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I can’t tell you how happy I am that I can now run again. I love to run. I thought I’d have to wait until I was much lighter but I find with a soft terrain, good shoes and knee supports I do not. Both my mood & my fitness have benefited immeasurably from this.
Actually, that’s not true. My fitbit is measuring both.
The biggest deterrent to being a very overweight middle-aged woman running is, I am sad to say, teenage girls. I am aware that their unkindness & mockery of me is really to do with their own insecurities about their developing bodies & I also no longer give a fuck.
I am occasionally tempted to stop & tell them that I am attempting to make myself healthy in order to have the fortitude & energy to continue trying to protect their future against forces that would disempower & divide them, but I do not.
Most people, I have to say, are indifferent to me running and some smile warmly at me as if to say "Good for you." When an absolutely enormous lady joined my gym last year looking very nervous, I smiled warmly & welcomingly at her. This is the right thing to do.
I am sometimes tempted to create a positive form of Fat Activism which neither celebrates obesity nor makes the overcoming of it an arduous moral duty, but focuses on mutual support, making getting healthier fun, opposing discrimination & telling genuine haters to fuck right off.
Fatphobia is actually a real thing. It's not the recognition that obesity is unhealthy or finding overweight people less attractive than slim ones as fat activists claim. It's moralistic spite & nastiness to obese people & unwarranted assumptions about intelligence & capability.
It really does have significant impact on people's job prospects and willingness to go to doctors. In the first case, obesity should not be an issue unless the job requires fitting into small spaces or doing a lot of physical movement.
In the second case, doctors need to be able to tell patients if their health issues could well be obesity-related & if their weight is unhealthy, but they also need to be able to look beyond that & not assume that everything wrong with an obese person can be fixed by weight loss.
Anyway, I am having a date night tonight! Take-away and wine with the husband. I have lost nearly 2kg this week - about 4lbs & I have the blessing of my personal trainer. Now work!
