Month: March 2015

Guest Post · Sat with Nat · weight loss

Self-identifying as a “bad feminist”

natalieh (she/her)6 Comments

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “bad feminist” after I wondered if I was, indeed, being a bad feminist by talking about my ongoing weight loss when I wrote 40 years & 40 pounds . This is a blog about fitness and a feminist perspective and I felt more than a twinge of self-censoring. I certainly got riled up at the thought that people were thinking discussion about my weight loss made this a “bad feminist” blog. So much so Tracy thought we should do a series of posts about that term being bandied about. She did some great ground clearing in Does Feeling Good about Weight Loss Make Me a “Bad Feminist?”

I’m not an academic. I came to feminism in my late twenties as the realization dawned on me that the world was, in fact, highly sexist. I started to see how this gender game  had negatively impacted me. I took courses in women’s studies and try to apply what I’ve learned in my personal life and in my public life to end the oppression of women.

I think healthy debate is phenomenal, I love learning new things. The most surprising things in my life have come from changing my mind on something when I get new evidence. I remember the first time I watched Taylor Mali’s spoken word “Like Lilly Like Wilson” and thought, wow, I was, like, totally, like Lilly Like Wilson and it drove my feminist high school biology teacher around the bend.

She would try to get my friends and I to understand that in 1990 wearing dog collars as fashion statements was degrading, that we should go to Take Back the Night. We’d have none of it. I’ve changed my mind about dog collars and Take Back the Night so please hear what I am about to say.

No one gets to call me a “bad feminist” but myself and let me explain why. I think that term is slung around when we mean other things like sloppy thinking or forgetting privilege or perpetuating harmful and hurtful ideas about body image and weight. I don’t think it’s intended to shame or silence but that is the impact. How dare I write about losing weight when there are so many bad arguments about weight loss! Bad Feminist! Uh, no thank you. I do self identify as a “bad feminist” when:

-I try to make my experiences universal, I can only speak for myself

-I forget my middle class, cysgender, able, white privilege

-I forget the gift of a non-violet partner who is a feminist

-I self-censor for fear of reprisal from other feminists

-I tell another woman what to do instead of supporting her choices

-I tear people down instead of building them up

So, yes, when I catch myself doing these things I self-identify as a “bad feminist”. Honestly sharing my experiences to provide more stories about fitness and health instead of feeding women lies that there’s something wrong with us is something I’m actually quite proud of, so I don’t feel like a “bad feminist” at all.

Let’s all write great stories, about our health and wellness, our bodies, that celebrate our achievements measured by things we find meaningful for ourselves. My idea of health and fitness is largely keeping up with my family, eating great food and sharing  many laughs with my friends. What’s yours?

I also appreciate that many schools of thought teach us to critique and point out the problems in arguments, to debate the points, question assumptions. These are great things and I learn from feedback and questions. I have changed my mind about so many big things but I find I can’t be open to change if I’m feeling on the defensive from being called a “bad feminist” from other people. Although, I’d rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.

picture of a poster that reads "I'd rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all"
picture of a poster that reads “I’d rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all”
diets · eating

What’s natural? And why do we care?

Sam B10 Comments
https://i0.wp.com/s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/5f/91/d7/5f91d7eb9ddc7230c3a8d85b77fc15d8.jpg?resize=663%2C457&ssl=1
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/85779567877556239/

From Amber of Go Kaleo:  “I watch a lot of nature videos, and it struck me a while ago: no matter what native tribe you look at, the women are never exactly thin, despite their healthy lifestyle. I mean, those people live in harsh conditions and work their asses off to survive a hostile environment, be it the Amazon jungle or the African steppes. And yet look! They have belly fat! And thick thighs! Oh noes! And the best part? THEY DON’T CARE! A thin tree is as beautiful as a thick tree, so why not a human being? Indeed.”

I like the point very much. Not all natural bodies are super lean. Nice to be reminded of that.

Why does it matter to us so much though? Why are we so fussed about what’s natural? I get that lots of people are critical of North American diets with overly processed food and North American lifestyles with not enough walking and lifting and way too much driving and sitting. But it doesn’t follow from the rejection of that diet and that lifestyle that we ought to seek out exactly what’s natural.

With Paleo diets, for example, you see a kind of romantic attitude about our natural bodies.

Now there’s lots to say about the Paleo diet. As an academic I’m interested in what anthropologists have to say about the way our ancestors really ate.

Here’s Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh Over “Paleo Diet”

In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called “Paleo Diet” during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.

The Paleo Diet is a nutritional framework based on the assumption that the human species has not yet adapted to the dietary changes engendered by the development of agriculture over the past ten thousand years. Proponents of the diet emphasize in particular the negative effects of eating large quantities of grain and its numerous by-products, which can lead to hypertension, obesity, and various other health problems. Instead, the Paleo Diet posits that a reliance on lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables while minimizing processed food is the key to health and longevity.

The nutritional benefits of the diet are not what the grievance is about, said Dr. Britta Hoyes, who organized the event. She agreed that a high-carbohydrate diet can have a detrimental effect on long-term health, as many studies have demonstrated. Instead, the group’s protest is a reaction to the biological and historical pediments of the diet, in particular the contention that pre-agricultural societies were only adapted to eat those foods existing before the Neolithic Revolution.

