Paleo Pepper

The thing about living in society is that it makes us really good at constructing notions without ever being the wiser.  Both as individuals and as groups we have uncountable biases that shape the ways in which view the world.  Normally this is just…. normal.  We can’t really escape it.  We construct our worlds.  But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes harmful.   In fact, “sometimes” is a gross understatement.  It would take a million blogs to discuss all of them.  But today I think I can focus on a few of them.   What follows are both unconscious and (somewhat) conscious thoughts we have–specifically, unfounded socially constructed notions–that make us want to be skinny.   It’s hard to fight them.  But acknowledging them is half the battle.

—————————————————-

Why do we want to be thin?

Here are some common answers in order of what I think might be increasing acceptance:

Celebrities are doing it.

My friends are doing it.

Other people think I’m pretty.

I think I’m pretty.

Clothes fit me better.

I feel better.

I feel light.

I have more confidence.

It’s healthier.

———————————————————–

Okay.   Let’s analyze the list.

a)…Celebrities and friends are dumb.  I want to dismiss this point easily.  If I did every harmful thing other people do, I’d at the very least pass my afternoons snorting coke under my desk.  But—as in all things—it isn’t quite that simple.  With so many people in our lives looking and expecting certain things, it’s nearly impossible to not want to live up to them.   Having validation is so important for our psychologies.  For example: I longed for one friend of mine for years during college.  He told me he loved me, but not ‘in that way.’  Once I lost weight, he tripped over himself like an overeager bastard again trying to get my attention.  This shit is real.    Validation, especially based on our looks, is powerful.  Saying no to these impulses is, I think, really the hardest part of healthy eating and living.  What’s important to internalize is all that crap-which is true–about true love and true friends and how being a good person is more important than having good looks.  Yeah.  It’s the true stuff.  It’s just the hard stuff, too.

Another way to mitigate this issue, instead of just saying “fuck it” to validation and doing your best to value your personality against the external world telling you otherwise, is to instead surround yourself with the proper types of validation.  And the proper types of inspiration.  Don’t watch TV.  Don’t read magazines.  Don’t even go to the gym.  And don’t have shitty friends.  There are people and worlds out there that love and appreciate you for who you are.  There are.  So if you don’t have enough of them in your life, seek them out.  It’ll help.  Enormously.

b) “Other people think I’m prettier.”  This is very much related to the validation I was just talking about. Well, sometimes.   And “society” in general might like you thinner.  But time and time again people contact me through this website and tell me it’s ridiculous to think that men only like thin women.  And personally, anecdotally, just plenty of people don’t swear by that.  The thing is, as a culture, we can embrace ideas of “thinness” – but true sexiness and true sensuality occur absolutely 100 percent on a case by case basis.  Every individual is sexy in his or her own right, and no comparison can ever really dictate that.  Ever.

Which connects to a point I’ll make later.  “Confidence.”  YEAH.  Being skinny might make you confident.  But the thing is—this is the real reason you’re sexier now.  It has not one lick to do with being a size 25 rather than a size 26.  Fucking honestly.  What absolutely has to do with is your swagger.  I’m not going to elaborate on this.  Have swag, for god’s sake.  If you’ve don’t got it, fake it ‘til you make it.  SWAG.

c) “Clothes fit me better.”  It’s true.  When you’re little, everything “looks good on you.”  It’s easy to get dressed.  Nothing bunches or pulls in the wrong place.  It’s really a very liberating feeling, and one of my favorite parts of being thin.  The thing is—the only reason being larger sucks for clothes is that I’m always trying to hide things.  No no no, he can’t see my hip fat!  No I can’t let anyone know my thighs are actually that wide!  So I’d work hard to hide those things.  Fuck it!  Don’t hide them.  Be yourself.  Own it.  Love your hips.  Flaunt everything and cherish everything and obsess over hiding not a god damn thing.  No, I’m not saying you should always be naked or in unitards.  What I am saying is that clothes fitting you better thin is only a result of our culture trying to force you into a particular shape.  Fuck it!   Know what I’m going to say next?  Have SWAG.

d) “I feel better.”

