Sunday, February 06, 2022
5:41 PM |
Dearest Concerned People Who Tell Me To My Face That I Need to Lose Weight in the Middle of a Pandemic
I was out in the world for once. It was an increasingly rare thing, to be out this way in a world still teeming with so much uncertainty.
Like many people I knew, I still harbored a suspicious regard for the outdoors, even in the beginning of the third year of this pandemic. A few weeks ago, someone I know had announced in his Instagram that—even after two vaccinations and a booster shot, even after all these time wearing masks and being extra careful—he had contracted the Omicron strain of COVID-19, and was battling a debilitating bout of it. “But I was going out a lot during the holiday season,” he wrote. “I shouldn’t have, but I did.”
I knew several other people who tested positive for COVID-19 in January. And that was enough to keep me indoors for longer stretches, again.
Not that I was already going out even before that. Taking care of my mental health was becoming a full time endeavor, and home and being out of the radar from people was proving to be comfort I needed to have. Or else go mad. Being out meant courting needless anxiety, so I stayed in.
And when I did go out, it was to combat the occasional stir craziness—and much as possible, only in the most furtive way. Like a mouse. And only in the company of people in my immediate bubble. And only to familiar places I felt was safe enough to be in—like the open-air comfort of Caña at The Bricks Hotel, which had become a second home in the pandemic.
And so when I do go out, the effort often feels like a prize, almost.
So I was out in the world at the Valencia municipal plaza for their Sunday tabo, which has also become a gathering place for many of the province’s major restaurants to set up stands to cater to the eating pleasure of the early morning crowd [a lot of them from Dumaguete]. It was my first time to be there, and it was a tentative joy to behold—given that I was also seeing people I have not seen in almost three years.
Near the end of our excursion, I saw a familiar face, someone I had not seen in many, many moons. There was a rush to my steps as I turned to greet her, my smile wide beneath my facemask, my fist ready for a bump in what had become the fashionable replacement for the old
beso-beso. Before I could even say a delighted hello, she said:
“Tambok na ka kaayo! You really should lose weight.”
I really should just had taken it in stride.
I knew where it came from. It is cultural. One can even argue that it’s an unfortunate part of our DNA as a people. Even before the pandemic shattered our lives and reordered the way we did things and dealt with each other, Filipinos were wont to say, “You’ve gone fat!” in lieu of hello—and you can, with all honesty, say it is our hello. Apparently even pandemics are not earthshattering enough to change this.
It is rude—but it is also deeply ingrained, most people don’t even realize they traffic in its crudeness.
Still, it’s not easy to take this in stride. Whether in Tagalog [“Tumaba ka!”] or in Binisaya [“Nanambok ka!”], the comment—especially when it comes as a greeting—astonishes because it always seems to come out of nowhere. Your mindset is to be warm in greeting someone you have not seen in so long, and when the response you get is body-shaming couched in tones of concern mixed in with the salutation, your mind reels. You feel attacked just when you are about to welcome the person in your bubble of familiarity. You are never prepared to give an appropriate response.
What is an appropriate response?
Here’s one: “Ikaw rin!” My closest friends tell me this when I ask them over the occasional chat in Messenger.
But it strikes me as a witless, even commonplace, response; never mind that it is also answering passive aggression with equal hostility—and my mother once told me, in what she said was helpful Biblical metaphor, that it is better to throw back bread when people throw stones at you. [The Bible, I later found out, never said anything remotely resembling this maxim. But I was an obedient Sunday School-bred kid. So I learned to throw bread metaphorically, but also to eat them literally when I needed to soothe whatever pain I felt. I was constantly on the verge of becoming a doormat with eating problems.]
Besides, I am always afflicted by what the French term
l’esprit de l'escalier, literally “the spirit of the staircase,” or what they call coming up with the perfect response a little too late. So when someone hails me with “Nanambok ka!” I almost immediately respond with nervous laughter—and think of the wittiest rejoinder thirty minutes later, the offending person already out of sight.
I am certainly not alone in this commiseration. In a 2019 paper on the context of fat-shaming among adult Filipinos, Dr. Roberto Prudencio D. Abello of De La Salle University-Manila’s Behavioral Sciences Department writes that “the contemporary Filipino setting is both harsh and humorous toward individuals labeled as ‘fat’ and in local parlance, ‘tabachoy’ that would suggest that fat shaming culture exists in the Philippine society.” He cites depictions [and reception] of obesity in our popular culture—including movies and television [think of Bondying and Dabyana and Vice Ganda’s infamous 2013 fat-and-rape joke involving TV journalist Jessica Soho]—as the battleground figures that codify the popular attitude towards weight. The ramification, he concludes, is a social hazard: many fat-shamed individuals in his study grapple with unending levels of shame that also leads to feelings of invisibility and inadequacy, among other things.
