This is heck, nor am I out of it

[nancylebov]

From an article about weight loss surgery:

One woman, a patient of Ren’s, described the first time she was able to wrap and tuck a hotel towel around her body. It’s hard, here, to replicate the mixture of incredulity and gratitude in her voice.

A lot of the article is about how much better people get treated when they're thin, and how much happier they are with themselves, though it's also got a fair amount about the complications of weight loss surgery and that being thin can turn out not to solve most of the difficulties of life (unless, of course, you die of one of the complications) and sometimes add a few.

This article makes some people sad--it makes me pointlessly, murderously angry. I'd start with the woman with the towel, go on to anyone who contributed to her feeling that way, and finish with the hotel managements that don't get big towels.

What have I done in a past life to deserve living among such idiots, and to be somewhat vulnerable to their nonsense myself?

I've got sympathy for anyone whose weight is wrecking their knees, but the social thing is not sane. And it's funny that I've never heard of a fat person getting a suggestion to strengthen the muscles around their knees before they get into trouble.

Link found at Amptoons.

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Gah. And of course these women are left with swathes of excess skin, which means More Surgery, and stretch marks, which can't be removed, so they remain perennial victims...a most unlovely sicko trap.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It gets better than that--I talked with a woman who'd had the surgery and then the excess skin removal and then started regaining weight--but didn't have enough skin for the weight gain to happen evenly. Now, a horror writer could gotten some mileage out of this, but it wasn't quite that bad--she did end up bulging oddly.

She was also one of the 30%(!) who developed a drinking problem, though she got over it. Her opinion was that she wasn't used to her body metabolizing alcohol differently, but I wonder if it was also that alcohol is a very low bulk, digestible way of getting calories. It's pretty clear that weight loss surgery limited her ability to eat, but not her appetite.

I wonder if dieting would be viewed a little differently if the hunger from being underfed were counted as chronic pain.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

:::nods:::

Quite a few- I don't have numbers- down here who've had this kind of surgery regain weight by consuming lots of high-calorie beverages.

I wonder if dieting would be viewed differently if we owned more responsibility for the starving.

Those people are much more easily ignored if we fetishize seriously underweight women as beautiful.

Well, I'm too old to see those stripe-thin women start dying in large numbers early, and the backlash it's likely to create provided we're not all in the starved or blown-up category ourselves.

Eep! Gloomy tonight.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I wonder if dieting would be viewed differently if we owned more responsibility for the starving.

Damfino. It couldn't hurt, but I don't know if it would help much. A good bit of dieting isn't starvation.

There's a book called _Never Too Thin_ which tracks pro-thinness in the US, and iirc, it says that thinking thinness is a proof of beauty, virtue, health, and status is the result of a bunch of factors in the culture.

There's trusting what can be measured, a belief that people can and should remake themselves, a mistrust of comfort (played out very weirdly, imho)--and it's all supercharged by business.

I'd love to blame this mess on the government, but while the government occasionally gets involved, it seems to be following business and the culture, not leading them. (Note: I don't entirely blame business for what happens--if people didn't want what was being sold, it wouldn't be pervasive.)

I've wondered if every culture is vulnerable to a bad idea which happens to fit its weak spots. It could be worse--I'd rather have a weight loss industry than suicide bombers.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

I see being thin as replacing sexual continence as a virtue for women, at least partly.

Losing a hundred or more pounds probably does mean either rapid fierce starvation, or slower long-term. I can't see how not. That we know enough about vitamins and so on that the worst effects are abated doesn't mean that going hungry, sometimes very hungry, for a very long time doesn't feel like starvation. I bet it does. And any suffering seems deserved!

To me the vicious cycle seems to have got rolling when industry noticed it could make a lot of money on food that makes people hungry (carbs), as well as proprietry diet food. Profits coming and going! And when the ideological aspects of the early promotion of certain food (breakfast cereal) as promoting bodily (including sexual) purity, are taken into account, I see a pattern.

Body hatred is of course part of our heritage in the West.

Where we are now may have been nearly inevitable.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think you're oversimplifying, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

In any case, it's weird that people went from believing (or so I've heard) that fat people are lascivious (they indulge *all* their appetites) to believing that people have to earn sex by going hungry.

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

I expect I *am* (over) simplifying! It would take thousands of words and numerous cites to be convincing, and I'm sure it's been done, back in the sixties even.

Part of me thinks I have to earn sex by going hungry, and part of it says the heck: if so, fergit it~! Perhaps we see here an attempt to make something ubiquitously available for most in our culture seem rare? I don't know, for I rarely want men.

I don't actually know how much of it is sex, and how much is an attempt to associate with, look like or join the rich and famous, with young women.

[kressel.livejournal.com]

In any case, it's weird that people went from believing (or so I've heard) that fat people are lascivious (they indulge *all* their appetites) to believing that people have to earn sex by going hungry.

Do you know, I said something very similar on someone else's journal last week. The thread may interest you. It's more about legislation and pornography in Sweden than societal pressures to be thin, but it's in there.