Hoyes, a paleoethnobotanist who specializes in reconstructing prehistoric subsistence, stated that only thing unifying the myriad diets that she’s studied has been their diversity. “You simply do not see specific, trans-regional trends in human subsistence in the archaeological record. People can live off everything from whale blubber to seeds and grasses. You want to know what the ideal human diet consists of? Everything. Humans can and will eat everything, and we are remarkably successful not in spite of this fact, but because of it. Our adaptability is the hallmark of the human species. We’re not called omnivores for nothing.”

As for the idea that agricultural products are somehow maladaptive to the human species, researchers at a seminar entitled “It’s When You Mate, Not What You Ate,”  pointed out that evolutionary fitness is measured by reproductive success, not by the health or longevity of an individual.

Richard Wenkel, a biostatistician who chaired the panel, explained: “As long as the diet of an individual keeps them alive long enough to successfully mate, then that diet has conferred an evolutionary advantage. By that metric, the agricultural revolution has proven to be the most effective dietary system in the history of our species. We are the most prolific higher-order vertebrate on the planet.” It is a point that he feels is overlooked by Paleo Diet enthusiasts.

See also  How to Really Eat Like a Hunter-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet Is Half-Baked [Interactive & Infographic]

I also want to read Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live.

But let’s suppose we did have a handle on our natural diet. Two things rub me the wrong way about this.

First, what’s natural versus what’s cultural is often very hard to tell. Here’s one example. People say it’s natural for men to have a more muscular physique than women and that women are naturally smaller and thinner than men. Okay. But why then, if it’s natural, do we work so hard to achieve those differences?

Read Are You Working Hard Enough to Achieve Your Natural Body?

We commonly hear claims that men are naturally more muscular and physically intimidating than women.  “It’s a biological fact,” someone might say.  If that were true, though, we wouldn’t have to work so incredibly hard to make it so.

@IllMakeItMyself sent in this great example of the way in which we are pushed to force our bodies into a gender binary that we pretend is natural.  On the upper right part of the Men’s Health cover, it reads: “Add 15lb of muscle” and, right next door on the Women’s Health cover, it reads “5 ways to lose 15 lbs.”

If we have to try this hard to make it true, maybe we’re not as different as we think we are.

This point is true for all sorts of so called natural differences between men and women. Men and women are fed differently and treated differently from birth (maybe even earlier as more people choose to know the sex of the child they’re carrying). How we turn out is a result of both social and biological forces. It’s hard to weed out the social and talk about how men and women would be if we were treated the same. What’s nature? What’s nurture? We just don’t know.

Second, that something is natural is neither here nor there in terms of goodness. Not everything natural is worth wanting. That’s something that authors of the Natural News ought to consider.

What’s Natural News? It’s the worst of the anti-science health sites on the internet, according to Skeptoid.

When Natural News began, it was basically the blog and sales portal of anti-pharmaceutical activist Mike Adams. His basic premise has always been the Big Pharma conspiracy, the idea that the medical industry secretly wants to keep everyone sick, and conspires with the food industry to make people unhealthy, all driven by a massive plot of greed to sell poisonous medicines. Adams appears to have become a protégé of Alex Jones, for he now writes on Natural News at least as many police state conspiracy articles as he does anti-science based medicine articles. They carry ads for each other on their sites as well.

The Natural Society is also opposed to Google’s new evidence based news ranking.

But I wouldn’t wave the banner of “natural” quite so proudly. Cancer is perfectly natural. Nature isn’t all sunshine and rainbows.

Philosophers call the fallacy of assuming what’s natural is good the fallacy of the appeal to nature.

…[C]onsider the…argument that what is natural is somehow good and what is unnatural bad. …[T]he principle is rarely stated so explicitly, but if we look at what people actually do, this does seem to be an assumption that underlies people’s behaviour. Consider, for example, the popularity of “natural” remedies. A great many people would always prefer to take a “natural” remedy over an “artificial” one. Similarly, people prefer foods that have “all natural” ingredients.
One obvious point to make here is that this very characterization of certain things as “natural” is problematic. What always strikes me about health food shops are the rows and rows of bottles and tablets. A greengrocer seems to be a much better source of natural products than such collections of distilled essences and the like. …
However, let us set aside such doubts about the category of “the natural” for the moment and just ask, even if we can agree that some things are natural and some are not, what follows from this? The answer is: nothing. There is no factual reason to suppose that what is natural is good (or at least better) and what is unnatural is bad (or at least worse)

Source: Julian Baggini, Making Sense, Oxford, 2002, pp. 181-182.

Here’s an excerpt from Tim Minchin’s heroine in the story Storm:

Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.”

 

body image · fat · interview · media

What’s Wrong with the “Feeling Fat” Emoticon?

Tracy I7 Comments
Facebook emoticons, including "feeling fat," with a chubby face.You’ve probably read by now that Facebook has removed its “feeling fat” status update/emoticon from the list of options. Over 16,000 put pressure on the social media goliath by signing activist group Endangered Bodies’ petition.

This article quotes Catherine Weingarten, the author of the petition, as saying:
When Facebook users set their status to “feeling fat,” they are making fun of people who consider themselves to be overweight, which can include many people with eating disorders. That is not ok. Join me in asking Facebook to remove the “fat” emoji from their status options.
And when it decided to do the right thing, Facebook said:

“We’ve heard from our community that listing ‘feeling fat’ as an option for status updates could reinforce negative body image, particularly for people struggling with eating disorders,” Facebook (FB, Tech30) said in a statement.
But media is just about sound bytes (as I myself discovered in a TV interview that I’ll post below), and neither of these get to the full picture.

