *grin*)

Pop me and I’ll add you to the group chat (as long as you’re one of the people who got a confirmation email). Easy as pie!

(If there has been some confusion, remember that gmail is a free service so you should be able to create an account and start chatting immediately – we’ll just need to know your username to match it up with the registration list!)

Thanks y’all. I’m totally excited about talking to you.

But for fatties (and nonfats) in these first awesome (some would say cruel) days of summer, things are heating up fast. It’s no big surprise to me in Florida that we’re having 90 degree days (we’ve been doing that since May) that, with the heat index, feel like 110 (in the 40s, for my Celcius friends). But I know it’s running just about that hot in more northernly climes as well and people just aren’t as climate controlled.

And so I thought I’d throw out a little advice for being a fatty in the sun.

1. If you are not used to sun exposure, wear a hat and sunscreen. The paler the skin, the more vulnerable it tends to be. Stay out of direct sunlight as much as possible. Seriously, the last thing you want to deal with is sunburn. Experiment as much as possible with sunscreens until you find one that works for you. I hate feeling slimy so much that I just cannot deal with a large percentage of lotion-based sunscreens. HATE THEM. The one that works is also so expensive I almost laughed in the sales clerk’s face (it isn’t her fault, she doesn’t set the prices), so I settle for spray on sunscreens. Also, though it might seem counterintuitive, I wear a lot of long sleeves during the summer. Nothing heavy weight – light cottons or cotton/rayon stretchy knits. A physical barrier will help save your skin. Light flowy layers are often just as effective at being cool AND they provide some sun protection.

2. Stay hydrated! Carry water with you and drink it. Especially if you are outside walking to the bus stop or something like that. Even if you don’t think you’re sweating enough to get dehydrated, drinking water will help your body cool itself and manage your temperature more efficiently. In addition, if you ARE sweating, it is really easy to lose more moisture in the heat than you realize. Dehydration is NOT fun for the whole family or even a fraction of the whole family – meaning you. Caffinated beverages don’t count toward hydration. Flavored water, if you can’t abide plain water, is acceptable but make sure it doesn’t have too much crap in it. Crystral Light is, of all the diet products out there, actually one I’m okay with because if you are okay with artificial flavors and sweeteners than it makes water a lot more palatable for a lot of people. DRINK WATER. Gatorade and that sort of sports drink… not all they are cracked up to be. Don’t make those the bulk of your beverage intake, please.

3. Use a body powder. We talked a lot about body powders in the hygeine post – when the temp goes up, powders become even more of a useful option. And don’t just put some on in the morning and expect it to last all day – carry some with you and reapply if necessary. If you’re doing a lot of walking or commuting without A/C, this can be especially important for your own comfort. Put powder in areas that tend to be sweaty or otherwise hold moisture – underbust, armpits, crotch, between rolls. You can go wild and dust your whole body! It’s pretty freaking awesome. This’ll help with chaffing in general as well. Relatedly, someone suggested wearing a cotton camisole (not a tank top!) under your bra – that is a FANTASTIC idea.

Note: Any sort of external product is going to wear away. That’s why I suggest carrying stuff like powder with you (and I have more maintenance tips in just a minute). You can put powder on at home but then if you walk to work or commute in a car with no A/C or something like that, once you get to work you might feel kind of gross. That’s when it’s handy to reapply your powder. Clean up in your work bathroom, redust, and you’ll feel way more comfortable than your coworkers who didn’t take that step. The real trick of living in the heat, I’ve found, is not solely about prevention – it’s about being able to handle things DURING the day in ways that minimize your discomfort or that make it less intrusive. It takes some forethought but it’s usually hella worth it to go through the little bit of extra trouble.

4. Carry baby wipes/facial wipes with you. I use those MAC face wipes to clean off my makeup and I also use them when I just feel sweaty and GROSS. Wipes tend to be cooling but they also keep me feeling CLEAN. If you worry about smelling bad after sweating, wipes will especially help. Make sure to get something that you can use on sensitive areas. I know some people are more sensitive than others in the genital bits – I can use the MAC wipes with no probs but your mileage may vary and it’s important to find something that works for you. Actually, even just wiping off my face and neck can make a HUGE difference when it comes to my comfort in the heat. You don’t have to do a full-body rub down or anything. Small things make a difference.

