Fatness isn't inherently bad. 

       I felt like I needed to say this, especially after all I've learned losing weight this last year. It's been a long, difficult journey that's been peppered with self-loathing and dealing with my own internal biases. I've recently discovered fat activism and it's changed my perspective on weight loss as well as health. There's a lot to unpack there, but I'll come back to it.

       In early 2018, I had a conversation with one of my doctors about my chronic pain condition, Fibromyalgia. She suggested that if I simply lost weight, I'd feel less pain. But I knew that wasn't right. Two years prior to that conversation, I weighed 70lbs less and was in the worst pain of my life. It was then that I was diagnosed. The extra weight had piled on from medications and being housebound because of the condition.  Still, this doctor insisted it would work and refused me other care options until I lost weight.

       I was enraged. Logically, her argument didn't make sense to me because I knew what my pain felt like at that lower weight. The fact that she didn't believe I knew my own body was so infuriating that I decided to do something about it. I would do as she asked, I would play by the medical system's rules, only so I could prove a point and finally be taken seriously for my pain.

       Losing weight was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Calorie counting is not easy, even though I made it seem that way in some of my earlier posts. I struggled, I cried, and I did feel like I was starving myself regularly. But, after 6 months of dieting, I lost a significant amount of weight. Guess what happened? My pain increased tenfold, just like I knew it would.

       That terrible chat with that biased doctor had broken me, and I put myself through hell to prove a stupid point. I never returned to see that specific physician (she was an unnecessary addition to my medical team at a time when my pain clinic had a discount on private care). Unfortunately, the damage her comments and suggestions made is still ongoing. I wrecked my metabolism just to access better care. The anti-fat bias doctors possess, that we all possess, has hurt me and will continue to hurt others until we make changes.

       As I said before, I discovered fat activism this year. There are some lovely people out there trying to make a difference and getting people to acknowledge their own biases. Here are a few awesome peeps on Twitter for you to follow:

• @meghantonjes
• @comfyfat
• @fatgirlfreedom
• @yrfatfriend

       Your Fat Friend also writes wonderful essays on Medium about the anti-fat bias that are really worth a look: How Healthcare Bias Harms Fat People. If you want more information, Your Fat Friend and the others I listed above are great resources and it's better to hear it from their point of view rather than myself as I am now a small fat after my weight loss.

       Anyways, if you would like my perspective: I think the main point of this cause is to get us to recognize our own biases and deal with them to hopefully stop demonizing fatness and fat people. It's not an easy task; many of us, even fat people themselves, harbour this extreme negativity towards fatness. We've internalized these biased views of society and for many of us who are or were fat, we've turned against ourselves because of it. I know I hated myself whenever I looked in the mirror, ever since I hit puberty. Even when I wasn't fat by any standard (age 10 or 11), I hated any bit of fatness on my body. When I did gain massive amounts of weight, I still looked the same in my eyes. I had always been fat, I was always going to be fat. When I did set out to lose the weight, it came from a place of self-loathing and I shamed myself through the entire experience.

       Even after I lost 50lbs, I still harboured those feelings. But you know what happened? Being thinner, and fitting into straight sizes (S-L, 0-14), made me feel beautiful and acceptable. It made me feel like I was better than people who were bigger than me, and that's terrible! This right here is my anti-fat bias at work. I'm not better than them and I can't let my bias make me think this kind of discrimination is okay.

       It takes a lot of self-talk and head-work to stop these internal judgements. Still, it must be done because I don't want my biases reflected in my actions. I don't want to treat people poorly, even subconsciously, because of their size. I know how awful it is to experience this kind of prejudice, and it's something that will take a lot of effort to eliminate from society. Anti-fat bias, in particular, is very tricky to root out because it's propped up by the medical system.

       Society insidiously imprints us with this negativity against fatness and fat people by using numbers under the guise of science to make the hatred seem okay. Clinically, I'm still 'obese' at a BMI of 32, down from 41 this time last year. Now, that word itself is not neutral and is often thrown around as a hateful term. I use it only to reference the specific medical measurements that have helped fuel society's hatred of fatness.

