Have you ever noticed that it is per­fectly accept­able to make fun of and degrade peo­ple who are fat? Think about it for a sec­ond. When­ever a movie needs to show that some­one was pre­vi­ously unat­trac­tive there are flash­backs of him/her being fat (think Mon­ica (Court­ney Cox) on Friends).  I was watch­ing (some­what begrudg­ingly) The Seeker on the WB and the main char­ac­ter was forced to enter­tain a King’s unat­trac­tive sis­ter. Of course she was over­weight and to add insult to injury, she was sex­u­ally aggres­sive and des­per­ate because of course no man had every touched her before. Unfor­tu­nately, this priv­i­lege does not end with Hollywood.

I was read­ing an arti­cle about how Gaboure Sid­bie (of Pre­cious fame) slapped Chris Rock because he grabbed her butt when she stood to accept an award. Even worse than his dis­gust­ing misog­y­nis­tic behav­ior are the com­ments that peo­ple left on the arti­cle I won’t post them here, but please, check them out and see what I mean.

And even on a more per­sonal level, my hus­band and I had a con­sul­ta­tion with the doc­tor (Dr. J) who will be per­form­ing the endoscopy that out WLS Dr. D requested. Moments before meet­ing with him were seen by a nurse who sat us on a table to check out blood pres­sure. When she was done she ush­ered us into Dr. J’s office. He explained the pro­ce­dure to us and then explained that we may not be able to have anaes­the­sia for the scope due to our sizes. But he did not stop there. he went on to make a big deal about the beds not being able to hold us. In fact he went into the hall­way and asked a nurse to check the weight limit on the beds and as he showed us around the facil­ity he made one state­ment after another about how big we are. My hus­band was imme­di­ately both­ered. But me, in my “fat-girl shame” made excuses for this guy.

The funny thing is that this hap­pened last Tues­day and the more I think about it the more it both­ers me. What made him think it was OK to voice his dis­gust of our size? We obvi­ously know that we are fat– in fact we are try­ing to change that and he was aware of that fact.Why do peo­ple feel that it is their right to point out that an over­weight per­son is over­weight. He would never have ver­bal­ized is worry about per­form­ing this pro­ce­dure on a homo­sex­ual, or some­one of a dif­fer­ent race. If I had entered his office with HIV or some other dis­ease that could have been pre­ventable would he have treated me the same way?

Absolutely not!

A blog­ger who I at one time respected made sev­eral state­ments against Fat Accep­tance (I won’t link to it because you can Google it quite eas­ily). I wanted to com­ment on it when it was writ­ten but felt that it was a win-less bat­tle. After all, it has been made appar­ent to me that no mat­ter how intel­li­gent, pretty, tal­ented a per­son is, if he/she is fat no one notices accept to ridicule.

Hatred towards over­weight peo­ple is the last form of accept­able discrimination.

And this is not about the fact that being fat or obese is unhealthy. We know that and most of us have made numer­ous attempts to change our sit­u­a­tion. It’s not easy nor is it made any eas­ier by being made the butt of jokes or hav­ing peo­ple spew their hate and dis­gust with­out regard for ones feelings.

Filed under: General, Kristina's Journey by Kristina Brooke
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After going back and forth for 4 years and com­ing so close to hav­ing the surgery only to learn that my insur­ance stopped cov­er­ing the sur­geon, I have decided to move for­ward with weight loss surgery.  I will chron­i­cle my jour­ney here because as I talk a lit­tle more about it I real­ize that more and more peo­ple think that under­go­ing WLS is a cop out– it’s tak­ing the easy way out. And, like with most things in my life, I feel the need to edu­cate and inform peo­ple on the reality.

