Ftrain, by Paul Ford

I have decided on daily weigh-ins, first thing in the morning, followed by a measurement of blood pressure. If I'm going to count every calorie, learn about healthy food, and understand my body, I need to collect as much data as possible. I added fields to my database; I will post the numbers when I can figure out an artful way to display them. At first I had decided only to post a plus/minus--but what do I have to hide? People know my secrets when they see me walk down the street.

Last night I bought a huge tome on nutrition by the American Dietetic Association. It's shaped like a phone book, weighs 46.9 ounces, and is written to appeal to inmates and dimwits. Leaving to the side that one page espouses the consensus hysterical sentiment that even a few spare pounds can lead to sudden death as the fatogens consume your BRAAAAAIIIIIN (wisdom that the book itself ignores a few pages later when it discusses finding the healthy weight "for you"), it has sensible-seeming information on the different kinds of fiber, the nature of bread, etc.

I enjoy strolling around thinking my deep thoughts, and doing challenging, big-boy things--writing books and stories, making websites. I speak on panels. I live in an international city, in a privileged and liberal world of excessively-read neurotic aesthetes, philosophers, and homosexuals--the hyperacceptors, people to whom you might say "I am on a real Barrett Browning kick," and be met with a smile and a nod, or to whom you might confess that you love vomit porn and be met with merely a cocked eyebrow. I am among them and one of them. We go out to dinner in lonely neighborhoods, to restaurants with five tables; there, we complain about our powerlessness before our compulsions (smoking here, food there, sex here, the television shows House and Scrubs there). Thus I am rarely exposed to things that are crafted for die Volk; even the television I watch is written by people like me for me, with enough short skirts and low-cut tops thrown in to keep the rubes staring.

But here I am reading my large nutrition book, absolutely of the people; all my pretensions are rendered moot by a look at my pants size. In fact, on this subject I am less than a fool--I am a flat-earther. So it is strange to read this book, the words put forth by topic-experts and seemingly Flesch-Kincaid-scored to a fourth-grade reading level. I have docked at Sidebar Island and our landing party is under attack by endless waves of exclamation points. There is a chapter entitled "Fiber: Your body's broom."

So fine; I am once again humbled--I'm getting used to it--but of course even more humbling is that all of the book is news. Somehow, willfully, I've missed it, the information on fat deposits and saltiness. Imagine if I sat down with you and you began to tell me about cars. And I stopped you and said: "wait, cars run on gasoline?" Because I'd never thought about it before, even though I see thousands of cars every day. That's how much I understand food. And I have to read the whole stupid volume.

Let me tell you something, though: the idea, offhandedly espoused in this book, that one can "replace" potato chips with, say, a cup of healthful sliced carrot, is nonsense. That's like saying, "rather than cigarettes, try buck-dancing," or "replace bowel movements with a hug." There is a situation that calls for potato chips; there is an entirely different situation that calls for carrots. Those two situations have nothing in common other than that they involve food; you change not the snack but the nature of the moment. They should have hired at least one fat editor.

Something a friend of mine wrote long ago, on a now-defunct blog:

What she doesn’t get is so clear--it’s not these nice restaurant meals where my diet goes wrong. It’s not dinners out that make me fat. It’s the pain and shame when I’m alone because my alleged friends treat me this way that make me try to use a cookie based cure when I get home from a three hour degradation. I know it’s an anomaly that as one of America’s obese I don’t live in a dank apartment littered with Cheet-O bags and get all my entertainment from television. My social life centers on the one group of people--single, urban upper middle class white people--who have aggressively shielded themselves from ever being too fat. They’re ten thousand kinds of crazy, but the point is you’d never know it to look at them. I wear all my issues on the outside, I break the cardinal rule.

I know how much I mess up the group photos of your hipster landscape. I know all my friends are thinner and prettier than I. But I am kept around because I see most people in a way I dream of being seen. In my eyes they have already been forgiven. But there’s no apology that gets you off the hook if you’re fat. If you’re fat, no one hesitates to keep you constantly apprised of the exact status of your failure. It’s just too obvious to ignore and too hideous to forget. I try so hard to love people inclusive of, not in spite of, their foibles, so I guess it’s no different. I try to love people the way I want them to love me. Michelle is trying to teach me to be as inoffensive to the eye as she is, but her lessons never seem to take.

She was a big girl, L--. She was in the midst of a long and awful medical disaster when she wrote that.

I wonder what she'd think of this site. It overlaps with so many of her own concerns--not just avoirdupois, but web design and information architecture. Aesthetics a major concern, on screen or in the mirror. I worry she might have hated it.

At the very least she would have expected me to gain her approval before starting it. That was her thing--she liked being asked for permission. And I doubt I would have asked for it. I would have plowed ahead on principle. There'd have been this wedge between us until we made up. Which we always did. She's not here any more, so it's a fight we're not going to have. She was a big girl, but it wasn't the weight that killed her; it was the treatment. I miss her.

Weight: 340 lbs