On the process of exercising our own voices

"...[T]he same thing happened to me that has happened to many other women who've set out initially to recover lost and silenced feminine voices. Too constrained or timid or plain bewildered to speak for ourselves, unready, perhaps, to open certain doors in our own consciousness, we take the part of another...and break her silence. It might be our mother or grandmother, a woman of our own ethnic background or religious tradition, or one who has undergone a significant experience that we have, too, like illness, divorce, conversion, or exile. We choose our alter egos carefully and practice ventriloquism under the guise of scholarship or journalism, and eventually, often before we realize what's happening, we've begun to exercise our own voices."

– Carol Lee Flinders
At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst

This rings true for me. For you?

I thought first of Faith's recent post on sexual harassment and fear, because she expresses anger on behalf of her younger sister in it — though I don't want to impose Carol Lee Flinders' analysis on her.

The incident that comes to mind from my own life: the sadness and anger I felt when I overheard my younger cousins assessing their bodies with the most ancient-sounding of sighs. Before I could recognize my own eating disorder as outrageous and grievous, before I could want health and peace for myself, I had to want it for them. And so I spoke about them, and a year later was ready to repeat my sentiments on my own behalf as well.

It is beautiful and right to become angry for others and advocate for them. And it is most beautiful and most right when it reminds us to expect and demand no less for ourselves — because it is consistent, because justice belongs to everyone, because we deserve no less than anyone else does. No less.

The next time you eat something sweet, fatty, or high-calorie...

1.
I saw a sign at Panera that say, "Only [xxx] calories for the entire meal."

What an odd phrasing, I thought. I wrote it down.

I recently saw the exact same formulation in another food ad recently. Don't remember where.

It's how we normally talk about money, e.g. "Only $4 for the entire meal." The "for" indicates an exchange, that you must give up something in order to get and eat the food. And that's why it's weird.

You lose money when you buy something to eat. But do you lose calories when you eat it? Of course not. You get calories when you eat something. Calories are not the cost of eating; calories are the core benefit of eating. The calories are what you're paying for.

2.
There were a couple times at college where I was concerned about money. That was a new thing for middle-class white USian, mostly-supported-by-her-parents me. And a revelatory experience for my relationship with food.

I remember walking through the grocery store, laughing at the 100-calorie packs — no thanks, I'd prefer a snack that doesn't leave my stomach growling — and declining to go to the gym, because spare calories are a luxury, and calories are a gift with enjoy a few more hours of life! written on them, and because calories are awesome and I'm grateful for them.

3.
I would like to do an inventory of a supermarket. Measure the cost/calorie of each item, and then compare the marketing across different cost/calorie levels.

4.
Those of us with the means to be well-fed act as though "post-calories" comes along with "post-industrial." But calories are energy. We'll never be post-calories. Not even the diet industry's best successes at creating anti-fat panic can change that. Humans need a given amount of calories, no matter how fat they are or how passionately they would like to be thinner. A low-calorie lunch means you'll need a higher-calorie snack or dinner, and exercising doesn't mean you "get" more calories to "spend" later; it means you need more calories.

5.
The next time someone or something tries to shame you for eating something sweet or fatty or higher-calorie,  let yourself be puzzled, because it is puzzling.

The human body knows how to find find equilibrium over the course of a few meals or a few days, so that you get just the right amount of calories for you. Do they not understand that? Or do they think that shame can lower a human's basal metabolic rate?

The next time you eat something sweet and fatty, remember why it tastes so delicious. It tastes delicious because it is the assurance that you will continue getting to be alive. And that is something for your body to be happy about.

Food and time

I wrote on Wednesday:

I've thrown so much time away simply because I thought it wasn't mine — time when I was "supposed" to be doing other things. Why is it a rule that when you're procrastinating, you have to be numbing your brain, bouncing around from website to website or similar? It's not. It's stupid. It results in nothing worth remembering, and it's not even enjoyable.

and I wanted to elaborate on that and connect it with eating as Sui did in her comment.

In Intuitive Eating the authors mention several adolescent clients who had gotten into the habit of overeating after school because as long as they were eating, their parents didn't make them do homework. In other words, their right to nourishment was acknowledged, but not their right to leisure time, and the result was that they tried to suppress one need by oversatisfying another.

I've realized that I can fall into a similar trap. When I'm willing to acknowledge my need for, say, an internet break "just to check my email" (ahem) but not my need to do something ACTUALLY enjoyable, like have tea with a friend, or ride my bike, or do some pleasure reading — then I overdo the internet surfing in an attempt to satisfy my chocolate craving with rice cakes. Falling into the black hole that is the internet can take longer than a real break would have, and it's way less satisfying.

