Since I always thought weddings were a patriarchal waste of good money, I have been trying as best I can in the weeks before my own to not talk about it. But if one more person asks if I'm giving up gluten and dairy to lose weight for the wedding, I am going to… well, have a lot to say to them.
Years ago, I was diagnosed -- by a doctor doing a lab test -- with celiac disease. That means the little absorby thingamabobs in my belly get sort of drunk whenever they come into contact with gluten, and they open overly much, allowing all kinds of toxins to flow in where they shouldn't ever go. Gluten, and dairy too, it turns out, makes me tired. Have you ever had a kidney infection? That initial malaise, the overwhelming exhaustion in which your dream brain starts to overlay your waking consciousness and walking across a room requires a rest period in the middle, is a symptom of your body getting all backed up with waste products. I lived like that all the time as those wastes that would usually be filtered at the small intestine were pumped right into my blood stream by glutened villi.
When folks pick up gluten-free diets in an attempt to eat healthier, it obfuscates the fact that celiac disease is a DISEASE. Writers actually get published saying idiotic things like, 'you never see a poor person choosing the gluten-free cereal,' in essays about how pickiness and fussiness is a type of unfriendliness. Sure, it is. But for much of my adult life, I have been a poor person who was not choosing the gluten-free cereal -- and experiencing debilitating side effects -- because she couldn't afford safe food. I ate unsafe food because I couldn't find ethically raised or local sources of protein and I literally was put off my meals by the thought of carbon effects from trucking my food in from Malaysia or the germ evolution trajectories in the factory farms. I ate unsafe because my little boy's eyes lit up at the sight of an expensive electronics set or the prospect of a class in real wilderness survival skills and the only budget I could dip into to make their dreams come true was our food budget. In fact, I often still choose gluten and dairy for those reasons. Every time I go back on unsafe food, I get tired, I get kidney infections, I get depressed, and I catch every bug that passes through our neighborhood.
I'm just coming off a month-long unsafe diet now, and having a hard time of it. The first few days, I never feel full no matter how many vegetables and beans I eat. If I can resist the frantic urge to shovel cheap calories into my gullet, the cheese craving often undoes me next. Nothing else is quite like cheese and my body mourns it when I stop eating it, though if I make it through that, it's pretty easy after. After a few weeks off gluten and dairy I feel so much better than I start to become scared by unsafe foods, unwilling to go back to the exhaustion I'd forgotten wasn't normal. Being able to stay awake for fourteen hours a day is, it turns out, just as addicting as cheese.
Talking about the adjustment is helpful. Coffee dates do the research and make sure they invite me somewhere safe, and that makes it easier. Robin brought home four pounds of bacon and two gallons of Rice Dream in anticipation of my need to load calories and hit my comfort zones. The support of family and friends cheering me on does a lot of good, as does the accountability, so when I am going safe again, I tend to talk.
But to hear of folks choosing what feels to this bodily-coerced person to be the most expensive and unethical diet on earth, just to lose weight of all things, well, that irks me. Weight loss isn't worth it. Weight loss isn't really worth anything besides self-control points, unless you're cowing to bullies, because fat is not ugly and is not necessarily unhealthy, either. If you feel strong and energetic at your current weight, for god's sake, maintain it! Fat shaming, even in the form of support for image-dieters, is nothing but cruelty, and cruelty taught to us by businesses, advertisers, trying to convince us we aren't good enough so we'll feel like we need what they're selling. The whole industrialized world really needs to learn to stand up for beauty and how prevalent it actually is, and no one should ever feel like they win a prize by conforming to the demands of fat-shamers.
That people diet for their own weddings is a fact of which I was aware, in the same way I knew that folks in China eat cats sometimes. I knew it was true because I fact checked it once, but I still thought it more polite just to quietly not point up that this whole foreign culture was doing something gross. When I chose what to get married in, I didn't think about how I'd look in it -- I thought about how it would look on me, but mostly I thought about waste and chose a handmade patchwork dress that is suitable for wearing again to other occasions. I would not want to make myself the center of attention any more than I can unavoidably be at an event that exists solely to reinforce mine and my spouse's social categorizing. Nor would I want to wrap myself up as though to present my body to my spouse as a gift; this body's unalterably mine, no matter what vows I make, and implying otherwise in a setting that will be full of children and abuse victims is creepy. And no, I do not want to change, for this occasion particularly, the body my spouse met me in and with which we have made so many good memories already. May we all be so lucky as to see across from us on our wedding day the person with which we will actually be spending the rest of our lives, not a temporarily better-looking stand-in for the occasion.
"No, I have a disease that is managed via diet," is what I will actually say next time, as I have before, because, "and my husband would rather marry me exactly the way I am, because, despiring what corporate America has been whispering in your ear for 100 years, I'm actually awesome while fat," is rude. But I truly do burn to find a way to push back against a culture that thinks such a statement obnoxious.