First of all, it’s not just about people with eating disorders and it’s not just about making fun of people. No doubt, Catherine Weingarten said a lot more than that. I’m almost certain of that because the Endangered Bodies offers a more nuanced set of reasons for what the problem is. The petition talks about fat-shaming, body hatred, and Facebook’s influence and reach as a significant social media platform:

Fat is a substance that every body has and needs. Fat is also an adjective – a descriptive word about a physical attribute. Just like tall, short, black or white, it should not be misused to shame oneself or others. However, the fashion, beauty and diet industries have an interest in making us feel insecure about our own bodies and over time “fat” has become a negative word, not a simple statement of size. There is nothing neutral about it. The stigma and criticism of fat and the elevation of thin make them stand-ins for other kinds of words, feelings and moods.

Endangered Bodies sees this fear of fat and idealisation of thinness throughout society as a form of weight stigma, which can have a serious impact on the millions of people dealing with negative body image. Body-shaming and weight stigma are associated with lower self-esteem and disordered eating, an issue that Facebook – being a social platform – needs to take seriously.

I myself blogged about “feeling fat” a long time ago, when the blog was just a month old. There, I talked about the difference between feeling fit and feeling fat. Most especially, we need to be aware that feeling fat has nothing to do with body weight. It has to do with the assumption that fat is bad. When we feel bad about ourselves, that self-loathing can express itself in feeling fat:
It’s a strange and complicated thing, feeling fat is.  It can settle in overnight, or even through the course of a day. Clothes that fit just fine when I put them on in the morning might by lunch time start to feel like they’re pinching and snug, especially if I had a bad morning.  Even the red silk scarf, not a body-hugging item, might not look right when just yesterday it accessorized perfectly. And a general feeling of unworthiness accompanies feeling fat. It’s astonishing and sad that internalized cultural stigma against weight and body type can feed so powerfully into these negative attitudes about oneself.

Remember, feeling fat is amazingly unconnected to actual body size and even percentage of fat. But it is also, for many women I know, the “go-to” feeling when they are unhappy with themselves about something…about anything.  This says a lot about the hold that our culture’s attitudes about weight and body size has on us. Even those of us who are explicitly and consciously attentive to the irrational and unfair social stigma, even working to challenge it, latch onto fatness (real or imagined) as a personal deficiency. It then spirals into an energy-sucking, self-defeating stick that might make a person feel motivated to get active (but for all the wrong reasons) or thoroughly hopeless about exercise because it doesn’t “work” (as if its only purpose is to lose or control one’s weight).

When we can use feeling fat to articulate low self-esteem, as a stick to beat ourselves with, then it’s not funny. It’s sad. One thing I believe is that when we feel fat it’s a good sign that something else is going on with us. And that’s probably not the time to invoke a glib emoticon that announces to the world: “I hate myself right now.”

The social meaning of feeling fat ensures that it’s not simply self-abusive. Not at all. A purely individualistic explanation of why it’s harmful to include it among “impatient, amused, better, discouraged” doesn’t capture the social harm. It’s fat-phobic and fat-shaming.  Even if lots of the people who feel fat don’t appear to others to be fat, they’ve internalized the message that fat is loathsome to such a degree that it’s what they latch onto when they want to express how much they despise themselves in that moment (because, and this is one thing it has in common with actual feelings, it can pass as quickly as it set in). That’s a pretty awful thing for people who others actually do think of as fat.

We live in a fat-phobic, fat-shaming world. In providing that emoticon, Facebook is perpetuating an oppressive social attitude.  The local news came to see me about this today. I said a lot of stuff that was more interesting than what they chose, but if you’re interested, here’s a link to the clip.  They will make you watch an ad first and for that I apologize.

And from the Endangered Bodies’ Fat Is Not a Feeling campaign:

With social influence, power, and reach comes social responsibility. It’s good to see that Facebook can respond appropriately at least some of the time even if they don’t have a very nuanced public presentation of their reasons.

It’s not, as the other person interviewed in my clip said, that they can’t afford not to be “politically correct.” Why do people always talk about “political correctness” as if there is something wrong with simply choosing a socially responsible course of action? That charge that mega-corporations are always having to bow to political correctness is a simplistic and dismissive response to genuine concern about real social harms.

And to those who think that in removing this choice FB has somehow done us a disservice, it’s not some God-given right that everything we experience needs to be expressible in a canned status with a matching emoticon. I’m glad they took it down and I will be happier still when we stop using “feeling fat” as a form of self-abuse and a socially acceptable way of body-shaming in a fat-phobic culture.
Guest Post · menopause

Doctor’s orders: Menopause and fitness

KateNorlock13 Comments

Not everyone shares this sentiment, I realize, but for me, menopause is great news. My menstruation was as rough at 44 as it was at 13. But for over half a year I’ve had no excruciating cramps, no backache that feels like it’s splitting me in two, no radiating pain down my thighs. It’s fantastic. Some late-night hot flashes and a little weight-gain seem a light price to pay for freedom from monthly decommissioning.

Today was my doctor’s appointment to confirm that menopause is, in fact, happening, and not something more mysterious. When my mother was my age, she developed large, benign fibroid tumors in her uterus, and I wanted official word that the same was not happening to me. The doctor agreed that an ultra-sound could be done but assured me that usually, the sorts of tumors my mother had were accompanied by more bleeding, not less.