5. Carry a hand towel if necessary. When I lived in Thailand and when I continued to visit Thailand and other countries, I noticed that people often carried small towels, sometimes just wash clothes, with them. It took me a little observing to figure it out but people were carrying towels so they could dry their face when they started to sweat. OH. THAT MAKES SENSE. I’ve seen it as an adult among the population of immigrants from South and Central America as well. It just makes sense, y’all. If you’re going to sweat, carry a small something with which to dry off. You’ll feel better! Simple solution! Seriously, this was one of those super self-evident things that I kind of smacked myself in the head about because OF COURSE.

6. If possible, turn off the lights, especially between 1 and 4 when the sun and heat are at their worst. This might not work in your office, but, hey, people might go for it! Stay inside, if you can, during that span of time as well. It’s not the time to go out and do your heavy chores. Frankly, I’d declare that siesta time if I could when the weather gets like this. It’s really pleasant to take a nice nap when the inside is nice and dark and cool and the outside is bright and hot. In lieu of a nap, just take it easier and stay hydrated during those hours. Also, if you ARE outside, be extra vigilant about the sunscreen and hydration. I’m not sure how much it applies the further north you go, but here, especially during those hours, it doesn’t matter if it is cloudy, you can still get sunburned. And heatstroke is always an issue, cloudcover or no. Protect yourself during the height of the day’s heat.

7. Wear fabrics that breathe. This does not just mean natural fabrics – I actually hate linen in the summer because it crumples up and wrinkles like mad in the humidity. And some man-made fabrics do a really good job of keeping heat at bay and keeping air flowing. Find what works for you and wear it – whether that means shorts or dresses or whatevers. I would say avoid tight things – the more constricted you are, the sweatier you are going to be and the more uncomfortable. But clothing and comfort is so individual that, really, you just have to experiment. I wear a lot of jeans during the summer because the length of the jeans don’t bother me. Jeans are more comfortable than shorts because shorts ride up in unpleasant ways. Work it out and go with it.

8. Eat summery foods! When it is super hot out, fruit can be a serious pick me up. And dishes that don’t come to you steaming hot can also make a difference in your comfort level. I tend to favor a lot of noodle dishes in the extreme heat. Noodles don’t sit heavy in my stomach which keeps me from feeling sick when I have to go outside. Remember, you can freeze a lot of fruit, too, and cool off a little bit that way. If you don’t like fruit, that’s okay, too. Popsicles are not just for kids! (Nor are pudding pops, I’d like to point out.)

9. Change your clothes. Even just some of your clothes. If you know you’re going to be sweatsoaked by lunch time, take a change of underwear with you. Clean undergarments, including socks, can make you feel like you’re wearing a whole new outfit. But if you need a whole new outfit to feel comfortable, bring a whole new outfit. It is okay to change when you get home or at some point during the day. I’d say, if you have to wear pantyhose, 100% change those suckers during the day at work. Nothing traps heat and moisture like pantyhose, man.

10. Create opportunities to cool down. If you are inside, this can be as simple as putting a bowl of ice in front of a fan. (You might be surprised by how well this can cool an area.) If you are outside, it can mean taking rest breaks far more often than you think you need them. The military has work tables that show how long people can work in varying temps under varying conditions wearing varying gear. You might be surprised how quickly it can turn into working 20 minutes and resting 40 minutes. Don’t have unreasonable expectations for yourself when it’s this freaking hot, okay? Take a cool shower just to cool off. Suck on an ice cube. Drink a cool beverage. Stick your feet under cool running water (you lose a lot of heat through your feet, your hands, and your head – cool these and you’ll help cool the rest of your body) or your wrists under the cold faucet. Sit in the shade.

You might not be able to entirely prevent periods of discomfort, but you can make the rest of your day a lot more pleasant. Keep in mind, too, the heat can be actively dangerous for small children, the elderly, and small animals.

Signs of heat exhaustion include: nausea, vomiting, fatique, weakness, headache, muscle cramps, and dizziness. If you are experiencing heat exhaustion or are with someone who is, find a cool and shady area – get out of the sun and heat. COOL OFF. Heat exhaustion is less severe than heat stroke but can quickly progress to heat stroke. Stave it off by bring down your body temp (or the temp of the person suffering from it). Take it seriously.