Well, you might.  But—try and be more specific.  What do you mean by “better”?  I have a pretty good feeling it has to do with confidence.  The other thing it might have to do with is lightness.  Which is the cornerstone of today’s diatribe:

e) “I feel lighter.”  FUCK IT.  Tell me: why do you like feeling lighter?  Why does it feel so good to be lithe, to fold up real small, to feel like you might float away, or easily be packed away in a box?   This is a feeling I have always had.  I have always yearned for it, and once I achieved it, I loved it greatly.  On the inside, I always felt like I was a “little” person.  But WHY.  Why do I like it?

In part, I think I want to be little because it’s a surprise.  I’ve got a big personality, and when I meet people they often tell me they thought I was taller.  That’s nice, I guess.  It’s probably not the most important reasons.  One of those big reasons is this: being little means that bigger people can take care of me.  It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.  I am self sufficient in the most ridiculous way.  Sometimes, I like to fantasize about times in my life that I’ve been taken care of.  I imagine this as some person (man!) coming up and putting their arms around my whole person, being able to just enfold my worries away.  Our society, I think, encourages this in a similar way.  Women are supposed to be taken care of.  We are supposed to be little in this way.  We are supposed to be diminuitive.  This is why women rarely date men shorter than them, and vice versa.  No one wants to challenge that gender role.

The second reason is related: our society in many ways encourages the disappearance of women.  Women are supposed to be light, and to float away.  This kind of lightness encourages women to be in the background, to be thrown around.  No woman aspires to heaviness.  No woman aspires to solidity.  Why not?  Why don’t we aspire to be established, powerful, strong, big figures?  Because men are supposed to be those figures.  We are the light ones, the one’s that should be brushed aside.

What the fuck.

HEY.  I’ve got an idea.

With numbers, the lowest we can go is “zero.”  Zero is good.  Digits are bad.  And double digits…Double digits are like spending a weekend alone in a funhouse with The Situation, then having to go home and tell your grandmother about it.

And we give them crazy stupid labels.   Mostly: Regular, sometimes Petite, and Plus.

Where’s the minus?

I want a minus size!

Let’s add a Minus to the spectrum.  Maybe getting a bit of negative connotation down there to balance all the hating we do on “plus” will help us re-discover our appreciation of the middle sizes.

Here are some ‘plus’ size photos:

A la my recent post on the masculinization of the ideal female body, people seem to think I’m advocating that whole paleo muscled, shredded woman as beautiful.

I’m not.

I do think it’s sexy.  It’s why I worked so hard to achieve it.

But I think it’s overdone.  Strong does not = healthy.  Strong = strong.  Sated and energized and fertile = healthy.  This often means fat.  Fat in your chest, fat on your thighs, fat on your hips, maybe some fat on your abdomen.

Deal with it.

I refuse to hate my thighs.  You know– that’s why I had to get so skinny.  I couldn’t get that damn fat off of my thighs.   Fuck it.  I’m tired of hating my body for something that I did to it, and I’m tired of counseling women as thin as I am on how to stop obsessing over food when the most obvious answer is to eat more.   Yes, I think of course that disordered eating is still a problem.  I think emotional relationships with food occur at all weight levels.  I will always help and love you within the paradigm of your mindset and your goals.  Unconditionally.  But when your health is at stake, please please please please please consider all of the options.  Including this one: embrace fat.  Double zeroes are not ideal.  Threes are even not ideal.  What’s ideal is your body and comfort.  That I am certain is sexiest thing of all.

HEY.

What do you think the most beautiful female body looks like?

Is it like this?

Or like this?

Or most probably, especially in paleo circles, it looks like this:

(For more of these, see Crossfit Babes at Tumblr.   There are thousands.)

HOT.  These women have got breasts and hips and beautiful sets of abs.  They’re defined, and they’re strong, and that’s something that we value very highly.  And holy crap, that woman doing the one handed push up, I’ll have sex dreams about her for a week.

