It Looks Like It's Supposed To
Just not the way "they" think it should
It is interesting how we come to the impression of how our bodies should look. We can look at our birth parents, siblings, and extended family and see how genetics influenced things. We can look to society’s collaborative impression of beauty and decide how we should measure up. We can look to our own past body image in photos and memory and think of how we looked then versus how we look now and we can also form opinions about which is better.
I’m 62 and by that time, the body has some miles on it. I have been pregnant and given birth six times and came away from each pregnancy heavier than I went into it by varying degrees. I am wearing decades of fat accumulated from foods I ate to feel good when I felt like my life was burning down around me. My knees and back start to complain when I stand or walk for too long. I snore horribly. My belly gets in the way of doing things I want to do. I don’t need a seatbelt extender on an airplane but man, it’s close. The large muscles in my body are not nearly as strong as they should be.
I don’t hear well because of Meniere’s Disease, which also affects my balance which isn’t great when excess weight makes a fall more dangerous. Sure, you have more fat to land out and cushion a fall, but you also have more weight coming down onto your skeletal structure and muscle groups. I struggle going up and down long stairways, partly because of the excess weight and partly because of the balance issue. Since my hysterectomy, my body doesn’t ask for permission twice when it needs to pee.
Other than those things, my body has been pretty good to me overall. It has tolerated a great deal of shit I put it through. I have often said that part of the reason it is difficult for me to lose weight is that I don’t hate my body nearly enough. I grew up with a very obese mother and for the last half of my life at home, my father was also obese. Both of my younger brothers were extremely overweight the last time I saw them in 2003.
My mother has many brothers and sisters and they have two standard shapes. They are either tall, lanky, and weather-faced or they are round, jolly, and soft:
I remember at my mother’s funeral my Aunt Hazel (my grandfather’s sister) commenting on how much weight I had gained since my father died in 1986, 17 years before.
“Why Kathy, the last time I saw you, you wasn’t but this big.” [holds her hands out in front of her, making a circle with her fingers about the size of a dinner plate]
“Yep, Aunt Hazel. You’re right.”
Someone else walked up to offer their condolences and Aunt Hazel said to them, “I was just telling Kathy that the last time I saw her, she wasn’t but this big.” "[Again holds out her hands to demonstrate my previous and clearly preferred state of slender]
“I’m just going to go stand by someone else, now, Aunt Hazel.”
As I walked away, I heard her say to the next person in line, “I was just telling Kathy that the last time I saw her, she wasn’t but this big.”
I don’t know the full extent of the nature vs nurture factors in my own obesity. I know that neither of my husbands (consecutively, not concurrently) ever had a day of dealing with obesity other than mine. They ate and ate and ate like bears and stayed slender. They ate complete garbage and stayed slender. Eric is much more active than Paul was and there is not an ounce of spare fat on him.
Of course, he also eats salads like there’s going to be a run on produce and he’ll never see another head of romaine again. He rock climbs. He does UFC fighting. He swims. He does it all. He also eats ice cream almost every day, power eats sugar-sweetened cereal, has bagels every morning with or for his breakfast, and drink beer.
Neither of the husbands “got it” where the obesity struggle is concerned and that is forty-five years of living with people who just don’t get it. I don’t know if I would have been happier or thinner or better off if I’d been partnered with someone who knew what obesity was like. I really can’t say. I likely would have encountered greater compassion and understanding, but I also may have run into some enabling behaviors that I did not have with the husbands I did choose.
Any kindness I have had regarding my body had to come from me. Thankfully, not everyone has the same experiences that I have had, but for me, once I got past a certain weight and added into that a certain age, I no longer heard that I was beautiful or desirable. The flirting stopped. I was a bit late in catching up with that message and for a very long time, still felt beautiful and vibrant and succulent. After a decade or so with no feedback in that regard, I just stopped thinking about it one way or another.
I don’t feel bad about my body. When I think about my body as a woman, as a sexual being, as a source or receiver of any kind of passionate anything, the word that comes to my mind is “silent.” It feels “silent.” It is there, but it does not move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t make a sound.
I am surrounded by love. Let me tell you, I have the most amazing friends in my life. I have a beautiful relationship with one of my cousins. I am close with my sister-in-law, although we do not talk often. There is no lack of love and validation in my life. For that, I am profoundly and humbly grateful.