       The Body Mass Index is a strange scale that assigns numbers to determine what your 'healthy' weight is for your height. 'Overweight' starts at 25, 'obese' starts at 30 and 'morbidly obese' begins at 35. It's a simple mathematical equation to find out where you land, but it doesn't make sense. BMI doesn't account for muscle mass which means big burly athletes with no fat can be considered obese. It was also based on average weights during the early 1900s when food was not nearly as plentiful as it is now and people regularly starved themselves out of necessity. So, of course, you might be thinking, "Why haven't they updated the standard then?" Well, that's a good question with an unfortunate answer. The reason no one has updated the formula is that using the BMI scale simply conforms with our already existing biases against fatness. Why change something that helps confirm what society already believes?

Because hatred on a grand scale is wrong.

-Dana.


Have you ever felt medical professionals were biased against you because of your weight? Did you ever struggle with self-loathing because of your weight or your internal biases? Let me know in the comments down below!

I thought receiving a diagnosis was an achievement in and of itself. I thought everything that came next couldn't be as bad. The logic was, "If I know what's wrong with me, I know what I can do to help fix it." I never counted on my illness begin incurable. Modern medicine is so advanced that we've made AIDS treatable to the point that it's very unlikely to die from it anymore; so in my mind there shouldn't be many incurable illnesses left. Turns out, not only was I wrong, but I was being very naive.

Fibromyalgia is what I was diagnosed with recently after decade of searching for answers. It is a chronic pain condition that causes widespread pain throughout my body as well as sleep problems, sensitivity to high/low temperatures, muscle spasms, overactive nerves, bad joints, fatigue and many other issues. Basically, I can't walk very far or stand for very long and using my joints for prolonged periods of time can cause serious problems. On my bad days, I end up confined to bed rest. Even on my good days, I can really only tackle a couple short tasks or run one errand without causing a painful flare for the rest of the week.

While knowledge is power and knowing what caused all these problems helped me, I didn't realize how limited my treatment options were. Exercise is usually the blanket, throw-away advice from doctors and rheumatologists. However, it only seems to help a small portion of fibro patients improve, for some it can make the pain much worse. I, unfortunately, ended up in the latter group. As I continued my research post-diagnosis, I found that there was very little new information on treatment. "Pain management" was a term used most often, talking about how to learn to live with the pain. It also seemed that there was very little research going on about how to cure fibromyalgia patients and most efforts seemed focused on just dealing with the pain. Learning this broke my heart. They weren't trying to make us better, they just wanted us to complain less and do more. (Shut up and be useful.) This kind of thinking is not helpful for the patients who just want to be better, who want to eventually be pain-free. For now, we accept that pain-free may not happen, but we need to hope it is a possibility. Hope is all we have.

Around this time, I heard the phrase, "Fibro won't kill you, but you'll suffer every day until you die of old age." While that isn't the greatest outlook to have, as a person with this disease I feel like it still rings true. Fibromyalgia as it stands is a life sentence of pain, insomnia, and the inability to complete basic daily tasks. Like many fibro sufferers, I can't work. Since my wrists lock up, it makes it hard to drive a car or use a computer for long periods of time. Working retail or any other minimum wage job that would have me on my feet most of the day also wouldn't work as I usually can't walk or stand for longer than five minutes at a time. The only other choice is working as a call center employee, but with the emotional toll that can take on a person's mental health, it's extra dangerous for a fibro patient to take on that kind of work. This is because fibromyalgia patients have a suicide rate 10 times higher than the general population [1][2]. The cause for the high suicide rate is split between the fact that fibromyalgia cause severe depression due to pain levels and the anti-depressants with suicidal side effects often prescribed to fibro patients to treat their pain.

Speaking of treating the pain with prescriptions, there aren't many options in that department either. Anti-depressants are usually prescribed as fibro patients often present as severely depressed and many doctor's believe the pain to be psychological. (It's all in our heads! No.) There are some pills that some patients have had limited success with such as Lyrica and Gabapentin, but, like exercise, they only seem to work for a small portion of sufferers. Many fibromyalgia patients then go on to rely on opioid prescriptions like Tramadol to make it through the day. The problem there is that with the number of overdose and addiction victims rising, doctors have been taking away valid opioid prescriptions from non-addicted chronic pain patients [3][4][5]. This leads to loss of function and increased pain flares for patients who had returned to almost full function. Unfortunately, this problem is not being addressed as the chronic pain community doesn't seem to have a voice loud enough to be heard over the shouting about overdose deaths.