Instead, he said, it is a greater concern that I’m a bit young for menopause, and at higher risk for osteoporosis. “Okay,” I said cheerfully, “tell me something I can do to prevent osteo.”

“Exercise,” he said promptly.

Pause. “Tell me something else I can do.”

The thing is, I have been lucky in the body lottery, getting by on regular walking and not much more, despite a sedentary job. So exercise has always seemed optional to me. I know I lack fitness, but until now fitness seemed like it would be an improvement on my current privileged situation, and not like it was required.

This doctor’s visit was taking all the joy out of menopause.

He sent me to another room for blood-work, where I had time to stare at the long list of tests the lab was to conduct. My options seem to be dwindling. I know, I know, the future should not be presumed to resemble the past. None of ours should. But it wasn’t just that my body was changing. It’s that my concept of fitness was changing. Was fitness an optional state of well-being, or had I always been wrong about what was up to me? Had it always been required from above, an edict that I’d ignored? If I didn’t have the higher risk of osteoporosis, would I reconceive fitness, do what I’m told, obey?

I teach my students about autonomy often. I tell them that autonomy is complex, that it isn’t just equivalent to getting to do whatever you want to do. I have very high-minded lectures in which I emphasize that freedom of choice requires preconditions, and so autonomy also refers to the conditions that make choosing possible. When we refer to children as developing autonomy, we’re not referring to the numbers of new choices they can imagine, but to the physical, mental, and moral powers they are gaining, the capacities to choose. So I know I could see fitness as a capacity, a source of further choices. If I want it, if I choose fitness, maybe exercise won’t seem like a punishment, like I am being told what to do.

I was drawn to feminism because it spoke to my desire for autonomy, freedom, choice. Most of the bloggers here see fitness the same way. Only today did I realize that I don’t. At least, not yet. Before I start an exercise regimen, I’m going to need a little more of a mental workout.

Uncategorized

Guess Who Has a Book Contract?

Tracy I22 Comments

open book Today, when I got home from work, I stopped in the lobby on the way upstairs so I could pick up a few days’ worth of mail that’s been gathering because of my neglect.  Among the bills and junk and coupons I found a big white envelope with my name on it.

In the left top corner it said “Greystone Books.”  I opened it up to find our signed book contract and my portion of our advance.

Yes, you heard that right!  A book contract. An advance.  Maybe it’s crass to talk about the advance, but as academics we do an awful lot of writing for free and the idea of an advance is so out of the range of what’s expected that I’m just chuffed every time I think of it!

I emailed Sam. Yep! She got hers, too.  We had a pact that we would not officially announce anything until the publisher returned the signed contract to us. We have that now. So here goes!

We’ve been working on this book idea for over a year now.  With just a sketch of a concept in the fall of 2013, I contacted an agent whom I’d met at a publishing panel back in 2006.  On that panel, he’d described his agency, Garamond, as specializing in non-fiction work and said they liked working with academics who were venturing into the world of trade (non-academic) publishing. I approached him afterwards to get his card.

I’d had his card on my desk for seven years, waiting for the right project. I sent him an email, floating our feminist fitness book idea by him to see if it might be of interest. He passed this informal pitch on to his business partner, Lisa. She followed up by asking for a fuller proposal with a chapter by chapter outline. We didn’t have one. Over the next six months, she helped us write one, paying attention to every detail, making suggestions for revisions, revising some of the more marketing-oriented sections for us, to produce a proposal she could sell to publishers. I don’t know about all agents, but Lisa worked hard for us and we could not have produced the proposal we did without her editing, comments, and suggestions.

Lisa is based in D.C. and started shopping it out to some American presses last fall. But we were too Canadian for them.  Then she met Rob and Nancy from Greystone Press in Vancouver at a book fair in Germany. Greystone is a wonderful Canadian trade book press that focuses on “high quality non-fiction books that appeal to regional, national, and international readers.” They publish the work of all sorts of Canadian authors, including environmentalist David Suzuki.

They’ve published other works about sports and fitness, including Feet Don’t Fail Me Now: The Rogue’s Guide to Running the Marathon, by Ben Kaplan and Eat, Sleep, Ride, by Paul Howard, about the Tour Divide (the world’s longest mountain bike race).

They saw the book’s potential and wanted to hear more.  We had a chat. They didn’t just share our enthusiasm for the project, they had a good grasp of what we wanted to accomplish in offering our own experiences and our feminist critique of and approach to fitness.

Then came the offer. Lisa reviewed it with us and talked it over with them. A contract came our way. We signed. They signed. And yay!

Here’s an overview of the project:

Part fitness memoir, part reflection and commentary on fitness and dieting, and part inspirational text, Fit Over 40 [provisional title] moves past the latest fitness trends. What’s a beach body? It’s the one you take to the beach. Your yoga body is the body that gets you through your yoga class. And your runner’s body runs you to the finish line. Period.

It’s not easy to reject strong and pervasive cultural messages about losing weight, the obligation to diet, and the rejection of the overweight body. We also need to get past the idea that exercise and physical activity are joyless duties that we need to undertake to keep our unwieldy bodies in check. There are lots of good reasons to resist the mainstream view. Reason number one: why miss out on the fun you could have?  We can reclaim play in our adult lives. Reason number two: medical and health research shows over and over again that the odds of losing weight and keeping it off are slim, far slimmer than a chronic dieter will ever likely be. So we can set that aside and look for other sources of motivation. That’s where fun comes into the picture. And the idea of being as energetic and strong as possible as we age is yet a third reason to take up an active lifestyle for people who are not already leading one.