I think this also has to do with the fact that I can avoid some of the responsibility for "procrastinating" by blaming the internet's addictive and time-warping qualities. (One earth hour = sixteen internet minutes, to quote my high school government teacher.)

And yet all that's needed to make taking that responsibility less dreadnacious is to accept that taking breaks is allowed — yes, even long unscheduled ones — and that I don't have to guilt-trip myself by labeling them "procrastination." That it really is okay to set aside a paper in order to go for a bike ride. (Appeal to pragmatic side: After all, if that's what I'm craving, then that's probably what will best refresh me and and re-energize me for more paper-writing later.)

Back to the food. I'd like to propose an analogy:

Unrealistic dedication to productivity is to wasting time as dieting is to overeating.

And what is the way out? Intuitive living, something like intuitive eating but bigger? Are there thoughts as trustworthy as the body's hungers?

I think so. I'm experimenting.

Read in October 2011

1. Fox Poems, 1998-2000, by Adrienne Rich
Not my favorite of hers.

2. Rose, by Li-Young Lee
Poetry. Romantic and image-driven. I posted a section from the long title poem.

3. Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
I absolutely love their approach to recovering from the diet mentality (which I'd say almost every US American has, apart from actual dieting). Essentially, it's about re-learning to eat the way that we were born knowing how to: eating what our body wants when we're hungry and stopping when we've had enough. The book outlines their core principles (which are smart and kind and utterly sustainable) and the process of becoming an intuitive eater.

4. The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis
Dense with insights. I could definitely read this again. Exposition on four categories of love — affection, friendship, romance, and charity — and what they show us about God, as well as the particular opportunities in each for idolatry. Anytime he mentions gender, he tends to say something misogynistic, though.

5. Riptide: Struggling with and Resurfacing from a Daughter's Eating Disorder, by Barbara Hale-Seubert
I had a lot to say about this book, so it'll get its own post soon.

6. The Beautiful Between, by Alyssa B. Sheinmel
YA, set in a Manhattan high school. Not terribly memorable, but written with heart.

Read in September 2011

1. Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin
The political implications of intercourse from a radical feminist perspective. The first half of the book examines different (male) authors' views of sex; the second is all her. Quite a fiery analysis, quite absorbing. It made me despair at times of the male sex, but it's not really fair to count that against it.

2. The Weather of the Heart, by Madeleine L'Engle
I've posted two poems from this book before, here and here. Her spiritual musings are highly intellectual/her intellectual musings are highly spiritual; and she has a naturally lyrical voice.

3. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
Like a literary lovechild of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë. Such lovely prose...not flowery, but beautiful, to fit the elegance of life at a seaside manor in 1920s England. Very period-atmospheric, and sort of nouveau-Gothic.

4. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977, by Adrienne Rich
I like pretty much all her writings, but I love her seventies/eighties work. Lesbian feminist thought/poetry at its glorious and incisive best.

5. The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin
Funky retro satire-thriller slash conspiracy novel...contemporary to the second-wave feminist movement and mostly just amusing, but the penultimate scene was a bit too real to be funny. I read it in about an hour and a half (unfortunately, because I had chosen it for a five-hour flight...).

6. Goodbye Ed, Hello Me: Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with Life, by Jenni Schaefer
Quite conversational (a bajillion short chapters) without being light on content. Made me realize that there are still aspects of the ED/diet mentality in my brain/life that I hadn't recognized as such and was still tolerating. That's not discouraging, though — what's discouraging is thinking that a sometimes-mediocre recovery is as good as it gets.

7. Trickster's Queen, by Tamora Pierce
A favorite fantasy author from my childhood, i.e. always good.

8. love belongs to those who do the feeling, by Judy Grahn
More lesbian-feminist poems from another second-waver, yes. (I've been utterly absorbed by the questions and ideas of the seventies this summer.) Very spell-like, influenced by myth and ideas of ritual. Her work was recommended to me by the two Canadian sisters.

Answers

(to questions submitted via The Box. if you find a question interesting, drop me a comment with your own answer. I'd enjoy reading it.)

how do you trust?
how? if you believe it's worth it but it doesn't come easily, I think you have to just muscle past your doubts and pretend to yourself that you do trust whoever it is...act as though you have the feeling of trust and security, until you actually do. this is something I am working on.

