Supersize versus Superskinny: A Spiral of Shame

Readers, I’m sorry.  My mind has gone dull and I’m totally ashamed.  I blame it on Lady Gaga.  A week or so ago, she announced to the world that she has endured a lifelong struggle with anorexia and bulimia.  At the time of her great announcement, it was evening and the Boatman was working late.  Instead of following  James Altucher’s Seven Habits for Highly Effective Mediocre People, I made the evolved decision of going on Facebook.  There I learned that in response to someone calling her fat, Lady Gaga launched a movement called “Body Revolution.”  

Lady Gaga poses for “Body Revolution.”

Lady Gaga’s movement is a forum on Lady Gaga’s webpage meant to promote body acceptance.  People post photos and stories about their struggles to adopt a positive body image, be they due to eating disorders, illnesses, disabilities, or whatever reason.  Clicking away I travelled from one article about Lady Gaga to another.  Miraculously, my psyche remained undamaged despite the fact that Lady Gaga is 26 years old just like me and like Kiera Knightley (also my age), she has accumulated heaps more fame and success than me and my sad blog and self-help book. 
 
In case you forgot, the moral of the heartbreaking I-wish-I-was-kiera-knightley story was:
 
We all have high vaginas.  Me, you, Kiera, Knightley, Lady Gaga.  Everybody.
 
Here’ s my High Vagina.  Again.  



Me and my High Vagina at the Boatman's mother's cottage

But a twist of fate occurred when I came across the site, “Healthy is the new skinny.”  Like Lady Gaga’s cause, this site also promotes positive body image.  It also seems to advocate for realistic and healthy models in the media.  Wonderful. I’m all about this.  Healthy is the new skinny has a section of videos from Youtube and beyond.  Some of them feature people sharing their own journey towards body acceptance.  Others contain different news stories about disturbing diets, stereotypes and the fact that if Barbie a real person, with her disproportionate body, she’d suffer horrendous back pain and be hard-pressed to walk.  I like this sort of thing, so I kept scrolling down and clicking.

Then I came across a British reality television show called

“Supersize vs Superskinny.”  The whole thing’s on Youtube.
 
As the title suggests, the show profiles a “diet swap”  between one morbidly obese person and a waif-like, usually eating disordered person.  For five days, the large person will eat the emaciated person’s measly diet, while the poor person who’s used to eating nothing has to stuff his or her face with the multi-caloried mountains of food that the big eater consumes every day.

As someone who used to have a litany of food rules and restrictive habits, I find the diet swaps to be a bit unlikely.  Most of the time, the participants change their ways far more quickly and amicably than is realistic.  After five days, almost all of the superskinnies are putting dents in the piles of the supersize’s feasts.  And just about every time, the supersized participants make peace with their meagre portions, and end up leaving something on their plates.

Apparently a lack of sound, realistic journalism isn’t that important to me.  I didn’t count how many episodes I’ve watched, but I made it to approximately season five, where the outcomes of the diet swaps become slightly more realistic.  I know way too much about this show.  I’ve watched it way too many times.

Between meals, other journalists examine different diet and weight related issues.  For one season, a reporter tries out all sorts of fad diets.  On a couple others, they follow a group of anorexic and bulimic patients.  Season five, if you’re interested, does a bit of both.  The doctor on the show travels to Evansville, Indiana, apparently the fattest city in the United States.  In Evansville, they have ambulances that can carry a 1400 person.  So far most people max out around 800 or 900 pounds.  But still.  Oof.

 This guy would need an enormous ambulance to move him which must make him feel terrible.

Seriously, these people have wounds from surgery that won’t heal because they’re covered in fat.  They have to get someone else to help them shower, or wipe their asses. 

I can’t believe I’ve watched this show more than once. Surely once would be enough.  But no, I can’t stop.  I know I shouldn’t look, but I can’t look away.  It’s a big fat binge. 

Although I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this, if I were you, I’d avoid this show.  My obsession with it has caused me great shame.  I wish that I could say something profound and meaningful about obesity and eating disorders and the world’s ridiculous obsession with food and weight, but after so many hours watching these youtube clips, I’m consumed with lethargy and self-loathing. 

Now it’s time to go teach a core strength yoga class. Let’s hope that my students work very hard, igniting the fire deep within their lower stomach so that I may vicariously burn away this spiral of shame.

The End.

Me being skinny in India. Kerala, 2016.
India is the best diet. Or the worst.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Tell Me I'm Fat, by This American Life

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Day 69 of Not Puking in Your Mouth
The Benefits of an Ashtanga Yoga Practice, Part Two
 

 

My Eternal Tits

I have no boobs or retail experience, and I just dropped off my resumé at a Bra Fitting store.  This is probably a lost cause, but it does provide an excellent segue into the excellent story about my excellent tits. 

My Small Breasts used to be my Designated Issue.  Designated Issues are large or small matters whose resolution you designate to be the cure of your existence. 

For example, I used to think that my life would be considerably more manageable if I found an effective eradication of Pubic Hair that wasn’t too expensive and didn’t leave hideous red welts in awkward places around my crotch. 

