But I’m not convinced it’s an accurate statement for the fat kids out there; especially not those who grow into fat adults.

For people of size, I’m not sure it does Get Better, at least not naturally.

Left to its own devices, the Western Beauty and Culture Machine will happily crush you underfoot –for your own good, of course– for being too big for their britches.

Everywhere you look there will be pop-up ads and billboards and interchangeable vapid reality TV “stars” admonishing you from photoshopped pages to change your body into something society deems acceptable. Only then will you get invited to the cool parties, have a partner who loves you and finally be worthy of full human status.

Oh, and don’t you dare be angry. They’re just doing it so you’ll feel better about you! They’re “just worried about your health”. Did they mention you have Such A Pretty Face? Did they make the Pointed Sigh?

Sigh.

It’s not like people really need much of a push to treat fat people as sub-human anyway. We’re manifestations of weakness, of the laziness and sloth they fear in themselves, we deserve our bad treatment because really, we’ve brought it upon ourselves. (You can try pointing out science refuting the claim that size is more than just a case of calories in vs. calories out, but be aware it’s dancing-with-a-pig futile in many if not most cases.)

Nope, you’re a lazy cow and there’s nothing sacred about cows in this culture: They just get slaughtered…or worse, slaughter themselves.

Bullying is now news, after too many –one is too many– kids, perceived or identifying as something other than cut-and-dried hetero, committed suicide.

But bullying, we all know, is not new news and it’s not solely the domain of gay kids.

Yet how many front page human interest stories do you hear about the plight of the fat kid being bullied in school?

Whither our tearful congressmen? Where’s the garment-rending when a bullied fat kid commits suicide?

More importantly, where are our 24-hour specialized hotlines to stop those suicides before they happen?

Tormenting fat kids is less of a headline and more of a forgivable rite of passage, swept neatly under the Children Can Be So Cruel rug (Children Can Be So Cruel, a fully-licensed subsidiary of Boys Will Be Boys and She Was Asking For It In That Skirt Partners, International)

Yeah, children can be so cruel.

Is it a newsflash that adults can be too?  The “War on Childhood Obesity”, however good its intentions might be, is just another way to codify and institutionalize size discrimination against the people least capable of defending their own interests: children.

Regardless of age, if you’re fat, Society, either openly or covertly, wants you to hate yourself thin. Except we can’t hate ourselves thin, at least not in the long term. Sometimes only thing that sticks from years of being hit in the head with the anti-fat hammer until our ears ring with self-hate is…guess what? Self hate.

So it’s hard to say It Gets Better because really, it’s going to get worse. Subtler, to be sure, but worse.

What’s the solution? We can’t wait for it to GET better. We have to MAKE it better.  Individually. Put on your own oxygen mask, then help your neighbor.

Make it better by applying a critical eye (and okay, sometimes a critical finger) to anti-fat bias.

Surround yourself with positive, thought-provoking friends and resources. Read The Fat Nutritionist. Understand Health at Every Size.

Reject any media that celebrates a culture where our bodies are punchlines and our feelings don’t count but still want our precious, precious dollars. I’m not the smartest girl on the block (and it’s not even a very big block) but even I have a problem with giving companies money to insult me.

Stop watching E! and its equally abysmal coterie (Those channels make you stupid. They just do. Read a book. Watch a documentary. Just step away from the “Reality TV” before mindless describes more than just your choice in entertainment).

For the love of all things holy, stop buying women’s magazines.

Watch the runway shows if you want to be up on fashion, at least you’ll only subject yourself to the models and not hot pink headlines offering quadruple chocolate fudge bombs, plastic surgery tips and “630 Ways To Drop Fifty Pounds By Thursday You Pathetic Spinster Cow!” on the same cover.

Find your own path, define your self BY yourself.

McDonald’s (stay with me now) has served “billions and billions” and is probably technically the most popular restaurant in America, but it isn’t popular because it’s good or because it has meaningful value. It’s popular because McDonald’s is non-threatening, low-investment (mentally and economically) and easily accessible.

Those descriptors are fine if you want to grow up to be a Happy Meal, but consider setting the bar a bit higher if you want to be a Happy Human.

Speaking of being a happy human, getting to that goal is easier when you recognize just because someone is in a position of authority in your life, it doesn’t mean they’re right.

Easy to see on the macro level –we disagree with politicians all the time– but a little tougher in the micro.

One of the greatest gifts my mother ever gave me was the day she denied me a glass of juice by announcing “Orange juice has a lot of fat in it.”

My teenage brain wobbled with confusion.

How, precisely, does a product whose one ingredient is naturally fat-free get to have “a lot of fat in it”? Were the otherwise trustworthy and respectable people at Tropicana sneaking sticks of butter into my freshly-squeezed not-from-concentrate?