What song could you listen to over and over without getting annoyed?
"To the Lighthouse" and "Signs" are the two songs I can (and do) listen to on repeat literally for hours. my trance songs.

Hey, hope I'm not disturbing you but you left a quote in one of your comments before and it really rang true with me. I believe it was "women called beautiful because they threaten no one but themselves" I really wanted to write an opinion article about it for my women's studies class, but I need to know the source of the quote to do so. Could you please let me know where this quote came from? I'd really love to look deeper into the meaning of it. Hope I don't creep you out or anything! ;) Thanks so much!

That was a paraphrase from memory. The exact quote in context:

"I had been willing to accept self-sabotage, but now I refused to sacrifice myself to a society that profited from my pain. I finally understood that my eating disorder symbolized more than personal psychodynamic trauma. Gazing in the mirror at my emaciated body, I observed a woman held up to her culture as the physical ideal because she was starving, self-obsessed and powerless, a woman called beautiful because she threatened no one except herself."

It's from an essay called "The Body Politic," by Abra Fortune Chernik, which I read in an anthology called Listen Up. I would love to hear your thoughts...I think you should email me if you have time. :) [wie.ein.lied at gmail.com]

Who knows what she would do?

"What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do? She might rip her stockings and slam-dance on a forged ID to the Pogues, and walk home barefoot, holding her shoes, alone at dawn; she might baby-sit in a battered-women's shelter one night a month; she might skateboard down Lombard Street with its seven hairpin turns, or fall in love with her best friend and do something about it, or lose herself for hours gazing into test tubes with her hair a mess, or  climb a promontory with the girls and get drunk at the top, or sit down when the Pledge of Allegiance says stand, or hop a freight train, or take lovers without telling her last name, or run away to sea. She might revel in all the freedoms that seem so trivial to those who could take them for granted; she might dream seriously the dreams that seem so obvious to those who grew up with them really available. Who knows what she would do? Who knows what it would feel like?"

- Naomi Wolf
in The Beauty Myth

The details will be your own, but the joy and defiant freedom that I wish for us are exactly as voracious as this.

NaPoWriMo revision

Wading out into a great tree's shadow
and its conversation of angles, the sun's billion-mile speech
to tree, whose reply printed on earth
this needle-done reply, touches also me
kicking its lace around my ankles:
you remember that
these wrists are same shadows, dark blood-
branches of your own April-pale person

I wonder if I could feel the raveling patterns under my skin
and do they graze the tree's when I stand here, fall into any accordance?
(as if I could be picked apart by robins'
feet. as if I couldn't be.)

When everything is stirring into life like this,
it's hard to prefer other. I could be hungry
and still, mays mights mustn'ts of grass stamped
onto my thighs,
I could be my own
hopeful pretentious self unfolding here
beneath these trees.

Being beneath these trees, blue under my skin,
sun over my skin, the thin lines of ink bleeding
from the letters you left across the back of my hand:
Mourned English subjunctive, cast my eyes
back onto this earth.

What I know about eating at college

[vegetarian meatballs=love]

I have had a request, from an incoming freshman who has heard too many horror stories about the Freshman Fifteen*, for a post on how to eat well while at college—i.e., while living in a dormitory and on a dining hall meal plan.

Here is what I know about general good eating.

"The best way to nourish your body is not by a) counting calories b) adopting a diet c) depriving yourself of dessert or any other foods. It's to listen to your body’s internal cues, and respond as best as you can."
-[weightless]

One. You can listen to your body and give it what it wants; it knows when you're hungry, restless, full, or tired. Eat what will satisfy you when you're hungry, stop when you're full, sleep when you're tired, get out of your room and exercise when you're restless.

The body (clever thing) hasn't been conditioned the way our heads have been to think in terms of good foods and bad foods, diets and rules and plans and wagons, guilt and "self-control." It still knows what it needs and how it works. And shockingly, the way it wants things will generally keep your weight stable.

Two. If you strive to pay attention to what you're eating, you will enjoy your food more, notice when you get full, and be more aware of what will satisfy your body.

Three. Three regular meals plus snacks is the Best Way. Eating frequently in smaller amounts does wonders for keeping your mood, metabolism, and energy stable and your appetite under control.

Four. Restricting what you eat confuses your appetite and metabolism. Even if you overeat at one meal, it's best not to attempt to compensate at the next meal, or at your next workout. We don't give much credit to moderation and regularity in eating, but they work extremely well. (Imagine that!)

Oh, and? No offense, but dieting is a rubbish idea. It's crap for your health and crap for weight loss.

