Welp.

[Content Note: Fat hatred; diet and surgery advertisements.]

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about writing a post on the ubiquity of weight loss and/or body shaming advertisements. They are everywhere in my every day: I see them on the television, in magazines, in junk mail, in billboards along the roadways, in content-generated online ads prompted because I often use the word "fat" in my work. (Oh the irony.)

They are ads for diet pills, diet programs, diet food delivery services, weight loss supplements, fat-busting miracle elixirs, gyms, workout equipment, restrictive "shaping" garments, body mutilating surgeries, and every other conceivable variation on weight loss and/or body shaming one can imagine.

This is the time of year when there's a lull between the "New Year's weight loss resolution" theme and the "get your body ready for a bathing suit" theme. So, at the moment, it's mostly just run-of-the-mill "you're fat and you shouldn't be" stuff.

Anyway.

I thought that I would keep track of how many of these ads I saw during one 24-hour period. A typical day.

So, one day I started counting, while I was watching the morning news. By the time I'd turned off the television, I realized I'd already forgotten to keep counting.

I had another couple of false starts, where I'd lose track during the day, so I decided to carry my notebook around with me, to write down a mark for each ad.

By midway through the day, I'd again failed to keep up.

The problem is not that I get distracted, or that I don't care about the project. The problem, I realized, is that I am so inured to advertisements admonishing me that my body must change that they barely register anymore.

This is a commentary on their terrible pervasiveness, but it's also a commentary on the coping mechanisms fat people must employ. I have to turn off my conscious mind to these things, to this incessant messaging that my body is gross, sick, less than, because if I stopped to register every one, I would never escape the crushing oppression of being urged to loathe myself.

I literally wouldn't have enough psychological capacity to process each one of them, if I let every one of them penetrate.

So I am obliged to turn off part of my mind, part of myself, to the world around me. Because the world is so intent on telling me that I am broken and need to be fixed.

Ultimately, that realization felt even more important than reporting the number of ads I'd seen in a day. The realization that I can't even see all of them. If I want to survive.