The diet culture people can all fuck right off. I had a therapist I loved & who seemed to be a great fit, until I talked to her about working to lose the 40 lbs I gained during the pandemic that were on top of the "baby weight" I never lost, and wow - being shamed by your therapist for wanting to change something about your life is a special kind of WTAF. She was a "health at any size" practitioner and fully dedicated to only that perspective on bodies and how to be in them. I just wanted to not have my plantar fascitis not flare up, because it made my knees, then my hips hurt and I had to freqently chase my autistc child to keep him from running off to his certain death. I also just didn't like being so big & squishy & sweaty & out of breath. I got a new therapist & am still rounder than I want, but I'm less round and not being shamed for it.
It is a treat to have your magical words in my inbox twice in one week!
Oops. I’ll continue. Most of us have trouble finding fat-accepting therapists, therapists who don’t view our fatness as pathological or reflective of some deep, dark issue. Yes, I understand that she was treating your weight loss seeking as also pathological, and that makes her a poor fit, but recognize that your experience is very much the exception, not the norm.
Seems to me the norm should be that therapists are able to see clients outside the lenses of their own political or social ideologies. How utterly insane that a person allegedly trained in the BRAIN can’t do more than slap their own read on the complex human being sitting before them. I’d leave immediately if I got some weird shaming for wanting to lose weight or for being fat. If a therapist can’t see past a superficial body judgment and/or their own political leanings there’s no way they can help me understand myself or the complexity of experience
I facepalmed so many times reading this. I wish people would stop trying to convince each other that there is one and only one (theirs) acceptable moral way to be in this world (this is probably broader than you intended, but this is how I interpret it.)
This made me tear up: "For some reason, in that moment, I was the most beautiful I had ever been. And I saw it, not from you, but from me."
Thank you, and I think what you got from this is the real point of what I'm saying here. It's wild how oversimplified everything becomes, and how tightly we cling to our black and white concepts of right and wrong. I mean, some moral issues are pretty clear (and oddly I see people floundering the MOST on what seems to me to be an easily agreed-upon shared value of morality), but most things are not so clear.
I so appreciate your writing -I’ve been an on and off reader for…a decade…maybe more…after my wife shared a few of your posts.
I was a student in one of your writing workshops during that welcomed time of reflection and panic we called COVID-19. There’s something approachable the way you share, cutting through the BS.
So, as a GenX male (yeah, arbitrary label), I’m sheepishly writing, and wondering if I’m supposed to be here. Oh. I am aren’t I? OK then.
First off, I still remember the time I asked a woman about her pregnancy only to be informed that she was not, in fact, with child. What a jerk, and an assumption couched in the body image expectations you write about.
Our culture swims in misogyny (dating back to, oh, the rise of permanent settlements fueled by agriculture in the “Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago or whatever). That’s not intended
to be an excuse! But a way for me to contextualize just how f__king big of a problem this is.
I’m part of it in ways that irritate me and are evident when I laugh at jokes from movies like Airplane, Slapshot, Animal House, etc. and then I hate myself, which is not helping. I’m sure there’s bias and/or inflammatory points here, perhaps the mere point that I’m writing this.
The family I was raised in has enough toxic masculinity to keep me in therapy for the rest
of my days. the pressure to conform to some “ideal manhood” for me, is real.
Am I making enough money (no)? Am I ripped like a god (no)? Do I have a big enough truck to talk gear with other dads (minivan)? Can I converse intelligently about sports (kind of)? Do I meditate enough (shut your mouth! That’s not manly!) Is my dick hard enough (prefer not to answer)? More importantly, what do the people I love and respect have to say? Do I listen to them? Sometimes, but, mostly not.
And, I can push back against these narratives, especially with my sons, to break the cycle of what it means to be a man.
Apologies for a long-winded “thank you” disguised as an attempt to be witty.
Hi, Wayne, you very much belong here, and I hope you stay! I appreciate your insights. And thank you for reading my work, and for so long! I died at "and then I hate myself" after laughing as something we should not laugh at. My entire life.
