Once upon a time, I wrote a book about Pagans and body image, in which I discussed why we should love our bodies regardless of what size or shape they are.  And once upon a time, I really believed that.

I’m not sure what happened.  The culture we live in is so determined to sell us a perfect body (for just $29.99 plus shipping/handling!) and the alleged perfect life that comes with it (because there’s no such thing as miserable or unhealthy “beautiful” people), that learning to love your body not only takes years, it takes constant effort.  It’s a practice like meditation or yoga, a muscle you have to build up and then maintain or it atrophies.  Somewhere along the way, I stopped using my self-esteem muscles, and they went limp faster than an insecure ex-boyfriend.

Like so many people, I decided that my life would be magically better, and I would be magically different, if I lost weight.  To that end I joined Weight Watchers and, over the course of six months, lost about 40 pounds.  During that period I became even more neurotic about food, constantly comparing Points values in my head and thinking about nothing but the next meal, the next workout, and whether I’d get that little gold star for my bookmark this week.

Needless to say as soon as I realized how miserable I was, I gained it all back plus about thirty friends.  That was two years ago, and since then I’ve been in a spiral of self-loathing that whirled faster and faster the fatter I became.  My continued failures to lose weight became a reflection of my quality as a human being – I was a failure, a screwup, a lazy tub of lard, and so forth.

I made the mistake that those poor bastards on The Biggest Loser are basically abused into making:  believing that losing weight would give me self-esteem, and that my self-esteem would survive if the weight loss didn’t, which, statistically speaking, it won’t.  I’d feel elated when I lost, and then the minute the scale crept back up, I’d plummet, because that happiness was fixed on something external instead of arising from the cultivation of joy and love within.

The ironic thing is that this shame, which the media would like you to believe is necessary to make fat people “do something about it,” had the opposite effect on me.  I hated myself, and that drove me to make unhealthy decisions about food and exercise because I didn’t believe I deserved better than ill health and early death from diabetes/heart disease/whatever.  That made me gain even more weight, which made me hate myself more.

Perhaps it’s because my meds are finally working, or perhaps it’s because I finally looked at my life and the people around me and realized how absurd my obsession with fat had become, but recently my brain kind of turned itself inside out and I realized:  I can’t do this anymore.

The realization came when I was considering what I wanted to blog about next:  the idea that if you want to make positive changes in your health, you should only take up habits that you can see yourself keeping for the rest of your life.  Anything else is going to either make you crazy and send you into a shame cycle or simply fail, because an unsustainable life eventually collapses.  As I was considering this, I realized that the reason all my attempts at improved health have failed is because they were coming from a place of self-loathing that is as unsustainable as Big Oil.

I have a disordered relationship with food.  That much I’ve known for years.  But it wasn’t until I started actively trying to lose weight that that relationship became genuinely abusive.  Ever since then things have gotten worse.  All I think about is how much I hate being fat.  How many calories I’ve eaten.  How impossible the idea of being healthy is because of how fat I am.  I’m constantly surrounded with diet talk and fat shame and food guilt, just by virtue of living in America, but I chose at some point to internalize all of it…and it’s killing me.

Funnily enough, as my weight has increased, the actual indicators of health for my body have stayed blissfully fine.  If being obese was such a death sentence for me, then over the years as my weight has crept up, so should have numbers like blood pressure, blood sugar, liver/kidney function, cholesterol, et cetera.  This has not happened – not even a little bit in fourteen years.  What has happened is that I’ve become totally pathological about eating and exercise, am constantly stressed about my body, and have let the size of my ass dictate how happy I believe life could be.

Yes, I’m fat.  Obese.  Okay, fine.  Yes, my body weight has increased the pull on my bones and joints and causes me pain.  Yes, I have a hard time moving and getting around compared to how I used to.  There’s no guarantee that losing 150 pounds would magically make me healthy – when I was 40 pounds lighter I was eating absolute crap, just fewer calories of it, and my stress levels were through the roof – but I acknowledge that I passed the comfortable range of how fat I could be at my current level of strength a while ago.  I have always believed, and continue to insist, that each person has a range of size that is healthy for that individual, and that range has nothing to do with antiquated height/weight charts or BMI, but has everything to do with that person treating her body well and eating, moving, and breathing in ways that promote wellness for that person.  That’s why there are thin people who are terribly unhealthy, and fat people who are active and vital – it’s about balance and mindfulness, and one size does not fit all.

I have to get off the Fat Hate Train.  It’s speeding toward a cliff.

I am a bit embarrassed that it took me this long to realize it given my history as an author.  But it just goes to show you that anyone can fall into a body image trap.  I said in The Body Sacred that I wasn’t an expert and I wasn’t “over it,” because, as I said, self-love in this world is a continual practice, not a one-time epiphany.  At the time I knew this to be true, but now, I understand it in a way I didn’t before.

I’m tired of being ashamed and feeling guilty for what I eat (ice cream) or don’t eat (leafy greens).  If I’m going to live healthfully in my body and enjoy my life I have to relearn how to act based on the desire to feel better and encourage joy, not to force myself to shrink until my problems disappear.  Weight loss may be a result of self-acceptance and a turn toward wellness, but I can’t live my life under the tyranny of the scale.  It’s made me unhappier and, ironically, smaller as a person even though my physical size has increased.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on letting go – another thing I have a very problematic relationship with – and I understand now that I have to let go of the expectation that taking care of my body will lead to thinness which will lead to happiness.  I have to seek out happiness here, now, in this body.  Wearing smaller-sized jeans won’t do me the least bit of good if I hate myself.  It’ll just give me something else about myself to hate if I eat pie and gain a pound.  Life is too fucking short to live that way.

It’s also too short not to eat pie.

More to come.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Body Sacred. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.