Five. Being thirsty can make you feel hungrier, but eating obviously doesn't make you feel less thirsty, so keeping well hydrated helps keep you from overeating without meaning to.

Six. Not every meal has to be perfectly rounded, but if you stay slightly conscious of what you've been putting in your body, you can adjust accordingly for any deficit at your next snack or meal. E.g.: If you feel like you've been low on protein, have a hard-boiled egg or some roasted chickpeas at your next study break. If you're feeling sluggish and you realize you have been subsisting primarily on carbs for the past couple days, tacking a salad onto your next meal will probably be a help.

I highly recommend reading "What is Intuitive Eating?" and this interview about beginning to adopt intuitive eating principles.

And what's different at college? 

The dining hall where you'll be having many of your meals might be buffet-style.
This is where intuitive, mindful eating comes in. Overeating ceases to be a worry if you listen to your body. Your stomach doesn't want to be stuffed; it's either previous calorie restriction or emotional factors that make people overeat.

You have to choose your own snacks and keep them in your bedroom.
Hopefully your residence hall does have a kitchen where you can cook if you're so inclined, but the bedroom-snacks thing can make it easier to eat out of stress or boredom. Again, work on becoming a mindful eater, and be thoughtful about how the snacks you keep around will fit in with your dining hall meals. For example, when I'm at school the snack foods that I keep in my room are things like dried fruit, yogurt, almonds and roasted chickpeas, and not because I don't like sweets or carby things. Rather, it's because fruit and vegetarian protein are the things that my dining hall doesn't offer as much of, whereas it's pretty good at doing desserts, fresh breads, and cooked vegetables

But the dining hall doesn't provide all of your meals, most likely.
Some people are used to cooking when they leave for college; others not so much. For the meals you have to prepare for yourself, you kind of just have to figure out what's doable and affordable for you. Of course there's a ton of almost-prepared food to choose from in the supermarket (canned soup, freezer food, sliced bread and peanut butter and jelly, etc.), and sometimes that's all it feels like you have time for. For when you can dedicate a little more time to those meals, though, why not copy some of the simpler recipes your family uses? Or take a look in this free e-cookbook? You'd have to get some less-basic ingredients, but it promises that each of its recipes requires a max of 5 ingredients and 10 minutes to prepare.

You may will start staying up ridiculously late, if you don't already.
There's nothing wrong with being a night owl (I love the late hours) and there's nothing wrong with eating at night, but 1) sleep deprivation can mess with your appetite, and 2) the quantities you eat should ideally taper off before you go to sleep. I think nights are when it's easiest to overeat. Probably the best safeguard against this is, as always, remembering to take notice of how hungry your stomach actually is: just because it's been six hours since your last meal and someone's ordering a pizza, that doesn't necessarily mean you're hungry for another full meal, especially if you've just been sitting at your desk. I tend to drink a lot of hot tea when I stay up late; it's good for when your mouth is hungry but your stomach isn't.

Accordingly, if your class schedule allows, you may be waking up at lunch time. 
That's rather tricky. What I've found works best for me when I sleep in like that is to eat something small as soon as I wake up, and then wait until I'm feeling normal meal-type hunger signals (n.b. not the same as hunger pangs!) for my first meal. After that, proceed as normal, i.e. snack when hungry and have a meal sometime in the evening or late afternoon. I insist on having that morsel upon waking because I know it's not that I haven't gotten hungry; it's just that I slept through the hunger! Bottom line, the body still needs fuel to start the day, even if you don't feel like it and no matter what time it is.

Anything I haven't covered? Any advice of your own?

*which, it turns out, may be closer to the Freshman Five

Been reading

I wanted to share this definition of normal eating which I read in two different places recently:

Normal eating is being able to eat when you are hungry and continue eating until you are satisfied....It is leaving some cookies on the plate because you know you can have some again tomorrow, or it is eating more now because they taste so wonderful when they are fresh. Normal eating is overeating at times: feeling stuffed and uncomfortable. It is also undereating at times and wishing you had more. Normal eating is trusting your body to make up for your mistakes in eating. Normal eating takes up some of your time and attention, but keeps its place as only one important area of your life. In short, normal eating is flexible. It varies in response to your emotions, your schedule, your hunger, and your proximity to food.

That's from Ellyn Satter, a dietician and therapist. I know some dietary restrictions aren't always a matter of choice; some people for moral or medical reasons do have to give a lot more time and attention to their eating. But I like what she says. It sounds counter-intuitive after the decades of rubbish that diet culture has taught us, but it used to be intuitive and can be again.

