Weighted | The Button Jar
Content note: this post talks about weight and weight loss, and other people’s reactions to it. Please note, I realise weight is a very personal subject. Each person’s relationship with their body is entirely their own. My decision to lose a little weight was the right one for me, but should not be read as indicative of my views about bodies in general. Accordingly, I have written this to within the confines of my experience.
And this post contains swears. #$@%!
I’ve lost a little weight recently.
And I would like to talk a little about my experience of it, but also about some of the reactions to my weight loss that I’ve found challenging to deal with.
A few years ago I went through a period of depression and high anxiety, and that (coupled with the changing metabolism of a person in their mid-thirties) meant I put on a bit of weight. Not a lot, but a bit. At the time I was dismayed that it happened. But what I was more dismayed about was something else: my younger self’s attitude towards her body.
Me circa 2008. Can you believe, I thought I looked awful that night, that I shouldn’t have worn a bias-cut top because I was “too large” to wear that cut of top? I can only shake my head in sadness at that attitude now.
I found myself looking through photos of my younger, slimmer self, utterly gobsmacked that this lithe thing in those pictures hated her body and could only see it as something that needed to be smaller and smaller and smaller. I never had an eating disorder, but I had a cruel, punitive view on the size I was, and what I thought I should be. Where I should have been relishing my twenties, I was worried about the three or four or whatever kilograms that my frame really didn’t need to lose.
So for a year or two I sat with it. I sat with the new weight on my body, and I sat with my sadness and regret at the attitude of my younger self. And I tried really hard to sit without judgement. I’ve been working hard at seeing myself in the moment through a lens of kindness, compassion, positivity, and if those weren’t possible, at least neutrality. And sewing has been wonderful for that: for learning to accept, appreciate, care for and dress courageously the body I have. Learning to see my larger self in photos and think, “hey, that outfit looks awesome! I look great! I’m going to post that on Instagram!” Because I didn’t want the person I will become in my forties to be as sad as this thirty-something self found herself about her twenty-something self.
During that time I consciously decided not to try lose the weight, even though it was the familiar clarion call of old. I knew I would like to eventually try lose the weight I had gained (I have a family history of diabetes) but I did not want to until that decision to lose weight could come from a place of kindness, and could come from acts that were outside the goal of ‘weight-loss’ in and of itself. I started running because it soothes my anxiety and boosts my mood; I started to drink less alcohol because, as a child of an alcoholic, I’ve always had a fraught relationship to alcohol, and I feel better on a number of emotional levels when I don’t drink a lot; we cut back on red meat and diary because of our concerns about climate change; plus a few other shifts that were meaningful in ways that was far more important than weight management.
Since the beginning of the year I’ve lost maybe seven, eight kilograms (give or take the vagaries of menstrual cycles, celebration meals and energetic weeks of exercising). It’s not a huge change, but its enough that others have started noticing. But with each step my focus has been one of equilibrium: “I feel good now and if the weight loss stops here that’s fine, I’ll accept that as where my body is wanting to settle”. I want to view my self, who has been coming out of one of the hardest periods of her life, not through superficial judgments about her size, but through celebration about how much she grew emotionally, how hard she worked in therapy to deal with past traumas, what she achieved in her life and loves and profession. You know—meaningful lenses!
This woman you see on your left has just completed her confirmation in her PhD—she’s glowing with professional pride! And the woman on your right is relishing the first quickening of spring in Wellington’s fickle shift out of winter. They’re not ‘before’ and ‘after’. They’re a continuum of the exact same person, on the same growth trajectory, as valuable as each other, caring for themselves in different ways in that moment but each in a way that encapsulates a new-found enjoyment and satisfaction and boldness in living her life.
And it’s with trying to hold this way of thinking in mind that I’ve found some of the reactions to my weight loss either problematic, or outright damaging. Particularly my father’s.
I saw him last week. I haven’t seen him since March (we’re not close) so he hasn’t seen the process of my weight loss. But his response was SO enthusiastic (ebullient about it, even) that it made me feel terrible.
Dad’s response—with it’s completely over the top enthusiasm that extended throughout the whole evening—immediately threw me back into my old cycle of body hatred. My new-found equilibrium of: ‘I’m here and I feel good’ disappeared in a flash. The angry side of me wanted to yell, ‘FUCK you!’ at him, and try to put all the weight back on. The anxious side of me immediately went back into self-loathing, feeling terrible about my current weight, panicking about gaining the weight loss back and stressing that I wasn’t losing enough weight, fast enough. It was so disturbing.
As context, the enthusiasm he showed for my weight loss comprehensively exceeded any enthusiasm he has shown for any of my professional or life achievements. I don’t think he ever congratulated that woman above, when she completed her confirmation. I don’t think he was nearly as congratulatory when Justin and I had our civil union. (Oh, and his response to my sewing? I told him last summer I was making myself a pair of shorts and he scoffed and said, “why don’t you just buy some?”)
That evening, I felt in his eyes like a decorative ornament, a slightly-smaller-than-before Fabergé egg, empty inside, but with increased value because of weight loss.
He saw me as ‘more’ because I was ‘less’.
Which brings me to a different reaction that I find so, so sad. A couple days after my encounter with Dad, I bumped into a fellow PhD student whom I haven’t seen in a while. She said how well I was looking because of the weight loss and within a heartbeat started denigrating herself, saying she ought to lose weight, come on runs with me, etc, etc. A few minutes later, at the talk we were attending, she tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Look, I’ve messed up already, I ate half a doughnut!” The immediate instinct to cruelly police her own body (irrespective of the size she is) on seeing another woman’s weight loss was awful to witness.
My father’s reaction as damaging to me, but I see my colleague’s reaction as sad and problematic for the apparent way she thinks she needs to treat herself.
After Dad’s reaction, I felt the familiar, sticky, sludgy feelings of depression gather around me, but I’m relieved I didn’t slip into it entirely. I am starting to regain my equilibrium: understanding and being empathetic to myself again. But the past little while has made me hyper-conscious and desperately sad about how often people equate ‘small-er’ with ‘good’ when it comes to bodies—particularly women’s bodies—in society. How people see the size of the body, not the size of the spirit, the size of the love, the size of the personality and the skill and the work and the growth.
I’m not really sure to round this off, except to say that learning to see my body as a palimpsest of every stage that it was, is and will be, is hard-won and iterative. I refuse to accept the ‘before and after’ mentality of a society obsessed with ‘thinness’ as a marker of worth.
I am a whole, total being, on a continuum of growth and aging, within a frame that I choose to be kindly towards, care about in the way that suits me, and sew beautiful things to clothe myself in.
And an emphatic fuck you to anyone who sees me as less than that.
