Today's post was inspired by a 3am coughing fit which prompted me to do as I usually do when I have a bought of insomnia....Check my social media sites! Facebook is really the only social site that I update and check regularly, however, I have a 10 year old daughter that seems to exist for the sole purpose of posting on Instagram and seeing how many followers the anonymous account that she shares with her best friend, can attract.
Until now, just about all of their posts have been harmless as they began with a "Music" theme and then changed to a "Fashion" theme and soon started attracting many other youngsters that were interested in their posts. I monitor it regularly, and due to the fact that neither her name nor her picture is on this account, I chose to allow her to create this page along with her friend.
This morning (albeit, at an ungodly hour), I was personally offended by one of the posts that I saw on their wall. I have yet to find out which of the girls actually posted it, however, it really doesn't matter much, as they are partners in crime, so to speak, on this account anyway. It was a picture of a Celebrity character named "Fat Amy"! She is a woman that starred in the Movie "Pitch Perfect" and has quickly progressed to a popular known "Star" because she is publicly MADE FUN of about her weight! Apparently, she is now choosing to make fun of herself and will be going on to create more TV and Movie roles about being overweight. What compounds things is that it is actually done in a vile, offensive manner. Amy is often shown stuffing her face full of junk foods, poking fun of her body with hate comments, and in the post that I found on my daughter's wall, she was covered in red food products (pizza? sauce?) under the caption "Fat Amy's Been Shot"!!!
Needless to say, that after 12/14/12, when our lives changed forever, I will never again be able to look at a "funny" gun comment again, nor do I ever want my children to. Couple that with making fun of a person for the way they look, and this is a recipe for future disaster in which I am hoping to nip in the bud.............Today!
Being a person that has continually struggled with weight and self image issues, I am not only sensitive to this subject, but enormously offended by it, as I have seen and lived the destruction that judging a person for anything, let alone the way the look, can cause. Quite frankly, it is pure and utter IGNORANCE!
7 years ago when I began my journey in Nutrition and Natural Health Care, I was overweight by society standards and suffering the gamut of emotions that came along with feeling "not good enough." I had just given birth to my second child and was desperately clinging to the "Baby Weight" theory. A year after his birth, when I hadn't seemed to shed a single pound, I began looking for ways to fix myself. I enrolled in Nutrition school and began learning how to properly feed my body, what foods were good, bad, poisonous, etc. I quickly became excited and started putting everything I learned into play ASAP....in fact, I even created a business out of my new found education; "Whole Food Lady Nutrition" was born shortly after graduation.
Did I lose weight? Yes, of course I did....I lost lots of weight. I began gaining recognition for my new look and traveled to public places and people's homes to teach them of what I had learned....I THOUGHT I had struck gold! I thought that if I could just teach people how to successfully feed their bodies REAL food and avoid the many poisons they had been ingesting for years, that I could happily fix every person on the planet that has ever had a weight problem! Boy........was I WRONG!
Over time, as my business grew from Whole Food Lady NUTRITION to Whole Food Lady DESSERTS, my eyes began to open to the fact that weight and body image were much more about your emotional health than simply your poor eating habits. In fact, poor eating habits directly stem from poor emotions and lack of self esteem; which, in my eyes, is the REAL problem.
My dessert business was created purely from my good intentions for others, wanting to offer people the option to have a healthy sweet treat, which I have successfully accomplished. Looking deeper into my intentions, I now question my motive for myself? Why did I NEED to open a Dessert business? Why not a Health Food Business? Why not sell vitamins? T-Shirts with Health Conscious sayings? Etc.? The answer to that was and is that I truly missed my go to comfort foods and needed to find a way to be able to continue eating them with the knowledge that they were no longer poisoning me....at least in one way!
As the years went on and my little bakery business began to grow, my list of steady customers who came to me in confidence that I would be able to provide them with healthy baked goods for special occasions, made me quite happy! And so I did.... I baked and baked and baked until I landed my cakes on the popular TV talk show, The View! Boy, was I ever happy! The question was....if I was so happy, why was I gaining so much weight back? Why was I NEEDING to eat so much of what I was baking? Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't simply because my treats were so good, how could you NOT?
The reason was (and still is at times) because I've had a pretty hard life until fairly recently. I will not bore anyone with the long laundry list of major issues and family problems that I faced as a child and most of my adult life, but I will tell you that certain hard knocks in life can send you scurrying for something to drown these emotions out! Since I had always been a "good girl" so to speak, I never drank, smoked, did drugs or gambled.....so, what was left?! Why...Chocolate, of course! As a child, growing up with a mentally ill mother, chocolate and desserts were my best friend. I could always count on that piece of chocolate cake to temporarily soothe my emotions of fear and despair. I didn't choose my complicated childhood....but I DID choose the chocolate cake.
So...why do diets only ever work TEMPORARILY? Truth be told...........WHO wants to address all those yucky emotional problems?! Who wants to open up all those cans of worms and clean them out when you can simply DROWN them out? Whatever vice you choose, whether it be alcohol, drugs, cigarettes or food, it's all for the same common reason. I know this now....however, most of my life (even up until quite recently), I had been using the excuse of "I'm a Baker", that's why I can't keep the weight off. The truth is, keeping a bit more weight on my body makes me feel safe, protected in a way. I would bet to say that many people feel this way as well.
Now....back to "Fat Amy" and why it is so utterly IGNORANT to come down on things like "Obesity and Childhood Obesity" by trying to restrict people from eating: Simply put....You DON'T KNOW THAT PERSON'S BACKGROUND OR HISTORY.... PERIOD! You don't know if that person is holding extra weight because she's been raped in childhood and uses it as a barrier between herself and the cruel world, you don't know if he/she grew up in poverty and was close to starvation, and is keeping the weight on as protection from famine, or in my case, you didn't know until now that I grew up with a mother that cried 24/7 in clinical depression and I knew no other way as a child to drown out that sound. Till this day, hearing the sound of crying makes me want to run and hide. Thank Goodness I have amazing children that rarely cry, but when they do....that's when the chocolate comes out!
It is our hope that our children will come to truly understand that the very best way to treat an individual with a self esteem issue is to give them a hug and let them know that you love them. Reassure them that the problems they see in themselves, are not visable to you. Make them feel loved and excepted... as this, is the only way for them to ever begin to heal.
Today, I am truly blessed with an amazing husband that encourages and supports me to address issues, and also works on addressing his own as well. We have 2 wonderful children that we are raising to be conscious people as well, always encouraging them to speak their emotions and work out issues with friends and family, etc. and we strongly DISCOURAGE ignorance such as "Fat Amy" and bullying over physical appearances and such, so you can imagine my dismay when viewing my daughter's Instagram account this morning!
Instagram will be addressed today for sure, as will my over indulgence of baked goods! As they say....."Today is the first day of the rest of my life". Thank you, Jessica, for always inspiring me...even if today's inspiration was one I'd rather never have to address again!
