A Picture

This picture was not special.  I wasn’t smiling.  I wasn’t wearing a special outfit.  I had two of my children next to me.  We were standing in a field.  I chose this picture because I judged myself has “horrible” in the picture.  I was in a larger body.  My clothes were ill-fitting.  I choose this picture so I could shame myself.  I would look at the picture and think, “thank god that’s not me anymore!”   

Here’s the thing.  It was me.  It is me.  It will always be me.  I believed I needed to disconnect from that self.  That was the “fat” self.  Not the “me” self.  I wanted to leave that body behind.  It was like a giant costume or wooly coat that I wanted to peel off and walk away from.  It was terribly sad.

What made it so sad?  When I think back on how I wanted so badly to disassociate from myself, I feel disappointed.  I was miserable.  Let’s take my physical appearance out of the story.  At the time the picture was taken, I had recently moved to England.  While I had my children and husband with me, I had left everyone else thousands of miles away.  I had left my career.  I had left my parents, my siblings, my extended family, and my friends.  My marriage was struggling (it took me another 10 years to walk away from that situation).  Don’t get me wrong, I was extremely grateful for the immediate family I had with me.  I was experiencing what was supposed to be an opportunity of a lifetime; my family was living in a foreign country.  I was lonely and baffled by a community that I thought would be so similar to what I was used to, because we all spoke the same language.  I was busy keeping up appearances.  Whenever someone emailed or called from America, I would talk about the adventure and the fun I was having.  It was a facade.  I was just too afraid to share the challenges, for fear that I would look like a failure.  Really, I would just look like a human.

Now that I’ve shared how I was feeling when that picture was taken, on top of that I had a larger body.  At the time, my body was the largest it had ever been.  Living in western society, I was bombarded constantly by body-shaming advertising, news, and marketing.  I didn’t want to be in that body.  The world around me was telling me my body was wrong.

So what did I do?  I went and joined a weight loss club.  This club was a well-known organization that purportedly helped people lose weight.  How did they do that?  Through shame.  Ok yes, they provided you with a “meal plan,” some diet foods, and recipes you could share with your family.  They provided rules on how much you should eat and what kinds of foods you could eat.  But the thing that made me follow these rules and eat these foods?  That was shame.  Shame for the body that was me.  My own authentic self, I was trying to chuck it in the bin.

How was this shame presented?  Weekly, I went to meetings to get weighed.  When I lost weight, there was cheering. I could even share my “success” with others in the room, who would cheer, while secretly feeling envious.  If I gained weight or stayed the same weight, I felt dejected.  It was if I had somehow failed in a battle I thought I could win.  Maybe I chose pleasure over discipline.  Maybe I had the sugar-filled yogurt that week instead of the sugar-free one.  Here my food choices had moral values.  If I was “bad” one night or I “cheated,” I shouldn’t be surprised that my weight went up.  It was the karma of doing what I shouldn’t have.  I am a “when the going gets tough the tough get going!” kind of gal.  I wouldn’t give up.  I was going to prove everyone wrong and get rid of that fat body that was the ridicule of all of those advertisements and articles.  What I didn’t recognize in that thinking was that I was giving up myself.

I found my success with that weight loss organization.  Well, if you call losing 50 lbs. success, then I was successful.  I was so proud of myself for giving away my freedom to let my body choose what to eat.  I decided to start working for the weight loss organization.  I was going to lead meetings and tell other people how to give up their  right to choose and let decisions to nourish themselves with food (both nutritionally and emotionally) be decided by a third party.

I’ve said it in past blog posts and I’m going to say it again here: 98% of all diets fail.  Sure, you might lose weight, a lot of weight initially, but within 5 years of losing weight people gain it all back.  Many times they gain even more.  At the time of my big weight loss, I didn’t know those facts, but yet I had seen other dieters struggle as soon as the weight was off.  I had lost and gained back weight prior to the 50 lbs. experience, and I would lose and gain back many more pounds before I freed myself from dieting.  In the back of my mind I knew this was a scam.  But I kept chasing the thinness dream.  Why?  Because I believed the fat phobic messages that my society was telling me.  Messages like: I was dumber if I was fat;  I was uglier if I was fat;  I was lazy if I was fat;  I was just not good enough unless I was in a smaller body.  Never mind that I had been successful in my career, co-published books, spoke at conferences, cared for 3 children, coordinated our move across the ocean, made friends easily, and had a number of hobbies.  The size of my body was the litmus test of who I was.

Once I started working for this weight loss organization, I had to present myself as a believer, a believer in the fatphobic fallacy.  As I stood in front of my class, presenting my slim self as an inspiration to all the slim wannabes, I had to hold up a “before” picture.  A picture of who I was before I found the holy grail of thinness and became the amazing person I was in a smaller body.  So I held up that picture.  The one of me standing in the field with my children.  I had it blown up to 8”x10” and I had it framed.  It was so wrong.

On a personal level, this picture represented a terrible message to myself.  There I was, standing up in front of as many as 50 women every week saying, “I used to hate myself.”  I was saying how I wanted to slice a part of what was me away from me.  I wanted to just hit the “delete” key on that part of my life.  Looking back on myself, I think that’s pretty fucked up.  I was so cruel to myself!  There wasn’t one ounce of self-compassion there.  Not only was I pushing away the reality of how unhappy I felt in my new environment, I was pushing away the reality of me.  I couldn’t accept my self on either the physical or emotional level.

On a public level, this picture represented so much judgement.  I was standing in front of all of those hopeful women, saying all they had to do was follow the rules of the weight loss organization, and they too could be thin.  But for now, they were bad people, just like the woman in the picture.  They were unwanted and undesirable.  They represented all of the awfulness that fatphobia saw in people with the wrong BMI numbers.

In my self-discovery around diet culture and the move to weight neutrality, I am learning to accept myself.  I am recognizing that my weight only matters when there are 2 people in the room.  When it’s just me, it makes no difference how much I weigh.  What if tomorrow doctors woke up and rearranged the BMI scale?  Suddenly, the weight marked on the BMI scale as “overweight” was “normal.”  What if the weight marked as “obese” was changed to  “underweight?”  Would we suddenly started treating those people differently?  Would we suddenly start treating ourselves differently?

If I was a time traveler, I think I would like to go back to that point in time when I stood in that field.  I would like to give myself a hug and tell myself that I’m going to be okay.  It was okay to feel sad about moving away from friends, family, and a culture I was comfortable with.  It was (and is)  okay to feel those emotions and let them run through me.  Then I would tell myself it was okay to be in the body I was in, because that was my body.  It didn’t matter what shape she took or what size clothing she wore; she was me.  She was that fierce, hardworking, resilient mother who took on adventures and navigated the lessons she learned.  She would feel lonely, helpless, unhappy, and sad many more times in her life.  That was okay.  There was no reason to shame her body because those on the outside had judgement about it.  I would watch her walk off that field, and just keep living her life without putting any energy into taking off that giant costume.  Because it wasn’t a costume.  It was authentically me.  What thoughts could I have filled my head with then?  Maybe I could have thought about my feelings.