The skinny lies we tell ourselves

This is a tale as old as time. The one between a woman, her weight, and all it carries.

We are young when the idea first pierces our consciousness. The breadcrumbs sprinkle into our daily lives before we can even pinpoint what they are: belly buttons and low rise flares. Hip bones. Our mothers drinking diet sodas. Wet Seal and spaghetti straps. Withholding then rewarding. Pendulum swinging. The I’ll be good tomorrows. The shame when we’re not.  

I have been a little overweight most of my life. Not in a way that jeopardized my health but in the way that earned questions from pediatricians like, “How much juice does she drink?” and ideas from my daughter’s first nanny like, “Why don’t you try only eating hard-boiled eggs?” I attribute this to a mix of genetics, lack of consistent exercise, and a passionate love of food. All of these factors existed before I knew, though. The day someone first used the “f word” on me lives rent-controlled in my brain forever. In fifth grade, a boy I thought was my friend called me and another girl “fat and fatter.” In all fairness, I had just called him and another boy “dumb and dumber,” in reference to the movie, but words cut deep in those tender years when our insecurities meet the mirror. I’m sure my words hurt him, too.

Not long after the “f word” was first used on me, I realized how my own behaviors could impact my weight. I started trading nuggets for salads. I skipped the juice. When I returned to overnight camp with the same bunk of girls much smaller than me, people noticed. A favorite staff member kept saying how amazing I looked and asking what I had been doing differently. (How much can a 12-year-old girl do differently?) Looking back, I hope she was being sincere. I would never be cute, like my tiny, athletic best friend that the counselors loved carrying around on their backs.  But I did feel a little more seen. I brought my first tankini to camp that summer and wore it with a towel wrapped around my waist. Badly, I wanted that for myself.

The teenage years can destroy anyone’s body image, but I had some help destroying mine. Weight Watchers fertilized all my bad thoughts and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. By morphing food into a points system and grouping pubescent teens with middle-aged women, they set up a framework for me to justify depriving myself. We weighed in like wrestlers and celebrated eating full boxes of 1-point popsicles. I was always exhausted, always on the elliptical to earn my slice of diet bread. That was my lunch: one slice of diet bread, cut in half, with light turkey and mustard. No cheese. One apple. A powdered drink for breakfast. I lived and died by the rules, because rules and numbers felt safe. SAT scores, class rankings, the size of my Miss Sixty jeans.

These were numbers to define ourselves by – numbers that spoke for us – when we couldn’t speak for ourselves.   

I am fortunate that disordered eating did not follow me into adulthood. Moving thousands of miles away for college gave me freedom from the great lengths I went to seek control. Finding love, new friendships, and more space to find my own joy, outweighed any voice inside telling me I was wrong for wanting these things. But the disordered thinking has been more of a chronic challenge than my diet ever has. There are years, maybe even decades, when I can quiet that voice inside. The voice that feeds young girls the narrative about what sizes and shapes they are supposed to be. The one that tells us we are more beautiful, more lovable, more valuable, when there is less of us.

But the voice does return. After giving birth to my first daughter, we moved to the suburbs in a town with no one familiar and a body I didn’t recognize. Everyone focuses on losing the baby weight, but no one talks about the leaving the city and driving everywhere weight, or the finishing your toddler’s pizza weight, or the autoimmune systems wreaking havoc on postpartum women weight. I carried all of that weight.

Mothers carry too much weight.

Until one day, my thyroid started eating itself. Like a switch that flipped, I began shedding weight faster than ever – fifteen pounds – through sweats, tremors, and twitches. I was convinced this was it, the final straw from years of mystery symptoms that would lead to an autoimmune disease diagnosis, which I was terrified of but mentally ready to receive. I was thin, though. At least there was that. Friends who knew what was going on still said I looked great. Sitting at the urgent care during the time between my first bloodwork and the soonest appointment with a specialist, even the physician’s assistant joked, “At least you probably have the good thyroid disease – the one that makes you skinny!”

We glamorize frail women. They are angelic, weak, and controlled. We all know that if I presented with the other thyroid disease (the one that makes you gain weight), we’d be blaming it all on me.

Every single time I’ve been thin, I’ve been sick. During the first six months of the pandemic, I dropped a lot of weight, too. All the running and walking was actually great for my physical health, but underneath my efforts was sheer terror. I truly believed we wouldn’t be able to find food, and I obsessed over keeping an anti-inflammatory diet to help me through what I thought would be our inevitable battle with COVID. Recently, I caught myself lamenting over a pair of size 27 jeans that no longer fit. I thought, how did I manage to stay so *healthy* when the world was falling apart? But my husband checked that lie right at the door.

“You weren’t healthy. You were thin, because you thought you were going to die.”

When I am in a good place, I don’t look like that. Right now, I don’t look like that. Even though I’m mentally stronger, in better shape, physically well, and all the numbers – the numbers! – check out, it’s still a tough pill of self-acceptance to swallow. But why? It shouldn’t be like this. Many of us are finally living some semblance of our normal lives again and enjoying them. If we are lucky, we’ve gained some perspective and are striving to live better than before. Clearly, my body wants me to be the size I am. It’s my brain that keeps on lying.

We don’t write our happy endings by gaining or losing. That perpetual cycle is a maddening way to never be satisfied and always be searching for another diet, another program, another way to change yourself. It’s not necessarily indicative of our overall health, either. Health is much more nuanced than what we learned growing up, and much of what we are still exposed to today.

The body positivity landscape has improved dramatically, but we are tasked with implementing its message. We can only win by pushing back on all the noise that lies to us about how we should look, and by doing everything we can to alter the story. Even when we don’t believe ourselves, because the lies are so loud.

We are the new adults in the room; the ones raising and teaching and guiding the next generation. Before they reach an age when social media can be blamed, we begin those lessons, and children deserve better ones. Don’t comment on the size of a child. Don’t tell them you’re on a diet. Don’t make them smaller; make them stronger, so that our generation’s whispers don’t turn into voices they can’t shut off.  

I’d love to keep talking about this: averagejoelle3@gmail.com.

---

The little things

Spring has sprung - on my nails

Are you sick of my manicures yet? All of my favorite nail artists on Instagram are showing flowers for spring, so I had to jump on it, even if it meant my hands didn’t match the temperature outside. I’m manifesting, though!

---

Also

New York Magazine published The Thing She Carried, a chilling story in photos of the most important items Ukrainian refugees brought with them from home.