The book makes a strong case–both through our personal stories and our critical spin on the received view–for our belief that the pursuit of fitness ought to be reclaimed as a worthy goal in itself, distinct from weight loss and the quest for that elusive slender (and youthful) body that our media and our society so highly prize. Anyone at any age can get more active, learn to accept and maybe even love the body they have, and stare down those milestone birthdays so many of us have come to dread. And they, like us, can have a great time doing it.

We’re not targeting high-level athletes or people who need a hard to sell to get off the couch and move more. We’re not going to spell out all the bad things that will happen if you want to sit still. We’re not going to provide training plans or outline food plans. This is not a “how-to” book in the formulaic sense of that genre. Instead, through our own stories of our “Fittest by 50” challenge and our reflections on fitness, dieting, body image, aging, attitude, competition, families and fitness, and our celebration of the idiosyncratic activities we each love, we aim to inspire others to embark on their own challenge, on their own terms, each of us in her own voice.

We haven’t settled on a title yet–suggestions welcome.

Sam and I have a standing commitment to get together every Monday and Friday for two hours to work on the book for now. We’ll step that up as soon as classes end so we can meet our June deadline.

Stay tuned for more information about the release date, sometime in early 2016.

cycling

I’m back! Thoughts on my first spring bike commute and why I take the lane

Sam B12 Comments

I did it.

It was above freezing this weekend and a high of 7 today. And I did it.  I got my cyclocross/commuting bike (complete with bell, panniers, and fenders) out of the basement and rode to work. I smiled the entire way there and back. It felt so great to be riding outside again.

The bike path along the river in our city is nowhere near clear. It’s got big patches of snow and ice but the roads are in good shape. Cars aren’t quite used to seeing bikes again so I smiled and waved a lot but since bikes are associated with the return of above freezing weather, I think most people were happy to see me.

Finding a bike rack once I got the campus was a bit trickier. I had to climb a snowbank and attach my bike to what was the top of the rack, now the only accessible bit of metal on which to attach a lock. Some of the spots are still taken by bikes that over-wintered on campus, abandoned by their owners on the first day of snow and now still frozen, deep in the snowbank. Tracy points out that one even has a note, from campus police, warning the owner that their lock is inadequate.

Anyway, it was a great ride. I’m happy. I’m back.

But I’ve got to say that the first ride will probably make me nervous each year because of something that happened 4 years ago.

image

image

image

What happened four years ago?

On a nice March day in 2011 in conditions much like today, I landed in hospital. I was taken there by an ambulance. And since then my first ride of spring always freaks me out a bit. As cyclists might say, “I came off my bike.” That’s as opposed to crashing.

It happened not far from my house on a stretch of Wortley Road full of potholes. Cars were passing closely and rather than stay out in the lane–AS I SHOULD HAVE DONE–I moved right, got out of their way, and hit a pothole. I don’t remember the next bit. I do remember being put on a stretcher. I do remember emergency service workers asking me to sit up and help get my jacket off or they’d have to cut if off. It was a really nice cycling jacket. I sat up.

I spent the day in hospital being scanned every which way. The nice ambulance guys kept coming in to joke that they’d left my bike behind the counter at the ER and it was doing fine. Thanks guys.

They also came in later to look at my head scans and joked that I should do a poster for helmet use. Because even though I looked awful and my helmet was completely destroyed my head was actually just fine. In the end, though I was battered and bruised, I had only the mildest of concussions. I was symptom free within a couple of days. I was very lucky.

It’s why I was very happy to take part in the Bikes and Brains event last year.

I also had a teary experience in our local grocery store a few days later. A woman came up to me and touched my arm. She asked if I’d had a bike accident on Wortley Road recently. I said yes and then she hugged me. “I’m so happy you’re okay.” It turns out that she was behind the car who passed too close and watched me come off my bike. She had called 911 and stayed with me until they arrived. But she didn’t know how the story ended, if I was okay in the end. We were both happy to have met each other.

Lessons learned? Well, I now assertively take the lane when the edge of the road is snow, ice, and potholes. Yes, I might slow the cars down. Yes, drivers might have to wait. But my safety on the road comes before your convenience. Welcome to spring in Canada!

Here’s my helmet after the crash.

helmetcrash

Here’s the obligatory post crash selfie.

mecrash

diets · weight loss

On wishing for weight loss (and wings that can fly)

Sam B7 Comments

Do I want to be smaller? Yes.

Ask me a hard question, as they say.

(I’m much more comfortable with big/small language instead of fat/thin. Why? Read Fat or big: What’s in a name?)

Look, it’s not irrational in a size phobic society to not want to be fat.

Why? More clothes fit, you’ll get paid more, get higher teaching evaluations if you’re a professor (like me), be seen as smarter, be more attractive to a wider range of partners (don’t get me wrong, I’ve never had a shortage of people finding me attractive but I’m a bit of a niche taste), and more to the point, in my case, climb hills faster. Zoom!

Added bonus: It’d improve my running times a lot.

Oh, and since I’m writing this on a plane, let me note that it’d be easier if there were less of me taking up seat space.

No more fat shaming and discrimination? Who wouldn’t want that? How bad is it?

