Content warning: Weight loss, body shaming, etc.
Apart from my short stature (5'1"), my physical person has always been decidedly average, which is perfectly ok with me. I was never the prettiest, the fastest, the thinnest, or the most graceful person in school. I was both a tomboy who played in the dirt, ran around fields, woods and streams, caught frogs and other unfortunate reptiles and insects, and a girlie girl who danced ballet at least three days a week for ten years. I wasn't much for contact sports, but on any spring, summer, or autumn day you might have found me playing tennis in the condo complex we lived in, or racquetball with my dad, and when I wasn't playing tennis, I was swimming my heart out in the neighborhood pool, cycling around the complex, or rollerskating. In winter, I was an avid skier. Later, I took up running, made trails in the woods with a weed-wacker and a hatchet for fun, and my friends and I tried to learn volleyball (we sucked).
My point is, I was always a physically active person growing up. But at the same time, I always thought I was fat.
When I was about five years old, my mother was helping me get dressed and she stopped, in horror. "You have cellulite on your stomach!" she said.
"What's cellulite?" I asked. She grabbed the layer of fat on my stomach, and I could see little dips in my skin.
"That!" she said, appalled. I didn't know what it meant or why I had it. But I sure knew from that moment that I should be ashamed of it. And I was, sadly. This was the late 70s -- the era of thin and slim. Like a lot of girls, I remember trying to diet when my age was still in the single digits, reading women's magazines to get the inside scoop on shedding pounds.
I love my mom and I know she herself has battled the same issues, as did her mother. She lives under the foot of patriarchy that oppresses all of us. When she brought me to nutritionist appointments to talk about how I could lose weight, I wanted to go. I wanted answers. I wanted the magical formula that would make me thin. Except...
Me? When I look in the mirror, all of that insight and inspiration instantly vanishes. Above a certain size, my self-confidence shuts down. I analyze every photo. I stop thinking of myself as a sexual being. I stop thinking anything positive about myself. If someone tells me I look nice, I cringe and I definitely don't believe them. I can only think of that unattainable body I'm not living in, the 'real' me that I could be if I weren't so shit. I look at photos taken when I was thinner and hate myself even more.
Add to that, in my late forties, my aging face, the sagging areas of my body that never sagged before. The fact that my metabolism has slowed. My hair isn't as thick and shiny as it was. I have melasma around my eyes. The list is long.
This is not a unique story. Lots of women reading this will probably be thinking, "Yep. Same. What's your point?" In a recent Zoom call, I told some school friends that I'd gained 30 pounds (over 2 stone/13.6 kilos) over the past couple of years. The announcement was met with a sad, awkward, pitiful silence until I added hopefully that I was trying to lose it.
I'm trying to untangle about three issues all at once, I think, so please bear with me.
Genetically speaking, I'm not prone to thinness. Culturally speaking, I was raised on large portions and convenient junk food. While my mom was taking me to the nutritionist, our presses were stuffed with sugared cereals, mac and cheese, sugar sodas, all manner of cakes, several varieties of crisps, double stuff oreos -- you name it. So for my entire life, I've had to wrestle with an extreme push and pull, fighting the starve and purge cycle and the control/shame cycle it comes with.
At a certain point, I said fuck that. I tried to be more relaxed about food and really ditch food guilt. If I'm going to eat, I decided, I refuse to tarnish the amazing experience of eating with shame. Who wants to look back on a party where you had a great time with friends and take away from a lovely event by thinking, "I was bad for eating so much cheese, though." Then your mind pushes the dancing, the chats, the feeling of connection to the back and the food guilt obscures those memories. Instead, I taught myself to say, "I had such a good time, and the cheese was so amazing, I couldn't stop eating it." I try to replace the shame with gratitude. I mean, how lucky that I can eat loads of cheese! What a fucking great thing! Once I took that power away from food, I stopped having as much of an emotional connection to it. I felt more free.
Losing food guilt has not made me feel better about my body, however. And not being a person who turns to food for comfort doesn't mean I don't consume more calories than I burn. But I really thought it would be easier to change how I felt about my body than it would be to lose weight.
Trying to juggle a job with a long commute, full-on pro-choice activism (and some other activism on the side), renovating a house on a tight budget (ie, not being able to hire builders) and coping with the illness and deaths of my in-laws took its toll on me, starting roughly in the summer of 2016. I barely made it through each milestone, but I survived. We moved into the house. We won the referendum. Eventually, I bowed out of activism. The fallout from my in-laws' deaths became more bearable. But I still struggled to process everything that happened. So I fell into a pattern of work, dinner, couch, bed. Near daily drinking. Lots of snacks. Hiding. Not feeling motivated to change. Thinking about everything I should have done differently. Wishing my life were different. Wishing I was different.