Therefore, fibromyalgia patients find themselves in quite a bind. We can't work, and sometimes even taking care of ourselves is too much. Adding onto the fact that there just isn't enough research being done to cure us and chronic pain patients losing access to their prescriptions, we can easily start to feel like we've been imprisoned in our own bodies. I continue my own research and participating in fibromyalgia communities in the hope that I can find ways to ease the pain and break free of this life sentence.

Dana~


"Do you suffer with chronic pain? What's your biggest hurdle? What treatment have you found to be the most helpful? Let me know in the comments below."

Fibromyalgia. One word, five syllables. The truth I had been searching for that I knew existed all along.

A decade of doctor's appointments, specialist consults, foreign physicians, late nights reading medical journals and endless days thinking I was insane finally lead me to this. It was real, others had the same symptoms.

I first heard the word from a gynecologist in the UK. My birth control was running low while I lived in the South of England so I booked an appointment at a sexual health clinic. Since I was foreign, they wanted my full medical history before I was given a prescription. I chuckled and apologized to the nurse for the long story I was about to tell her. She sat with me for almost half-an-hour as I regaled her with all the main issues I had and what procedures I had undergone. When I was finished, she thanked me and took the report she wrote to the gynecologist. When the doctor came into the room, skimming the report as she sat down across from me, she made an off-handed comment, "Have you ever been tested for Fibromyalgia?"

The sentence would open up a whole new world of research for me, but I hadn't connected the dots yet. I responded to her inquiry in the negative and she said I should speak to my general practitioner about getting checked out. I agreed and that was the end of it for the time being. I didn't have a  family doctor in the UK and I was focused on relationship issues I was having with my partner at the time. Still, the word stuck with me. The next time I had a moment to myself I started to look up the symptoms and signs. It had no known cause, no cure and mostly effected women. This was disheartening, but all I wanted was an answer. As I continued my research, everything I read just felt like I was reading my life story. It felt like I was a typical case and I had no idea how this had been missed previously. That's when I noticed how little it was recognized back in North America. It wasn't until recently that doctors started to believe patients and consider fibromyalgia a real condition.

On my return to Canada last summer, I was determined to get my diagnosis. The only problem was I didn't have a family doctor because mine retired while I was abroad. Clinic doctors were wary of giving referrals to specialists, which I needed to confirm that it was Fibromyalgia. So I set out to organize a new family doctor for myself only to discover there was a shortage of family physicians in my province. I also had a bunch of paperwork to fill out and file after returning to the country. By the time I had managed to sort everything out and get an appointment with a doctor who was willing to take me on as a patient, it was a full year after I learned of the condition from the gynecologist. The symptoms first seriously reared their grotesque head when I was 12-years-old. After I booked the appointment, I turned 22. Ten years of seeking a diagnosis had passed and I was so broken down, I thought there was no fight left in me.

Sitting down with my new doctor, explaining everything to her and then bringing up what I knew of fibromyalgia...It was nerve-racking and it honestly took the last of my mental energy to do. I had waited so long, suffered for so many years in the dark. I wanted, no, I needed to hear an answer to my question, "What's wrong with me?"

Walking out of my new doctor's office with her agreement and her pledge to help me further investigate my issues, was so liberating. I could not have been more relieved. One journey, the search for an answer, had come to an end. The next journey, the search for a working a treatment, was just beginning. Ten years of fighting for an answer has prepared me for the next battle, and I'm ready to take on the new challenge. I welcome it.

Dana~


"Do you or a loved one have fibromyalgia or CFS? How long did it take to get the diagnosis? When did the symptoms first start? Tell me your story in the comments below."

I give in really easily, especially to people I care about. I always do my best to please those that matter. I try to make even strangers happy. I like to spread smiles and do my best so others feel their best. Sometimes though, the weight of it all crushes me.

I got  to my lowest point earlier this year when I had been crushed over and over again; my kindness was abused by someone I truly cared about. I fought to put that behind me and learn to only do what I can.  I give a lot of myself, but not everything. I too deserve to feel my best just like the others I'm always trying to help. I moved on and made new friends. I found another very special person who has helped me see that there is a balance between doing good for others and doing good for myself. This balance has helped me find happiness. I created positive change in my life and I am determined to keep it that way.

This week my determination was tested. Do I give of myself too much once again? Do I let someone else's happiness override my own well-being, just because they are in need? Do I accept the hurt and the sorrow, simply so they don't have to face a situation of their own creation?