The overweight and obese face significant discrimination. A 2014 study from University College London that followed nearly 3,000 adults found that overweight individuals experienced teasing, harassment, or felt that they received poorer service everywhere from restaurants to doctors offices for their size. It’s a process informally known as “fat shaming,” and it does nothing to improve the lives of the shamed. From here.

You can divide the above list of facts into two categories, those that depend on the attitudes of others and those that don’t.

Arguments about homosexuality used to have that kind of flavour back in my youth. “I don’t know why they’re called ‘gay’,” says homophobic uncle. “I’ve never met a happy one.” Another relative says, “It’s a sad life. They’re treated so badly.” But homosexuality isn’t inherently sad. It’s sad in a homophobic society. Sad to be gay when gay people are treated badly.

Lots of the arguments about it being bad to be fat are like that. Bad to be fat when fat people are hated. It’s interesting that some of the attitudes we have towards fat are more dangerous in terms of health impact than fat itself. See Fear of Far More Dangerous Than Fat. Even the health impact of obesity is a more complicated than you might think. For example, being overweight though not obese, is linked to lower overall all cause mortality.

Mostly I’m okay with the attitudes of others. I’m smart, tough, successful, and I’ve got a terrific group of family and friends. I love my body, that’s true, but even for me, multiply privileged me, it’s tiring in a fat phobic world.

It’s consistent with wishing the world were different that if I can’t change the world, my next best choice is changing me.

That’s true of race as well.

I remember reading Lawrence Thomas’s piece years ago and being moved by it.

Next Life, I’ll Be White Maybe Then, I’ll Be Trusted By Others

My 40-year journey through life has revealed to me that more often than not, I need only to be in the presence of a white woman and she will begin clutching her pocketbook. My sheer presence has reminded more white people – female and male alike – to lock their car doors than I care to think about. I suppose it can be said here that I make an unwitting contribution to public safety.

I rarely enjoy what is properly called the public trust of whites. That is to say, the white person on the street who does not know me from Adam or Eve is much more likely to judge me negatively on account of my skin color, however much my attire and mannerisms (including gait) conform to the traditional standards of well-off white males.

I’m not comparing in all aspects size discrimination with race discrimination but that’s clearly one way they’re alike. In both cases prejudice, discrimination, and implicit bias make your life worse.

The other set of regrets are tougher. They’re more like the laws of physics. Hill climbing is all about power to weight ratio. To beat someone who weighs 140 lbs up a hill I have to be an awful lot faster and and more powerful. If I lost fifty pounds I’d shave lots of minutes off my five km time.

So just how much can you expect to benefit from being lighter? Joe Henderson, the author of various books on running, has this to offer: “The loss of a single pound doesn’t mean much for a single mile, but the effect multiplies nicely. Ten pounds equals 20 seconds per mile, which grows to a minute-plus in a 5K, more than two minutes in a 10K, nearly 4.5 minutes in a half-marathon and almost nine minutes in a marathon.”

So, yes, lots of reasons to want to be smaller.

But also lots of reasons to want to be taller too. It’s a real help in rowing though not in cycling or running. Cycling favours smaller bodies and height isn’t a factor in running. Yes, tall people have longer legs but they weigh more and that offsets the height advantage in running.

Yet, while I’m teased about my height no one expects me to do anything about it.

My height for those who don’t know me in person is a life long, family related joke. I’M NOT SHORT. (“You keep telling people that mum.”)

I’m 5’7. That’s well above average height for a North American woman. But in my family, it’s short. My daughter Mallory is 5’11. All the men in the family are above 6’3. In that context, I’m short.

Cue the Hobbit Mother jokes. They even play the Hobbit song when I’m sad. “Here the music of your people will cheer you up!” (Or the Taking to Hobbits to Isengard song on 10 hour loop when they want to annoy me.)

But weight isn’t like height. Usually we think that one is changeable and other other isn’t. I’m not sure they’re that different.

Is long term weight loss impossible? I suspect impossible is too strong. Some people have done it so it’s not impossible. It’s just very very hard, highly unlikely, improbable. I know in my case it’s tough.

It might both be true that weight loss is near impossible and true that excess weight hurts health. That’s sad but something being sad doesn’t stop it being true.

The poodle video makes this Health at Every Size point in terms of dogs. See Poodle Science.

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No one wants greyhounds to put on weight, or chihuahuas to get taller. No one expects Saint Bernard to slim down. That’s true even though the larger dogs have shorter lives.

Now when it comes to humans and weight, it’s more complicated than that. But the truth is there’s lots of things I want that I can’t have. For example, I’d love changeable length hair. And while we’re really dreaming, changeable height. And wings. And maybe we could be playful with gender.

I’ve often thought it would be great to have size adjustable breasts, big and fancy for going out, pretty much flat while running.

I’d also like to have houses in New Zealand and Australia, find a cure for cancer, end racial discrimination, make the world happy and safe for people of all sexual and gender orientations and have more time for camping, canoeing, biking, etc. Life is full of things worth wishing for.

We do what we can. I’ve exercise a lot not just because it’s healthy but also because I’m happiest moving a lot. I eat well, again because eating well helps my body move in ways I enjoy.

If I lose weight, that’s terrific. But frankly while it’s something I want I have no big expectations beyond losing weight for the cycling season which I know I can do. Keeping it off is tough. I’ve been trying to lose weight most of my life. And wanting what I can’t have has never seemed a good game plan for life happiness.