In other words, “Nanambok ka!” is not helpful at all to anyone’s mental health—so whatever friendly concern it may have been intended in its utterance is all for naught.
And besides, we are living in a pandemic!
When COVID-19 started its onslaught in 2020 and we were all forced to stay indoors for months, I knew what it entailed: it was a wholesale disruption to our ways of doing things, including our rites of fitness we once took for granted. Gyms closed down. We had no idea if it was even safe to venture outdoors for a run. And lockdown also meant, for most people, sedentary living bingeing on movies and TV and partaking of food that was closest comfort in precariously uncertain times. On Facebook, I posted: “In the next few months, please, let’s not comment on each other’s weight.”
There were many individuals, of course, who took to the pandemic like the perfect excuse to gain a six-pack. Good for them. Many of them had access to homebound gym equipment—which is privilege. Diet is also privilege. In Dumaguete, so many food delivery businesses sprouted in 2020, a lot of them touting the latest fad in “healthy eating”—but for a price.
I thought the pandemic was enough to give pause to the usual judgments on weight and other ornery things. I was banking on common understanding and goodwill. I thought: we were fighting a battle in this pandemic, surely we could afford to be kind to each other.
But still—after not seeing each other in months and months, there was this: “Nanambok lagi ka!”
In August 2020, actress KC Concepcion shared on Instagram her own experience with body-shaming: “I used to get body-shamed when I went on my 3-year hiatus for not having that Asian, stick-thin body (for an Asian like me), and many women like me get affected by this mentally, emotionally and physically. Going through a pandemic and realizing the big picture issues of the world, I realized life is to be celebrated, and enjoyed... Like, why would I choose to develop an eating disorder over losing all the extra weight healthily?”
Later, in November of the same year, the Department of Education had to issue an apology when a module for distance learning from DepEd-Occidental Mindoro took potshots at a celebrity and subsequently made the rounds on social media. The material, for a MAPEH class, prompted students with the following situation: “Angel Locsin is an obese person. She, together with Coco Martin eats fatty and sweet food in Mang Inasal fast food restaurant most of the time. In her house, she always watching television (sic) and does not have any physical activities.” It went on to ask students what would happen to the popular actress if she “continue[d] her lifestyle.”
Needless to say, I am perfectly aware that I have grown bigger as the pandemic stretches on. But I’ve weighed things—no pun intended—and have chosen to first take care of my pandemic-induced mental health issues. My anxieties add fuel to my being adrift, and I do find myself eating my feelings. [And food is such a glorious escape.] I will certainly get around to keeping fit. It is part of my recovery. I just do not need the casual reminders from the most random people that all they see of me—a person of so much more complexity—is my weight.
Most people I know never do this, I’ve noticed. It is only certain people, and I feel they are guilty of projection: the unsolicited remarks on people’s weight feel like shields to their own insecurities, deflecting their own deficiencies by lobbying petty grenades first. When I think of that, I ultimately forgive them. [But I do not forget.]
A good friend’s boyfriend told me, “You’re fat!” We were in Adamo and I had not seen them in six months, and this was how he greeted me. I forced a smile.
Was my hello not effusive enough? But I thought: He has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. In the middle of the pandemic, he opened a milk tea café near downtown, which promptly closed within six months. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I know.”
An older woman from a social circle I used to run in told me, “You’re fat!” We were grocery shopping in Lee Plaza and I had not seen her in a year, and this was how she greeted me. I forced a smile.
Was my eagerness to see her not sincere enough? But I thought: She has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. She found out her daughter’s a lesbian and had called for a hasty intervention that doubled as a threat—because it was apparently an embarrassment to their tony family. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I do need to go to the gym.”
An acquaintance from school told me, “You’re fat!” We were at the Pantawan of Dumaguete to see the Christmas lights and I had not seen her in two years, and this was how she greeted me. I forced a smile.
Was my fist bump not cordial enough? But I thought: She has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. Her husband is having an affair with their driver, and she knows all about it—but can’t do anything because her husband is also an abusive prick. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I’m going on a diet.”
(I have of course changed details in these blind items so as to spare these people embarrassment—a courtesy they did not extend me. I know they are probably reading this. But they do have bigger problems than my weight.)