I really cannot imagine the pressure of "ideal manhood," and there's no competition, of course -- seems we have figured out ways to decimate both sexes in creatively unique ways. Awkward laughter. For example I watched my boomer dad essentially die because he could not A.) Be "weak" in accepting his age and related frailty. B.) Be "weak" by getting help for mental conditions really messing up his life. and C.) Holding all of this inside because real mean would never admit anything along those lines.
I feel certain narratives of masculinity have cut boys and men off from the full range of human experience and there's a real reason why men kill themselves more often than women and experience more deaths of despair, etc. I've been writing about it in another essay, and surely some feminists will get mad at me for daring to speak of problems boys face, but as a fellow Gen X-er, I'm too old to give a shit. THERE IS ENOUGH PAIN TO GO AROUND, GUYS.
You and my husband would probably be friends. He's an outwardly "man's man" in that he grew up on a ranch, is a builder, and has a beard and demeanor that I always say makes him look like Amish mafia, but he gets tears in his eyes looking at his damn cat and when men talk to him about sports he smiles and nods like all the rest of us who don't know shit about sports. It's almost as if we're all individual human beings.
Still, honest to god, if I had to pick "an evil," I think I'd choose woman. We may go through a lot but at least we're allowed to connect in real ways with other women, and TALK ABOUT IT without people saying we're betraying our sex. It's also been hard for Mac to find male friends who want to talk about real things.
Anywho, I wrote a comment longer than yours, therefore my dick is larger.
I'm sorry. I had to. There's something wrong with me. But you said dick and that you laugh at Animal House so surely we're cool?
I would listen to a Podcast on modern living with you and Wayne (Hi Wayne!). We need more folks having conversations about learning to relearn how to be a person in a land of systems built to kill us and opinions sold to us like gospel. We're all just trying to filter out the shit we know was never ours to carry while trying not to drown in the river of brown.
Apologies for my delay. I’m still working to set the right notifications and filters to receive those things for stuff I actually give a crap about, like this string.
Yes. The only podcast I listen to diligently is Your Undivided Attention by the Center for Humane Technology. While it’s focus on regulating tech, such that it gives a crap about human well-being, the reality is that underpins much of our society today, whether we like it or not.
As much as I decry the amount of content in the world, I’m wading into it with a friend - creating a radio program that’s evolving to be a Gen X, middle age, AI in the workforce, white male cringe fest. In other words, we shoot the shit anabout meaningful topics like toxic masculinity, parenting in a digital age, how to engage in our democracy and devolve into sophomore humor occasionally.
What you said about Mac not finding male friends that want to talk about real shit hit me too.
The problem I have is when there’s sliver of deeper connection with another man I word vomit all the late capitalism/toxic masculinity/consumer culture/disconnection from nature/social media is satan’s work stuff I think about a LOT in their face, and never get invited to the Memorial Day cookout.
I love your stories and you are awesome. This spoke to me- it’s my daily struggle and also I feel stupid & guilty about it because 1st world problems for me and also I didn’t ask for treatment-resistant depression so I try to cut myself some slack but mostly I just feel embarrassed 🫠
“The “eating while down” thing is particularly tricky because one must define “down.” There is “down” like the day my grandmother was murdered by my mentally ill cousin and then there is the daily “down,” of “I thought I’d be further along at this point in my life.”
Or, “Fuck me, corporate elites still run America.” The down that lives in the bones, just sort of swimming around, whispering malaise into the cracks of my skeleton. The boredom, the exhaustion. The existential down.
Thank you, Joanna. I hear you sister. I am rather hesitant to admit it because it’s all rather clichéd but after I went to an inpatient trauma treatment center for what we shall call “childhood shit,” my entire relationship with my body, sex, and food transformed seemingly on its own. I mean I had to do a LOT of work in that center and for two years after, two years of dissociative episodes and a real blight on my fucking career (losing one’s mind tends to impede writing), but I see now how much of my embodied experience was a direct result of depression, trauma, and a body seeking something it would never find “out there.” I’m sorry about your depression. I am by no means “fixed,” but I believe I’ve been through the worst of it, for now, at least. I’m not sure what I’d do if it resisted treatment. My heart goes to you.
Oh yes. I remember feeling magnificent in my big pregnant body. Look at me taking up space and growing a human being like it’s magic or something. Yes. Kinda awesome.