Maybe she meant to say orange juice has a lot of calories, maybe she was on some low carb kick and was convinced downing even a drop of juice was the nutritional equivalent of slurping from Satan’s own toilet bowl, maybe she honestly thought the big zero next to the grams of fat on the nutritional label was a mountebank’s ruse used to trick the foolish and unsuspecting into a life of obesity, though –it must be admitted– very little scurvy.

No, my mother was just wrong.

And if my mother was wrong about that, maybe she was wrong about other things too. Maybe other adults were wrong about things I never thought made sense.  That certainly would shed some light on the whole “You’re never going to get anyone to like you if you’re fat but don’t hang around black guys because they like big butts.” conundrum of 1995.

It’s not easy, this whole Making It Better thing, and we’re all dealt a different hand. Sometimes we come up with aces in terms of supportive family and friends and sometimes we’re playing five card stud with two baseball cards and the remnants of an Uno deck, but you CAN make it better, just a little bit at a time.

If you are a struggling young person, or know a struggling young person who could benefit from counseling, size-positive resources or heck, even a one-on-one chat with your not-in-any-way-professional-counselor Pal Plummy, please email me at plumcake@shoeblogs.com. I can’t promise to make things better, but I can promise to listen and try.

No, it’s not one of the usual predawn car alarms or impromptu dog fights,  it is –joy of immeasurable joys– an anxiety dream.

They’ve been coming around with less-than-endearing frequency recently.

That’s no big surprise.

I’m about to move out of the current Villa Plumcake, which is entirely too big, plus it’s being held together by nothing but duct tape and prayer, into a sweet little cottage in a new village a hundred miles away.

Moving is stressful so naturally daytime stress equals nighttime book reports in my underwear.

Except they’re not book reports in my underwear: they’re vivid replays and variations of my mother’s name-calling and overall cruelty about my size when I was a child.

Weird.

It’s weird because I’ve been at peace, or so I thought, with Mommie Dearest for a decade.

I harbor her no ill will, I understand why she is the way she is and even though the phrase “all the warmth and parenting skills of a particularly unself-aware komodo dragon with the worst taste in men this side of Eva Braun” MIGHT be bandied about with what some people COULD describe as pinpoint accuracy, I’ve got no beef –not even a lean four ounce portion, “about the size of a deck of cards”– with the old lady.

"Hi, for the next 17 years I'll be projecting my own insecurities and body hate onto you. Oh, and punishing you for my own bad life decisions. Enjoy!""

So what’s with the nightmares?

I don’t know.

I have them, then I spend the next few minutes in a flush of relief because that’s not my life anymore, the blood stops banging hot in my ears and I’m fine. I go back to sleep to dream about talking to Wayne Rooney about how we’re going to comfort Cesc Fabregas now that his lifetime hero Pep Guardiola has relinquished the reins at Barcelona. You know, like a normal person.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this other than to remind my readers –many of whom suffered more than I did– that even when you’ve moved past your childhood, even though you’ve done the inner work and shelled out squadrillion dollars for a therapist and you can look at yourself naked in that hateful dressing room fluorescent lighting and still love what you see, still believe you are worthy of love, sometimes you can stumble or heck, your dreams can stumble for you, and –to steal a phrase from Stuart Smalley– that’s okay.

It’s so easy, I’m especially guilty of it, to gloss over the pure trauma sometimes involved with being a big young person in a world that equates big with bad.

Maybe that’s because in my travel across the fatosphere I’ve run into a lot of mawkish pity parties written by women in the permanent victim mode, those unfortunate souls unable or unwilling  do the work required to move on from their teenage angst and so every human interaction is an affirmation of their deeply engrained flawed belief that they are not worthy of love, that everyone hates them or looks down on them because they’re fat and that their mother/father/seventh-grade boyfriend was right all along.

I have empathy for those girls, but at the same time I secretly want to shake them and say “Maybe you don’t have friends because you’re a total downer. No one likes a sadsack, regardless of the size of said sack. Get thee to a therapist and work that sh*t out. Then let’s have gin and tonics.”

Still, it’s okay to have a mini relapse, a relapsette, if you will.

It’s okay to revisit and remember those dark times and the people who led you there.

Just don’t get stuck.

Your childhood, no matter how magical or traumatic, is over.

One of the great luxuries of being an adult is the ability to reframe our own past.

We can’t change it –Lord knows I wish I could, I totally would’ve gone back and cut that snotty Ruth Wallach-Eisenberg’s stupid crimped hair when I had the chance since I got punished for it anyway– but we can change how we look at it, how we let it inform who we are as adults, even if we stumble.

After all, you’re good enough, smart enough, and gosh darn-it, people like you.

I didn’t have a eureka moment per se.

I never had that cinematic money shot where I jumped on my desk in the middle of my social studies exam and suddenly declared “This is patriarchal hegemonic bulls**t of the most rank and venomous order and, as God as my witness, this misogynistic outrage shall not stand!”

