quietann

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hm. not much to say tonight. I am a bit self-conscious about this livejournal thing... I mean, who will read it? I am certainly reading other peoples', and I am sometimes surprised by what I find. Currently foremost in my mind is someone I know who seems totally obsessed with her weight in her LJ, even though she is not the slightest bit overweight and is very athletic.

(I used to get mad at skinny girls who complained about being fat, but I've decided that they are no less subject to American women's weight obsession than those of us who are not skinny...)

Rat report: the rats are fed. Ghost and Ruby both bit me tonight. I don't understand what is going on; until a few weeks ago I hardly ever got bitten. Maybe the rats sense pre-wedding stress. The three pregnant girls are still pregnant; due this weekend

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From:

lyonesse.livejournal.com

i presume that the weight-obsessed person is me. here's a little explanatory background....

1. my weight was rock-stable between the end of my adolescence and my starting to take ssri's (about ten years). on prozac, i lost eight pounds in two weeks; very scary. (it did come back when i stopped taking prozac a few weeks later.) that's when i started checking my weight much at all.

2. this past year i've been changing my meds again (i've come off gabapentin entirely, and have been cutting back on benzos). i gained five pounds in the course of a month during the winter (no weight change otherwise during the year). then i (a) took up running and (b) started doing more cooking for myself this past spring. between the lot of these things, and in light of my prozac experience, i've gotten re-obsessed with checking my weight all the time. since my lj is more or less my running log with occasional divertissiments, and i routinely check my weight after my run, it ends up getting written down here.

a couple more things to note at kind of a meta-level:

1. i haven't had a significant weight change during the whole time i've been recording it (i'm usually at about 121#). so fret not that i'm suffering from eating disorders or wasting away or anything.

2. lj's, or at least *my* lj, should not be considered a representative or even random sample of life at large. mine is at least 90% about my running, but my *life* isn't mostly about running. this weekend, for instance, the big things have sorta been: house painting (a LOT) and not being able to live in my room cuz of the new paint; going on a hike with elf my elf and discovering that the therapy worked and his mushroom phobia is not a problem anymore; finishing another installment of the werewolf novel; and various musical things and people's feelings about them.

but the only things that made it into lj were my running, my meds, and my sleep. i hate to admit this, but lj is not really quite a communications medium to me. i gather my lj is amusing to at least a couple of people, who like being in touch with something as silly and daily and mundane as my running log.

but please, i beg you, don't mistake my livejournal for my life.

From:

awfief.livejournal.com

There are a lot of things I've been thinking about, being on Weight Watchers and having it actually work (down 16 pounds so far).

(1) skinny people were not always skinny. This came about by me thinking "wow, I still vision of me at a larger weight, and other weight watchers do that, too (from stories they've told). I wonder how different it's going to be being a non-skinny person in a skinny body." Because face it, people who were always skinny grew up on the other side of the battle -- instead of hearing "fat is bad, you should lose weight" they heard "skinny is good, don't get fat!".

(2) (and the part that applies) It's very unsupportive to tell someone "I don't think you need to lose weight". At 5'4", 185 pounds, I had people telling me that. And I agree -- I don't need to. I'm healthy, etc. But I *want* to lose weight. I'm amused that at 170 pounds, people are worrying about me going too far, becoming anorexic. But I've heard other people (some even telling

lyonesse) say "oh, you don't need to lose weight". If someone is *trying* to lose weight, that's not very supportive. (on the other hand, if they're *thinking* about whether or not they need to lose weight, that is OK).

I mean, I know this comes from people thinking, "I never thought of foo as overweight" and wanting to voice that, but bodies are different. I was OK with being (if I'm to believe the height/weight charts) over 50 pounds overweight because I am very healthy -- I can do heavy cardio stuff for a long time without getting really tired or out of breath. And I'm doing it, honestly, just to slim down, so clothes will fit me better. So I can shop in the female section of any major department store, which I can just barely do now, even though I don't look very overweight.

OK, I'm rambling now. This is a new topic for me, that I was going to post in my own lj, so pardon my extensive talking on the subject. :) Anyway, it's more a "I've realized that telling someone 'you don't need to lose weight' isn't necessarily a good thing" even though I've done it for a long time.

From:

quietann.livejournal.com

Hi -- yeah, you are the person. I wasn't worried about you as much as I was surprised that _you_ of all people would be obsessed with weight. And I really couldn't tell from your entries whether you were obsessed with gaining weight or losing weight or staying the same...

LJ -- yours or anyone else's -- is not life itself :)