But if we want things to change, we have to do something differently. And eventually, I started the process of repairing myself. I got a new job working with really lovely people in a much better location and working from home three days a week (currently 5 days, of course). I started running again, in stops and starts (mostly due to illness). I started to want to reconnect with people again. I started to forgive myself for not being perfect. Gratitude started creeping back in. I started to feel gradually better, like I was emerging from a shell, even though I hadn't lost any weight.
If you think I'm going to say that I felt better about my body, you're wrong. I still looked in the mirror and shuddered. For a month, I went running five days a week and my jeans were just as tight. I weighed myself and that's when I realised that at some point in the course of four years, I'd put on over two stone.
It turns out that for me, it's easier to lose weight than accept and love my body the way it was. I hate saying that. I hate that it's true. Accepting myself at 160 pounds was an impossible burden that I could not carry. And I am well aware that 160 pounds at 5'1" is not huge.
After three weeks of using my fitbit to calculate my calorie intake/output, I've lost over half a stone (8 pounds/3.8kg). While I'm not starving myself, I am walking that fine line between having a plan and having an obsession. I find myself looking at the calorie tracker, watching to see if the available calories went up. I am never over, always under. I resist the urge to weigh myself more than once a week. I resist the urge to starve myself. Still, I resist the urge to eat cheese.
I have failed. Fat phobia won. All the programming of patriarchy and women's magazines and, you know, everything, was more powerful than my feminism, when it came to how I feel about my own body. Other people can be beautiful at any size, but not me. I'm not allowed. It would require a level of re-programming I'm not capable of when I look at myself. So here I am, trying to walk the line without falling over a precipice. I just hope that this time, I can find some point of satisfaction because my body (like everyone's) is aging and I want to experience what it's like to love my body while I can still use it. I don't want to look back on a life of self-hatred.
Apart from my short stature (5'1"), my physical person has always been decidedly average, which is perfectly ok with me. I was never the prettiest, the fastest, the thinnest, or the most graceful person in school. I was both a tomboy who played in the dirt, ran around fields, woods and streams, caught frogs and other unfortunate reptiles and insects, and a girlie girl who danced ballet at least three days a week for ten years. I wasn't much for contact sports, but on any spring, summer, or autumn day you might have found me playing tennis in the condo complex we lived in, or racquetball with my dad, and when I wasn't playing tennis, I was swimming my heart out in the neighborhood pool, cycling around the complex, or rollerskating. In winter, I was an avid skier. Later, I took up running, made trails in the woods with a weed-wacker and a hatchet for fun, and my friends and I tried to learn volleyball (we sucked).
My point is, I was always a physically active person growing up. But at the same time, I always thought I was fat.
When I was about five years old, my mother was helping me get dressed and she stopped, in horror. "You have cellulite on your stomach!" she said.
"What's cellulite?" I asked. She grabbed the layer of fat on my stomach, and I could see little dips in my skin.
"That!" she said, appalled. I didn't know what it meant or why I had it. But I sure knew from that moment that I should be ashamed of it. And I was, sadly. This was the late 70s -- the era of thin and slim. Like a lot of girls, I remember trying to diet when my age was still in the single digits, reading women's magazines to get the inside scoop on shedding pounds.
 |
| I was already dieting when this photo was taken. |
I was thin.
The problem with an eating disorder mindset like the one my mother and the majority of women are raised on is that you are never thin enough. (Or, if you are thin enough, then the threat of regaining the weight is a constant threat, hovering over you at all times.) So for nearly five decades, I have lived with a constant, inescapable feeling that I cannot be happy with my appearance. Ever. Because there's always a few more pounds to lose.
Finding feminism taught me other ways of thinking about women's bodies. Punk taught me about alternative aesthetics. Riot Grrrls showed me that fat can be cool as fuck. It's been a very slow and gradual process, but I see so much beauty in bodies of all types. Genuinely.
Me? When I look in the mirror, all of that insight and inspiration instantly vanishes. Above a certain size, my self-confidence shuts down. I analyze every photo. I stop thinking of myself as a sexual being. I stop thinking anything positive about myself. If someone tells me I look nice, I cringe and I definitely don't believe them. I can only think of that unattainable body I'm not living in, the 'real' me that I could be if I weren't so shit. I look at photos taken when I was thinner and hate myself even more.
