I work in a cafe inside a giant bookstore. Our specialty is coffee (it has been so much fun to learn to make a latte!), but we also have a pretty neat little pastry case. We have all the sweet basics: cookies, brownies, cake, donuts, cinnamon rolls, etc. I have been pleasantly surprised at how few people I’ve heard go on about how “bad” they are for buying a cookie or a latte. By far, the people who talk about fat and/or calories and the like are rare. I can probably count all of those I have seen in two weeks on one hand. But, one customer in particular really struck me…
She was on some long road trip and was stopping in to have a snack, so she could finish the last leg of her drive. She ordered a coffee drink and it was obvious she wanted something to eat with that, so I suggested a cookie. Sheesh. Had I known what her reaction was gonna be, I might’ve just held my tongue to avoid the drama. Who am I kidding? I’m not usually one to skip challenging someone to avoid drama. 😛
She started off with some cliched diet talk about cookies and “badness” and fat or something. I responded about life being too short to make so much difficulty over A COOKIE. (Seriously. Aren’t there more important things in life??? Well, aren’t there??!!!) She snarkily responded that life is too short to have fat thighs. Sigh. That comment inspired feelings of sadness for her.
This was a fat woman, though my guess is that if she knew I thought of her as “fat” that she would be really upset. Well, guess what? I’m fat too. 😛 It’s just a word. Whatevs. Like me, her weight seemed to gravitate to her thighs. This made her comment seem even sadder to me. This wasn’t just some hypothetical fat hate rant. She seemed to be talking about herself.
Had it not been really late (near store closing and way past my bedtime) and had I not been really tired, I hope that I would’ve gone on to challenge her more. Instead I pointed out that food is just food (not bad or good) and that it’s no crime to eat a cookie that you really want. I advised her to get what she wanted and to take her time and savour it. She ended up buying the cookie afterall… and three bags of chocolate covered expresso beans that she seemed to guiltily declare were gifts for friends. Who cares? You have a right to buy whatever you want. You owe me no explaination, ma’am. But… whatever…
Had I been “on,” I would’ve liked to have pointed out that not eating that diets don’t work, that forbidding foods doesn’t work (with some health related exceptions that I don’t know how to deal with, cuz they don’t apply to me, so I am not even going there…) and that what I really meant was that life is too short for all the self-hate and food obsession that comes with restricting the foods we really love. It’s not just “life’s too short to not eat a cookie”… it is so much more than that… I wish I could’ve expressed that at the time.
I did manage to mention something to a co-worker (after the customer had sat down with her drink/cookie and some magazines) how forbidding food causes obsession and even binges in some cases. His snarky reply was, “yeah… cuz you know that’s my problem with heroin.” Sigh. Meaning he binges on heroin all the time (joking statement), cuz he labels it “forbidden.”
Well, the good news is that I am secure enough in my recovery to be really tired and still not buy into an idea like that even if I’m not sure why it doesn’t make sense… cuz I’m that beat. 😛
Now that I’m all rested and perky – heroin is not the same as food. Food we need to live. Heroin is not something that every person is born needing and will die without. It’s not the same. Not even close. If we restrict enough (at least in the case of most people), some part of our brains will take over and push us very dramatically to the highest fat/calorie food in our proximity. This system is designed to override any desires we may have to make our thighs thinner or whatever. Life is too darn short to live in starvation survival mode. Life is too short to be self-hating. Life is too damn short to make judging ourselves (or others) over cookies a top priority (or any priority at all!).
Yesterday I watched a movie called “Just Friends.” Ryan Renolds plays a fat teen that goes on to become a super fit and conventionally hansome grown man. He later explains something along the lines of his not eating sweets for 10 years. I also remember something from “America’s Sweethearts” that was similar from Julia Roberts’ character who also lost a lot of weight… something about not eating any carbs for the last 10 years. What bugs me about this is that these characters say these things like it’s nothing. Like the restriction doesn’t cause self-hate and sometimes even binges. They say it like they just switched toothpaste brands for the last 10 years and that is so disgustingly misleading. It just isn’t that easy for the vast majority of people. Even so, some folks are still going to be fat even if they do restrict food to a large degree. Some people will get even fatter for their efforts. And… I wonder where this woman (with the thigh-hate) heard the messages that fat thighs are a) bad and b) easily correctable through restriction…. because they are neither in the vast majority of people.
What really gets me is that this woman was beautiful and I don’t even think she knows it. She has very distinct features… such wide eyes and a big smile. I thought her thighs suited her body shape very well. And yet she is wasting so much time worrying about fat thighs and the morals of eating cookies… how sad.
I hope she was able to enjoy that cookie. I’ve had one of those caramel, pecan, chocolate chunk ones and they are glorious… if one can get past all the brain noise about fat and the supposed morals of fat to actually notice the flavours and textures of the cookie that is.
–AngryGrayRainbows
Angry Gray Rainbows 
That was so good to hear. I was just trying to explain to a friend about my efforts to neither vilify nor glorify any particular food…after hearing her declare that french fries were “bad”.
It’s just a potato, sliced into pieces and fried in oil. Nothing “bad” about that.