Thanks for the link to the article. I've been reading about all the medical benefits of this type surgery, but not much about life afterwards.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Where have you been reading about the medical benefits of weight loss surgery?

You might be interested in this from Making Light about what a large proportion of the "news" consists of press releases.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I work with a woman who has, over the past 18 months, lost a substantial amout of weight. Several of us were talking last week, and she mentioned some of the things that are better--like finding pretty clothes, and a certain amount of self-confidence. But some things are still the same--her family dynamic, which is probably the greater contributing factor to her self-esteem issues; some health problems which may have been made worse by the weight but are still present, and other things. She was tickled that men paid more attention to her--but now finds herself wondering "Is it the real me--what's inside that hasn't changed all that much--they like? Or is it the envelope?" At first she was very upset to find out that losing all the weight didn't fix everything, because for so long she was convinced that somehow it would; it was a sort of magic bullet to her. She's still sorting this out, but she said she was glad to have lost the weight, because now she could see that the real problems in her life weren't the weight issues, but other things, and can work on them--and also because chafing sucked, and this was less of a problem at size 16 than it had been at size 26!

The more I see, the more I feel that weight becomes such an issue it hides too many other things that could be (or almost certainly are) far worse problems, and people feel that the weight's the only thing wrong. I've seen too many people like my co-worker who have buried their real problems under the weight, and were convinced (or were surrounded by people who were convinced, and wouldn't listen to them) that the only thing between them and a perfect life was losing weight--and that their failure to do lose weight had robbed them of said perfect life, and that they were losers because of this. They had been blinded to whatever gifts and advantages they did have, and couldn't make an accurate assessment of what they really needed to accomplish in order to be happier because either they'd been sold on there only being one problem, or because they couldn't get enough support, even from professionals, to work on the other problems.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

She was tickled that men paid more attention to her--but now finds herself wondering "Is it the real me--what's inside that hasn't changed all that much--they like? Or is it the envelope?"

It was always the envelope, which is why dust jacket art is often as lurid as possible. Personality is how a woman keeps a man, not how she gets one.

[avram]

So if you managed a hotel, would you buy the biggest towels you could find?

Would price be an object? Especially considering that towels are one of the things that hotel customers are notorious for stealing, and you’d therefore have to keep buying them in large quantities?

That the larger your towels are, the heavier the laundry carts will be, and the more laundry machines you’ll need to wash them?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's a rant, a rage fantasy. I don't have to be reasonable. Besides, you're usually the liberal and I'm usually the libertarian. It's fun to see you defending standard business practice.

However, if towels are so much trouble, why offer them at all? Surely it would be cheaper for the hotel if it just offered a hot air fan. Instead, they choose a towel size, and I bet they're just guessing about what people want and what they'll tolerate.

Imho, there's a lot of prejudice and habit in business defaults.

I have read about one hotel which makss it a point of pride to offer extra big towels, but ghu knows what the rooms cost.

[kiya]

I'd like that hotel.

I find hotel towels far too small.

(You've met me. You know I'm not exactly large. :P )

[avram]

Hey, I’m a liberal, not a leftist.

I expect customers would revolt if you didn’t offer towels. I don’t actually know. Didn’t Helinein’s super-showers-of-the-future include warm air drying?

I associate large towels with luxury — they’re often described in luxurious terms. I’d expect luxury hotels to offer them. And I’ve noticed that lower-end hotels often have smaller, thinner towels.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Hey, I’m a liberal, not a leftist.

OK. It's been a while since we've argued about such stuff.

I think you're right that customers would revolt if you didn't offer towels unless it was a *very* cheap place.

I don't know how much it would add to the hotel's expenses to offer big towels, nor whether customers would tolerate paying a few dollars more to get them.

If I were running a hotel, I'd offer the nicest towels I could and they'd have the hotel's name on them. If they get stolen, it's advertising. The only problem is that it has to be white-on-white.

If you set your prices properly, it might be worthwhile advertising if people steal the towels and sell them on ebay. It might even be better advertising because it would get around the white-on-white thing.

I've considered a turn-in-your-towel-at-the-desk-for-discount policy, but I don't think it would be worth it.

[firecat]

You could do what one spa I know does, and offer large towels to the large guests and small towels to the small guests.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's logistically more difficult for a hotel--a spa has the customer right there so you can see what size towel to offer. A hotel would either have to keep track, or have the customers hang a sign on the door or somesuch.

[firecat]

You know, I have always believed myself to be fat, but I lost a substantial amount of weight once (not via surgery), specifically to find out what it was like to be thinner. I discovered what was better in my life and what wasn't. A few important things were better, and most important things weren't. A few unimportant things were better; being able to wear hotel towels was one of them.

I'm glad I had that experience so I'm not tempted to have weight loss surgery for what I consider to be frivolous reasons such as find it easier to buy clothes. I am more sympathetic to people who do it in the hope it will resolve their health problems. I won't do it myself because I suspect it will only change which health problems I have.