WORK BY WENDY ORTIZ

I am a freefeeder.
But I was not always a Freefeeder.

From the age of five onward, like many girls, I was on a diet of some sort. My mom told me that when she was young, her mom helped her stick to diets, once even slapping the food right out of my mom's teenage hands. This was not just a family affair. It was:

My mom and grandma told me these things:

"No one likes fat girls."

"You don't want to end up like me, fat and unhappy."

"I just don't want you to have all the problems I had."

"I had no friends, no boyfriends. I fought other kids. I was mean because I was fat."

"I looked so good when I was thin. Then I had you, and I got fat and could never lose the weight."

. . .among other creative and interesting stories about why I should avoid fat.

My responses were these:

I tried to sneak Dexatrim into my mom's shopping cart.
When I was 9 or 10, my grandma bought me new fangled fiber pills that I ate before meals to make me feel full.
I ate chocolate Ex-Lax like candy straight out of the medicine closet.
I joined all the sports teams in 6th grade and got so thin that my parents insisted I eat ice-cream sundaes after track meets.
I did Weight Watchers twice and Jenny Craig, while my friends did Nutri-System.
I drank a lot of Boones Farm and missed dinners.
I snorted coke and crank and experienced the wonder of no hunger.
I exercised like crazy, sometimes going for a run in the snow.

Those are just the action-ways I responded. It says nothing of the ways I responded internally. I have kicked my own ass when I was already down. I pushed myself away when I was hurting. I've ignored myself when I was hungry and blamed myself when I felt ill from eating so much. I did all the usual comparing games and never honored my body as it was at that moment in time. I looked into mirrors and saw drastically different images hour to hour, and cried over it.

Some, not all of these things, still happen for me. But less often, and a lot less.

Weight/body image is only one of the reasons I used to hate the way I look. I am a Chicana woman, which accounts for some of the other self-loathing things I have done to my body in an attempt to look like u. s. teen angel snow white queen. That's a whole other zine. Plus, those issues are largely unresolved, with mini struggles here and there, while the weight/body image looms large, like my body, even today.

And, in fact, it's all related.

What I mean is, that Latina women often have larger, fleshier bodies than white women. That doesn't go for everyone, obviously, but there are patterns -- wider hips, fleshier thighs, thicker arms. Genetics of my comadres y abuelas. But try telling that to my mom and grandma. They are firm believers in the power of diets, never realizing that flabby underarms and round bellies run in the family. And if I wrote lists of what they had done to avoid fat, they would look a lot like my list, only they were co-conspirators about weight loss and still are to this day. I, on the other hand, wrenched back the power that was mine and became the Freefeeder.

It all started -- no, wait, it didn't really all start here, but it's storylike if it had- it all started when we got our cat Bossanova 2 months ago. She's a big, heavy, dark lounge leopard. I love her love her love her. I checked out books from the library about cats because it's been awhile since I've lived with one. I wanted to find out what was up with stuff like natural remedies for cats, etc.

In my readings, the term "freefeeder" came up a lot. I like the sound of the word, its alliteration. Its rythmic quality.

To a woman who has struggled with body image, the word sounded powerful. I let the word play on my lips a lot - I asked other cat people if their cats were freefeeders. Many were not. I relished telling people that Bossanova, the big voluptuous fur friend, was a freefeeder. Occasionally, I trill "Freefeeder!" while I'm in the kitchen getting her food and she responds "RRrrrrrrRR." In the past, I would I have envisioned "freefeeder" as someone thin; someone who got to eat all they wanted and never gained a pound.

Now, I am the freefeeder, the one that eats candy bars when I want, eats whenever I feel like it, satisfies cravings, uses food for comfort happily and actively, eats what makes me feel good, eats delicious things for the sake of taste, and I, freefeeder, also love & appreciate my body, pounds gained and all. Bossanova gets a full dish whenever it starts getting low so that she can eat whenever she wants. I, too, feed myself when I am hungry and slowly lose the voice that used to question my every act with food. That part did not start when Bossanova entered my home. And it doesn't finish here. It's a slow, ongoing process. . . . .

From freefeeder - free to feed
freefeeder#1, Olympia, WA