Because I Have to Hate: Weight Loss Culture

The onslaught of weight loss commercials is just beginning as the new year approaches.  I am so sick of living in this weight obsessed culture.  I have been robbed of YEARS of living a life all because some fucking corporation wanted to sell more diet food or workout DVDs or magazines or size 0 clothing.  I have been lied to over and over and over again and made to believe that I was somehow less of a person with each pound away from my "ideal BMI" I got.

I have been sold beauty myths that have served to keep me focused on every imperfection that I could find in the mirror rather than on what I could do to stand against the false narratives that every person in our culture seems to be fed from birth.  I have watched friends and colleagues and clients all struggle against the medicalization of these weight myths - that to lose weight is the ultimate test of goodness and health when IT IS NOT.  I have starved and vomited and binged and broken blood vessels around my eyes and blown out my gallbladder and given myself ulcers and eroded my teeth all for the lie that the weight loss industry has sold me since childhood.

WELL, FUCK THAT.  I refuse to believe the lie.  I love my body regardless of size because it is a Darwinian miracle that it exists at all.  And it doesn't matter that I was a lower weight when I hiked Mt. Rainier and a higher weight when I hiked a glacier in Iceland.  My amazing body let me hike regardless of the years of torment the diet industry convinced me to put it through.  I refuse to measure my life by what number I was on a scale at a given moment.  I am here.  I am alive.  Every moment is mine to do with what I want... and I know for certain that what I want to do with those moments has NOTHING to do with weight loss.