fuck you. love, nico

Dear Anti-Size 0 League:

I've come across a few of your sites over the growing years and while a part of them always resonates with me, "Love yourself. You are okay just the way you are. You deserve ______," I have a hard time swallowing your messages of positivity and quasi-hope. Even tho you are trying to broadcast such a shiny-happy-ideal to today's modern girls and women, one that's all about being happy with yourself it taking precedence over weight loss, beauty based on looks, and being the "Ideal 0", the pictures you plaster on your websites seem to convey a deeper, more disturbing message: You are pretty and deserve all that life can offer if you are avearge (ie. not fat).

I strongly believe that being overweight and, further down the scale, obese can lead to health problems much faster than if you were average or "thin". There is enough medical evidence to back up this claim and being the girl of science that I am, I won't dispute these claims when there has been study after study to back it up. However, I do believe that lifestyle is a bigger factor to health complications than the number flashing up at me from my digital scale or what an online BMI calculator can give me. These words aren't to debate whether or not being fat is bad or not but to give you some idea as to where I stand. I will also add that for this argument, I will refer specifically to anorexia nervosa when mentioning eating disorder.

I am stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place when I read your pages - I have disordered eating (or, if you will, an eating disorder) but I am still overweight. On the one hand, it seems to me that because of my DE/ED, I should be loved all the more, shown that there is more to life than calories and numbers and sizes. On the other hand, I am not as deserving as someone who is painfully thin and on the brink of death because my BMI hasn't reached 16.3. Which is it? Do I deserve whatever it is you think I do or should I just chill out a bit but keep at the "diet" because I'm gonna die from being a cow?

I understand that being overweight while disordered is the grey area of society that no one touches (unless it's a disorder that is seen as the "fat person's disorder" - COE and BED). I also understand that it morphs into some strange paradox. It doesn't really seem possible, does it?

The images of of girls and women with anorexia are always that of feeding tubes and bones protruding through thin layers of skin. Yes, that is anorexia at it's finest. I will not and cannot fight the DSM-IV on this. But then there is ED-NOS. ED-NOS is the combination of all of the disorders lumped together for people who are sort-of screwed up but not quite there yet. Even then, there are certain things that even the overweight person cannot live up to - all of the criteria for anorexia are met yet they still have a cycle and/or are of normal weight despite having lost significant amounts. Even in a world where people both love and hate a good label, ED-NOS still doesn't quite fit the bill.

I'm working around my issues with your crusade to get directly to the point of this "letter": regardless of your preaching that body acceptance is top notch, we should only accept ourselves if we fit into some normal category. Those of you telling me that I should love myself would more than likely applaud my efforts (if I made them) to be cool with what I look like but still harbour that deep seeded idea that I shouldn't go so far as to accept myself if I am still "unhealthy" (fat).

I never see true diversity with the pictures in terms of size. It's a very narrow stream of a size 6 to a size 12. (I'm bad with sizes, however, so I could be off.) You want to show thin people who aren't too thin while giving us a bigger chick who is no where near fat just for the sake of saying you're giving it to us. Without consciously meaning to, you have bought into the idea that what is acceptable is what we see in the old school seasonal Sears catalogue. You remember them, right? Where "normal" was quite slim and "plus sized" was average? You are perpetuating that ideal.

I've bounced all over the map with this but in the end, I don't buy the bull shit you're feeding people in an attempt to veer away from the mainstream. You are the mainstream. It doesn't matter how much Midwestern, non-Hollywood, peace and love speeches you make, you are still falling into the "You're only okay if..." trap you wage war on if all I get to see is the media's version of average.

Yours,
Bri

Tags: letter