After all, I was popular and being Popular While Fat, especially in high school was radical enough. I didn’t want to ruin my chances at Prom Queen.

The truth was, and still is,  I’m a pretty girly girl on the outside and my highly-polished candy shell has served me well.

It’s not fake.

I point that out because  we’ve all run into sugar-coated vipers from time to time — in the South their distinctive hiss is, of course, blessherheart– but I believe for every poisonous powder puff there are a dozen women just like me, whose almost cartoonish femininity is just one letter in their persona’s alphabet soup.

It has always been thus.

I loved classic movies as a kid.

I still do, but as pretty as Audrey Hepburn looked in all her Givenchy frocks, I never related to the easily-digestible non-threatening Professional Naif. Where were the female rugged individualists with opinions and guns to back them up? Except Annie Oakley from Annie Get Your Gun. Screw that trick-shooting traitor.

Sure, I wanted to DRESS like Holly Golightly but I wanted to BE The Duke.

And as much as I wanted it, I knew it was out of reach and it was out of reach because the Rules were Different For Girls.

I didn’t even know what the rules were.

I knew they didn’t involve  pushing for the front of the line or trying out a new and exciting dirty words only to have it excused away with the mysterious “boys will be boys“.

I knew it involved being a Nice Girl, since the worst thing in the world –with repercussions so terrible I never exactly found out what they were– was to have your name whispered along with the pointedly capitalized phrase “Not a Nice Girl”.

Nice girls did (or more often didn’t) do this, that or the other thing and the finishing school finish line always kept moving.

I was walking a moving tightrope just to make sure I didn’t fall into perdition before the training wheels fell off my bra and yet somehow when my brother acted up it was –say it with me now– “Boys will be boys“.

Sure he got punished –I still can’t believe he thought making pornographic calls to 911 from a payphone and then hanging around the phone after was a good idea– but for he was punished his actions, not as a judgment against his character.

He had to worry about grounding, about spankings and demerits, but I’m pretty darn sure no one ever told him he’d end up alone, unloved and surrounded by cats unless he had gleaming bouncy hair, inoffensive opinions and a stomach that curved in instead of pooching out.

In fact, I suspect if someone had told him that, he probably would’ve nodded his seven year-old head seriously, sworn to walk the straight and narrow forever and then shrug the whole thing off as ridiculous and proceed to do what he damn well pleased.

I was 17 before I realized rebellion, either oblique or acute, was an option for girls.

It would be five more years before I started saying “no” to menial gender-based assignments and another five before I understood wanting freedom from being treated involuntarily like a publicly-held commodity in which all people everywhere own shares is not sociopathic entitlement: It’s a basic human right.

My brother figured that out at seven.

So no, I didn’t really have a “feminist eureka” moment.

I am a work in progress, and like many women who’ve grown up in the comparatively calm waters of passive third-wave feminism, the recent “War on Women” (because yeah, that’s new) has been an unpleasant wake-up call to necessary activism.

I’m interested in hearing the stories of other women. Did you have an easily traced Feminist Eureka or did it comes in drips and drabs, like me? Maybe you’re still waiting. Either way, put it in the comments.

As an aside, Hot Latin Boy’s workplace offers free birth control to employees and their partners –not just spouses– and most of my friends here were genuinely surprised that was not the case in the United States, since it’s seemingly standard practice in their culturally Roman Catholic developing third world nation. Interesting, no?

It’s Shrove Tuesday, more popularly known as Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras and Pancake Tuesday. People everywhere will be getting their flapjack on in order to get all their indulgent behavior out of the way before Lent which starts tomorrow for the Western Church (those Eastern guys with the awesome beards and whatnot have their own schedule. Also better baked goods. Schisms ruin everything fun).

It’s common for people who observe Lent to also observe a Lenten discipline.

Back in the olden days it was usually giving up something; meat, chocolate, booze, swearing…you know, pretty much everything that makes life fun.

That never really worked for me.

I’d give up the lot and come Easter morning…nada. I hadn’t evolved in my spiritual journey one bit. The only thing I got out of it was a habit of swearing like Wally Cleaver. Gee Willickers!

More recently the trend has been towards adding something beneficial to your life, often in the form of volunteering and study.

I’m all about that, especially the volunteering because most of us should be ashamed at how little time we dedicate to the poor and needy people of this world, but in addition to service and study, I’m going to try something a little new this year.

I’m going to work on my self-maintenance.

(photo courtesy of the wonderful and amazing Lady Mechanic Initiative of Nigeria)

This whole relocation thing has been a tough row to hoe and I’ve let myself slip the way so many of us do when we have supposedly bigger fish to fry (because apparently it’s also folksy idiom day here at Manolo for the Big Girl).

I’ve found myself making less of an effort each morning to dress “just so” or to do my hair or makeup.

