Chasing Beautiful
And why it's time to stop
Hello!
Sometimes, my son likes to lift my shirt and poke at my tummy. He drums on it, blows raspberries, inspects my roomy belly button.
"Why is your tummy so big?" my daughters have asked me at various times.
Because I like ice cream and beer, I think. "Because it needed room for your little bodies to grow inside of it," I say instead. Both are true.
My relationship with my body has been a journey. I've hated it, loved it, respected it, and punished it. But lately, I'm starting to move past all of that. There's this movement out there, you may have heard of it, called "body positivity." Rather than the fat-shaming that goes on under the guise of caring about people's health, rather than promoting the ideal that there is one version of beauty - skinny and smooth and flawless - body positivity asserts that all bodies are beautiful.
Which, yeah. Sure. Bodies are beautiful, I guess. Inasmuch as a flower or a mountain or a burbling brook is beautiful. Bodies - fat, thin, tall, short, with or without a full complement of appendages - are beautiful because they're a creation of nature, capable of propagating more bodies and continuing on the circle of life. OK, I can get behind that.
But it's always felt to me that the body positivity movement was a swing too far on the pendulum. Things in this world come in pairs. In order for there to be beauty, there must be ugliness, too. And if we walk around defining some - any - bodies as beautiful, the natural next question is, "What is ugly?"
So then of course there is this other movement called body neutrality. Which is much more my jam. This ethos says bodies are just bodies. Reader Barbara said it better than I ever could: "...my body is just where I live. It is not me. I need it to get around this life, so I take care of it as best I an, but it is not a reflection of who I am or what I am worth."
I've been thinking (and, of course, writing!) a lot about this lately, and here I wanted to put my recent articles on the topic of redefining beauty and separating the body from the beauty.
First up is a reimagining of a piece I wrote a while back about finding my beach body. Turns out it wasn't as hard as I'd been led to believe all these years. I even included an actual photo of me at the beach, bathing suit and all. Because why not?!
Next is an idea I've struggled with throughout my weight saga. I've spanned 100 lbs or more in my adult life, and never once felt like my body looked "right." It took a lot of years and soul-searching to realize there's no such thing as an after photo.
On the heels of that epiphany, I started thinking about all the assumptions we carry about beauty and what it means to be beautiful - namely an association with youth and slenderness. (And whiteness, which I don't get into in this particular article which you can learn more about here and here.)
And, finally (for now), I reflected a lot on my expectations as I've worked through a weight loss program over the last few years. Specifically how I look into the eyes of everyone I see, waiting for them to show some sign they notice my weight loss. There's something unhealthy about that, isn't there? Why are we so quick to praise someone for losing weight or whisper about them when they gain it? So, I'm asking friends, family, and strangers to rethink the way we talk to people (especially, but not exclusively, women) about their bodies. The more thoughtful you are about it, the better you'll be at giving compliments that will stick with people much longer and don't center on their bodies.
Okay, that's it for now. What are your thoughts? Check in over at Facebook, or reply below.
See you next time!
P.S. Send this to someone in your life who enjoys questioning our societal norms. We can break the system together!
P.P.S. I can't believe I almost forgot to tell you that next week's blog is going to be super special and super cool and you won't want to miss it. I.Am.So.Excited! Stay tuned!
P.P.P.S. Still checking my email every three minutes for news about the book. Anxiety is totally not eating me from the inside out. Definitely not.