#disordered eating m

[librarycards]

considering it's almost ~resolution season~ i'm obviously thinking about fat people and about solidarity between (non-fat) ppl with EDs and fat people of all kinds. and i want us to remember that the unhealthiest diet, regardless of its contents, is one that is forced on you. the worst amount of calories is the one strictly managed and mandated by paternalistic authorities. the worst body is the one you are commanded to have, forbidden to change.

and the best of all of these things are the diet, lifestyle, habits, and body that you choose. autonomy = freedom = life.

[hetheyshe-remade]

I come to front. My stomach hurts. "You haven't eaten yet". I remember how much I hate eating.

[royalreef]

In the wake of yesterday, Bellanda surveys the damage.

Miranda is still asleep, curled up around herself with the blankets all fussed. Last night, too, was rough, and despite the need to maintain schedules, even now, she lets Miranda sleep. She had tossed, she had turned, she had woken up to begin screaming in Bellanda's ear and kicking her sides, and she had been unable to sleep for very long until she had to awake and scream again. The fact that she's been asleep the past few hours is a small miracle, and not one that Bellanda is passing up anytime soon.

This means she takes care as she pulls back the covers. Just a little, not a lot, just seeing how bad it was. The first thing she sees, thanking her good luck that they make the silly things bright and glowing blue, is the claw caps. They're still on, so she's worrying far less about open wounds, disregarding Miranda's own teeth and her habit of biting at herself. Good. There's something there, a dull awareness that Miranda could have pulled them off again, that she didn't — but Bellanda doesn't know what to do with this other than feel grateful about it. Should she reward Miranda, somehow? That feels inappropriate, wrong, like tossing scraps to the worrier sharks after a hunt.

Still, claws or no claws, Miranda's fins have begun bruising, and they bruise dark and purple and green and yellow. It flushes against the pale skin like a body pressed up against a window, all detail and no mystery, revealing every turn and twist that had been taken. One looks bent wrong, and the thought that she should set it again occurs to Bellanda. It would make it easier, if it healed correctly the first time, and it probably wouldn't cause Miranda as much distress when they fixed it anyways — but, again, they would fix it anyways, and doing something about it now would mean additional pain, additional worry.

She tilted her head, looked over Miranda's arms. No visible wounds, none that she could see, so that was good. She'd have to do a full check-over later, but if Miranda hadn't bitten herself, then that meant that any other damage she had to worry about would all be internal. Something which was likely, considering the amount of screaming yesterday, and clawing at herself, and...

Bellanda was taking her victories where she could get them. Isn't that something she was supposed to pay heed to, being Chief Warlord? If she didn't value what she did take, when she managed to take it, then she wouldn't be able to utilize it, wouldn't be able to turn those into victories of their own. Losses already were lost, already had been paid for, and she had to keep moving, keep thinking ahead, change her plans as needed but be as fluid as the sea. Stewing in them was only going to make her fall behind.

Her sister hadn't eaten yesterday, too. Bellanda hadn't either, because she was busy worrying about Miranda, but she could remedy that now. Something gentle, yeah, probably something warm. Something that wouldn't strain Miranda too much to eat, and something that was easy enough to get down that it meant she wouldn't be thinking about the fact that she was eating at all.

That was pragmatic. That was easy. That was something that she could focus herself on, in lieu of continuing to worry her own bones, something that could partition out her time and distract her from the fact that she was going to have to determine if this week was enough. If something like yesterday happened so late in the week she had gotten time off for, then they weren't through the worst of it, then it might happen again, then it might happen where someone could see. But asking too much time, keeping to herself too much, avoiding their duties... That was dangerous too. That would be just as disastrous if it got out, would doom them both all over again. She had her own interests to attend to, interests which needed her to act fast as much as Miranda, and spending too much time with her would still cause her to falter on that end, still make other things come apart.

But she could think about that later. After food.

