Like most children, I grew up in a world where weight mattered. My mother was self-conscious about her weight, and how much weight others had gained or lost was always a ripe topic of discussion.
As a teenager I believed that if I weighed less I'd be loved more. I knew that the only reason I wasn't as popular as I wished was because I wasn't slender. I was built like a farm girl: strong and square.
My belief that my body was responsible for all my social inadequacies didn't inspire me to change anything about how I ate, however. I still baked batches of warm chocolate chip cookies, drank chocolate milk, and ate appreciatively of my mother's homemade bread drizzled with butter.
Sally Tisdale's book The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food [1] discusses how deeply food is engrained in our personal histories. The foods we were nourished with as a child become an indelible part of our psyche, evoking tastes, scents, and cravings long into adulthoood.
Yet sadly, for so many women, eating is no longer about nourishment. It has become a secret, dirty pleasure.
When I was a teenager, I put up with my shameful body because I believed that I had no control over my desire to eat. I tried diets from women's magazines but abandoned them when cold cabbage soup couldn't assuage my emotional hunger. I despised myself as weak when I reached for cookies for breakfast. I truly felt that my weight was a red flag to the world, signalling a weak will.
These attitudes were not unique to my teenage self. They are common in the cult of beauty. The feelings of shame and guilt about having a body that doesn't reflect our innermost dream about who we are can be torturous and lead us to feel like we are two people: the one who squeezes into ugly clothing, and the one we are in our dreams.
That is why is angers me so much when people (mainly men) tell me, "Overweight people are that way because they choose it. It's a simple equation: what you gain is what you eat minus what you burn."
Weight is emotional. The heft of our body can weigh our hearts down. Images of stick-thin models encourage us to believe that burning away all fat will lighten our spirits until we blissfully drift away. Our desire for food is heavily influenced by whether we are happy or sad, content or stressed. Food is our friend and enemy, filling us with the loving remembrance of childhood pleasures and the corresponding guilt of indulgence.
It is tragic how deeply our body image affects our sense of ourselves as sexual creatures. We've been led to believe that we cannot be attractive or sexy unless we have a certain body type.
Some of us, like myself, were even taught to believe that whether or not people like us is based on our appearance. Every time a guy we like rejects us, every time we don't get noticed, every time a relationship breaks up, it is tempting to blame it on our bodies.
"If I were more beautiful, he'd still be in love with me. If I were more beautiful, I'd have men falling over their feet to be with me. If I were more beautiful, I'd be happier."
Wrong. This might only be true if we replaced the "If I were more beautiful…" with "If only I loved myself more…"
I have learned to live comfortably and happily in my body no matter what my shape and size, but I know that I will never escape the cultural mandate that punishes women for volputuous, sensuous, natural bodies.
Today, years removed from the chunky figure of my teenage years, I am embarrassed to admit that I am still proud of myself when I lose a few pounds. The lower number on the scale is like a pat on the back. In the back of my mind I imagine my mother telling me, "You've done well."
As women, we owe it to one another to stop perpetuating the cult of weight. What would happen if we all stopped criticizing others for their weight? Stopped complimenting friends for having lost a few pounds? Stopped obsessing over dress sizes and diets? Started enjoying good food, good living, and the wonderful bodies that make it all possible?
I think that the world would be a better place. 🙂