It really does. Particularly in the arena of sex, for me at least. But this was so connected to body. I was fundamentally disgusted by and ashamed of my sexual urges, which came from my body. It was viewed with such distrust and then the whole narrative that the Holy Ghost (lol) could only be in a “clean temple.” And then all the covering up. My lord. When did you leave the church? I was around 16.
I've struggled my whole life with food/body/weight, and what I called emotional eating, and what I considered an eating disorder. I started semaglutides a few months ago, and guess what. This medication (for me) has turned off all the eating signals except the "my stomach is empty" one. What I considered emotional eating or an eating disorder was just body signals--even if they were emotional, they still existed *in my body*. My body was telling me to eat.
I realized: If I was getting signals that I had to pee, for example, even though my bladder was empty, that's a MEDICAL ISSUE. I might be annoyed with the signal, but I wouldn't consider it a character defect if I couldn't resist sitting on the toilet. So, why did I consider myself weak or broken for eating when my stomach was maybe not completely empty?
Medication-assisted treatment is now considered the gold standard of treatment for substance use disorders; basically, keeping the person from experiencing dopesickness goes a long way in helping them stay clean and sober.
I wonder if medication-assisted treatment will one day be considered standard for eating/weight issues.
Yes to all of this! I know glp-1s are new and people have a lot of opinions about them, but I feel like a late-diagnosed ADHD person on Adderall for the first time. As in: you mean to tell me this is how the "normal" people felt ALL THE TIME? I was operating from a deficit that convinced me I was hungry and it was also an emergency, and now I just eat when I actually physically need to. But of course I had to work through a ton of worries about whether my personal decision to try these drugs to feel better in my own body was somehow letting down feminism, because of all the messiness Janelle wrote about in this piece. Sigh.
And I'm also a late-diagnosed ADHD person who has tried Adderall, and the analogy is apt. "You fuckers have been walking around with this level of functioning the whole time?!"
Thank you for this piece. It hits home, hard. I am now 53, & the strongest I have ever been. Would i like to lose the belly left by a giant 1st baby and twins the second time around, that protrudes because I enjoy the celebration of small and big wins by including food? Sure I would, but I will not starve my self or participate in restriction culture any more. I was never designed to be thin, my wrist and shoulders are larger than my brothers. I am not sure i will learn to love my body in this life time, but wow, it feels good to be comfortable in it!
I feel all of this in my fat-padded bones. I started weight loss injections after several years of judging anyone I knew who’d been on them. I sat my teenage daughter and preteen kid down and talked them through the fact that, despite my 16 years of telling them (and myself) I loved my changing body in all of its flabby, changing ways, I’d been mostly lying. I told them I was starting the shots and that I was being honest because I didn’t want them to think I was secretly sick or dying if I succeeded at losing as much weight as I wanted. I told them part of my wish to lose weight was because I want to live longer and healthier than my genetic predisposition to T2 diabetes and high cholesterol might allow. But that the other part was that I missed being thinner. I told them that I’ve never been able to diet successfully because I suffered food insecurity when I was little, so feeling hunger pangs makes me panic. I told them that I’ve always wanted them to love their bodies in whatever form they are or become, but that I would be there for them if they ever don’t. It’s all so complicated and such bullshit. But life is short, and if we aren’t hurting someone else with our actions, maybe it’s all going to be just fine.
"Are we working for individual liberation or are we fighting for conformity to shared ideology? "
I am putting this on my mirror as a reminder and may put it on a giant sign outside my door. I think we all (well, those of us who aren't unashamedly automatically pro conformity) we need to ask ourselves this more often.
We still aren’t talking about WHY everyone is puffy, inflamed, gaining weight, losing hair, losing teeth. Our physical health is a reflection of the health of the planet. The way we treat the earth is the way we treat ourselves (usually neglect and cycles overindulgence/restriction.) We cannot bomb the bejesus out of the planet while we frack it and mine it and poison it and expect our bodies to thrive. It’s bigger than individual weight loss or gain. It’s bigger than just America has bad food. This is global, Europe started it, so escaping America to go to Europe won’t fix it.