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My trip to gender equality in sports coverage
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My trip to gender equality in sports coverage

Moira6 Comments

I just returned from a terrific work-related trip to the lovely and truly impressive Lund University in Sweden. When planning my trip, I realized that I would also be there for the Tjejvasan, a 30 km women’s cross-country ski race in the heart of Sweden. Unfortunately, with 10,000 women signed up for the event, the race was full. I nonetheless held out hope that I might find someone to sell me their bib (which is permitted). Sadly, I eventually realized that even with a bib, it would be logistically impossible to get myself from Lund to the race. I felt pretty disappointed. How often does one get the chance to ski a race with 10,000 other women, and in Sweden no less? The disappointment deepened when I realized I was also going to be in Sweden for the FIS Nordic Ski World Championships and there was no way I could be a spectator at any of the events.

But I ended up having an unexpected and really awesome vicarious ski experience in Sweden. It turns out that coverage of cross-country skiing in the Swedish media is terrific. Whenever I turned on my TV in the hotel, cross-country skiing was on. I asked one of the guys at the conference about this and he said “Oh yes, in Sweden we love our skiing!” The 90km Vasaloppet cross-country ski race is apparently the most watched sporting event of the year.

But what was most striking was the coverage of women’s skiing. They had full coverage of women’s events, complete with post-race commentary and panel discussions. It was on par with the coverage of men’s skiing. My experience of watching the Swedish women’s ski events was therefore kind of surreal: it was as though I was suddenly dropped into an alternate reality where women’s athleticism is valued as much as men’s athleticism.

Of course, Sweden still has a way to go towards women’s equality in sports and sports media coverage (through probably not as far as most other countries, including Canada). And a lot of this has to do with factors beyond Sweden’s—or any individual country’s—control. All of the women’s cross-country ski events in the FIS World Championships and the Olympics are set for shorter distances than the men’s events. These restrictions have no good rationale: women can unquestionably compete the same distances as men. And they prevent women from experiencing and showcasing their full athleticism.

These points are underscored by women’s participation in the 90 km Vasaloppet, the final race in a week of races that includes the Tjejvasan. The Vasaloppet is mixed gender and has a men’s winner and a women’s winner. While only 2000 of the 15,800 participants this year are women, they can be expected to do very well in the race. Last year, Laila Kveli won the women’s class with a time of 4:31:57.30, and did so without using grip wax – the first woman to do so in this race. The male winner – John Kristian Dahl – had a time of 4:14:33.75. (Also notable is the age range of participants from 19 to 89. If you are looking for life-long sporting passion, you can’t beat cross-country skiing!)

Anyway, as annoying as I find the gender inequities in competitive cross-country skiing, I am grateful for my encounter with Sweden’s media coverage of skiing. If only for a short time, I experienced what equality in women’s sports coverage might be like. This is one reason why I will be watching the 2015 Vasaloppet today—on Swedish SVT online.

Relearning the virtue of patience and being a beginner again
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Relearning the virtue of patience and being a beginner again

catherine w7 Comments

In the past couple of years, I’ve been more seriously involved in two winter sports—squash and cross country skiing. I’ve blogged about my re-entry into competitive squash and my adventures in cross country skiing.  In neither case would I consider myself a beginner—I started playing squash almost 30 years ago (interspersed with long dormant periods), and cross country skiing has been a regular feature of my winter activity for the past 3 or so years, so both are familiar and comfortable.

However, I ventured way out of the zones of familiarity and comfort last Saturday, when I decided to try skate skiing. First, a few terminology notes. Cross country skiing can be done using different techniques, with correspondingly different skis. Probably the most familiar style is classic , which looks like this:

classic

Then there is skate skiing, which looks like this:

skate

Both classic and skate skiing are done competitively and recreationally. However, in in my area, most of the bike racers tend to skate ski during the winter; it’s an excellent and time-efficient workout, and is also good cross-training. Is it a better workout than classic skiing? Turns out that the answer is complicated, but this much is true: it’s much easier to be a beginner on classic skis than skate skis. The learning curve and fitness requirements are much steeper for skate skiing. Here’s why: if you’re not experienced on classic skis, you can still glide forward, but on skate skis you have to push yourself side to side, which is exhausting when you don’t know what you’re doing. In fact, it’s exhausting even when you’re an expert.

exhausted-ski

I’ve been skiing classic regularly for a few winters now, and really enjoy it—it’s a way to get outside in the winter, get a workout, enjoy nature, and do something active and fun with friends of all ability levels. As in biking, if you’re in a mixed group, you can go slower and also stop for people to catch up and catch their breath.

In skate skiing, however, all that goes out the window. Or so I found out last Saturday.

My friend Janet and I decided to rent skate skis last weekend at Great Brook Farm,  a lovely groomed ski area near Boston. We went with our friend Jessica, who is a very experienced skate skier. She moves seemingly effortlessly, gracefully, and very fast down trails. Janet had taken a skate lesson and tried skating a few times, and I had witnessed her skating along, slowly and haltingly at first, but steadily. I thought to myself, how hard can it be?

It is shocking sometimes when you realize that something you thought wasn’t hard at all turns out to be really really hard. I had prepared by watching a bunch of youtube videos on skating technique. They all made it look easy. You put your skis in a v-position, push off one ski, and glide along, balancing on the other ski.

Surrounded by well-meaning friends, I tried to push off, but to my surprise, didn’t actually go anywhere at all. I tried again. And again. And again. Nothing. Wow—mind blown. Was I not going to be able to do this at all?

