I’ve always tried very hard not to judge myself about my body weight. I’m not fat, but I’m also not skinny. I’ve always been told that I’m a perfectly healthy weight for my height and body build. I’m not someone who enjoys working out, but I know it’s good for me, and I also try to eat food that is good for me as often as possible. However, over quarantine, I became more conscious about my weight because I was not as active as I had been while at school. Looking back on it now, I only gained maybe 4 pounds, which is really not that much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s interesting how distressed it made me.<\/p>\n
This semester taking Professor Farrell’s fat studies class has really opened my eyes to how much I criticized myself about my body and my weight gain over quarantine and how I used to exercise because I wanted to look in shape rather than feel healthy and strong. Taking the class also made me think about how often I would feel guilty about eating something that I knew wasn’t necessarily healthy but was something I wanted to eat.<\/p>\n
Reading the poem, “Kitchen” by Susan Stinson really spoke to me about this guilt that I had when eating certain foods. The last stanza where she writes, “Leaving the tradition of a woman\/in the body of a cat,\/we become whales,\/all mouths,\/all surface,\/all grace” (Stinson 18), caught my eye. I love the idea behind “Leaving the tradition of a woman\/in the body of a cat.” I took this to mean that a woman’s tradition is to question what she eats and be hard on herself about what she eats, so women should give this tradition up place it on the body of a cat to free herself from that constant nagging.<\/p>\n
It has still been hard for me not to judge what I eat even now that I’m back at school and moving around a lot more than I did when I was at home. However, thinking about these feelings in terms of this poem makes me realize how I shouldn’t be ashamed of what I eat and should leave that embarrassment and pressure and give it to a cat. I feel like the poem is telling us to, in a way, be a cat because a cat could care less what they eat, and we should try to do the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve always tried very hard not to judge myself about my body weight. I’m not fat, but I’m also not skinny. I’ve always been told that I’m a perfectly healthy weight for my height and body build. I’m not someone who enjoys working out, but I know it’s good for me, and I also try … Continue reading “Leaving the tradition of a woman” Coming to Terms with Food During a Pandemic<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}