I enjoyed reading this , and i can relate to a lot of all you are saying and have lived ! I agree with you ! It is our bodies and i try to keep telling myself that i dont care what other people think of my body , but still deep down it does concern me what others think about me in general ! I know it should not ! I too avoid converations with certain friend about my weight and body ! I am working on my thoughts on this ! Thank you for sharing this , your words have helped me so much !!!
Thanks for this. It really hits the spot. Trying to learn how to be at ease with this brand new body/metabolism gifted me by menopause. Jaysus. I rail against all the time I've spent trying to lose weight, change my shape, take up less space. But at the same time, the changes wrought by menopause haver spurred me to be more active than maybe ever in my life. I'm building muscle and on good days that makes me feel like f**king goddess. But still... What to wear, what to eat and not eat, will I ever feel like I've arrived at that place we're all trying to get to where we feel good about our bodies. I had a similar sense during my pregnancies of feeling so gorgeous in my round fatness. Why does that feeling fly away when the baby is born? Your essay made me feel seen and less alone. So thanks for that. Here's a poem I wrote about all this stuff, offered in trade: https://connort.substack.com/p/what-to-wear
This really resonated with me. I also gained 30lbs during covid and am nearly 50 and felt terrible. I was having a lot of joint pain etc. I did Weight Watchers and not only did it work, but I feel so much better! Of course I also enjoy buying a smaller size and not feeling like a whale in a bathing suit, but mostly I feel better. Why can't I want to be healthy AND look good??? Anyway, thanks for writing this. I'm tired of the feminist trope of fat activism. Obesity is a problem and leads to many health issues and glorifying it doesn't do anyone any favors.
The diet culture people can all fuck right off. I had a therapist I loved & who seemed to be a great fit, until I talked to her about working to lose the 40 lbs I gained during the pandemic that were on top of the "baby weight" I never lost, and wow - being shamed by your therapist for wanting to change something about your life is a special kind of WTAF. She was a "health at any size" practitioner and fully dedicated to only that perspective on bodies and how to be in them. I just wanted to not have my plantar fascitis not flare up, because it made my knees, then my hips hurt and I had to freqently chase my autistc child to keep him from running off to his certain death. I also just didn't like being so big & squishy & sweaty & out of breath. I got a new therapist & am still rounder than I want, but I'm less round and not being shamed for it.
It is a treat to have your magical words in my inbox twice in one week!
I agree that that therapist was wrong for you, but most of us have trouble finding a therapist w
Oops. I’ll continue. Most of us have trouble finding fat-accepting therapists, therapists who don’t view our fatness as pathological or reflective of some deep, dark issue. Yes, I understand that she was treating your weight loss seeking as also pathological, and that makes her a poor fit, but recognize that your experience is very much the exception, not the norm.
Seems to me the norm should be that therapists are able to see clients outside the lenses of their own political or social ideologies. How utterly insane that a person allegedly trained in the BRAIN can’t do more than slap their own read on the complex human being sitting before them. I’d leave immediately if I got some weird shaming for wanting to lose weight or for being fat. If a therapist can’t see past a superficial body judgment and/or their own political leanings there’s no way they can help me understand myself or the complexity of experience
I facepalmed so many times reading this. I wish people would stop trying to convince each other that there is one and only one (theirs) acceptable moral way to be in this world (this is probably broader than you intended, but this is how I interpret it.)
This made me tear up: "For some reason, in that moment, I was the most beautiful I had ever been. And I saw it, not from you, but from me."
Thank you, and I think what you got from this is the real point of what I'm saying here. It's wild how oversimplified everything becomes, and how tightly we cling to our black and white concepts of right and wrong. I mean, some moral issues are pretty clear (and oddly I see people floundering the MOST on what seems to me to be an easily agreed-upon shared value of morality), but most things are not so clear.
I so appreciate your writing -I’ve been an on and off reader for…a decade…maybe more…after my wife shared a few of your posts.
I was a student in one of your writing workshops during that welcomed time of reflection and panic we called COVID-19. There’s something approachable the way you share, cutting through the BS.
So, as a GenX male (yeah, arbitrary label), I’m sheepishly writing, and wondering if I’m supposed to be here. Oh. I am aren’t I? OK then.