If you have read my pre­vi­ous posts you may have real­ized that I have been strug­gling with my weight for some time. The truth is that I have been strug­gling since I was 19 years old. I have actively tried los­ing weight– work­ing out, Weight Watch­ers, cut­ting calo­ries, lifestyle change,  med­ically super­vised diets, nutri­tion­ists, fad diets, and even hyp­no­sis. The thing is– I have never been able to lose more than 50 pounds.  Now I know that 50 pounds is a lot of weight to lose, but when you have to lose 232 lbs it’s vir­tu­ally noth­ing. Espe­cially since for every 50 that I lose I seem to gain 60.

But the weight alone is not the issue. Not really. My over­all health is suf­fer­ing. Not only have I screwed up my metab­o­lism, but I have thyroid/autoimmune issues, sleep apnea, res­pi­ra­tory ail­ments, join prob­lems, high cho­les­terol and more. And the life that I am liv­ing is not one that I am happy with. I have no energy. Between the extra weight that I am car­ry­ing and the other issues I am unable to muster up enough energy to func­tion at even a min­i­mal level. My daugh­ter is 3 and she deserves a mom who can play and function.

And so I made the deci­sion to get help. It was not one that I made lightly. It was not one that I rushed into. It is, how­ever, a tool that I admit that I need so that I can move for­ward in my life.

Today was my con­sul­ta­tion with the Bariatric Sur­geon (Dr. D). My BMI is cur­rently above 55 and I am con­sid­ered “super­obese”. Those words stung, but it wasn’t some­thing that I did not know already. Like I said, I have been research­ing this for years. And like many of the things in my life there will be some hur­dles that I have to get through– my insur­ance does not cover the surgery that Dr. D rec­om­mends and there are a few peo­ple in my life who are very unsup­port­ive in my deci­sion. Not my hubby though! He knows how impor­tant this is to me and, as always, con­tin­ues to be my rock.

So stay tuned. I will share more of my jour­ney here.

Filed under: Kristina's Journey by Kristina Brooke
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Intro­duc­ing Bucket the Wonderdog

Happy Hol­i­days every­one! If your Christ­mas (if you cel­e­brate it) was half as good as mine then you should be very happy! This year we decided to add a dog to the mix– a beau­ti­fully well-tempered dog named Bucket (my daugh­ter named him). Isn’t he adorable?! While we made this deci­sion so that my daugh­ter would have a play­mate, we did so also because of the exer­cis­ing benefits.

We live in as apart­ment and since mak­ing the deci­sion to work from home I have become some­what of a shut in. I home­school my daugh­ter and then work as a writer, web designer, Blog­ging Con­sul­tant, and am co-founder Moms of Hue and the We of Hue Net­work the rest of the time. I have very lit­tle rea­son to leave the house out­side of doctor’s appoint­ments and the occa­sional fam­ily out­ing. This has proven to be dis­as­trous to my health as I have gained weight which is in direct oppo­si­tion to what I need to do. So, the deci­sion to get the dog came from a need to force myself to brave NY win­ters and get my butt and my daughter’s butt outside.

And it has.

We live on the sec­ond floor but have to climb about 35 steps to actu­ally get there– 20 to get to the front door of the build­ing and then another 15 to get to my door. I have been climb­ing those steps twice daily at the least since bring­ing Bucket home. In addi­tion, my daugh­ter and I, along with buddy walk roughly .25 miles when we take him out for his after­noon walk. In addi­tion, in the morn­ing we have begun walk­ing an addi­tional .5 mile and plan to work our way up to 3 miles. As you can see, I have already begun to get more exer­cise since Christ­mas Eve than I have prob­a­bly done all year. All this walk­ing com­bined with my daily EA Active exer­cise (once I get the doctor’s approval to con­tinue) will help me reach my over­all goal.

It is so impor­tant to get up an move. I feel bet­ter than I have in a long time because I am forc­ing myself to exer­cise. Those trips up and down the stairs count. The brisk walks of the dog around the neigh­bor­hood count. It all counts and I plan to con­tinue get­ting exer­cise in any way that I can.

What do you do tho get more exer­cise in?

Orig­i­nally posted on Mom on the Rise

Filed under: Exercise, Kristina's Journey by Kristina Brooke
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