Extend understanding, be a bundle of love, and know with all of your heart the difficult circumstances of our lives in these fraught times.
We’re alive! So far! That’s what matters most, I think.
When you meet someone you have not seen in months because of the pandemic, say: “I’ve missed you. And despite everything that is wrong in the world, you look fabulous.”
Labels: coronavirus, fitness, friends, health, life, mental health, social norms
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, June 02, 2011
9:42 PM |
The Sound of Feet Running in Place
This is a post about gym, but let me start by saying that things sometimes begin because of heartbreak.
In 2008, at the tail-end of living another life, I was weighing close to 185 pounds, the heaviest I have ever been. I was, for lack of a better term, fat. The bulges were generous and spread out everywhere in my body like sly interlopers—they became stubborn residents; my belly was a balloon; my face was a rotund ball without angles; my breathing caught at the mere sight of staircases. I lost my cheekbones.
I used to be a skinny college kid, prey of the common wind, which could topple my thin frame over with a single blow. I had always been thin, and then just like that, I was fat. The slow road to obesity does not contain signposts. No warnings. The destination just happens. One day you try to tie your shoelaces and that simplest act becomes—to your utter surprise—a rigorous Olympic event.
But you get used to the heaviness over time. Its companion—an abundance of delicious food devoured indiscriminately, like one would feast on love—is a darling comforter. And sometimes food is there not just to sate physical hunger but something more. An unacknowledged craving for what one can’t have, perhaps, or a panacea for a hungry hurt. Sometimes food can take place of communication: you and your old lover, you have nothing anymore to talk about, and to fill in the gnawing silence, you go to a 24-hour diner and feast in shared delight over a sinful after-midnight meal. When that happens three or four nights every week, there is nothing else to expect except the growing blubber on your sides they have knowingly named after the handling of love. There are still incriminating photos and videos of me online that speak of that time—a strange figure who sounds exactly like me, but looks…different. Looking at an old Dumaguete episode of QTV’s
Ang Pinaka…, for example, I see a guy bearing my name and my voice, but he’s darker, rounder. And sometimes my current heart aches for that guy—I know what he was living through. What I remember about that time is a kind of “comfortable” darkness. The weight I found myself in existed as a kind of symptom to what was going inside. I was, still am, a comfort binger. My weight is twin to sadness.
Before 2008 was over, a necessary breakup. (Even that comes saddled with pain.) In the haze of those December days that followed, I crawled the streets like a lost caterpillar. I was in Don Atilano one day, enjoying a cup of coffee, and an old friend dropped by. One
beso beso later, I was told: “I met [named withheld]! Are you both okay now? I met the new boyfriend!”
A new boyfriend? I thought.
Less than a week after we broke up? My heart sank. But this is my point after this long introduction: I remember picking up my bag; I remember going home fast, following a compulsion and energy new to me; I remember changing clothes; and then I remember heading straight to gym. Under the white-lights of Cellutrim, confronting the reflection in the wall of mirrors, I swore never to be fat again.
What was gym for me? A refuge. It was my sanctuary that afforded me a time and a place to let go, for two hours each day, the painful cares of the world. It “gave” me permission to focus on myself for once. Gym took me in, blubber and all—and I was promised that, with due concentration and sweaty hard work, there would be transformation. I took that as cue to healing. Shedding the pounds was shedding the pain bit by bit. I could tell you I went to the gym for health reasons, but that would be a lie. Being fit was just a wonderful side-effect to nursing a broken heart.
This is why I like gym, and why I still go to the gym, even when sometimes life happens and there are intermissions when focus becomes lost and some pounds come raging back. But I return to it time and again, knowing full well that this how physically I can claim some form of steadfastness to a life that has a tendency for tattering.
Cellutrim, ran by the Sy family, was a good place to begin, and perhaps it still is. At that time, it was the best fitness center in town, and helped me find a good program that identified the body’s muscular regions to develop. “I don’t want muscles,” I told the instructor, “I just want to lose weight.” Cellutrim taught me the basics, although not much the proper form (the instructor, I soon found, was just too busy to tell me what was proper or not). It was a small gym, but it felt like family—and it was there that I got into what is now a familiar rhythm in gym culture: the fraught traffic for the cardio machines; the rudeness of certain foreigners who come in the early morning; the parade of carefully made-up
matronas who come not really to work out but to chatter, the machines becoming their own version of the water cooler; the heavy grunts of metal fetishists; the leaner gym bunnies infatuated with mirrors; the endless skirmishes with various kinds of body odor; the constant talk about supplements and protein shakes and the like; the love-hate relationship with the weighing scale; the constant presence of body ache, which you learn to long for.
