An ivory tower that touches the moon

I was reading this blog post regarding experiments in calorie reduction, as linked from this blog post about forcing Guantanamo detainess to diet as torture (I’d really recommend reading both of those posts), and it’s similar to studies I’ve read about before regarding weight loss and why it’s regained and no one can stick to a diet, but I thought the parts about how it affects people mentally were particularly interesting and enlightening.

The thought of dieting circles my head occasionally because there is no real estate on Mars for me to set up my hermit shanty yet and I see diet commercials every five seconds when I watch TV. I assuage this desire by reminding myself that hey, I’m getting degrees right now, I need my mind to be sharp so I can study and learn! I guess I never really had a scientific reason this other than when I’m hungry I’m thinking about foods rather than what hearsay exception is implicated when someone shouts “Sweet Baby Jesus on a cracker he shot me!” seconds before death, but I guess when I’m right, I’m right.

I was thinking the other day about how baffling it is that the same person who spews the “calories in calories out” mantra to justify railing against people for being overweight has no problem believing there are people who can eat as much as they want and never get fat. Hey, they have high metabolisms! But when I tell people my husband and I eat the same shit every day and he weighs 100 pounds more than me, I am assured he must be eating something else SOMEWHERE you know. At work or something. Because if we ate the same shit we’d definitely have the same body types.

I’ve come to the conclusion that people abandon all logic in order to cling to their prejudices a long time ago, but it just wears me down so much. I try to tell as many people as I can I probably eat like 2500 calories a day or more, which would be “overeating” except that eating like a normal person is only overeating when you’re fat.

The fact that I should supposedly be able to happily live on roughly half the calories I do is where the diet thoughts come in. Geez I bet if I went on a diet I’d be like, Kiera Knightley, except that’s just a product of memory loss since I’ve dieted while running a few miles a week and doing yoga and I only lost ten pounds and was constantly sick and felt like shit on a stick.

So, I was also reading this blog post the other day, on Pandagon, which is a blog I really like and read all the time. I don’t really care to comment on the contents of the article so much, but I find it interesting that people didn’t consider comments about “idiots” purchasing diet cokes with fatty food to be fat shaming. Who are those idiots likely to be? I guarantee if I walked into a McDonalds and ordered 5 cheeseburgers and a large fry and a diet coke people wouldn’t think anything of it, but WOULD if a fat person walked in. If I did that it would probably accurately reflect what I was doing–having a once in a while treat, and having my brain replaced by someone who can tolerate artificial sweeteners and McDonalds food. But if a fat person does it, it’s probably a habit, right?

What struck me the most though was the author of the piece, Amanda Marcotte (and again, I really like her stuff a lot this is just thinking about what she said not trying to slam her or something) responding to a comment someone made about high metabolism people being able to eat what they want (which I can’t find again, I have to get ready to leave in a minute so I’m not reading them again), and saying well she wishes she had that metabolism, but since she doesn’t, she has to watch it.

I generally consider myself to have a good metabolism and I usually think it’d be unfair of me to sit there and chomp down a hamburger and think, well, tough luck person with a propensity for weight gain, you better have a heap o’ carrots. Mmmm burger omnomnom. Really though that’s probably an exaggeration of her point but that IS how a lot of people think about it. Oh I can go into McDonalds and have 12 chicken nuggets and a bucket of fries once in a while, but if I ever see someone fat in there, holy hell that person is shameful. I can engage in this activity, but when that person does it, it’s wrong. I can sit in my ivory tower and shake my head and make disapproving ingressive sounds with my tongue when I see someone else doing the exact same thing I’m doing because wow if *I* didn’t have a good metabolism I’d have the willpower to not see food as something I should enjoy, right?

On one hand it seems prudent to say “but of course, eating healthy is always good.” Well, yeah, eat your veggies. Blah blah blah. I also refuse to believe that eating Thanksgiving dinner and the occasional giant fucking chili cheese fry will shave ten years off of one’s life. I do think it would be great for the U.S. and the world if people of all incomes had access to healthy, hearty home-cooked food and weren’t wage slaves without the time to prepare it. I don’t think you can separate cultural reality of no money and time for organic greens with a grilled rosemary salmon every night from this food morality so it’s a moot point to pontificate on what people OUGHT to be eating when the ability to eat the oughtfoods is just not there. I also refuse to believe it’s any of my goddamned business what someone else chooses to ingest, all things being equal.

Don’t believe for a goddamn second all the studies which comprise our knowledge of what is good now will not be seen as outdated, strange and quaint as the practice of using leeches in medicine appears to us today. I guarantee people thought they were the height of modernity back then and looked upon the past as a swirling cauldron of ignorance and idiocy.

I guess this rant is all over the place and incoherent, but, tl;dr version, I’m fucking sick and tired of people holding others to standards they could never ever ever fucking ever adhere to themselves. I’m also sick of people not engaging their neurons and firing one fucking synapse when thinking about this shit. The end.