Why bother? I don’t have many posh parties or elegant soirees to attend, heck, I haven’t been to a restaurant that has more than three walls in a month, I’m not going to be here long enough to need social currency (I’m moving farther south in May) and I’ve already got the single best looking man in the entire country wrapped around my little finger, among other places and he’s certainly not going anywhere. Why not traipse around in the proverbial bunny slippers until three in the afternoon?

Because habitual self-indulgence is bad for you.

Okay, okay. Self-indulgence isn’t bad for you per se, but when you exchange self-care for self-indulgence and that self-indulgence turns into self-neglect (like it can and so often does) you have found yourself careening down a dangerously slippery slope which ends in Froot Loops from a mixing bowl, unattended facial hair and yoga pants worn in non-yoga situations. Sometimes in public.

That’s just not okay.

That’s not okay because women are so devalued as it is, and fat women especially, that we can’t really afford to tell the world “Go ahead and treat me like garbage or ignore my voice and my needs. After all, I’m doing it to myself so it MUST be okay.”

A girl has got to maintain. I’m not saying you have to dress and do your hair and makeup, that’s just my own example. For someone else it could be meditation or target practice or taking better control of your finances. Whatever.

Tomorrow I’m going to get up and make myself a proper breakfast (though I’m not going to lie; a fat slice of homemade not-too-sweet sweet potato pie with a rosemary shortbread crust using ingredients from my garden, all accompanied by a large milky cafe au lait with chicory was a pretty damn fine breakfast, especially for Mardi Gras morning) and eat it outside under the shade  of my lime tree.

I might not even hurl verbal abuse at the &^%$ roses if I’m feeling charitable.

Then I’m going to get dressed like an actual grown up with a job that doesn’t involve being Jack Tripper’s landlady and get a haircut, which I need if for no other reason than to stop people asking me if I’m “growing it out for the wedding.” and then…well, then I don’t know what I’ll do. Work on the book, make a lesson plan for my English students, do a little gardening (backyard only, I learned the hard way that a white woman doing her own yard work quickly becomes a spectator sport punctuated every few minutes by a guy with a truck full of shovels offering his services).

I’m going to commit to self-care for 40 days, plus Sundays and I hope by the time Easter rolls around I’ll be back on track to treating myself the way I want others to treat me. Maybe you will too.

I still want the sweet potato pie, though.

Not this kind of sloth… though I am a big fan.

No, I’m talking about this kind of sloth:

You know the sort of day, when there’s just an air of non-mammalian sloth in the wind. Those days when you get out of bed reluctantly and then realize you don’t actually have to go anywhere or do anything unless you seriously want to.

I had a couple days like that this week. Mr. Twistie finds a day like that about once every three or four years, and only while we’re on vacation somewhere. He’s not good at sloth. I am.

So what do I do on these lazy days? Well, I’ll snuggle back under the covers for a while and ignore every attempt on the part of Jake the cat to wake me. Then I’ll roll out of bed late in the morning, start myself a pot of coffee, and read my email as I caffeinate.

Depending on my mood at that point, I’ll either grab a book, decide to spend the day watching the Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice again, pull down my lace pillow and toss bobbins, or go back to bed. Some lazy days I’ll get ambitious and bake a pie or a batch of scones, both of which are low-pressure baking projects. Cookies require more ambition from me.

Bubble baths are great for lazy, slothful days. Nothing clears my brain like sitting in warm water surrounded by bubbles and rubber duckies. There’s a reason I’ve always felt a strong, spiritual bond to Ernie.

And every once in a while, I take my lazy day to dress up in my Stevie Nicks best, choose my most fabulous chapeau, and treat myself a good lunch at my favorite neighborhood bistro. The one where the owner loves me not only because I’ve been a devoted customer from almost the time she opened, but also because I have baked her birthday cake for the past two years. After all, most people seem afraid to cook for chefs, but they deserve birthday cake, too.

Lazy days are days to be good to ourselves in whatever way pleases us most. So what do you do when you have a slothful day at your disposal?

Welcome 2012.

So. New Year’s. That time when everyone makes huge resolutions about spending the year building world peace, inventing cures for cancer, and losing huge amounts of weight. This time for sure!

Yeah, right.

Me? I still make some resolutions… small ones. Goals I can actually reach if I put in a bit of effort. I make resolutions about finding ways to be slightly better organized, kinder to other people, and more thoughtful about how I spend some of my time. And while I make a couple for January first, I don’t necessarily make all my resolutions then, either.

There’s an art to making resolutions that stick. You have to choose things you’re actually ready to do, make them big enough to challenge you in some way, but not so huge that you’re doomed from the outset, and you have to recognize that even if you don’t succeed at all of them, that doesn’t mean you’re an utter failure. Oh, and it helps a lot to keep the list fairly short.