Signs of heat stroke include: high body temp, the absence of sweating, flushed hot skin, rapid pulse, difficulty breathing, strange behavior, confusion, hallucinations, agitation, disorientation, seizure, and coma. Obviously, heat stroke is a BIG DEAL. If you think you or someone else is experiencing heat stroke, get out of the sun. Call emergency services – this is not optional, y’all – heat stroke can kill. Call emergency services as soon as possible. While you wait, find a place to cool off. Remove clothing if possible. Bath skin in tepid or cool water – NOT cold. Fan yourself or the person suffering. Use ice packs if you have them, under the armpits and on the groin. (Be sure to wrap the ice packs as the shock of frozen ice packs can damage skin tissue.) Moniter body temp – people suffering from heat stroke can have temps as high as 106 degrees! This is not healthy. Continue efforts and try to bring it down to at least 101. Keep these efforts up until emergency services arrive. Don’t fuck around with heat stroke, okay?

People are comfortable in the heat to varying degrees but hopefully these tips can help make it easier for everyone to survive in comfort and with less anxiety about being fat and sweaty. Thin people are struggling, too. It’s hot, y’all! That isn’t your body’s fault. Take care of you out there.

ETA: Also, while we’re on the subject, never EVER leave your animal or a small child in a locked car in the summer. I don’t care how fast you think you’ll be. The temperature inside a car can climb by 7 degrees inside 5 minutes. If it’s already 100 degrees out, well, you do the math. And then keep doing the math because the temp can climb 13 degrees in 10 minutes, and 30 degrees in 30 minutes. It can climb faster but these are the conservative table numbers in use at the moment. You might think you’re just running in for a quick, I don’t know, Slurpee or something, but it’s really not worth the risk. Cracking a sliver of window doesn’t help as much as you think it does. A car – BIG METAL BOX – can heat to over a hundred degrees faster than oven. Keep that in mind.

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It’s ridiculous and I am losing patience with myself.

See, I’m a first-class won’t-let-myself-have-what-I-want window shopper. This is a learned behavior.

I trace the genesis of it back to “you can have it when you lose weight.” It’s a common motivational strategy and I 100% believe it usually comes from a place of love. After all, it’s positive reinforcement! If you do x, you get nice thing y!

The breakdown, of course, is that dieting is a sucker bet, especially for still-developing bodies.

But I remember, with exquisite clarity, scouring the pages of the JC Penny catalog, looking at the clothes – not so much the straight sizes as the young plus. I was a pre-teen (and I continued this when I was in high school) and I was, in the extreme unadmitted privacy of my own head, seriously into clothes. The problem was that I wasn’t losing weight so I had no hope of actually GETTING the clothes. But I had the ability to dream and make lists so that was what I did.

I wrote down pages, sizes, colors – all the info as if I were actually going to be ordering those garments for my body-as-it-was. Everytime there was a new catalog, I poured over it. Often, I did this while laying on my stomach on the living room floor of my grandparents and I spent special time going over the Christmas catalog.

This is, I shall note, the genesis of my extreme and irrational dislike of Keri Russell. She was in most of those catalogs and she just looked like someone who would say stupid things. Anyway, I wasn’t very into people at that point. And I still dislike her. I know, it’s irrational. I’m sure she’s a lovely person.

As an adult, when I was first on my own, I kept on fantasy shopping; this was in part the same old habit but it took on some special nuance. I fantasy shopped because my body didn’t deserve nice things, or so I was convinced. And I fantasy shopped because I was too broke to do the real thing.

I no longer made those kind of tragic lists of things I’d order if I magically came up with $400. At least not on actual paper. Those lists were in my head, though. And I still think, when the thought occurs to me, that the number one thing I’d do with a large sum of dedicated fun money is indulge in some new clothes.

But I know myself and here’s what would happen: I would have every INTENTION of spending fun money on clothes and then I’d be terrified I’d never have money again and not spend it on clothes because clothes are frivolous.

Yeah, it’s fun inside my head, people.

Anyway. Now it isn’t about me not being good enough to deserve clothes but the habit remains rooted there. If I never got that message, that clothes are a reward, what would my closet look like now? Would I have the orchid pink dress I keep looking at on eshakti like it’s a freaking holy grail of dresses?

What ifs are a dangerous game, of course – a slippery slope down which it is all too easy to fall and gain momentum. There’s no way of telling how I’d have turned out and there’s a chance I’d still be making lists and then not buying things because something in my crazy little brain enjoys the self-denial and self-torment. I don’t even know.

But that’s one of the things I hope we can weed out through Fat Acceptance, the idea that fat people, even and especially young fat people, don’t deserve nice clothes. It’s a load of bullshit all on its own, of course, but it also breeds all sorts of disfunctional relationships with clothing.

With clothing! How ridiculous is that? So ridiculous I sometimes want to cry about how not at all ridiculous it is.