I have the hardest time around people who associate moral or spiritual purity, superiority and general betterness with restricting, fasting, and dieting…
* : (
Oh yeah… my (fat) mom says things like that all the time. Sometimes she phrases it as: “Life is too short to be this unhappy with my body” Which I agree with, 100%! I just wish she wasn’t so convinced that the answer was to change her body rather than her mind.
My mom talks about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods quite frequently. It irritates me to no end. I’ve tried telling her about intuitive eating, and she listens, she just doesn’t absorb the info. Anyway, I enjoyed your post…now I want a cookie. Mmmm, a caramel, pecan, chocolate chunk cookie.
OMG, I love Ryan Reynolds. He makes me feel funny on the inside 😉
Ok so now that I got that out of the way… I saw a few minutes of that movie once while channel hopping, and despite Ryan being gorgeous, it made me sad. I saw the bit where they went to a cafe and the waitress brought his “usual” from when he was a kid – some giant sundae thing as I recall. And he was all “OMG get it away from me I haven’t eaten sugar in 10 years if I eat that my ass will explode”.
Yeah. And sadly, some people really are like that. And you could just tell that if they hadn’t taken the icecream away, he would have been face down in it in 2 seconds flat. Because forbidding icecream just makes it taste better!
That’s the one thing that has really surprised me since I found FA and IE – decriminalising food really has made it less appealing. I will now happily turn down icecream if I am full. But if you had told me that a year ago I would never have believed you.
Me too! Same job, same crazy flagellation. My solution (such as it is) is to point out all the “healthy” qualities of the particular item–protein and omega-3’s in peanut butter cookies, for instance. It puts the whole thing onto a lighter level, which I hope might help the customer lighten up on her/himself.
Wow I wish I could attempt conversations like that with my customers at work. My boss would have fired me for challenging a sale. I don’t think any food is bad. Its only bad when you abusing it. Her attitude toawrds food and health sounds pretty off.
While I totally agree with the premise of what you are saying, I think you should maybe consider ‘time and place’. If a customer isn’t open to what you are saying, they could well put in a complaint about you to management. After all, if you were a customer and someone was talking diet talk to you, would you appreciate it? I wouldnt want you to end up losing your job or anything…
Oh and Ryan Reynolds? OMG cute. Have you seen The Proposal? The scene where he and Sandra Bullock are totally in the buff? OMG…
One of my mother’s best friends came to visit a few weeks ago. She is a beautiful fat woman. We ordered lunch to be delivered to my apartment and she made some self hating comments about her body. She is such a beautiful, powerful, funny, authentic, brilliant, and cool lady. I made a comment to her about Fat Acceptance and the possibility of seeing herself as beautiful. She went inside herself for a moment, then she rolled her eyes and made another self hating comment about how horrible her body is. In that moment, I decided to drop it because it really didn’t matter how much logic or evidence I put in front of her about Fat being beautiful, she was too wrapped up in her own fat hating belief system to hear anything about that.
I am into the Law of Attraction in a big way. I find the same kind of resistance to the tenants of this thought system when I try to explain it to someone who isn’t receptive. I find, for me, that keeping my comments in the first person, ex. ( ” I find for me that…., or I used to think that way too, then I found the Fat Acceptance community and they taught me…. or I weigh 380 pounds and I have learned to love my body is easier than…. ) is a way I keep from getting frustrated and the person I am speaking to are a little less resistant when I take this tact.
Anyway, always like seeing your posts….
Cheers.
Ivan
A few weeks ago, in our kitchen at work, one of the men was heating some pizza rolls for lunch. A female co-worker commented how much she loved anything pizza-y. As she got her sliced carrots out of the fridge. When I pointed out that carrots didn’t taste anything like pizza, she said something along the lines of “my ass is better off with the carrots.”
I went to a similar place as “life is too short to….” I asked if, when she was on her deathbed, she will wish she had been thinner or wish she had enjoyed more pizza. She looked at me like I had 2 heads.
Man, now I want a caramel-pecan-chocolate chunk cookie and I don’t know where I can buy one. Perhaps I will look for a recipe after classes and make some. (Although that will trigger an avalanche of “Oh, these are fat pills, I’m sooo bad” comments from my mom. Seriously, she calls any sort of rich dessert ‘fat pills’.)
“That’s the one thing that has really surprised me since I found FA and IE – decriminalising food really has made it less appealing.”
Truth. Two weeks ago a friend of mine brought me a bag of European sweets from her trip to London. I think there were eight total bars and bags of candy in there. I still have three bars and about half a large bag of candy left. Not because I’m rationing them, nibbling away at a candy bar a few grams at a time… I just haven’t felt like chocolate or caramel lately. Pre-FA, I would have been face-down in that bag until I made myself sick, because if a friend gives you sweets it’s totally legal to eat them! You’ll offend hir if you don’t eat them, so you can go to town!
I did ration the coconut rolls though. The ones I’ve found here in California were just meh, but the coconut rolls from London? Soooo good!
I hate this kind of behavior too. I have a few friends who do this a lot, especially when they’re on diets.
It’s really prevalent in ads for foods marketed to women. The whole – “it’s so bad/evil/tempting but only xx calories” – genre is really maddening. Compare that to ads for food marketed to young men, where tastiness is celebrated.
And yet, I know I internalize it and do it myself. I may not use the same language, but if I’d been the woman in the cafe that day, I might’ve said “It looks tempting, but no thanks”