Years ago, I was diagnosed -- by a doctor doing a lab test -- with celiac disease. That means the little absorby thingamabobs in my belly get sort of drunk whenever they come into contact with gluten, and they open overly much, allowing all kinds of toxins to flow in where they shouldn't ever go. Gluten, and dairy too, it turns out, makes me tired. Have you ever had a kidney infection? That initial malaise, the overwhelming exhaustion in which your dream brain starts to overlay your waking consciousness and walking across a room requires a rest period in the middle, is a symptom of your body getting all backed up with waste products. I lived like that all the time as those wastes that would usually be filtered at the small intestine were pumped right into my blood stream by glutened villi.
When folks pick up gluten-free diets in an attempt to eat healthier, it obfuscates the fact that celiac disease is a DISEASE. Writers actually get published saying idiotic things like, 'you never see a poor person choosing the gluten-free cereal,' in essays about how pickiness and fussiness is a type of unfriendliness. Sure, it is. But for much of my adult life, I have been a poor person who was not choosing the gluten-free cereal -- and experiencing debilitating side effects -- because she couldn't afford safe food. I ate unsafe food because I couldn't find ethically raised or local sources of protein and I literally was put off my meals by the thought of carbon effects from trucking my food in from Malaysia or the germ evolution trajectories in the factory farms. I ate unsafe because my little boy's eyes lit up at the sight of an expensive electronics set or the prospect of a class in real wilderness survival skills and the only budget I could dip into to make their dreams come true was our food budget. In fact, I often still choose gluten and dairy for those reasons. Every time I go back on unsafe food, I get tired, I get kidney infections, I get depressed, and I catch every bug that passes through our neighborhood.
I'm just coming off a month-long unsafe diet now, and having a hard time of it. The first few days, I never feel full no matter how many vegetables and beans I eat. If I can resist the frantic urge to shovel cheap calories into my gullet, the cheese craving often undoes me next. Nothing else is quite like cheese and my body mourns it when I stop eating it, though if I make it through that, it's pretty easy after. After a few weeks off gluten and dairy I feel so much better than I start to become scared by unsafe foods, unwilling to go back to the exhaustion I'd forgotten wasn't normal. Being able to stay awake for fourteen hours a day is, it turns out, just as addicting as cheese.
Talking about the adjustment is helpful. Coffee dates do the research and make sure they invite me somewhere safe, and that makes it easier. Robin brought home four pounds of bacon and two gallons of Rice Dream in anticipation of my need to load calories and hit my comfort zones. The support of family and friends cheering me on does a lot of good, as does the accountability, so when I am going safe again, I tend to talk.
But to hear of folks choosing what feels to this bodily-coerced person to be the most expensive and unethical diet on earth, just to lose weight of all things, well, that irks me. Weight loss isn't worth it. Weight loss isn't really worth anything besides self-control points, unless you're cowing to bullies, because fat is not ugly and is not necessarily unhealthy, either. If you feel strong and energetic at your current weight, for god's sake, maintain it! Fat shaming, even in the form of support for image-dieters, is nothing but cruelty, and cruelty taught to us by businesses, advertisers, trying to convince us we aren't good enough so we'll feel like we need what they're selling. The whole industrialized world really needs to learn to stand up for beauty and how prevalent it actually is, and no one should ever feel like they win a prize by conforming to the demands of fat-shamers.
That people diet for their own weddings is a fact of which I was aware, in the same way I knew that folks in China eat cats sometimes. I knew it was true because I fact checked it once, but I still thought it more polite just to quietly not point up that this whole foreign culture was doing something gross. When I chose what to get married in, I didn't think about how I'd look in it -- I thought about how it would look on me, but mostly I thought about waste and chose a handmade patchwork dress that is suitable for wearing again to other occasions. I would not want to make myself the center of attention any more than I can unavoidably be at an event that exists solely to reinforce mine and my spouse's social categorizing. Nor would I want to wrap myself up as though to present my body to my spouse as a gift; this body's unalterably mine, no matter what vows I make, and implying otherwise in a setting that will be full of children and abuse victims is creepy. And no, I do not want to change, for this occasion particularly, the body my spouse met me in and with which we have made so many good memories already. May we all be so lucky as to see across from us on our wedding day the person with which we will actually be spending the rest of our lives, not a temporarily better-looking stand-in for the occasion.
"No, I have a disease that is managed via diet," is what I will actually say next time, as I have before, because, "and my husband would rather marry me exactly the way I am, because, despiring what corporate America has been whispering in your ear for 100 years, I'm actually awesome while fat," is rude. But I truly do burn to find a way to push back against a culture that thinks such a statement obnoxious.