Somehow, by using poles to push myself along (skate skis are completely smooth on the bottom, so they slide very easily on snow) and stuttering along, I made it to a flat field area with a straight groomed trail. Jess was offering advice to Janet, who was making progress.

I was really frustrated—I could see what I was supposed to do, but couldn’t put it into action, and was seriously considering giving it up altogether. I had brought my classic skis with me, in case I wanted to switch.

Then something nice happened. Another friend we ran into—Dan, who cycles, skate skis, speed skates and roller blades (so he’s completely comfortable with this type of activity) said to me, “you just need to spend some time on the skis. It will take some time. Just stay on the skis for a while.” This was good advice. It calmed me down and helped me reset my expectations. I was going to have to spend some time not being able to do this, and at some point in the future, I was going to improve. Maybe not as soon as I would like (that is, immediately), but sometime.

I had completely forgotten what that was like—being absolutely at the beginning of learning how to do something. As adults, when do we experience this? Not often. It’s a scary and uncomfortable feeling. But I was intrigued and also heartened by Dan’s comments. He’s a shop teacher, so he’s used to introducing students to activities they’ve never encountered before. I decided to take his advice and just spend some time on the skis, in this one little area, by myself.

Sending everyone else on their way, with them agreeing to come back to check on me later, I proceeded to practice poling and pushing off one ski and gliding. I can’t actually say what happened, or even how long it took, but within an hour I was sort of skate skiing! It was tiring, it was solitary, and it was not comfortable. While I was practicing, a group of small children and some parents came through, with several of the kids on skate skis, just gliding along. Sigh. Well, there’s no way through it but to do it. And I did.

I’m still at the bottom of the learning curve, and (unlike Janet, who just bought skate skis at an end-of-season sale), I’m not yet ready to commit to this. But maybe after next season. It takes courage and patience to embark on something completely new and alien, and I’m working my way into acquiring enough of each to keep going at it. But I’m not giving up—there is fun out there to be had skating along on snow, and I want some more…

me-skate

fitness classes · Guest Post · yoga

Being asked to smile in yoga (Guest Post)

natalieh (she/her)16 Comments

One of my strategies for supporting my mental health, lower blood pressure and dealing with muscle fatigue from triathlon training is to go to yoga classes and do short routines at home.

There are many schools of yoga, some focus on flowing through postures, others holding postures for long periods of time. I like them all because I always learn new things from each instructor through their approach and methodology.

The one thing I struggle with is being asked to smile during yoga. A few weeks back I was having a run of very stressful days. They were days where it was all I could do to get to work, not cry, then come home and support my family. It is those kind of days where yoga helps me stretch my clenched muscles and relax my face. My typical yoga face is expressionless, flat, and slack-jawed. I feel serene and beyond the stress of my day in that face.

On this night I was in a new class with an instructor I didn’t know so I had no expectations. Her approach is from a restorative yoga perspective and she focuses on alignment. I learned a great deal on how to move my feet to take pressure off my knees, how to use the creases in my wrists to align my arms in plank, really good stuff, then she asked us to smile.

I was so grossly unhappy that day I had used up all my energy just not crying and presenting a neutral face to the world. I have epic grumpy faces and I sometimes post them on my facebook feed because I’m a big drama queen. For example, I made this face once simply because I had to make my own coffee at work one day:

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So here I am, barely keeping it together, when the instructor asked us all to smile then went from person to person gently chastising those who weren’t then insisting we smile. She uses this technique as a measure to see if a student is pushing themselves too hard in class. Her thought being if you lose your smile ease back on the stance. It’s a great idea. That night though the effort to try and even gently turn up the corner of my mouth was painful. I was truly sad and the small smile seared a tunnel down into my well of unhappiness and I started to cry. Tears streamed down my face. I just wanted peace that night and here I was openly weeping in front of strangers and an instructor I didn’t know. It felt terrible. I was embarrassed and sad and thankful the lights in the studio were turned down low. I was able to keep myself from sobbing and I went through the postures, tears soaking my mat during child’s pose and downward dog. I got through the class and thought, that will never happen again.

The next week the exact same thing happened. The disconnect between smiling and not feeling happy was just more than I could bear. This was not what I was looking for from my yoga sessions. I stopped going for a couple weeks.

Part of what bugged me was my personal history of receiving messages that, as a women, I ought to always smile, that I should smile to be more pleasing to others, to hide my feelings and be less scary. I think I have a great smile because it is genuine and I don’t stretch my lips across my teeth in a weird, fake way. I am not stingy with my smiles but I also don’t throw them around willy-nilly. More simply put, if I’m happy, I smile.

Fast forward to this past Monday, the smile asking instructor was subbing in for my usual power yoga instructor and I was nervous. It turned out Anita, who runs with Tracy, goes to my gym and was coming to this class. We chatted a bit before class and were laughing at the absurdity of our lives as we grapple with growing humans. (I think we both agree that parenting is, like, way hard.)

Class started and I realized I was a bit self-conscious doing yoga alongside Anita. (Huh, wonder what that was about.) I don’t remember who laughed/groaned/admitted distress first  but I had a lot of fun and when it came to asking us to smile I did and felt great. Maybe I was having a better day, maybe it was being relaxed with my new friend, who knows, but it felt genuine and awesome and that is pretty cool, in fact, it felt a whole lot like this face:

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