I had a similar attitude about getting bigger boobs.  By the time I was thirteen, my Small Breasts became an immense concern of mine, accompanied with considerable dangers.  The first main danger was that if you are afflicted with a tiny flat rack, your stomach could only get to be a certain size before it started to stick out further than your boobs.  My fourteen-year-old mind, feared that this would be both hideous and tragic.   Actually, I’m pretty sure this fear began as early as age nine.  I remember taking on an unreasonable regimen of  crunches and abdominal exercises and an unreasonably young age.  When I turned thirteen and started lifting weights with the swim team, I refused to do the bench press, convinced that it would stunt my growth.  Well, apparently there was not much growth to stunt.  Despite refraining from the bench press, my boobs never expanded to fill more than a junior sized bra, available at LaSenza girl.

These are not my boobs. Mine are smaller.
  

Alas.  Although my abdomen never ended up protruding beyond my tiny tits, the terror that one day it would prevailed.  So too did my terror of a second breast-related danger.  This one had to do with what I call the “bum-to-breast ratio.”  According to my pubescent theory, the size of your butt had to be intimately in harmony with the size of your boobs.  Thus, if you butt grew, then your boobs needed to grow too.  In contrast, if your boobs failed to blossom, then your butt had best remain the same size.  I think it was around my development of this theory that I began squeezing my ass compulsively and repeatedly wherever I went.  At school, in the movie theatre, and during band practice.  Figured it burned extra calories and provided damage control for my ratio.  Looking back years later, I wouldn’t recommend this.  A tight ass is hard thing to cure and I’m not sure my ratio ever benefited much from the ass-clenching...

Still, I remained faithful to my ass-clenching and abdominal crunching for a number of years. Just shy of eighteen, and armed with Baby LaSenza padded bras, I entered first-year university in Montréal.  I’d barely had a boyfriend since kindergarten, and I felt certain that my tits were the reason.  One day, at a residence party, in a moment of uncharacteristic oversharing, I bemoaned my sad fate to the girl beside me.  She was relatively well-endowed, with an excellent bum-to-breast ratio. 

“Oh don’t worry,” she reassured me.  “My boobs used to be small too.  I just went up two cup sizes.”

I looked at her dubiously.  “What’s your secret?” I asked. 

Generously, she revealed it.  Five cups of 2% milk.  Every day.  More than a bag of that shit.

Well folks, I went for it, trudging to the grocery store every two and half days to buy four litre bags of the fatty white liquid.  I guzzled a hefty glass at every meal and snack.  All the liquid was terrible for my weird rumination syndrome eating disorder, which involved stomach contents travelling up and down my esophagus for up to an hour after I ate.  Still, I rarely fully expelled anything, and so I figured all of the two-percent goodness was making it into my boobs. 

A couple months later, it still wasn’t time to throw away my Baby LaSenza Bras.  All my ratios were the same size, but for some reason, I was so tired, I could hardly function.  Although I mostly slept a solid eight hours at night, I would regularly fall asleep in the afternoon, wake two hours later and wonder what happened.  I was less active than I’d been in my whole life, and ten times more tired. 
I went to the doctor who ordered a blood test.  She called me back, surprised I was able to pick up the phone.  Minimum iron levels for women are supposedly 12.0.  14.0 is better.  My hemoglobin was at 6.  I was severely anemic.  The doctor suggested I go to a dietician.  I showed the dietician what I was eating. 

“Why so much dairy?” she asked.

“To make my boobs grow,” I replied with great conviction.

I guess that the calcium in dairy can bind with something or other and prevent your body from  absorbing iron.  And the only way I could get my boobs to grow would be to a considerable amount of weight everywhere, which would put all my ratios at risk. 

I was left with no option but to un-designate the issue.  I surrendered.   My boobs were my boobs.

For a couple more years, I continued to wear my padded Baby LaSenza Bras, and by my some miracle, I ended up with my first boyfriend.  He called my boobs “very nice”  thoroughly agreeing with his grandfather who had always claimed that what mattered was shape, and not size.  God bless grandfathers.  Plus he said that it was unlikely that my boobs would ever sag.  I would defy gravity forever. 

Essentially, my tits were eternal.

I was twenty when I left my last padded Baby LaSenza Bra at the apartment of a man named Charlie.  (Don’t worry, mom, I would never ever have sex with a stranger.)  But the bra was removed and Charlie had the chance to say, “You have beautiful breasts.”   

34 F. Not for me.

The bra I'd worn that night had cost 50 bucks.  It had “hydralife insertions,” and was a slightly paler shade of turquoise than the margueritas I’d consumed that evening at the party where Charlie and I were acquainted. 

I escaped Charlie's apartment the next morning without saying good-bye, and without the bra.  I never went back for it.  I didn’t need it anymore. Apparently all you need is a handful. 

The End.

Perhaps now my Designated Issue is my pelvis: Twitter @mypelvicfloor!

And the fact that I want one million facebook Fans:  Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook.

And that I want one million people to buy my book. 
 
Peanut Butter, Pubic Hair
Keira Knightley's High Vagina
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part Two