For now, she pulled the blankets back up and over Miranda's head, let her continue to sleep and to dream. She pushed back off the end of the bed, feet first, her hands hitting the ground after a slow slide where Bellanda let gravity do its work. With nowhere else for all this manic energy to go, she turned for the exit out into the central room, and set about calling the kitchens to bring up something to eat.

[materialisnt]

they ate a couple tablespoons of cottage cheese and a couple teaspoons of turkey baby food. still groaning and panting off and on. gonna blend some rice into a mush to see if they like it, then can mix it with those other proteins

[librarycards]

what incredible company! i'm flattered and a bit overwhelmed. i'm going to add a few resources you might be interested in:

Pipe Wrench Magazine's Fat Issue, particularly Mikey Mercedes' piece on fatphobia in gynecology. Massive, MASSIVE trigger warning for that one.

My dear friend and comrade, Rachel Fox, has a number of written works published on antifatness and/as medical violence. She's one of the foremost new scholars in critical fat studies today.

Regan Chastain's Weight and Healthcare Newsletter reliably summarizes and critiques developments in so-called "obesity medicine" from a body liberation perspective. Chastain is author of the old-school fatosphere, still-going-strong blog Dances With Fat.

The podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back, features five fat activists/public scholars, including Da'Shaun Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia, offers a superb and unvarnished takedown of thin supremacy, including but not limited to its constitutive medical violence.

One notable absence in the fields of disability/Mad/fat studies is the particular violence against fat existence/fat people in the areas of "eating disorder treatment." This absence points both to a kind of organized abandonment (h/t Ruth Wilson Gilmore) by the medico-psychiatric industry....a kind of antifat necropolitics in which fatness both constitutes and forecloses the possibility of a deadly eating disorder - there's a lot to say about this in regard to "deathfat"ness and the literal categorical impossibility of the fat anorexic (de jure, as it were, up until the DSM V and still de facto).

Simply put, there aren't enough works in Mad studies/disability studies on disorderly eating practices, and when there are, they are focused on thin, white anorexic women and generally oriented around performances of starvation/refusal and the tired old arguments about their role in feminist discourse/organizing. Yawn. We desperately need more work on fatness and medical violence that takes disorderly eaters explicitly as its subjects, and looks to the ways in which disorderly eating is both the base underlying assumption of fat pathologization (obesity as "disease" that can be "cured" via lifestyle change, and increasingly, biomedical intervention) and is also strategically refused as a means of refusing "care."

There's a lot more to say here, but I'll leave it here. I need to go back through my readings (also my fat studies tag) and vet papers that do mention fatness/eds before i actually recommend them, but I do know that kelpforestdwellers and @bioethicists speak about this in regard to medical ableism. You may also be interested in @worth-beyond-a-number-scale, as I believe the blogger is also in social work school and posts regularly about antifatness and thin privilege. There's also their other blog, @fatphobiabusters, which does the same.

Hi Mac! Sorry to bug you, but do you happen to have any literature/reading about medical fatphobia on hand? (the prevalence, people’s experiences with it, etc.) I’m a fat disabled person and I’m currently talking to some of my friends about it, but I’d like to be able to provide some more info outside of my own negative experiences, if possible! No worries if not though, ofc <33 Thanks in advance for your time!

not a bother at all!! in addition to my fatphobia tag (link 1), i really loved & learned a lot from Anna Mollow’s article “Unvictimizable: Toward a Fat Black Disability Studies” (link 2). cw for discussion of oppressive violence, particularly anti-Black police violence

this one is not specifically medical fatphobia & is definitely in my fairly niche interest as a conversion therapy victim & ex-christian interested in the sociology of evangelicalism, but Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America by Lynne Gerber was a fantastic read that really shaped my thoughts on a lot of these topics

i also recommend checking out @librarycards + @heavyweightheart + @bigfatscience ! lots of great resources & starting points there, in terms of statistics etc but also towards developing a framework of analysis + locating our experiences within broader systems of oppression

[roman-roy-apologist]

maybe you don’t think this fictional character has an eating disorder. but i know better