Because that passionate part of my life is silent, I feel no need to cater to it. My motivation to lose weight is the same as it would be if I lived alone in the world. I want to hurt less. I want to move more easily. I want to sleep better. I want to be more graceful. If in achieving those goals, some hybernating and silent part of me decides to shake itself awake, that’s fine. I can’t, however, invest a year or two into careful eating, increased movement, deprivation, and dopamine loss just to f*** around and find out, just on the off chance that I might one day feel that way again.
Given my DNA, my inexcusable and fantastical lack of alternative coping strategies, my inability to feel passionate about anything other than food, my post-menopausal hormones, and how much I have to lose to be a “normal” size, I am already fighting an uphill battle. The odds are against me in a big way.
This isn’t about winning or losing. I get that. “It’s a lifestyle.” “It’s a choice every single time.” “It’s loving yourself enough to do it.” Throw out every platitude and I will nod and smile and agree. I seriously looked over several thousand memes and motivators and other graphics to find things to include in this journal that did not make me cringe. It’s grim. I hated most of them.
It’s weird how much our society absolutely hates fat people. The “othering” that occurs when obesity is such a predominant condition is amazing. Nearly all of those graphics referenced how much we should, of course, desire to be some other way than we are. We need to “change your mind so you can change your body.” We should work hard to “fit in” and conform and look more normal. We should adjust our bodies so that other people don’t want to look away in discomfort when they see us.
The bizarre food pyramid that we grew up with making grains the foundation of our diet ruined many of us and sent the aggregate weight of Americans to incredible heights… all to pander to the corn industry. The GMOs and other chemicals in our food designed specifically to make the food bigger also makes us bigger and guess what? Poor people often can’t afford non-GMO foods.
The ever-increasing economic vise that continually tightens around us to prevent ANY kind of forward advancement creates continual stress for everyone. Then your kids grow up and get stressed because they can’t succeed, so you have their stress compounded onto your own stress to manage.
When I was growing up, most moms stayed home. When my older kids were growing up, it was understood that you could not raise a family on one income, so both parents had to work, which amplified stress even further. Now we need childcare. Now we leave our kids with strangers for most of their day and hope they are not abused. Now we have to somehow effectively manage a home when both adults work full time.
These days, having two adults in the family working tull time does not create enough income to finance a family. How can we not be stressed when we are on this hamster wheel, continually running faster and faster to outpace the predator of total poverty? When we are one blown transmission or one layoff away from complete financial disaster?
Yes, I am lucky. Eric and I lived in poverty for the first two decades of our marriage. Paul and I lived in poverty for almost two decades before that. I lived in poverty for two years as a single mother between marriages. I grew up in poverty in Kentucky. Now, I have to try and manage the effects of that poverty where my body is concerned.
Now, Eric and I are safe and people say, “Oh, you are so lucky.” Yeah, luck had something to do with it, but so did all the years we didn’t have family vacations, and all the years our kids didn’t play sports and couldn’t go to science camp.
Taking chances on starting businesses that may or may not be successful and would ruin us if they were not successful had something to do with it. Finding multiple income streams, even little ones that could combine to make it work had something to do with it. Having a husband with a degree in business who worked his ass off to get an electrical contractor license and was a whiz at the stock market had something to do with it. Thanks to luck and other things, we do not now live in poverty and since I am semi-retired, I can at last take a breath and finally manage this obesity thing.
At least I hope I can. This is the last frontier. This is the one place in my life where I do not yet feel successful. This is The Thing that has bested me since I was a child. On one hand, the argument is always, “It’s easy. Just eat less, move more.” On the other hand, I feel like the deck is stacked against me and I am trying to win a game that is rigged. It’s not about winning, it’s about… [insert platitude here.]
It doesn’t mean I can’t do it. It just means I have to be clear about what I am taking on and appreciate even more every single little victory I can manage.
That’s my story and I’m stickin to it.
Thank You for sharing. I look forward to your posts.
Agree with everything you said, I am working this lifestyle for myself, to be Healthy and be able to see my Grandkids grow and great grandkids thrive. Thanks for waking me up my Friend.