"No."

It was difficult, but it was the right choice. I'm happier for it and I won't let anyone use my kindness against me ever again.

~Dana

I have always heard that once you hit rock bottom, you can only go upwards. I took that to mean that when everything goes wrong and I have to start over, that I will eventually be able to bring good things back into my life. Effort would be required, as it always is, but I would still find happiness. I clung to this ideal when life got rough this year.

Then, on one of my darkest days, something surprising happened. A positive and optimistic presence entered my life. The tears stopped. The frustration melted away. The hurt faded. In time, all that was wrong finally started to become a memory. This good influence on my life gave me the strength to believe in hope again. I remembered what it was like to be honestly happy, and not wearing the facade of happiness while I juggled emotional hurt and general frustration with life below the surface.

I'm not saying the new presence caused my happiness, I do not need to rely on something or someone outside of myself to be happy. What happened was that positivity reminded me about all that is good in life and all the good I have to look forward to in my future. By coming to terms with whats happened and remembering I have more to do as I move forward, I was able to find peace with myself and ultimately find my own happiness again. Hello, personal joy, I missed you. I won't let negativity steal away my awesome optimism and internal contentment. It's a lot more fun this way.

Dana~

I'm not sure what changed, but all of the sudden my lovely desktop gave up on me. I first noticed that my security software wouldn't load... I could click on McAfee all I wanted, it did not want to open. I thought that was weird so I opened my task manager. Task manager wouldn't open. I got very scared. Extremely so. Thus, I rebooted hoping that would fix things as it usually does (Windows memory leak and what not). Everything looked fine, booted to my desktop like normal. However, task manager still wouldn't open. Neither would McAfee. Uh-oh.

Now normally if a piece of software stops working, I write it off and uninstall. You can't do that with security software or the task manager. One is important for protecting my computer while the other is literally a part of my computer's OS. I knew I was in trouble, so I Googled like crazy. Many people said it might be a virus, just run your security software. Well, McAfee wouldn't open so I had to solve that problem first. The online consensus was that my Java needed to be updated. So I tried that. It spent 10 hours installing before I gave up. For hours after that I tried to do basic trouble-shooting until I decided I would have to run a System Restore. I've done it before, and in general it works like a charm. So I selected a day that it was working and let it do it's thing. I waited and waited. My computer wouldn't finish logging off. It was in a loop for three days. I finally gave up, forced it off and rebooted to the desktop. It didn't finish the System Restore, but it hadn't changed anything either. I realized that I would need professional help. And no, I didn't need a therapist.

I figured it would be a virus removal or something simple. Maybe the hard drive might need to be wiped. So I tried to pop my 32GB USB in to back up files. Uh, nope. It wouldn't recognize it. I started to sweat now; there were files I hadn't backed up in a while. Important writing. Game saves. Gulp. Then I realized, I still had access to my web browser. Google Drive was my saviour. I uploaded anything and everything I could find that was of any importance. However, after about five minutes of uploading, my Windows Explorer would crash. No, not Internet Explorer (I was using Chrome to upload), but the file explorer that allows me to view my documents and pictures. The task bar and start button vanished. Double uh-oh. Was this going to be more expensive than I thought?

To rescue my files before my computer completely died, I had to keep force rebooting every five minutes. Once Windows Explorer crashed I couldn't access the files. It was a pain in the butt to say the least. Eventually I salvaged my files and called a repair company. I dropped my tower off a day later and prayed that they could save it. I couldn't afford a new $800 desktop.

The very next day, not even 24 hours after I dropped it off, the tech called saying he'd fixed everything! He even replaced my old security software, gave me a bunch of new protection and computer health programs as well as updated all my installed software. He even got my computer to finish all pertinent Windows updates, ones that I couldn't do for years as it'd force my computer into a death loop. When I got it back, he showed me everything, talked me through the new software and showed me that my favourite game was still operable. He even opened the hard case and explained where everything was and what I would need to do when I was ready for a hardware upgrade. This tech went above and beyond; the service was exceptional and very reasonably priced! After about five days of using it, he even texted me to check up on it and answer any further questions I had. Honestly, if you have any computer problems and live in the Lower Mainland, call TSG Computer Services.

My much loved desktop is running better than ever and I couldn't be happier.

Dana~