A Stupid Article and Why I Will Not Return to Urban Active

So, cycle started yesterday, and boy did it start with a bang. For about 3 hours I felt like my legs were balloons and my vagina was about to fall out. Spent those three hours in the bath, where I turned the water a rusty red, twice. WTheck, body? WTheck? Then in the middle of the night I woke to more cramping.

I spent most of today studying, and I'm about to resume studying. I just...I want to address a Yahoo article I read (I know, pearls before swine). It was something like "Diet strategies that just don't work" or "diet fact and fiction." I'm not sure. I am, however; sad that now Yahoo will write more bs articles like this because other idiot ladies like me clicked the stupid STUPID link. I hate Yahoo. I hate it with a passion. It is a representation of all that is wrong in our society.

I'm not going to give them the satisfaction of clicking the link again in order to quote it, but aside from the first one (I don't know what to call it, myth? Pervasive dieting idea, they were doing this "true/false" thing), about weight loss being harder the smaller you get. Oh, my gosh. No. I take that back. I just remembered. It said "predicts just how long you'll have to say non to french fries." FOREVER, you twit! If eating french fries made you bigger the first time then any time in the future that you return to eating french fries will return you to your former size. This idea that bad-for-you food is a "right" of the thin because thin people don't get fat off it, only fat people do, is a myth. And it's disgusting, and it presents bad food as a "reward" and abstaining as "punishment" for being fat, and ugly, and a failure, and socially unacceptable.

So, here's the deal, the studies say that the smaller you are the lower your metabolism is. That is; the smaller you are the less you can eat before you start getting fat again. And yet, we have this idea that once you're skinny enough you can go back to eating like you did before, as a reward. And I know I see plenty of skinny people eating junk food all the time. Are they just still in the process of getting fat? Or, do they have better metabolisms? Is it that smaller people have better metabolisms and bigger people don't? And that bigger people's metabolisms will, in fact, get even WORSE if they loose weight? And will never restabilize? I really want to know. Because this whole line of thinking is like a maze with no end.

Then it was like "If you work out you won't loose weight. True." And proceeded to say, you won't loose weight but you'll loose tummy fat and get leaner and healthier. This is the kind of BS I'm talking about. You WILL loose weight, when we mean "fat" by weight, because only someone with disordered eating/body image is going to think that all "weight" is bad. If I loose a dress size from working out but  no "weight," I am going to be CONFIDENT THAT I AM HEALTHIER. SCREW YOU SOCIETY. SCREW YOU.

There was more. The whole article was awful. The ideas presented were awful. Eat right, not because it's punishment, but because it's a reward. Learn to see bad food as bad. Learn to see good behavior, like being active or working out (and communicating effectively, and healthy body image, and good time management skills) as good. Forget these stupid bs articles, they lie.

--------------------------------------------------

One more thing before I go. Two years ago I started at Urban Active. When I started I was told that one of the trainers would show me how to use the machines when I came in. So, on my first day I went to the trainer station and said I'd been told someone would tell me how to use the machines. I was pretty shy because I'd just come back from Korea and was still in that "passive Asian femininity" mode. So, when I waited a LONG time, and they had me fill out a sheet on my eating habits and working out (I knew I wanted to loose some weight, I'd put some on in the two months I'd been back), I didn't say anything, even though I had no idea what this had to do with the work out machines.

I tried to tell them why I was there. I wanted to know how to use the machines. When they said they were going to weigh me I didn't say anything even though I had no idea what this had to do with the machines. Finally a trainer came up to me and said I was 2 pounds obese and needed to loose 37 pounds, and that would only cost me about $40 a week. I was horrified, both at being called fat when I was already insecure, and being told I needed to loose almost twice the amount I had wanted to.  I just wanted to know how to  use the machines. At least I had the confidence to turn down the "offer" to drain my VERY limited bank account. He took me into a work out room and started running me through a private useful-only-with-a-trainer work out.

I said, again, that I wanted to know how to use the work out machines. He looked at me with this patronizing smile and said "Only the guys use the weight machines. You don't want to look like a guy do you?" I hung my head and said no. OF COURSE I WANT TO LOOK LIKE A GUY IF A GUY GETS TO EAT WHATEVER THE HELL HE WANTS AND HAS HARDLY ANY BODY FAT, YOU ASSHOLE!! I wish I'd said that. I hate body stereotypes  I am so embarrassed that I let that guy shame me. And angry. Angry at myself, angry at them. I never did learn how to use the weight machines, and I was too humiliated to ever go back and ask again. I spent the next six months working out two+ hours a day on the treadmill/stairmachine at the gym, until I felt like puking, limiting my calories to about 1100 a day, desperate to loose weight, going home and crying EVERY DAY because I still wasn't small enough. Never did loose all 37 pounds. Finally, I dropped the gym membership, because I couldn't handle it anymore.

Urban Active, you're a fat shaming body stereotyping bully and I will forever encourage everyone I know to NOT go to your gym.