Me? I’m vowing to be a better, more active FA activist this year. I’m going to keep right on being visible and fat. And while I firmly believe that others have every right to do as they please with their bodies – including dieting for weight loss and having bariatric surgery – I do not believe that this right requires me to agree with their decisions or actively support actions I believe to be more harmful than otherwise. I will continue to wear my scarlet Fat proudly, eat what I darn well please in public, talk loudly about human rights, and wear my new bright orange coat with great elan. Anyone who has a problem with that? Is cordially invited to eat a great big bowl of Mind Your Own Business Flakes.

I’m resolved to re-organize my kitchen this year. I haven’t done it since we moved in in 2001 and things have gotten a bit cockeyed, what with getting more kitchen stuff and just kind of jamming it in where I found a dab of space. Now there are cupboards that are unholy vortexes and I fear I will be sucked in. It’s time to pull everything out and put it all back together in a way that makes more sense… and maybe even get rid of a couple things that aren’t worth keeping.

Yeah, those are pretty much the resolutions I’ve made for this year. More will probably pop up along the way, but those are my big goals.

How about you? Anyone out there in Big Girl Land got a good one to share with the class? Do you have a secret for keeping resolutions?

‘Tis the season of giving!

Of course, most of us on hearing that phrase think of… stuff. Blu Rays, and X-boxes, and designer scarves, and jewelry, and fine cookware, and… yeah, lots of things. Don’t get me wrong, I love opening a box and finding something shiny in it as much as the next person. Quite possibly I love it more than a fair number of people. I fully expect to spend some time on Christmas morning opening some really superfantastic packages full of things. I expect to put them to use and enjoy the hell out of them, too. I’m giving some pretty awesome things to people, as well.

The anti-material girl I am not, no matter how little other resemblance to Madonna anyone can find in me.

But far too many of us think that if we can’t afford the big ticket items, we have nothing left to give. Really, though, we do. When we don’t have a lot of money, we still can come up with time.’

Even that doesn’t need to be much. A few minutes here, and hour or two there. It all adds up.

Some people find the time and energy to make huge commitments, like spending all their weekends helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity. That’s fantastic. Others find less time, but spend it consistently doing something fabulous. One friend of mine has spent years tutoring children through the Boys and Girls Clubs wherever she lives. Another volunteers for an organization that gets free books donated from bookstores and gives them to school teachers for their classrooms. She also spends a lot of time crocheting hats for cancer patients going through chemotherapy.

And there are the scattershot volunteers like myself. I’ve done probably a hundred charity walk-a-thons in  my day, and I never pass a Salvation Army Santa without putting my pocket change in his kettle. I spent a summer volunteering as a counsellor at a day camp for kids with Cerebral Palsy, I’ve donated handmade goodies to charity auctions, and I spent nearly two years volunteering in a museum.

Then there are the good neighbors. There have been times when Mr. Twistie has been in the hospital and I’ve been going out of my head with worry… and suddenly I hear the kid from next door mowing my lawn for me, or someone shows up with some tasty treat they just cooked. Then I remember how long its been since I ate, and whatever they brought looks like it just might hit the spot.

If you’re low on cash this holiday season, it’s okay. It doesn’t mean you can’t join in the festivities. You can still offer to help out somehow. Open a door for someone whose arms are full. Ask someone if they need a hand with their groceries. Listen to a friend going through a rough patch. Spend a little time with someone who’s lonely. Give someone a compliment.

Thoughtfulness and compassion are gifts, too. Best of all, random generosity doesn’t need to be wrapped.

And you can do it all year long, too.

Ah, the winter holiday season! There’s a crisp snap in the air, homes are filled with the aromas of peppermint and ginger, the malls are potentially lethal, a very few people recall that there are holidays other than Christmas being celebrated, and the world is awash in body shame.

I can’t turn on my computer or television without being assaulted by messages that I’m going to gain gigantic amounts of weight this winter if I don’t stop being so greedy at the same table I’m supposed to fill with homemade goodies until the legs give out. Every ladymag in the universe has a picture of the perfect pie, cake, or souffle I’m supposed to make, alongside a reminder that gaining a single ounce from eating it means I will die well before my time, alone and unmourned as Scrooge in the vision shown him of his potential future. Every year some fanatic out there starts a campaign to make Santa skinny so that he can use his role model status to shame those who carry more meat on their bones.

But you know what? We can opt out of the insanity. We can spend this special time of year failing to hate ourselves. We don’t need to create the false dichotomy of too much food  that we are not allowed to eat. You know what we can do?

We can take care of ourselves.

First off, those extra holiday pounds everyone warns us about? Are a natural function of being mammalian. During the cold months, most mammals put on some extra weight as insulation against – wait for it – the cold! You know? That snow outside? The biting winds? The heavy rains? Yeah, that cold. Fur-bearing mammals also add more fur. That’s why cats and dogs and horses and so on look shaggier in the coldest couple months of the year. So don’t panic if you suddenly weigh five or ten pounds more in January than you did in September. You’ll probably shed it again in a couple months when the weather warms up. It’s part of the ebb and flow of nature.