Many years ago, we thought that fat women were hot.  That was socialized.  Then we thought super-corseted, rounded women were hot.  That was socialized, too.  Then we got angry about masculine dominance of modern society, and we set out to claim as much equality as possible.   We’ve got female athletes.  We’ve got title IX.  We’ve got weight lifters.  Bad.  Ass.

People in the paleo community I think are especially attuned to this.  We are feminists.  We also believe in strength, rather than in being thin and supermodelly, such that I see at least one post a month in the paleosphere that advocates fit, strong, womanly hotness.

I am (was–this was me four months ago, not today) fit, strong, womanly hotness.

Yes, I cropped my face out of this photo.  No, I will not tell you how often I dress like this.

But I wonder: is this a socialized norm, too?

We are still constructing notions of beauty.  We are still putting different bodies on pedastals.  We can’t help it.  We are human, and we have tastes!  The thing is: I wonder, since we are reacting so strongly to the masculine culture, and since we are excited about athelticism, are we taking those ideas to the extreme and idealizing the hot, muscled body?

When are we going to idealize what’s healthy?

Healthy spans a big, big range.  I get that.  Some women are very healthy and very thin.  Some women are healthiest at higher BMIs, and might look more like this:

Ok.  I don’t have a photo.  I googled “woman bmi 25″ and “woman not super fit” and all sorts of phrases and got nothing but photos of women pinching fat and crouching over scales.  nothing.   I did get these nice graphics, though:

The whole point being: next time you’re striving to flatten out your tummy, and it’s not working, and you don’t have an eight pack, or you don’t have huge biceps because your arms just don’t get that thin, GREAT.  FLAB can be sexy.  Fuck, guys, I mean it.  Embrace it.  Men can go to super low body fats and be healthy.  They don’t have babies.  Women can’t.  Deal.   Be one with your natural femininity.

I have spent much of the last ten years of my life hungry.  Part of that is because of our fucked up food culture and egregiously tasty desserts, but that’s been the target of many posts so I’ll leave it alone today.  My new target comes in two forms: politics and perfectionism.  I don’t know which one I hate more.

The health risks of women being– hell, of having –fat have been grossly exaggerated.   Many of the studies conducted on correlations between heart disease risk and being overweight have been conducted on men, and then erroneously applied wholesale to women.  That was unwise.   We know that women have higher body fat percentages than men: but by how much?   How much should they?  What have we lost sight of?  Is it possible to be objective in cultural context?

Women do not just have higher body fat percentages than men, but perform better at even higher levels.  A BMI of 25 is considered “overweight” and 18 is considered the limit for “underweight” in women. 18-21 is considered ideal (by whom and subconsciously conditioned by what I ask you), but menstrual irregularities, sexual dysfunction, and poor mental health are statistically much greater risks at all BMIs less than or equal to 22.   Women at BMIs from 22 all the way up through the high 20s perform equally well in mortality and health statistics.  Additionally, women increase in body fat percentages  as they age, while men decrease.  This is true of ALL cultures, not just Americans.  FINE.   LET’S LET IT BE THAT WAY.

Women are told their entire lives that they need to be thin.  The rational question to ask at this point is “why.”  This is not the healthy ideal.  Where does this idea come from?  Many feminist sociologists point to the history of the 20th century.  As female power has grown, masculine-dominated culture (not men) has searched for ways to harness the power.  How can we keep women under thumbs?  Can we give them ideals?  Can we give them impossible ideals?  Can we take something genuinely beautiful to an extreme, such that young bulimic women are the norm in Calvin Klein ads?  The problem is not that women want to be anorexia twiggy things like models.  They don’t, at least not consciously.  The problem is that they want to be thin, a word we think is perfectly neutral, and even that is in many cases just too far.   The word fit is even positive.  But is a fit women without an ounce of fat on her hips fertile?  Not likely.

This phenomenon has a root in male affinities for visual aesthetics.  Fine, that’s cool, I don’t begrudge them that.

