Where am i now?
When I look at my body now, I see a fat body. My body hasn’t always been this way. The general shape is the same; I’ve always been an hourglass as an adult. But I was a smaller hourglass. As a young adult, I think my body would have been considered “normal” or maybe slightly overweight by the silly BMI standards. But now? The BMI standards label me as obese. So how did I get that way?
Too much sugar? Too much cheese? Actually, I think it was too much dieting. As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, dieting does cause weight loss. But it’s only temporary. Within 5 years, 95% of all dieters gain back all the weight they lost AND MORE. Don’t believe me? In 1992, the NIH acknowledged that diets don’t work. There are plenty of scientific studies that show that diets don’t work. Check out one of many articles like this one: Diets do not work
So here’s what I’m realizing: I dieted for close to 40 years. What did that do to me? It made me the body I am today.
When I made this realization, I got pretty damn depressed. I mean, I felt like I fucked up my life, or at least my health. By not listening to my body for wants and needs and instead listening to the diet industry, I made myself bigger. I put myself at a higher risk for heart disease, insulin resistance, and high blood pressure (ooh, I got that one).
Here’s the unfortunate part though. I got depressed because I thought, “You dumbass. You could have been thin. You would have looked just fine in your slightly overweight body. Now you’ve fucked it up and become a fatty.”
Woah, that’s intense. I mean talk about judgement. But it’s more than that. With words like that, I am not only judging myself, I’m judging others. If I say to myself, “If only you didn’t diet you would be a more accepted size,” I am calling myself out (and others) for being larger. I am buying into the fatphobia that I was trying to get away from when I stopped dieting. It’s really hard to wake up and see the self-shaming. If I truly want to break free from body shaming, I have to stop believing that when I went on diets and created the body I have now, the body I have now is bad. It is still the same body. All the pieces of it are ok.
There is a Buddhist poem by Ryokan that says, “showing front, showing back, maple leaves fall.” The maple leaf doesn’t care that it’s front is shinier or that the back shows more veins. I want to be like that maple leaf. I want to accept my body in all of it’s being. After all, it is the vessel that keeps me alive. I don’t want to judge it because now it’s at a bigger weight-to-height ratio than it was before.
It’s hard not to judge my body size. Hell, it’s hard for anyone to not judge their body size. The diet industry drives the fashion industry and the health industry. Isn’t that a mess? Beauty is defined as the size of one’s body. BMI is health metric when BMI doesn’t measure health. Shifting my thoughts from thinking, “I messed up because I’m not thin,” to “I made choices because society told me these were good for me. Now I know better,” is a rough ride.
I don’t want to be the person who says, “I’m fat, but not as fat as X.” I don’t want to walk into a room and think, “Am I the fattest one here?” I want everyone to be a falling maple leaf. I’ve spent 40+ years in my head making arbitrary judgements based on messages from family, friends, doctors, businesses, and media. I want those messages to end.
In 2018, the diet industry was worth $72 billion. We keep hearing that obesity rates (there’s that BMI word again) are going up and up. Should we be surprised? Dieting and weight cycling is a never-ending journey that increases people’s weight. Dieting creates it’s own repeat business. How brilliant is that? It’s like the guy who sold stars to the star-bellied Sneetches in that Dr. Seuss book. I remember reading that book to my children and all of us saying, “Just blow off getting a star! Save your money!” Yet with dieting, we are convinced to go back for more.
I imagine there are other folks out there like me, ready to get off the diet train. But like me, are they frustrated that they got themselves to a size that is larger than where they started? Do they rationalize that they were better when they were at the beginning? Because that’s fatphobia too. I can’t force them to like something when we are being told it’s wrong and unhealthy. It takes time to take apart a machine, and it’s hard to figure out which piece should come out first. I do hope the folks like me stop and think for a moment about the stories they are telling themselves.
Me vs. a $72 billion industry? That’s quite the David and Goliath fight. I don’t think I have a slingshot big enough to win the battle. Yet, I still want to fight. I want to fight to accept myself and all the other bodies out there. I want to be able to stand my own ground and be resilient. I want to be self-compassionate. I want to be compassionate for you, too. I know I will stumble along the way. I might get sucked back in a bit too. Yet every day, I’m a little more aware. I invite you too to be a little more aware.
