food and fat, fat and food

Have you read The Fat Girl's Guide to Life? I bought it, but I've only read a little of it, and I'm not sure I love it at all. But we'll see. I think I might be more fat-positive than she is. I think my food issues might be pretty much gone, or at least as gone as they'll ever be, or at least really insignificant compared to what they were a few months ago (but all women in our culture have food issues too, so whatever). Maybe I'm just deceiving myself, but it seems like once I really really accepted that my body just is what it is -- thin people are thin, fat people are fat, dieting is impossible, I really am not capable of losing significant amounts of weight, and that does not mean that I lack control or willpower or that I let my food issues control me, it just means my body wants to be fat (of course, who am I kidding, I'm still hoping my PCOS drugs will magically make me lose at least some weight) -- I sort of (unconsciously) realized that the reason that I still had had food issues in the first place (after the past few years when I started to eat well and exercise well, that is, not all those years of basically having a binge eating disorder) was because I thought my food issues were what was making me fat, so I fought against them, but really there was nothing to fight against except for the crazy demons that I invented in my own head. Once I realized that really and truly, my issues with food were not making me fat, and food was not making me fat (I mean, let's think about this -- I weigh more now than I did when I binged constantly and almost never exercised, so clearly the math of weight loss is somewhat screwy, or should I say FULL OF CRAP), it was just fat that was making me fat, I felt a lot less anxiety (although still not none, but again, see above re: our culture being toxic) about food in general. I still have a lot of fat anxiety, but I have a lot less food anxiety.

And it's horribly depressing at the same time that it's wonderfully freeing, because I STILL WANT TO BE THIN. And as long as I believed it was possible to overcome my "food issues" and become thin, I had that dream of a perfect thin body and a perfect thin life, even though I knew it was only a dream -- but that ideal was maybe waiting for me if I was only good enough and smart enough to figure it all out and stick to it. And in the long run, it is so much better to ditch the self-manufactured food issues and stop striving for something that is absolutely impossible, but in the short run letting that dream die is so, so hard, because this is the only body I get now, and while I was OK accepting this body and being fat-positive while I was striving for something "better" -- for myself only, of course, not that there's anything wrong with other women being fat, yay for Health At Any Size!, and the external pressure to lose weight is really abominable and we should absolutely do away with it, and I was trying to do it not only to look good (at least I was honest with myself about that) but also because I wanted to be in better shape! -- it's a lot harder to embrace this body when I know that I am really and truly stuck with it.