But what happens when a masculine culture that used to arbitrate the distribution of all privileges begins to lose them?  Where does the pressure give?   Lots of people think it gives with hunger.  They make a good case.  People who experience a loss of 25 percent of their body fat (this is a simple drop from a 25 to a 19 BMI, for example… something common and something I have voluntarily done) experience extraordinary psychological distortion.  They ferret away food, keep trinkets, draw obsessive pictures about themselves, become possessive about food, obsess over food, lose sleep over food…. the list of symptoms is endless.  Picture this happening to a group of men.  It has.  It did.  At war, in laboratories.  Not often.  Men can be victims of eating disorders, too.  My point is: think about a man with an eating disorder.  Think about him hunched over a toilet, think about him staggering out of a stall, think about him sitting down at a business lunch and munching on ice and lemon scraping the sauce off of his plate and staring fixedly at the dessert plate, obsessing over what food is an acceptable choice, which one will make him hate himself less… does that horrify you?  It should.  Put a women in his place.  Does that horrify you?  It should.  I bet it’s less surprising.  I bet it feels normal.  I bet it feels even a little bit acceptable.

What.

Is.

Wrong.

With.

Us.  

Problems with body image go beyond politics, of course.  Men and women alike suffer, though women far more so, and to far more deleterious effects.  Only women suffer increased risk for infertility, for ovarian and endometrial cancer, for miscarriage, for low birth weight, and for osteoporosis via having a body fat below ~22 BMI.   Politics and fashion and culture are destroying us.  Our perfectionist ideals are destroying us, too.

Perfectionism is a demon all it’s own.  Who says we have to be perfect?  Why?

Feminists have perhaps even more to say about perfectionism than they do about the politics of food.   Women have gone from being subjugate to demanding perfection in a matter of decades.   This is possibly because of women’s station as the under dog.   Young girls grow up throwing punches, told they really can have it all, but they’ve got to work at it, and like hell, they sure as fuck aren’t going to fail.   Women on college campuses are expected to be perfect without trying.  They might take hours getting ready… dressed in torn up jeans, flip flops, and a sweat shirt.  Ironed hair, perfect, discrete make-up, hundreds of dollars in beauty products on every inch of their body.  This look is sexy and casual.  They’re beautiful and high achievers and you wouldn’t even know it’s killing them.

But it is.  At least 1 in 5 women in colleges experience disordered eating behaviors and thoughts about food, increasingly commonly about bingeing.  That number goes up to 1 in 2 when it’s limited to “food and body image associations” at some elite schools.

Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.

———————————————————————-

Here are some more types of perfectionism on which to plant your rage:

Perfectionism is destructive in every aspect of our lives.  In order to be perfect, we are obsessive not just about our lives, but about our bodies.  In order to love ourselves, and to feel loved by society, we need to be as perfect as possible.   This fact used to kind of excite me.  Someone kick me, please.

We are perfectionists because we don’t know how to be anything else.   Not only are we totally isolated in a world in which everything is crumbling around us and there is not a drop of security or safety or feelings of home to be found, but there’s a gap of meaning in contemporary culture and we don’t know how to fix it.  With family?  Community?  Like hell!  With spirituality?  Art?  Who has the time?  But with my work?  Sure!  With self-improvement?  With the pursuit of a perfect relationship and perfect love?    It’s as though… look.  We have robbed ourselves of serenity.  We don’t know how to fix this.  We think bettering ourselves is the answer, but it only makes us worse.   In this fast, angry, modern, competitive, meaningless world, we don’t have any other choice.   The quickest, hardest, strongest, sexiest wins the race.  Always.  So we had best get to it.

———————————————————————-

I threw away much of my life and well-being to the pursuit of perfection.  I needed to be society’s ideal everything, including ideal body.  I can’t tell you how many nights I went to sleep between the ages of 14 and 23 salivating and agonizing over what I was going to eat the next day.  Fuck off!  Why do you think we are hungry all the time?  In part, it’s contemporary culture, tempting us with indulgences and sweets and all that stuff that we wish so desperately we could have but know we can now.  In another part, it’s contemporary culture pursuing the same aim in a different guise, telling us we need to be thinner than we are.