Remember that even when you’re fat, you still need to eat. Yes, even if you weigh eight hundred pounds, if you don’t eat, you will starve, and starvation leads inevitably to death. In fact, it’s a much more reliable predictor than how many pounds you happen to weigh. So do eat regularly, and let yourself eat until your hunger is sated. Then eat again when you’re hungry again.

Just because the food is on the table doesn’t obligate you to be the one to eat it. Look, there will be a lot of good food set out at this time of year, and the temptation on the part of a lot of people is to assume the fat people will take care of any leftovers. It’s not your job. Once you’re not hungry, it’s okay to stop eating. If you would like to take more for later, that’s okay. If you don’t want it, that’s okay, too. If there’s food left over, there’s food left over.

Find ways to tune out the body shame. I don’t know about you, but I’m in love with my DVR. It allows me to watch my favorite shows and zap through the commercials so that I don’t have to see so many diet ads, and promos for shows devoted to telling me my body is disgusting. I don’t buy ladymags. I don’t own copies of any film that someone wore a fat suit in for comic purpose. In fact, I don’t think I own a film that uses a fat suit at all. I do, however, have a book with paintings by Rubens in it. After all, there’s a reason people talk about ‘Rubenesque’ women.

Avoiding shame is great, but finding support is even more vital. Seek out people who are more interested in who you are than what your weight is. Find a community that accepts you precisely as you are this moment. Bask in the love. It’s good for you.

Keep moving, and get your Vitamin D. It’s easy for those inclined that way to fall prey to depression during the darker months. The cold and dark makes getting out for a jog a trickier proposition than it is the rest of the year. The shorter daylight hours mean more of us don’t get out in the sunlight for a good Vitamin D fix. But the fact is that physical movement and Vitamin D do help us maintain our emotional equanimity. So if you can’t get out for your usual walks, at least get up from your desk and do a few stretches. Go dancing one night with friends. Do some wall push ups. Just make sure you do some physical activity every day, that’s appropriate to your physical abilities and fits into your schedule. Oh, and remember: housework or a physically demanding job? Is exercise, too. If you wait tables or fix peoples’ plumbing all day, or spent the day scrubbing your bathroom until it sparkled, relax. You’re getting plenty of exercise on the job! As for the Vitamin D? Drink your milk, if you aren’t lactose intolerant. Take a supplement if you are. It may not be the ideal, but every bit helps. Just keep in mind that it’s possible to overdo even very healthy things, so don’t scarf down half the bottle in one go.

Laugh. It’s a small thing, but laughter really is good for you, both physically and emotionally. It’s a great way to relieve stress, and it tends to make people around you smile. So when the stress is piling up, the traffic is bogged down for miles, every mall in your state is out of the must-have toy that is the only thing in the world your child asked Santa to bring… find the funny. Oh, do let yourself experience the frustration first. After all, I’m not asking you to bottle up your emotions. That’s a recipe for disaster, too. Just once you’ve vented a little, take a moment to find the lighter side of the situation, too. There usually is one.

Help someone else. Look, it’s easy to look around ourselves and think we’ve got it rough. Every time you turn on the television, there’s Martha Stewart showing you that she lives a far more beautiful life than you do. The Kardashians make more money every day for being rich and willing to expose their dirty laundry on basic cable. Someone featured on Yahoo headlines just found a lost masterpiece hiding in their attic worth tens of millions… and you’re looking at that overdue credit card bill and wondering why your life sucks so hard.

But if you think about it a minute, you’re probably not in that bad a place. You’ve got a roof over your head, an internet connection, and probably a few things you don’t actually physically need in order to survive. So share a little. Take a day to volunteer serving dinner in a homeless shelter, go read to someone in a nursing home. Donate a couple sweaters and coats you’re done with to someone who needs them. Ask a neighbor if (s)he needs help hanging Christmas lights or shoveling the driveway. Drop a can of chili in the food drive barrel on your next trip to the grocery store. It’s funny how good it can feel to do something for someone else, even if it’s a very small thing.

If you need help getting through the holidays, ask for it. Look, I can sit here and blithely tell you to avoid toxic situations all I want, but if your job or your family is what’s giving you grief… well, you need more than a breezy blog entry to help you find a way to deal or a way to fix things. If you suffer from clinical depression, ten extra minutes in the sun isn’t going to be enough to balance your moods. If you fear you might do something drastic and irreversible, please don’t wait. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1 (800) 273-TALK. If someone in your family is hurting you, call the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence at 1 (800) 799 – SAFE.

Your well-being is important. You are important. Take good care of you, now and always.