Good medicine

I thought I'd compile a list of my favorite places to find people who are talking about body image, eating disorder recovery, etc.

Internet fiend that I am, I could hardly ignore the interwebs as a potential source of good body-image medicine for myself, and having done the finding, why not share?

Also stuck a few favorite relevant books on at the end.

If you know of something that should be on this list but isn't, please drop me a comment!

Body image:

• Already Pretty
• Operation Beautiful
• REVOLUTION OF REAL WOMEN flickr pool
• rvxn
• Sociological Images 
• Weightless 
• You Are Remarkable

Eating disorder recovery:

• ED Bites
• Men Get Eating Disorders Too
• rvxn
• The Support Letter
• Voice in Recovery  
• Weightless

Recovery support: 

• MentorCONNECT: mentorship and moderated forums for eating disorder recovery
• We Bite Back: "post-pro-ana" site and forum

Blog posts:

• Empty Bellies Do Not Beget Genius 
• How Do You Embrace & Celebrate Your Body? 
• How To Practice Major Mega Supreme Body Love...Daily!
• It's All Good. No, Really. *All* of It. 
• How to Survive a Case of The Uglies 
• Another Reminder 

Books:

• 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food, by Susan Albers
• Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch 
• North of Beautiful, by Justina Chen Headley
• Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott
• The Beauty Myth, by  Naomi Wolf
• The Good Body, by Eve Ensler 
• Life Inside the "Thin" Cage, by Constance Rhodes
• The Diet Survivor's Handbook, by Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel
• Shannon Cutts' list of nonfiction recovery books
• Sui's list of 8 books to transform your body image and eating

And on Twitter, my list of recovery/body image tweeters.

Your surrender is significant

To my fellow females:

For every one of you who capitulates to unfair standards of beauty, it is THAT MUCH HARDER for the rest of us to resist.

When you deny yourself food when you are hungry, when you call yourself names, when you spend way too much money on clothing and makeup, when you let yourself feel guilty for eating dessert, when you spend more time and money than you can afford to on bringing your appearance into line with The Man's dictates, IT AFFECTS US TOO.

It affects me. It affects my friends. It affects my younger sister and my little cousins.

Stop judging your worth by your appearance, like you're some collector's doll or a show dog. Stop doing things that you think are stupid just because it's culturally mandated. Stop accepting standards of beauty without asking where they come from, what they signify, what you think of them. Stop, stop, stop.

Don't you see, this heaviness you feel, we all feel it and for us part of the heaviness is what you have added by complying? And yes, some of your heaviness is my fault. It belongs to me too.

Your compliance is significant. Your surrender carries weight. Your capitulation is not just personal.

I am angry, yes. At myself too. (I promise there's never an imperative statement or word of advice on this blog that I don't write for myself as well as for you.)

I'm going to keep saying no to all this bullshit, even when it hurts and it's really tiring. I'm going to look my reflection in the eye even when it's all wrong, and I'm not going to say that I FEEL FAT like "fat" is an actual emotion. I'm not going to idolize sick women while calling myself a feminist. I'm going to eat as much as I need and I'm going to keep it down, and I'm going to do what I want to do even when I'm not confident in my appearance.

I don't want to come off like I'm saying I'm a saint, somehow stronger than all this and above all this. Frankly, some days I feel like I cannot deal with myself and these pressures, and please, I still struggle with disordered eating to an extent; I know what poison is like.

But I need this defiance even more. I need to know that I am not making this society any more oppressive for those of us born with two X chromosomes.

And you see, the flip side is this: if your surrender means something, then your defiance means even more.

Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal ... therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety ... As soon as the alternative appears, it threatens the very existence of appearance and living a lie in terms of what they are, both their essence and their all-inclusiveness. And at the same time, it is utterly unimportant how large a space this alternative occupies: its power does not consist in its physical attributes but in the light it casts on those pillars of the system and on its unstable foundations.

- Václav Havel

So if you decide to give the finger to The Man and his beauty culture, I'll be there with you. We can stand together and wave at the horizon and tell each other when we notice one of us starting to cave, and then help hold each other up. You won't be there alone. Promise.

love and defiance,

HOLLY.


eta: make sure you read the addendum to this post

Late-night rantings, an Inspirational Call to Action, all that good stuff

1. Isn't that a great face I'm making?

2. I have decided that for me, vlogging is going to be for when I just need to get things out. If I want to do drafts and be articulate, I'll write a normal post. Bah.