Less than a year later, I transferred to Fit for Life, ran by the Arzaga family, located at the top floor of Bandera Building. It was in a bigger space, after all; no jostling here. The machines were plentiful; no traffic here, either. And there was the exquisite view of Dumaguete from the top of the world. Have you ever pounded on the treadmill with a view of sky changing colors as day turns to dusk? It adds poetry to your craving for sweat. I met Pete here, my instructor, who told me the way to go for a better fit is a knowledge of form. That one can lift a particular load forever but without doing it right in the correct form, the effort was practically useless. Once I had been doing some lifting for a chest exercise, and found the 70-pound load effortless. “You’re doing it wrong,” he said. “Do it this way.” He demonstrated the correct form for me. And when I did it myself, there was the sudden rush of exquisite pain, totally unfamiliar, something that had the feel of chili and tamarind.
“Halang ba?” he grinned. I grinned back.
All in all, I lost 34 pounds.
I go to World Fitness now, on the third floor of Portal West, where Pete has relocated. The gym is owned by two Swiss men—Hans Jorge Schallenberg and Christian Gafner—and for more than a month now, they have opened the gym’s doors for free to anyone wishing to use its premises, pending the final issuance of a permit—but also, in a sense, giving the casual gym bunny a chance to sample the place. What better advertising is there? (And being law-abiding Swiss people, they won’t let anyone pay the fee unless there is an official go-signal to start the business. It has been two months now. And I ask: is this how business can get strangled by the slowness of our bureaucracy?)
I have transferred because the gym is nearer where I live and where I work, and it is also newer, slicker, and wider than the last gym I attended. Sometimes those things do matter.
Almost every day, as much as my schedule can accommodate, I find myself there, waiting to take my turn at running the treadmill. Around me, there are the familiar sounds of people grunting, of metal plates making contact, of dumbbells being dropped on the cushioned floor… When I finally get to run, as the sweat trails across my face and everywhere else, I remember why I’ve been running the treadmill in the first place. Among other sacred places in life, gym was where you go to find yourself. For fitness, or for forgetting what pains you, this is where one kind of transformation can happen. And sometimes that is enough.
Labels: fitness, life, love
[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
In Ateneo the other week, a bunch of students stopped to talk to me inside the university's famed art gallery. They asked to take pictures with me. "Sir," one of them said, "we read your blog!"
"Oh God," I said. "You must know too much about me already."
"Yes! We know about your love life!"
Oh dear God. Facebook status messages aside, this blog has become quite confessional for me -- and I seem powerless to stop it from being so. James, a good friend of mine, told me it's perfectly okay: "We are merely trying to make sure we record the fact that we
exist." Existentialism for the Internet Age? Perhaps. Heck, my life's already an open book. So let me blog about this particular ... indulgence. Let's talk about weight. I am what Oprah would call an emotional eater. Or I used to be. (The "used to be" is the good news.) I ate when I was depressed, so much so that recent years saw me balloon from 145 pounds to something close to 190 pounds at my heaviest. I was the most unhealthy balloon there was, walking on two legs. But food was
my ultimate lover: it tasted great, it gave instant satisfaction, and it was there in both good times and bad. Food was also the great democratizer for me -- in a fellowship with people you barely know or had nothing to talk about, the only "communication" device that is guaranteed to satisfy all would be a banquet. Last December, I saw shots of me and Jean Claire that our old college buddy Clee took of us in Hayahay. (This was the night that changed everything in my life...) Among the photos Clee took was this...
... evidence of how obese I was becoming. Look at that neck. That trunk. That elephantine leg. Even that black shirt couldn't hide anymore the size of my misery. That December night, I weighed perhaps 174 pounds. A virtual whale. I
had to shave at least 30 pounds off that. Or else call myself the ultimate loser. Two months later, I'm halfway through my goal.
That's 14 pounds off, baby. And here's to losing more for the coming summer.
Labels: fitness, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, January 19, 2009
7:45 PM |
Like the Wind
I look forward to that rush after ten minutes of running -- that rush that comes when your body is finally in sync with the physicality of the task, and your legs become so much eager to just
go, go, go. The endorphins take you high, and everything is all right with the world. You are lost in your own little world, and you can't help but smile through the ache, the sweat, the glow. I can't wait for tomorrow.
Labels: fitness, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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