Add to that, in my late forties, my aging face, the sagging areas of my body that never sagged before. The fact that my metabolism has slowed. My hair isn't as thick and shiny as it was. I have melasma around my eyes. The list is long.
This is not a unique story. Lots of women reading this will probably be thinking, "Yep. Same. What's your point?" In a recent Zoom call, I told some school friends that I'd gained 30 pounds (over 2 stone/13.6 kilos) over the past couple of years. The announcement was met with a sad, awkward, pitiful silence until I added hopefully that I was trying to lose it.
I'm trying to untangle about three issues all at once, I think, so please bear with me.
Genetically speaking, I'm not prone to thinness. Culturally speaking, I was raised on large portions and convenient junk food. While my mom was taking me to the nutritionist, our presses were stuffed with sugared cereals, mac and cheese, sugar sodas, all manner of cakes, several varieties of crisps, double stuff oreos -- you name it. So for my entire life, I've had to wrestle with an extreme push and pull, fighting the starve and purge cycle and the control/shame cycle it comes with.
At a certain point, I said fuck that. I tried to be more relaxed about food and really ditch food guilt. If I'm going to eat, I decided, I refuse to tarnish the amazing experience of eating with shame. Who wants to look back on a party where you had a great time with friends and take away from a lovely event by thinking, "I was bad for eating so much cheese, though." Then your mind pushes the dancing, the chats, the feeling of connection to the back and the food guilt obscures those memories. Instead, I taught myself to say, "I had such a good time, and the cheese was so amazing, I couldn't stop eating it." I try to replace the shame with gratitude. I mean, how lucky that I can eat loads of cheese! What a fucking great thing! Once I took that power away from food, I stopped having as much of an emotional connection to it. I felt more free.
Losing food guilt has not made me feel better about my body, however. And not being a person who turns to food for comfort doesn't mean I don't consume more calories than I burn. But I really thought it would be easier to change how I felt about my body than it would be to lose weight.
Trying to juggle a job with a long commute, full-on pro-choice activism (and some other activism on the side), renovating a house on a tight budget (ie, not being able to hire builders) and coping with the illness and deaths of my in-laws took its toll on me, starting roughly in the summer of 2016. I barely made it through each milestone, but I survived. We moved into the house. We won the referendum. Eventually, I bowed out of activism. The fallout from my in-laws' deaths became more bearable. But I still struggled to process everything that happened. So I fell into a pattern of work, dinner, couch, bed. Near daily drinking. Lots of snacks. Hiding. Not feeling motivated to change. Thinking about everything I should have done differently. Wishing my life were different. Wishing I was different.
But if we want things to change, we have to do something differently. And eventually, I started the process of repairing myself. I got a new job working with really lovely people in a much better location and working from home three days a week (currently 5 days, of course). I started running again, in stops and starts (mostly due to illness). I started to want to reconnect with people again. I started to forgive myself for not being perfect. Gratitude started creeping back in. I started to feel gradually better, like I was emerging from a shell, even though I hadn't lost any weight.
If you think I'm going to say that I felt better about my body, you're wrong. I still looked in the mirror and shuddered. For a month, I went running five days a week and my jeans were just as tight. I weighed myself and that's when I realised that at some point in the course of four years, I'd put on over two stone.
It turns out that for me, it's easier to lose weight than accept and love my body the way it was. I hate saying that. I hate that it's true. Accepting myself at 160 pounds was an impossible burden that I could not carry. And I am well aware that 160 pounds at 5'1" is not huge.
After three weeks of using my fitbit to calculate my calorie intake/output, I've lost over half a stone (8 pounds/3.8kg). While I'm not starving myself, I am walking that fine line between having a plan and having an obsession. I find myself looking at the calorie tracker, watching to see if the available calories went up. I am never over, always under. I resist the urge to weigh myself more than once a week. I resist the urge to starve myself. Still, I resist the urge to eat cheese.
I have failed. Fat phobia won. All the programming of patriarchy and women's magazines and, you know, everything, was more powerful than my feminism, when it came to how I feel about my own body. Other people can be beautiful at any size, but not me. I'm not allowed. It would require a level of re-programming I'm not capable of when I look at myself. So here I am, trying to walk the line without falling over a precipice. I just hope that this time, I can find some point of satisfaction because my body (like everyone's) is aging and I want to experience what it's like to love my body while I can still use it. I don't want to look back on a life of self-hatred.
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