So, yeah, okay, enough time has passed for me to post about this once more without feeling as if I am being repetitive. If you don't think so, you're free to bail right now.
When I was reading some of the fat acceptance and eating disorder and body dysmorphic sites last weekend, I came across a conversation in which a whole lot of women said that their road to food/body issues came in adolescence with reading in teenage girl/women's magazines the weight guideline of "100 lbs for 5 feet and 5 pounds an inch above that." I was like, holy crap! Me too!
At the end of eighth grade, I went on a 500 calorie a day diet for two months in order to starve myself down to the 110 pounds I was "supposed" to be. Never mind the fact that, even then, I had big boobs, and the fact that I was genetically predisposed to bulging thighs by the ancestors who needed them for digging turnips and spitting out babies on the steppe. There's no way I'm supposed to be 110 or under. Nevertheless, two months of not eating got me there.
Let's pause here to consider the fuckedupedness of my mom not only letting me do this, but approving of it. I remember her telling me while I was on My Very First Real Diet that she had a dream about me lying down and my stomach was concave and my hipbones sticking out and how great that was. She had her own body issues. She also was the world's best cook and baker, and no matter how tight money was at any given point, always bought the best food. No off-brand groceries, bruised vegetables, or going without meat or real butter or real cream for her family, even if it meant trips to four different supermarkets, compulsive coupon clipping, and scrimping on other things. So, there I was, being told on one hand that delicious, pleasurable food was important and on the other that being thinner than I was genetically meant to be was beautiful and desirable. Lalalala, hello binge eating and bulimic behavior.
Anyway, I did get down to 110 by 8th grade graduation and, damn, if I didn't get positive strokes about it from everyone, including my crush Brian H. who finally asked me out, made out with me in the music room the whole afternoon we were supposed to be decorating for our graduation dance, and was my boyfriend for a whole heady couple of weeks. I couldn't stay 110, though, and thus spent my entire high school and college years feeling way too fat when I weighed 115-120. Are you serious? Yup, I am. Now, it's possible that my big breasts and bulgy thighs would have made me insecure (after all, I had to deal with all six feet of Brooke Shields having nothing in between her and her Calvins, and growing another ten inches was even less likely than weighing less than a buck fifteen) even had I never heard that magic number, but it certainly didn't help. It was a concrete measure of something I felt I should be but just couldn't achieve.
Ironically, the first time I ever really appreciated my body, my whole body, not just the parts I found acceptable, was with pregnancy and nursing. For the first time, I could like my body for what it did, rather than what it looked like. I grew a baby in there, how cool. I spit that baby out without any pain meds, how cool (and, in retrospect, stupid.) I nourished that baby with just what my body could make all by itself for months, how fabulous. It was a turning point. As messed up as my body image still can be at times now, I do have appreciation of it for what it can do these days: walk ten miles, hike to the top of something, give a massage, get my ankles behind...oh, never mind. Suffice it to say, when I start hating how certain parts of me look, doing something that points out how strong or flexible or useful my body is, is the first, best step to getting out of that negative place.
I'd still like to bitch slap the douche who came up with the five pounds for every inch rule.
xoxo
1 comment:
In one sense, I'm part of the societal problem--I draw certain conclusions based on bodies, and they're not always generous to the bigger ones.
My rationalization is that genetics *must* have bestowed upon us a biological "unhealthy" detector, and we're silly to try to deny that we're all running one down in our subconscious somewhere. The problems I perceive begin when we as a society mix the signals from the one that abhors obesity for things like its waste of the tribe's nutritional assets, with the one that follows the whim of the crowd because it perhaps figures it's a short-cut to mating with the good genes without having to waste any energy thinking about it.
In my opinion, that "whim of the crowd" thing has wobbled all over the map, from the now-abhored "Rubenesque" pear shape, to wasp waists and the 100 +5 anorexic/bulemic death spiral (cue Karen Carpenter crooning "We've Only Just Begun") and I essentially don't care for others sloppy seconds. Nobody's suggesting 100 +5 is sane, or healthy, or bound to result in anything other than physical and mental disorders of frightening persistence, but neither is the indulgence of cottage cheese thighs because some randy painter tended to get luckier with those shaped models than the skinny kind.
I've found the sexiest women are the ones who are comfortable with their bodies. Sometimes they're 100 +5, but never via anorexia or bulemia or a gym fetish of unreasonable proportions. Sometimes they're 120 +10, but never via artery-sclerotic gluttony and/or slothfulness. They're what they ought to be, and happy to share with those they please.
I've always been eager to please ;-)
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