First off, I still remember the time I asked a woman about her pregnancy only to be informed that she was not, in fact, with child. What a jerk, and an assumption couched in the body image expectations you write about.
Our culture swims in misogyny (dating back to, oh, the rise of permanent settlements fueled by agriculture in the “Fertile Crescent 11,000 years ago or whatever). That’s not intended
to be an excuse! But a way for me to contextualize just how f__king big of a problem this is.
I’m part of it in ways that irritate me and are evident when I laugh at jokes from movies like Airplane, Slapshot, Animal House, etc. and then I hate myself, which is not helping. I’m sure there’s bias and/or inflammatory points here, perhaps the mere point that I’m writing this.
The family I was raised in has enough toxic masculinity to keep me in therapy for the rest
of my days. the pressure to conform to some “ideal manhood” for me, is real.
Am I making enough money (no)? Am I ripped like a god (no)? Do I have a big enough truck to talk gear with other dads (minivan)? Can I converse intelligently about sports (kind of)? Do I meditate enough (shut your mouth! That’s not manly!) Is my dick hard enough (prefer not to answer)? More importantly, what do the people I love and respect have to say? Do I listen to them? Sometimes, but, mostly not.
And, I can push back against these narratives, especially with my sons, to break the cycle of what it means to be a man.
Apologies for a long-winded “thank you” disguised as an attempt to be witty.
Hi, Wayne, you very much belong here, and I hope you stay! I appreciate your insights. And thank you for reading my work, and for so long! I died at "and then I hate myself" after laughing as something we should not laugh at. My entire life.
I really cannot imagine the pressure of "ideal manhood," and there's no competition, of course -- seems we have figured out ways to decimate both sexes in creatively unique ways. Awkward laughter. For example I watched my boomer dad essentially die because he could not A.) Be "weak" in accepting his age and related frailty. B.) Be "weak" by getting help for mental conditions really messing up his life. and C.) Holding all of this inside because real mean would never admit anything along those lines.
I feel certain narratives of masculinity have cut boys and men off from the full range of human experience and there's a real reason why men kill themselves more often than women and experience more deaths of despair, etc. I've been writing about it in another essay, and surely some feminists will get mad at me for daring to speak of problems boys face, but as a fellow Gen X-er, I'm too old to give a shit. THERE IS ENOUGH PAIN TO GO AROUND, GUYS.
You and my husband would probably be friends. He's an outwardly "man's man" in that he grew up on a ranch, is a builder, and has a beard and demeanor that I always say makes him look like Amish mafia, but he gets tears in his eyes looking at his damn cat and when men talk to him about sports he smiles and nods like all the rest of us who don't know shit about sports. It's almost as if we're all individual human beings.
Still, honest to god, if I had to pick "an evil," I think I'd choose woman. We may go through a lot but at least we're allowed to connect in real ways with other women, and TALK ABOUT IT without people saying we're betraying our sex. It's also been hard for Mac to find male friends who want to talk about real things.
Anywho, I wrote a comment longer than yours, therefore my dick is larger.
I'm sorry. I had to. There's something wrong with me. But you said dick and that you laugh at Animal House so surely we're cool?
Thank you for being here.
I would listen to a Podcast on modern living with you and Wayne (Hi Wayne!). We need more folks having conversations about learning to relearn how to be a person in a land of systems built to kill us and opinions sold to us like gospel. We're all just trying to filter out the shit we know was never ours to carry while trying not to drown in the river of brown.
Apologies for my delay. I’m still working to set the right notifications and filters to receive those things for stuff I actually give a crap about, like this string.
Yes. The only podcast I listen to diligently is Your Undivided Attention by the Center for Humane Technology. While it’s focus on regulating tech, such that it gives a crap about human well-being, the reality is that underpins much of our society today, whether we like it or not.
As much as I decry the amount of content in the world, I’m wading into it with a friend - creating a radio program that’s evolving to be a Gen X, middle age, AI in the workforce, white male cringe fest. In other words, we shoot the shit anabout meaningful topics like toxic masculinity, parenting in a digital age, how to engage in our democracy and devolve into sophomore humor occasionally.