Remember, everyone: there’s still time to change your plans.

I’m talking about having Thanksgiving with your family.

No, I’m definitely not saying that Thanksgiving with your family is a horrible idea. I don’t know your family. A family Thanksgiving may be just what you need to make you feel fantastic and confident and joyful for the rest of the year… I’m just saying not all families are created equal. And not all families are healthy for us to interact with during the holidays.

If your family feels no meal is complete without a side of body shame or the ritual humiliation of the fatty at the table, don’t go. Don’t do this to yourself. Really don’t do this to yourself if you’re expected to cook the feast, but accept that every mouthful will be accompanied with snide remarks about whether you really need the calories.

Nobody deserves to be treated that way. You don’t deserve to be treated that way.

Now if you have already made the plans, bought the turkey, and polished the silver, well, okay, you may have to go through with the dinner as planned. But that doesn’t mean you need to put up with abuse at your own table. Here are a few tips to help you get through the ordeal, and a couple to break the cycle afterwards.

Stand up for yourself. You are not a doormat. You do not deserve to be walked upon. Your raison d’etre is not so that others may wipe their muddy souls on you. I know it’s much easier said than done, and believe it or not, I do sometimes struggle with this one. But it gets easier the more you do it, so don’t hesitate to practice. Sit down in front of the mirror or in a room by yourself and practice telling people that yes, you have every right to a slice of the pumpkin pie you baked. No, you do not need to discuss the latest fad diet, and no, you do not wish everyone else at the table to discuss which sort of bariatric surgery you ought to have. It’s your body. You get to decide how to care for it, and it’s not up for general discussion.

Set the ground rules beforehand. If people are coming to your home, they need to follow your house rules. Even if you are going to them, you get to set boundaries around your body and your personal decisions. Let your guests know that the house rules include not commenting on what any person at the table has or has not put on their plate. If you are going to them, inform everyone in advance that comments on what you choose to eat or pass by are not welcome. Tell them your weight is not something you wish discussed.

Be prepared to follow through if the rules are broken. If it’s your home and the insults get bad enough, you can tell people to leave it. Yes, even your own mother. If you’re at their house, you still aren’t glued to the chair… and your pie/cake/stuffing/cranberry sauce/whatever you provided isn’t nailed down to the table, either. You can leave… and take your goodies with you. It won’t be fun. It will be talked about. People will take sides. It could get ugly. All the same, you deserve respect simply because you are a person. If others are unprepared to treat you with that respect, they need to understand that you can still respect yourself.

Don’t stoop to a schoolyard level. I’m not advocating simply taking your toys and going home at the first slip of the tongue, mind you. Nor do I in any way condone being rude about this. Don’t get into shouting matches, don’t call people names, and don’t hurl a pie in their faces. There are much better uses for pie. If someone snottily asks if you need that helping of stuffing, I recommend the Miss Manners approach: raise one eyebrow (if you can), stare icily at them and reply with  ’I beg your pardon?’ This immediately identifies the etiquette faux pas as theirs for asking, not yours for choosing to eat.

If you cannot muster up the icy stare and raised eyebrow, you can also just look them in the eye, say ‘yes’ and go back to eating. Either way, you have demonstrated that you will not be shamed into starving yourself at a feast. If the inquisition continues, see the previous rule.

Your health includes your mental and emotional health. A lot of body shamers are quick to tell us that they are only doing it for our health. This is a combination of horse hockey and weasel language that deserves to be laughed at until tears of mirth stream down our faces. Teaching people to be ashamed of their body size/shape is toxic, both mentally and physically. There are studies out there that demonstrate that people who feel good about their bodies are healthier physically and emotionally than those who dislike their bodies, regardless of the actual size of those bodies. Anyone who tells you to hate your body for health is actually part of making you unhealthier. Don’t let them do it to you.

Plan to opt out for next year. Look, you can set rules, you can refuse to accept a side of shame with your dinner, you can stand up for yourself… and Thanksgiving with your family may still be a form of torture that would make Medieval witch hunters blanche at in horror. If they can’t find a way to include you at the table without making you the ritual whipping girl, don’t eat with them again. Eat with friends. Go serve Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen. Make a perfect Thanksgiving for one for yourself and share it with a good book.

Look, I love me some tradition, but only when that tradition offers comfort and joy. If you’re doing something you hate simply because it’s expected, it’s time to throw off the shackles of expectation. Go do something that heals you and gives you joy.

The point of Thanksgiving is appreciation of whatever level of bounty you have available to you. So do what makes you feel comforted and thankful. Being abused is never something that will do that for you.

Find your happy place. Be there.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

There were some fabulous comments to my article last week about Thanksgiving dishes we love and loathe. It’s a meal most people have wildly strong opinions about, in large part because of our histories with the holiday.

