I’ve always wanted a long neck. I don’t have one. Short-ish necks tend to run in my family … who would’ve thought? LOL

Now, what to do about this desire? Admire paintings like Parmigianino’s Madonna with Long Neck (detail above). Draw sketches of myself with an impossibly long, giraffe-like neck. Grow my hair long. Wear V-neck tops or those with plunging necklines. I’ve done all of these things.

Then I learned about a practice of the Padung tribe of Thailand. I’m sure you know about it. Padung females wear rings around their necks in order to elongate them. They start at a very young age and add rings as the years pass.

I got very excited. (I was a teenager.) Maybe I could realize my dream of a long neck after all! But I found out that neck stretching is often painful and is actually deforming the collarbone and ribs to give the appearance of a longer neck. Sounded dangerous to me, and so while I sometimes catch myself wishing for a longer neck, it’s easy to dismiss because it’s not in the cards for me. Never was.

I’m also short LOL — I notice that it seems tall women’s height mostly comes from their necks. I’m about five foot three, five foot three and a half. Take a look at a tall woman’s neck sometime. They look to be about six inches long (about the length of a dollar bill). Give me my wished-for long neck, and I’d have height, too! I’d be around five foot nine.

Naturally, I’ve often wished I were taller. (”I wish I was little bit taller, I wish I was a baller” — anyone?) But really, aside from platform shoes à la Japanese Spice Girls, what can I do about it? Bupkis. And it doesn’t really bother me. In fact, I think short can be darn cute in its own right. I love Princess Leia all short and spunky barking orders while stomping between Chewbacca and Han Solo.

Being short doesn’t bother me anymore really. Any of the stuff on offer to “gain height” seems very scary and sketchy. So that sort of thing is pretty much off my radar. Mess around with supplements that stimulate the release of human growth hormone? Uh, no thank you. Bet it doesn’t work anyway.

I sometimes wish I weren’t fat. But the ways proffered to get unfat are just as dangerous, scary, painful, and unproven as neck rings and HGH-stimulating supplements. With that in mind, it’s much easier for me to quickly drop that “wish I weren’t fat” thought and move on. It makes it hard to obsess over my weight. It’s actually helping me to accept myself and my body on this come-as-you-are basis. As others in the fatosphere have noted, it’s hard to resist the urge and the imperative to diet. Looking at weight-loss efforts this way — on par with other willful deformation and tinkering with hormones — makes it all too clear what the sane and healthy path is … or the right path for me anyway.

This is just a quick response to an older post at Shapely Prose, especially considering the NYT attention, but I just wanted to share my secret.

Come closer …

My secret is I believe rejecting society’s insane beauty demands on women is the only healthy thing to do.

Further proof:

I’d rather be fat than addicted to drugs.

I’d rather love a fat girl openly (& be happy) than be too cowardly to stand up to my friends and be true to myself.

Society won’t change if you don’t.

Kate of Shapely Prose covered well the infuriating fallacy that fat people lie, underestimate, and flaunt their ignorance at every turn. There’s another crazymaking meme out there: there’s a psychological reason you’re fat, and you must find out what it is before you can truly live (read: lose weight).

This one is equally incensing, IMO. When I joined a diet support group a few years ago, I was told the first step in achieving permanent weight loss was to “fix my head.” OK. I was all on board. I read a recommended book, Fattitudes. Nothing in it really applied to me. We’re told time and again that fat women are hiding from men — literally using their fat as a barrier against men. Oprah is famous for saying there’s a psychological reason one is fat, and one needs to figure that out before one can get on with life (by losing weight, natch).

[Just a short aside on Oprah -- why, oh, why, can't she be one of us? She could be such a powerful fat acceptance ally. But no, she's told by Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue magazine, to lose 30 pounds before she's allowed on the cover, and Oprah -- arguably the most powerful woman in the entertainment business -- actually caves in!]

I tried and tried. I felt crazy that I could not figure out the why behind my fat.

Let’s see. I first got fat around age six or seven. I had just moved from a tropical clime to one with very harsh winters. I now discard the idea that it was stress-related from moving (I’d already moved once before that … and thin people get stressed, too.) I don’t take into account that I could have gotten less physical activity in a colder climate. That could be the case, but it doesn’t apply to becoming fat because at most one loses only four to seven pounds by exercising.

Then I came across a gem of a post at Fatly Yours. The author lives in Finland and talked about how her mother’s doctor explained how Finnish people tend to be fatter to make up for the colder temperatures. Eureka! I could have gained weight because my body was compensating for a different set of environmental conditions. Even if this is the case, that’s a physical reason … not a psychological one.

I don’t think I’ve ever tried to hide myself from the opposite sex. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve always been open to being noticed by men

That book Fattitudes talks about things like sabotaging oneself and discovering if you (mistakenly?) hold onto the “hidden benefits” of being fat. In all honesty, I can’t remember the particulars. I do recall that pretty much nothing in there applied to me. I just felt even more freakish that I didn’t seem to have enough introspection to figure out this mystery of my fatness. That was surprising considering how I’m very much into self-reflection.

Learning through the fat acceptance movement that fat is under one’s control as much as height is — and that dieting causes weight GAIN — finally truly fixed my head for reals. It really makes sense to me now. It feels correct as well as registering correct when I read about the scientific studies (widely ignored) that pretty much prove it correct. Those are two WHYS that allow me to finally feel sane about my fat.

It’s difficult to explain, but it’s just like it clicked for me. Years and years of feeling like there was something psychologically wrong with me that manifested itself as fat — and not being able to determine what it was despite purposely trying to — and finding out that was just so much bullsh*t … well, it’s mind-clearing and calming.  Fix my head? If it ain’t broke, honey …