My Friends Would Rather Have Their Guts Cut Open Than Be Like Me
theestablishment.co
Living a life like mine is so intolerable, some undergo serious surgery.

I stumbled across this while researching old feminist publications. I can’t really explain why I liked it so much.

I don’t agree with the author’s perspective, but it’s a point of view I’d never heard before, and she writes beautifully, with wit and humor and pain.

  • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    6 months ago

    I used to joke with people that I was my mother’s before picture, in the ubiquitous and devastating tradition of photos taken to reveal dramatic weight loss, the punchline for every ad that sells weight loss to women.

    the brutality of this sentence …

    The fat people who become obsessed with counting calories and steps, the ones who try to vacate their bodies a little at a time . . . I don’t worry about them. They’ll never make it. Sooner or later they all come back.

    jfc, as someone who is counting calories and fasting to lose weight (and have already lost 40+ lbs), this is so disturbing to read 💀

    I mean, she’s right - most people do regain the weight, but I have to believe I can be an exception and form healthier long term behaviors, otherwise there is no point in trying (and I wouldn’t have lost all the weight I have already lost by trying - even if I have still more to lose).

    Honestly, this essay functioned as a kind of advertisement for weight loss surgery, I never seriously considered surgery before but now she has me looking into it, lol

    Compared to the other surgeries, it looks like gastric banding is fairly reasonable tbh

    anyway - yes, what a great writer, “cautionary whale” is just pure gold