Here’s some news.  If we aren’t clinically overweight, if we test well, if we don’t have inflammation in our systems, we are healthy.   We do not need to lose weight.  We do not need to be obsess.  What we need is to love ourselves, and to accept our bodies, and to let our hunger regulate itself.

I do a lot of talking on here about how to stop yourself from eating.  In some ways, this makes me a healer.  I really do think that society and all sorts of nasty psychological problems get into our heads, and we need to heal ourselves with practices, food, and lots of mental behaviors.    I have spoken to that a lot on this site, and I hope to the gods that message has been heard.

In other ways, this makes me a part of the machine.  When I walk down the street nowadays, since I have rebelled against perfectionism, when I see women who are deliberately thin–like me–I want to cry with empathy and pain rather than envy.  But before it was easier to justify denying my hunger.   It’s not just porn and anti-feminist norms dictating my behavior, but health officials and sociologists and anthropologists and every single person in between.   Read in a certain light, I am a part of that machine.  This makes me furious.

I am not now, not in any way, shape, or form, an advocate of eating less food unless it’s medically important.  I wasn’t before, either.  But now I mean it, passionately.  Not just for you, but also for me.  There is a crucial difference.  I feel this conviction in my bones.  I mean it, and I will not stand for societal norms in this realm any longer.  I don’t stand for them in other ways.  Time for me to grow up and shed my hypocrisy.

Where does this leave me?

Honestly, I am not sure.  I have a complete wardrobe, an expensive one, ranging from sizes 00-01.  It doesn’t get much bigger than that.  I also don’t know what to do in general, or what I want to do.  I have achieved society’s “ideal” in many ways.  I have gone to elite colleges.  I have mastered several languages.  I have pursued advanced degrees at advanced institutions.  I have travelled the world.  I have worked several jobs.  I have a budding investment portfolio.  And I have been skinny for the last two years, and that very fact made me not just confident, but honestly, very, painfully, tearfully honestly, more attractive to men than I had ever imagined.

I see men as victims in all of this, too.  None of them want to starve women.  None of them want their girlfriends and sisters and mothers to go hungry and to hate themselves.  None of them want to sleep with a bag of bones, either.  BUT very few of them are comfortable dating a “curvy” woman.  When did curves die?!  I am a member of a couple of excellent and fun, hip and–most importantly here–intellectual and activist dating websites.  One of the most popular questions everyone answers is: “What kind of body type would you accept in an ideal mate?”  I have never seen a response that did not say, “I’m sorry, but I can not be attracted to anyone with just a little bit of fat.”

I think I am going to throw up.

It’s not our faults that this is what we idealize, women and men alike.  My heart is breaking just thinking about it.  I don’t know what to do.  How do I continue to be attractive in this society while feeling good about myself?  How do I navigate a world in which my standards are so different from everybody else’s?   How do I behave in a world in which I have previous been employed for having a supermodel body, and in which I have basked in the warmth of all the male attention I get for that body?  What am I going to do?

I am going to move slowly.  I have learned how to eat a satiating diet and how to be less obsessive with food, particularly in the last several months.  I have been learning to take even better care of myself, mentally as well as physically.   I will stay away from all the shit food I always have.  It’s nasty and that is something of which no one wants to be a part.  I will stay away from contemporary culture like I always have.  Advertisements make people crave food they never knew they wanted.  And I will eat healthful foods until I am full.  I imagine I will not go up to my biggest size– a size nine on a 5’2 body is bigger than I can handle– but I imagine slowly creeping up to a size 1, and maybe some day in several months a size 3, that is something I can handle.

For much of the last ten years, I have been hungry as hell.  I’ve been angry as hell, too, but not at the right things.

Time to stop hating myself, and throw my punches elsewhere.

*Statistics all from this wonderful book: The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf.