It’s on our local public access affiliate right now, which means about 12 people hear it, which is a great place to start. https://993wbtv.org/programs/yesterdays-update/
If anyone cares to stream it, maybe we’ll have 14 listeners. 😂
Glad the genitalia reference worked for you.
What you said about Mac not finding male friends that want to talk about real shit hit me too.
The problem I have is when there’s sliver of deeper connection with another man I word vomit all the late capitalism/toxic masculinity/consumer culture/disconnection from nature/social media is satan’s work stuff I think about a LOT in their face, and never get invited to the Memorial Day cookout.
I love your stories and you are awesome. This spoke to me- it’s my daily struggle and also I feel stupid & guilty about it because 1st world problems for me and also I didn’t ask for treatment-resistant depression so I try to cut myself some slack but mostly I just feel embarrassed 🫠
“The “eating while down” thing is particularly tricky because one must define “down.” There is “down” like the day my grandmother was murdered by my mentally ill cousin and then there is the daily “down,” of “I thought I’d be further along at this point in my life.”
Or, “Fuck me, corporate elites still run America.” The down that lives in the bones, just sort of swimming around, whispering malaise into the cracks of my skeleton. The boredom, the exhaustion. The existential down.
Do we eat to fix that too?
Yes, yes we do.”
Thank you, Joanna. I hear you sister. I am rather hesitant to admit it because it’s all rather clichéd but after I went to an inpatient trauma treatment center for what we shall call “childhood shit,” my entire relationship with my body, sex, and food transformed seemingly on its own. I mean I had to do a LOT of work in that center and for two years after, two years of dissociative episodes and a real blight on my fucking career (losing one’s mind tends to impede writing), but I see now how much of my embodied experience was a direct result of depression, trauma, and a body seeking something it would never find “out there.” I’m sorry about your depression. I am by no means “fixed,” but I believe I’ve been through the worst of it, for now, at least. I’m not sure what I’d do if it resisted treatment. My heart goes to you.
Every. Frickin’. Day. “ Fuck me, corporate elites still run America.”
Oh yes. I remember feeling magnificent in my big pregnant body. Look at me taking up space and growing a human being like it’s magic or something. Yes. Kinda awesome.
I was also raised in the Mormon church. It does a number on self esteem and body image, especially for women.
It really does. Particularly in the arena of sex, for me at least. But this was so connected to body. I was fundamentally disgusted by and ashamed of my sexual urges, which came from my body. It was viewed with such distrust and then the whole narrative that the Holy Ghost (lol) could only be in a “clean temple.” And then all the covering up. My lord. When did you leave the church? I was around 16.
Speaking of urges...
I've struggled my whole life with food/body/weight, and what I called emotional eating, and what I considered an eating disorder. I started semaglutides a few months ago, and guess what. This medication (for me) has turned off all the eating signals except the "my stomach is empty" one. What I considered emotional eating or an eating disorder was just body signals--even if they were emotional, they still existed *in my body*. My body was telling me to eat.
I realized: If I was getting signals that I had to pee, for example, even though my bladder was empty, that's a MEDICAL ISSUE. I might be annoyed with the signal, but I wouldn't consider it a character defect if I couldn't resist sitting on the toilet. So, why did I consider myself weak or broken for eating when my stomach was maybe not completely empty?
Medication-assisted treatment is now considered the gold standard of treatment for substance use disorders; basically, keeping the person from experiencing dopesickness goes a long way in helping them stay clean and sober.
I wonder if medication-assisted treatment will one day be considered standard for eating/weight issues.
Yes to all of this! I know glp-1s are new and people have a lot of opinions about them, but I feel like a late-diagnosed ADHD person on Adderall for the first time. As in: you mean to tell me this is how the "normal" people felt ALL THE TIME? I was operating from a deficit that convinced me I was hungry and it was also an emergency, and now I just eat when I actually physically need to. But of course I had to work through a ton of worries about whether my personal decision to try these drugs to feel better in my own body was somehow letting down feminism, because of all the messiness Janelle wrote about in this piece. Sigh.
Exactly.
And I'm also a late-diagnosed ADHD person who has tried Adderall, and the analogy is apt. "You fuckers have been walking around with this level of functioning the whole time?!"