[dennisboobs]

ah

[xseffort45]

never not obsessed with M!nnie's collarb0ne

[neonbodyache]

ᯓ★dreaming of a better body and i will make it so★

[librarycards]

ive been in recovery from disordered eating for some years now and would like to start observing kosher more thoroughly, but am concerned about the possibility of restrictions making it harder not to relapse. as a vegan, do you have any advice on maintaining a loving relationship with eating while still finding value in having rules around food?

thank you so much for this question! i think for me it's key to think about food and eating less as a set of discrete "behaviors" toward certain "safe"/"unsafe" foods (as it were) but rather as a holistic part of our lives intimately entangled with not only our social poitionalites but also our values.

for me, a vegan practice doesn't begin or end with food, and what i do or do not eat is not important bc of what certain foods "are", but instead the means by which they got to me, and the conditions under which they are / are not commodified/scraped of their connection to actual living things & systems of oppression. it's honestly hard to live a life with an actual vegan ethical framework while in what might be considered an "active" eating disorder - i know because i am trying to maintain this balance while also Not Getting Better right now. a fixation on the artificial stuff like calories, macros, and "health"-based moral measures is antithetical to an approach that considers the "how" and "why" of food, rather than the what.

i think that this has many parallels and overlaps with kashrut, which doesn't exist in a food-related vacuum, but instead among a constellation of halachic practices that help you feel more connected to gd, to your community/tradition, and more, and will help you materially live a life that will aid you in a more collective practice of tikkun olam. this isn't a set of restrictions designed to make you "perfect," after all. it isn't designed to remove you from community with others in favor of self-fixation. instead, it's a nonnormative way of thinking with what we eat, and imbuing food with a newfound connection to our broader practices of healing and liberation!

now, this is well and good, but what about practical matters? when on-the-ground shopping or ordering, it can be really helpful to go to aisles, spaces where everything fits a given guideline by default - that way, it's easy to catch yourself straying from checking to see if it's vegan/kosher and checking to see if it's "safe." same with spending time with loved ones who already make and incorporate these foods; there are tons of opportunities to eat spontaneously in ways that your brain might try to stop you from doing. i think particularly in the case of keeping kosher, if you pray, it's really important and nice to keep an open connection w/ gd in regard to the relationship between kashrut, harm, and healing. this is what i do each time a big fast day comes around, and inevitably come to the conclusion that the picuach nefesh mandate outweighs any excuse i can make for why i "should" fast. you will likely notice this if you find yourself using keeping kosher more as an excuse for restriction rather than a meaningful practice of connection.

what's important to remember is that so-called "dietary restrictions" are only restrictions due to an inaccess to alternatives, whether via inaccess to community/support or physical inaccess to the food you need. all communities that work, work based on shared rules/values/care practices -- so surround yourself with people for whom kosher is an act of care, not punishment. i think this is really the key: i don't view being vegan as a punishment, but an opportunity. for my comrades who also enjoy vegan food, it's also an opportunity to eat lots of food - including food that has challenged me in ed- ways. even though i am by no means a model recovering/recovered person (faaar from it) i find so much value and joy and liberation in the unrestrained, generous, and delicious meals we get to enjoy, whose excellence is only amplified by a grounding in intentionality and hope.

[sctir]

"i love my ocs" <- guy who gave them all eating disorders

[warlock-enthusiast]

When a coworker approaches you - out of love - and asks if you have considered losing weight, because I currently have a bit of backpain like every other fucking office person ever.

Bitch I have been on a diet for most of my life and suffered through eight years of bulimia and starving myself. I got bullied so bad that I wanted to off myself at the age of 10.

Fuck all the way off.

Ofc I was not savage or smart and simply teared up.

Out of love, my ass.

[stansayshi]

this part. this part got me.

[materialisnt]

they arent eating. theyre drinking water still. we see the vet today but might need to go directly to emergency vet.

[ser-princesa]

[crucifixateme]

You’re doing so well …why binge now?