Body positivity and all that

Started to treat someone else’s discussion forum post as my blog, so instead of doing that, here’s a blog post.

So I was reading someone else’s post and two things they said jumped out as being something I recognize from my own life.

1. Sudden weight loss as a result of the body snapping back to its preferred size.
2. Feeling like “a person without a country” in terms of body size.

I’ll start with the first one.

When I started this blog, I had suddenly lost a bunch of weight (all of it muscle). I had gained a bunch of weight—35 lbs, give or take—in the first 3 months of that year, due to an incredibly difficult life situation (more on that in another post, maybe). I included that as one of the weight tracking charts I posted about the other day. I finally got to see the endocrinologist in January 2011, and was not impressed with their diagnosis of, “this is your baseline weight; your body’s just snapping back to its preferred size.” But lo and behold, they were right. All my tests were normal (except iron, always iron) and I have remained roughly the same size since then, about 12 years. And my labs are all pretty much the same, too; some iron/RBC issues, but thyroid has remained perfectly stable and normal, and all the other things (cholesterol, blood sugar, etc. etc.) are fine, too. 

So yeah, sometimes bodies know where they want to be, and even if they take a detour due to stress or a medical event, they go back to their norm.

The second one is tough. I thought I’d written about this already, but couldn’t find the post, so maybe it’s in a diary or some other private place.

I carry a lot of issues about fat. Call it internalized fat phobia. I grew up with a fat dad (5’8”, 250 lbs, which is a BMI of 38, firmly in the “obese” category), who was very bitter about being fat, very opposed to even thinking about health, and constantly reminding me how fat men were underestimated and mistreated (Fatty Arbuckle!) while crowing over stories of fitness gone wrong (anti-cancer dietitian Pritikin getting cancer, jogging guru Jim Fixx dying of a heart attack age 51). When his sister called long distance to inform him of a death in the family, after making appropriate sympathetic noises on the phone, he hung up and said, “Looks like old Fatty’s going to outlive them all.” Old Fatty being himself.

At the same time, women who failed to maintain an attractive figure were repulsive creatures to be mocked and scorned. What is a woman’s purpose if not to be attractive to a man, or more specifically, attractive to him personally? So from childhood, there were comments like, “I can see that butter going straight to your thighs.” He of course didn’t see any hypocrisy in this. I remember making up a rule where if I rode x number of laps around the driveway, I could eat y number of pieces of candy. My sister told me I had an eating disorder (wrong—disordered eating maybe, but even then not terribly so). Over the years, I have had various boyfriends make negging comments like, “I don’t mind that you’re bigger,” or, “I prefer a woman with meat on her bones.” Last year I went on a date with a guy I met on an app—I was feeling guilty for not being more interested in him because I was unable to get past the fact that he was fat and balding and just old, and then he went on a little rant about how he didn’t appreciate middle-aged women trying to be too thin, complete with a repulsive anecdote in which he described silently judging the bodies of strangers on the street. Ugh.

All of which to say, while I can sometimes look at myself in the mirror when I am all alone in my room and think I look good, 99% of the time I feel fat. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I see fat. I look at a photograph of myself and I see fat. After decades of people telling me I’m not thin enough, endless struggles trying to find boots that fit my calves, or jeans that fit my thighs, how could I not think I’m fat?

So I used to subscribe to a newsletter about body issues, in an attempt to overcome this, leave behind the judgment of society and come to terms with myself. “Body positivity” felt like yet another thing to fail at; when I read about “Body neutrality” I thought, here’s something that might be within reach!

But then.

It turns out, if you’re not large enough to require specialized seating, seatbelt extenders on airplanes, etc., you’re not allowed to talk about how you feel about your body. You’re not allowed to post workout selfies. You have to just magically forget the 40+ years of being called fat and understand that you aren’t fat enough.

I struggled with some guilt about that—especially since the newsletter’s answers to what “straight sized” women are supposed to do with their discomfort was behind the paywall—and then asked myself, “why am I giving my time and attention to something unnecessary that makes me feel worse instead of better?” And decided to unsubscribe.

When I post a post-workout selfie, it’s to remind myself that I feel better when I work out (my cousin even commented once, “you look so happy after a run!”) and as a sort of counter-programming to the perfect filtered pics of people who invest a bunch of time and effort and money into skin care and makeup and hair treatments and all the rest of it. I kind of want to say, “Don’t forget us regular people.” Here’s what an average middle-aged woman looks like, with no makeup, no filter, no take-50-pics-to-choose-the-most-flattering, no styling, no botox or fillers or microblading or fill-in-the-blank-treatment, just a perimenoupausal woman with some grey hair in a ponytail and sweat running down my forehead.

And I’m supposed to feel bad about that? Women my age are largely invisible to society (when I was looking for free stock photos for a project, I was astounded at how only women in their 20s were ever featured, no matter what search parameters you used, unless you searched “grandmother” in which case you’d get a quaintly-toothless 90-year-old), but me posting a crappy selfie for the few friends and family who follow me on Instagram makes me part of the Diet Industrial Complex?

What pains me most about this is how it completely overlooks the issue of dysmorphia. The whole point of dysmorphia is the inability to objectively see one’s own body. 

And like most people in this situation, I don’t judge others’ bodies this way—only my own. I look at anyone else’s body and I see slender ankles or lush cleavage or a million other body parts that are better than mine and make me feel quietly envious. 

I guess the hardest part is that it doesn’t leave space for those of us “without a country” to talk about our issues, and if we can’t talk about it, how do we overcome our own fat phobia? It’s like saying, “You shouldn’t go to the dentist unless you need a full root canal.”

I don’t know what my point is with all this. Just venting into the void I guess. The three people who read this blog.

Anyway.

Today was chilly; chilly enough to wear jeans, which I haven’t done in months. I was not able to buy jeans off the rack for years, and eventually drafted a pattern and ordered a bolt of selvege denim to make my own, as it seemed to be the only way. Then a couple of years ago, in a Facebook mom group, someone mockingly posted a picture of a pair of jeans, saying, “Look at these ugly jeans, who would wear those?” I looked at them—high waist, flaring out over the hips into what I’ve seen called a “barrel leg”—and thought, “That is my figure right there. They’re so loose through the hip and thigh, they might actually fit over my hips and thighs.” And they did! I bought them and was so happy to actually, finally, for the first time in decades, by jeans that fit and were comfortable and made me feel cute, that I bought a second pair. Anyway today I put them on for the first time in a long while, and they feel a little loose through the leg. I’ve been noticing this week that my legs feel stronger—more muscular—and it feels good, and having my jeans feel comfortable and a bit looser than before feels good. I like the feeling of a bit of extra space around my thighs. And seeing this other person’s post about their own guilt about feeling happy to have lost a little weight made me sad. We should be able to celebrate the things that make us feel good! We shouldn’t have to constantly compare ourselves to other people and then feel bad about failing to meet their goals instead of our own!

So I’ve got that out of my system at least. People should be allowed to enjoy their own bodies, whatever that means for them. If that means celebrating running one 5k a month, so be it! If someone else wants to run an ultramarathon, good for them! Anyone who achieves something they wanted to achieve it should be allowed to feel good about themselves, full stop.