Thank you for this piece. It hits home, hard. I am now 53, & the strongest I have ever been. Would i like to lose the belly left by a giant 1st baby and twins the second time around, that protrudes because I enjoy the celebration of small and big wins by including food? Sure I would, but I will not starve my self or participate in restriction culture any more. I was never designed to be thin, my wrist and shoulders are larger than my brothers. I am not sure i will learn to love my body in this life time, but wow, it feels good to be comfortable in it!
I feel all of this in my fat-padded bones. I started weight loss injections after several years of judging anyone I knew who’d been on them. I sat my teenage daughter and preteen kid down and talked them through the fact that, despite my 16 years of telling them (and myself) I loved my changing body in all of its flabby, changing ways, I’d been mostly lying. I told them I was starting the shots and that I was being honest because I didn’t want them to think I was secretly sick or dying if I succeeded at losing as much weight as I wanted. I told them part of my wish to lose weight was because I want to live longer and healthier than my genetic predisposition to T2 diabetes and high cholesterol might allow. But that the other part was that I missed being thinner. I told them that I’ve never been able to diet successfully because I suffered food insecurity when I was little, so feeling hunger pangs makes me panic. I told them that I’ve always wanted them to love their bodies in whatever form they are or become, but that I would be there for them if they ever don’t. It’s all so complicated and such bullshit. But life is short, and if we aren’t hurting someone else with our actions, maybe it’s all going to be just fine.
Burst into tears at the end. This was so artfully, beautifully done. Thank you.
"Are we working for individual liberation or are we fighting for conformity to shared ideology? "
I am putting this on my mirror as a reminder and may put it on a giant sign outside my door. I think we all (well, those of us who aren't unashamedly automatically pro conformity) we need to ask ourselves this more often.
Brilliant. Your writing makes me feel seen and truly captures life and motherhood and marriage and career and and and. Thank you.
We still aren’t talking about WHY everyone is puffy, inflamed, gaining weight, losing hair, losing teeth. Our physical health is a reflection of the health of the planet. The way we treat the earth is the way we treat ourselves (usually neglect and cycles overindulgence/restriction.) We cannot bomb the bejesus out of the planet while we frack it and mine it and poison it and expect our bodies to thrive. It’s bigger than individual weight loss or gain. It’s bigger than just America has bad food. This is global, Europe started it, so escaping America to go to Europe won’t fix it.
“ Are we working for individual liberation or are we fighting for conformity to shared ideology?” Nailed it.
I enjoyed reading this , and i can relate to a lot of all you are saying and have lived ! I agree with you ! It is our bodies and i try to keep telling myself that i dont care what other people think of my body , but still deep down it does concern me what others think about me in general ! I know it should not ! I too avoid converations with certain friend about my weight and body ! I am working on my thoughts on this ! Thank you for sharing this , your words have helped me so much !!!
Thanks for this. It really hits the spot. Trying to learn how to be at ease with this brand new body/metabolism gifted me by menopause. Jaysus. I rail against all the time I've spent trying to lose weight, change my shape, take up less space. But at the same time, the changes wrought by menopause haver spurred me to be more active than maybe ever in my life. I'm building muscle and on good days that makes me feel like f**king goddess. But still... What to wear, what to eat and not eat, will I ever feel like I've arrived at that place we're all trying to get to where we feel good about our bodies. I had a similar sense during my pregnancies of feeling so gorgeous in my round fatness. Why does that feeling fly away when the baby is born? Your essay made me feel seen and less alone. So thanks for that. Here's a poem I wrote about all this stuff, offered in trade: https://connort.substack.com/p/what-to-wear
This really resonated with me. I also gained 30lbs during covid and am nearly 50 and felt terrible. I was having a lot of joint pain etc. I did Weight Watchers and not only did it work, but I feel so much better! Of course I also enjoy buying a smaller size and not feeling like a whale in a bathing suit, but mostly I feel better. Why can't I want to be healthy AND look good??? Anyway, thanks for writing this. I'm tired of the feminist trope of fat activism. Obesity is a problem and leads to many health issues and glorifying it doesn't do anyone any favors.