So I’m not going to even attempt to tell you what you have to have on your table or what you must needs avoid for fear of winding up in Food Hell. Where one person adores green bean casserole, another hates it. Where one can only eat homemade stuffing straight from the bird, another will only eat Stove Top cooked on, well, the stove top. Where one thinks sweet potatoes are naked sans miniature marshmallows, another holds any sweetening of sweet potatoes as an abomination. Where one wants a Jell-o mold, another longs for green salad. Pitched battles can be fought over pumpkin pie vs pecan.

In the end, I’m not too exercised about which dishes make it Thanksgiving for you and which you hold in contempt. I’m curious, but not worried too much about your individual decisions.

I do, however, have a few tips if you’re floundering about wondering what to cook for this Important Meal.

Know your audience. Before you can make any decisions, you need to know how many people are coming over to eat with you, and have a general idea of their Thanksgiving preferences. Be aware of any dietary restrictions, whether from religious belief, moral choice, medical issues, or just plain old preference. The great thing about the fact that Thanksgiving is usually served family style with platters and bowls being passed around the table is that you don’t have to limit every dish so that every person can have some… but you do need to know what to quietly warn people they won’t find appropriate.

Really think about what makes it Thanksgiving to you. See? There was a method to the madness of asking that question last week. You need to know what still makes it Thanksgiving if everything else is different. But once you know that, you are free to consider a Thanksgiving without the things you really hate, or that your family never touches despite your efforts. If the Thanksgiving thing you can’t stand is the turkey, you can serve ham or roast beef or sweet and sour shrimp, or pumpkin barley casserole instead. So long as you’ve got your beloved dish of green bean casserole or that special Jell-o mold or cranberries in some form on the table to make it the holiday you know, it’s okay to think outside the box. Just be sure the rest of your family is ready to experiment, too.

Play to your culinary strengths. This is not the time to try out something you aren’t absolutely sure you can do. Just be aware of techniques you’re good at and go with dishes that use those techniques. I’m just plain brilliant with baking and roasting… but sauces, not so much. I can do them, but they aren’t my strong suit. Knowing that, I look for recipes that allow me to show off what I do best and don’t rely heavily on the stuff I’m not as good at. So if you poach like a whiz, but aren’t very good at frying, look for something you can poach and pass the fried dishes by.

Know your resources. I’ve got one stove with five burners and a single oven to work with. I’ve got a sadly slender bank account. I’ve got a bajillion cookbooks. I’ve got a beautiful marble pastry slab. I’ve got great taste buds and a lot of food knowledge. I’ve got a kitchen table that seats four in reasonable comfort as long as nobody needs to get into the refrigerator. I’ve got Mom’s silver, but no formal china. I’ve got plenty of time. That’s what I’ve got. You may have more or less burners, a second oven or just one that’s really tiny. You may have more money but less literature to work with. You may have half an hour here and there to work with. Each of us has resources that help and lack of resources that hinder us in creating the perfect menu. Be aware of both your options and your limitations. After all, if you have one oven, you can’t cook two dishes in it at the same time unless they cook at the same temperature. And when the money’s gone, the money’s gone. But once you know where your strong and weak points are, you can get creative about exploiting one and mitigating the other.

Once you have a good idea of what you’re cooking, take a moment to work out a prep timeline. See what can be prepared in advance and how long things need to cook at the last minute. When you see  a conflict, either figure out a way around it or change your menu. This is where you get the best grasp of whether you’ve created a truly workable plan. And be sure to give yourself a bit of leeway here and there. Things come up at the last moment, we all lose track of time once in a while. If your schedule is too rigid, you’ll have no room if you fall behind. Besides, you’ll need time to relax a little and make yourself presentable before people show up hungry!

If you’ve got another cook coming to your table, consider farming out a dish or two. This is actually the deal I’ve got with a good friend. Mr. Twistie and I go visit her, and bring along a couple dishes. Basically, she makes the turkey and stuffing (homemade, in the bird, sausage and cornbread), a salad, and opens the can of cranberry jelly. I make the mashed potatoes (my mother’s recipe with sour cream and cottage cheese in it, topped with melted butter and toasted almonds), a fabulous fresh cranberry ginger orange relish, and the pumpkin pie. Then I spend a couple days with my friend eating leftovers and watching insane amounts of Criminal Minds and the occasional Bruce Campbell movie while Mr. Twistie goes home and plays in his studio for a couple days without worrying about whether I’m feeling oppressed by it. All is well. Then she sends me home with a rabbit to put in my freezer until such time as Mr. Twistie will be gone for several days. Yum.

Having Thanksgiving at your table without my mother’s annual meltdown that signaled the official start of the holiday season is mostly a matter of preparation. If you know what you’re doing, avoid things that make you crazy, rely on your strengths, know where to delegate and what to just punt… you can have a lovely meal with good friends and family that will please them all and leave you smiling.