Saturday, August 4, 2012

Why I Left Pinterest

My husband and I just spent the last three weeks in Florida with my mother and my middle sister, visiting my grandma at her home outside of Tampa. We had a great time, and part of having a great time, obviously, is eating awesome food: Indian food, Greek food (twice!), pizza, seafood (including fried alligator, YUM), and pretty much all the ice cream we could manage to shove down our gullets. We sampled various new Oreo flavors (my personal favorites are the ones with the mint filling) and introduced my grandmother to the wide variety of M&Ms available these days (almond FTW!)

So, naturally, I gained seven pounds.

I want you to read the above sentence and think about how you feel about it.

Now I want you to read that sentence again, this time with the knowledge that I am 5'4" (I used to think I was 5'3", but according to my doctor I was wrong) and that before I gained seven pounds, I weighed 99 lbs exactly.

At that weight, my BMI was exactly 17.0--the "underweight" category begins at 18.5. I was pretty underweight, my friends. And now that I've gained weight, my BMI is 18.2. This means that I am still underweight. I have always been small, and always been very active. I am ineligible to give blood, since the Red Cross required you to weigh 110 pounds in order to donate. Several doctors have actually insisted that I work hard on gaining more weight. I have been told that I must gain at least fifteen more pounds before Adam and I start trying to have a baby, because low maternal weights can contribute to low birth weights for babies. By all possible measures, gaining seven pounds was good for me and good for my body.

And yet, do you know how I feel? I feel guilty.

Because in this country, I am constantly inundated by pressure to lose weight. Always. Every time I watch TV there's a commercial for a weight-loss supplement or a diet plan or a home gym that can give me rock hard abs. Every magazine I read tells me that if I just eat more blueberries/take the stairs more often/try these five easy ab workouts at home, I can lose weight--the assumption being that I should lose weight, that everyone should. The expectation these days is that everyone should want to lose weight, all the time, no matter what. There is no exception for people who are already skinny or already healthy (remember, these are not the same). The cultural impetus to lose weight is universal and impenetrable, no matter how old you are, no matter what nationality you represent, however many kids you've had, however many fabulous things you've accomplished in life.

But beyond media, I get this message from a more influential source: people I know. Interestingly, it's never from people who know me well--my family and my close friends--but it's a pretty constant message from acquaintances. There was the co-worker who berated me for eating avocados because they're "so fattening." There was the Facebook friend who wrote horrible things about fat people on Facebook, and then acted surprised when said fat people were, in fact, deeply hurt and offended.

But there is no worse offender than Pinterest.

I cannot continue to use Pinterest because every other pin my friends (mostly my girlfriends) display is devoted to weight loss. There's "thinspiration" (pictures of super skinny girls--always girls!--and horrific taglines like "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," which is absurd because, um, have you ever even tried a Cadbury Creme Egg?!) and "fitspiration" (pictures of super muscular girls, and horrific taglines about "discipline" and "self-control" and "sacrifice," as though weight loss should be approached with the moral gravitas of, say, feeding the hungry or something) and various other random pins involving The Five Foods That Cut Belly Fat! or How To Lose Weight At Work.

I can't take it anymore. I just can't. I cannot stand being surrounded by five million little nitpicks, five million little reminders of imperfection. And I don't have to. So...I quit.

"But wait a minute," you're saying. "You're thin! You have privilege! You shouldn't be complaining about this!"

Society's extreme obsession with weight loss and appearance, often masked as "concern" over "health" (apparently mental health doesn't count), hurts everyone, skinny people included. Just as sexism hurts men, too--just ask any guy who ever enjoyed home ec or wanted to change his name when he got married or chose to be a stay-at-home dad-- the pressure to lose weight, to constantly be judging oneself and constantly finding oneself wanting, is exhausting to everyone, no matter how much they weigh. Fat people are shamed for being fat; thin people are made to feel as though their weight is the most attractive and important thing about them, and are warned that to lose that "asset" is to lose friendship, love, social approval, even one's life.

And I am done with that--absolutely, irrevocably done. There is so much more to my life than what I weigh. There are so many more important things to be doing than weighing myself. And by cutting out Pinterest (and hiding a few people from my newsfeed, natch) I can at least minimize direct contact with this sick philosophy.

Peace out, Pinterest. I've already planned my wedding, anyway.

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