truelove's ramblings

Some days I kind of want to get on top of a building with a megaphone and scream from the rooftops:

Food does not have a moral value.

It has, at most, a nutritional value. Vitamins, proteins, etc. Which are not moral choices. Nutrients are what physically keep you going; they are not moral.

You aren't an immoral person for choosing to eat something sweet. Or for choosing the low-fat dressing because you can't stand the salad without something on it. Or for choosing to have the full-fat dressing because the low-fat tastes like ass. Your choices of what foods to eat? Have no bearing on your moral character. Because food does not have a moral value.

And goddamn am I sick of how this permeates our culture. I actually particularly hate being told what a good, moral girl I am for eating... guess what? The food that I actually want to eat. Because fuck you, no. I am not a good girl. I am woman who is listening to what her body is craving and that happens to be something our fucked-up culture has decided is virtuous.

Food? Does not have a moral value.

Y'think if I did shout it from the rooftops it might make a damned difference?

Honest, I'll post the story behind that create-a-recipe contest one of these days.

Right now, I'm sitting here totally creeped out at the Mariah Carey music video I just watched. Putting aside the disturbing content of the song and video both, what was leaving me most creeped out was the fact that Ms. Carey is, like others, approaching the Uncanny Valley from the other side.

Seriously I was watching her going you... you look like a robot. The boobs failing to hang correctly didn't help, but mostly it was that her skin was all plasticine. I mean, not just her face. All of her skin was, and we certainly got to see a lot of it. Now, I don't know how much of that was makeup/etc. and how much of that was in post (less than would be in a still image, probably, but possibly still some of it).

But it doesn't really matter when or how it happened because I ended up with the visceral creeps. I mean I'd actually have been less creeped out if it *had* been a robot.

This is what's attractive? This is our future? I want to opt out, thanks. (Sadly, easier said than done.)

Reading through some fat-positive and body acceptance related blogs right now. Stumbled over into that part of the blogosphere via a link to this lady's blog and found myself particularly enamoured of this post addressing the bullshit statistics of obesity, along with helpful photographic illustrations.

Having a lot of thoughts, not least of which is: jesus christ the unhealthy messages are embedded so fucking deeply in our culture. I actually really like how my body looks lately, and I keep going "...but I could stand to lose some weight, really," and then stopping and listening to myself and wanting to shoot myself.

When I was a teenager I was very thin; thin enough people commented on it. I had trouble staying warm, it hurt to sit on hard seats. (Well, it still does, but for different reasons.) Even when I was 16, and quit gymnastics I was still quite slender. I thought weighing yourself was bullshit, too, because I weighed 140 and people still thought I was on the thin side and chronically under-guessed my weight at least 20, if not 30 pounds.

Then puberty finished hitting me upside the head, ages 16-18, and I had a hell of a rack which in all honesty is probably where most of the 10 lbs I gained after quitting gymnastics went. I was still pretty damn slender, though. When I moved when I was 18, I gained weight again. Stress, I am sure, and probably my body filling out that last little bit.

I remember when I was thinner and stepping on the scale was a pure curiousity and I didn't give a shit whatsoever what I ate. And -- mostly I've kept that. Except how I haven't. Now I think about diets and have to actively reject that kind of thinking. Now I think about how much bullshit the BMI is in a very personal, and not abstract way.

And, you know, I think so much of it has to do with clothing and fashion. I managed not to give a shit much one way or the other when I could find clothing that fit me. But these days? Clothing and clothes-shopping tells me, you are too fat, too busty, too curvy, too hour-glassed. Too too. Stay home and hide yourself, there's nothing for you here.

And it's just about impossible not to start internalising that shit.

I've been struggling with myself to not worry about my weight, about dieting, about being slender and perfect, for my cosplay for Club Vivid at vividcon this year. I'm cosplaying T'Pol and, and -- god knows, I know, that everyone there isn't going to give a shit that I'm probably at least fifty pounds heavier than Blalock. Except maybe me. And I'm working on that.

Right now my project is: eat healthy, nutritious foods (you know, all the ones that I actually do love), and eat at the right times. And eat enough protein. Because my energy levels are a hell of a lot more important than some fucking meaningless number.