Here’s another mental roadblock.  The thing about this one, though, is that we all face it, whether we know it or not.  And it goes like this:

I N E R T I A

What do I mean by “inertia”?  Inertia is a property of matter defined by resistance to changes in motion.   It means that cars don’t like stopping, boats don’t like turning, and planets like to keep going around the sun in their designated trajectories.   When used abstractly, however, inertia refers to all of the mental resistance we encounter when trying to do anything, ranging from trying to get a project done, to confronting an emotion, or to making personal changes.

The point of this post is that, as human beings, we don’t like change.  We resist it.  And often we don’t like challenges, so we resist those, too.  Often this is manifested in really obvious ways, such as my insistence on walking a block further to go to Family Mart (clearly superior!) instead of 7-11 (which is actually the same exact store as Family Mart).  Or perhaps: we all know people who have heard of the paleolithic diet (perhaps we’ve tried to convince them ourselves?) but just don’t want to give it the time of day.  Compelled by fear or inertia or both, friends and family members daily come up with some pretty nifty rationalizations that make their current course of action continue to be the best one in their own minds.  Whether it actually is or not is not the question.  The important thing here is the mental attitude, and the strong, almost irresistable impulse to never change.

This is a pretty well-known fact.  People don’t like change.  Why am I beating a dead horse?   Because I think it goes even deeper than that.

Sometimes we actively want change.  Sometimes we pursue it.  Sometimes we even achieve it.   We do this by making a conscious decision (not always!), by committing ourselves to new pathways, and by following through.  But it doesn’t always stick, and progress is really difficult, and one reason this is true is because we’re stuck in the same ideas of ourselves.
I’m currently pretty thin.  That happened about a year ago.  Up until that point, however, I battled weight loss and body image issues for eight years.  There were a lot of things going on, and I could probably write a book (have I already?) on them.  Yet one phenomenon was particularly vicious.  Every time I started gaining momentum, I up and threw it away. I pinched my thighs after a week or two of good eating and they felt different.  I noticed and this was so cool.  So naturally the first thing I did was walk into the pantry.  For a long time I wrote this off as my desire to “treat myself” for my progress, but after many years and deeper reflection I realized that my thoughts were far more twisted.  My body had changed, and that was weird.  I was in a place where I could be more confident, and that was weird, too.  Stefani (that’s my given name) is not hot.  Stefani is not thin.  Stefani is not confident.  These changes do not line up with who I am.   I need to prevent that change.  I need to put a little weight back on.

And I did it!  I swear to Hera I did this for years. It was never something I was conscious of.  Instead, this monster watched me from the deep folds of my subconscious, and every time I started getting somewhere reached out and dropped this huge rock of inertia (recall: resistance to change) on top of my progress.

I find myself wrestling with the same subconscious resistance to this day.  It’s like… we have this image of ourselves.  A physical image.  And we have this idea of ourselves, this mental, psychological, personality type thing.  And we don’t rock the boat.  Ever.   Whether it’s by other people or ourselves, our unconscious minds work really hard to preserve norms.  Everybody’s does.  It’s how we’re built.

Except it might be worse in people who are struggling.  Your resistance to change might be compounded by feelings of unworthiness. I often thought: “Stefani is not thin, pretty, or confident, therefore I need to restore the qualities that made her otherwise,” but it was much worse when I thought: “Stefani does not deserve to be thin, pretty, or confident, therefore I need to restore the qualities that made her otherwise.”     This is another reason that it is so, absolutely vital to love yourself. It is vital to forgive yourself.  And it is vital to realize that whatever you’re wrestling with is not your fault.  Only after practicing these self-loving mental habits can we dig ourselves out of the mental pits of unworth, and begin to really see progress in our physical, as well as mental, health.

That said, once we’re in decent mental condition and walking on the path of progress, we’ve got to safeguard against subconscious inertia.  We’ve got to break that mental mode.  We’ve got to be in charge of our emotions and our brains, and to make sure the riptide never pulls us back under.   Subconscious perceptions of ourselves are enormously powerful.   Recognizing that fact can help you re-define yourself, and make sure that that definition sticks.