Losing it with love

My inner (well, more like outer) feminist isn't that hard to bring out swinging, ready to ride her high horse a ranting and a yelling. One way to get her a little riled up is to start talking about the crazy expectations for beauty and women bodies. I think it is disgusting how fat or thin has somehow become almost a moral judgment. I'm generally a fan of the fat acceptance movement, and think most people who body snark under the guise of promoting health are about as sincere as those who use the passive aggressive "bless their heart" after their nastiness. I hate how narrowly we look at beauty. Most of all, I hate how often we hate ourselves for not being whatever it is we think we should be. (I tried so hard to find the scene from mean girls where the plastics bond over their mutual self-hate, but alas, youtube failed me). Most of how we view our bodies in contemporary culture is so destructive.

In theory I think of myself as having excellent body love. I'm the girl who sometimes takes her husbands compliments with a bit of gratitude and a cheeky "I know". The girl whose high school yearbook includes the message "you are beautiful...the problem is that you know it." And I usually do know it. Sort of.

That said, I'm kind of ashamed of how thrilled I am by my body lately. Not because I'm so glad that I embrace the whole aforementioned body love thing. No, I'm psyched to finally be back to my wedding weight. Really, really thrilled. Stop to check myself out in the mirror, contemplate how skimpy of clothing I can get away with thrilled. Which would be fine if I didn't remember how horrid I felt before.

My first year of law school was so not good to me. I went from walking around a huge campus everyday and halfway decent eating habits to taking the bus between sitting on the couch at home and sitting at a desk at school. The very same school where I survived largely on a diet of free pizza. Add in a lovely dose of birth control and I gained about 20lbs and officially moving to overweight BMI in the space of 6 months. Being 5' 2", those 20 lbs are kind of a big deal. As the stretch marks from my thighs ballooning will always remind me.

 

 Me in the Spring of 2009, at about 145lbs

I should probably say, that all in all, I was still fine. Health wise, I was probably just peachy. Even by superficial standards, I was still ok. But for me, I hated it. I hated me for getting like that. I silently, and not so silently swore at the new numbers on my necessarily new pants. I would suck in my cheeks when I looked in the mirror just so I could get a glimpse of the real me.

So, after reading some very good and very sensible posts on weight loss through calorie counting, I started paying attention to what was going into my mouth. For the first few months, I was a little crazy. I used one of those little calculator things that says if you want to lose x lbs in a certain amount of time, you should eat y calories. My magic number was 1,200. With that many "allowed" I would either scream from hunger and frustration at the end of the day, or cry with disgust at my failure of 1,300 and wonder why I just had to have that extra piece of toast and ruin everything.

I did gradually start to calm down, to stay aware, but in a sane way. But not until I started seeing some smaller numbers on the scale.

Yay rah for me for getting down to where I'm at now. I just wish I did it for the right reasons. I lost weight because I hated my body. I wish I had done it because I loved it.

I'm not anti losing weight. No one can deny that generally speaking healthy behavior like eating right and exercising leads to being thinner. And at certain levels, being overweight can cause some negative consequences of their own. I've seen people I love dearly deal with most of them.

It makes sense that if you love yourself, including your body and all its awesomeness, you would take care of it. That's hardly an original idea. Right now, that's not why I take care of my body. I take care of it because I only love it when it does what I want, looks how I want. Which is to say, I don't love it at all. Aa any child can tell you that conditional love isn't the real deal.

Hating my weight gain led me to do some healthy things. I think many people look at things like that and feel like it is necessary and positive to shame themselves and others into losing some weight. There's a reason we talk about eating dessert as being bad, talk about working out as making up for something. Every way we talk about anything that could impact weight is loaded with guilt and judgment. And I guess that oftentimes all that works. The crippling guilt from not meeting my calorie goals, not looking how I "should" really did cause me to loose some weight.

But ultimately it doesn't solve anything. It's built on a lie. There isn't anything inherently good about being thin. It fits a current, transitory beauty standard, but that isn't anything real. (Healthy is real, but healthy is more than just a number, and more than just the physical too.)

All in all, my body and my weight are going to do all sorts of crazy things throughout my life. Everyone's will. I'd much rather be happy through all of that. I imagine I'll be healthier too if I eat and act consistently because I love me than being stuck in a cycle where I'm only motivated to do well when I feel bad.

We would all be so much happier (and healthier) if we just let go of all that baggage, all that negativity. Easier said than done, I know. I don't know how exactly to love my body. Frankly, I'm not even sure what that phrase means, it is kind of a new agey overly vague kind of phrase. I just know that what I currently do doesn't work, not really. I hope to have a long life with me and my body, and I'd rather spend it as friends than enemies.

Me now, at about 125lbs. Not that the numbers really matter, but they kind of still do.