On brains and bodies

[strangecharm]

My mental health has been pretty damn good lately.

Except in one respect. And it's a new and annoying one.

The receptionist at my doctor's surgery called yesterday afternoon. "Your prescription for...some pills," she said. I'd just filled in a form to get more of the hormonal contraceptives. "You need to see the nurse before you can get any more. For your annual review."

I grew up with some really bad ideas about food and weight. I only recently realized, in learning more about them, how lucky I was to not have developed an eating disorder.

I was annoyed at this because

• I was about to run out so most of my brain was waiting for a friend to call or text me
• when I don't have the pills, the day before my period makes me want to die, and biggest of all
• the last time I saw the nurse for this "review" of something I've taken for years with no problem, she tried to bully me into losing weight and ignored everything I said about how any factor other than weight (such as the massive untreated anxiety I had a doctor's appointment about later that week...and indeed the lecture she'd just given me about being fat!) had made my blood pressure "on the high side of normal."
• The receptionist was being overly persistent about this -- "You have to have this annual review before you can get the prescription refilled," when I was just busy trying to figure out when exactly I was working and how crazy I'll be when I run out of these before I can get more.

A few years ago I noticed one of my good friends talking about how fat wasn't necessarily bad or unhealthy. She showed me the blogs she was reading, and from her good examples and from strangers blogging about Size Acceptance and Health At Every Size. All of this had a great positive effect on me: I saw that I didn't have to wait to be thin to be confident, healthy or to think well of myself. I realized I admire plenty of people who weren't thin, so why couldn't I be one of them? We have set up a nearly impenetrable binary that tells us thin=hard work=healthy=good and fat=lazy=unhealthy=bad.

One way I measured my success in making such a profound change for the better was how shocked I was to go back to my family and hear the way they talked about fat people, policing their clothing choices, equating thinness with beauty and moral goodness, categorizing foods as "good" or "bad,"e

This nurse made me come back in a month to have the blood pressure re-tested, at which point, the anxiety being more controlled, it was back to the low side of normal as mine normally is, despite my weight being exactly the same (she'd told me on my first visit that she wanted me to lose a stone in six months).

(Indeed, my experience is very like this post I just stumbled across from one of the Notes from the Fatosphere blogs, even down to using the example of high blood pressure.)

Ah yes, I remember that. I would have laughed in disbelief but I was kind of speechless, at the surprise of a nurse telling me to do something that if I tried it would certainly result in unhealthy behaviors, and would have little chance of getting its intended effect even if I didn't know that I'd be likely to put the stone on again, if not more.

I thought all the good little HAES thoughts in my head, but they were muddled in my distress and none of them escaped my lips.

On that second visit, though, the nurse listened to me talk about the effect my anxiety could have on blood pressure, and when I said I wasn't unhappy with my weight she said in a very casual way that this was the important thing; it was almost like I was seeing a different person from the one a month before!

So now I've got to go back and see her, and even though the more recent experience last year was better, it's the first one looms in my mind.

I'm fatter now than I've ever been, I think. Many of my clothes don't fit right; the new ones I'm buying are in alien sizes. Some of the new clothes I got for Christmas don't even fit, which makes me sad (though my mom persists in buying me "petite" skirts and trousers, as if being short is all it takes). I'm really struggling to feel okay in this body right now.

But I'm also frustrated because I know I'm getting it wrong: I know my appearance must not as intrinsically horrific as I feel -- Andrew still calls me "sexy" about a billion times a day and seems to particularly for instance my belly when I particularly don't -- but I still can't shake the feeling. I don't want to be appalled and saddened every time I'm reminded of the size and shape of my body (because that happens a hell of a lot) but nothing seems to help.

And in a way I'm sad that one of the things I've learned is that long-term weight loss isn't likely to work and it does make me feel a bit out of control. I wish there was something I could do to change that, rather than just having to change how accepting I can be about it. Because long-term weight loss might be impossible for 95% of the population, but that still seems easier right now than fixing my fucking brain.

So, I'm not looking for reassurance or compliments or anything; as well-intentioned as they might be, they won't help me right now. What I want is good ideas of stuff to say if this nurse (or anybody else, really) tries this "you're too fat to be healthy" bullshit again, something I can write down and bring with me, or practice saying until I'm confident I can actually manage it, so I don't get flustered and speechless like last time.

I really don't want to deal with this right now, but I suppose the reinforcement will be good for me even if it's easy to jump through this particular gatekeeper's hoop and get on with making my own choices about my life.

Comments

[miss_s_b]

I hate my belly and James loves it, so l feel your pain on that one. l don't tend to get the "fat" lecture, l get the "drinking" lecture. I have learned that quoting the BMT at them helps.