Hey friends! Sorry for going AWOL for a few days, I took some time and went and visited my best friend in Edmonton. It’s so nice now that we’re all getting vaccinated to be able to comfortably see friends again.
I wanted to take a minute and expand on something I mentioned in my previous post about my pregnancy (if you haven’t, you can read that here). You’ll excuse me if it’s not really about motherhood or pregnancy – this is a bit of a tangent about knowing our bodies.
I mentioned that I hated my body before I even knew my body. This is a real thing. I wasn’t being hyperbolic. For most of my life, I felt completely disembodied. I felt like I was who I was in spite of my body. I felt no connection to my body as part of my self. Whenever my body let me down (or I perceived it to have let me down), I thought of it as some malicious other. Someone or something external to me that at best was incompetent, and at worst was sabotaging me.
I HATED this body. It was my enemy. It had made me too tall. Too fat. Too awkward. It gave me lactose intolerance and later, diverticulosis. This body gave me boobs and my period so early that at 9 I was being hit on by high school boys. This body made it so that I couldn’t fit in, there were no trendy clothes for me. It grew my feet to size 12 in grade 7, so that I could never wear cute shoes. This body formed kidney stones in my kidneys, and cysts in my groin (hidradenitis suppurativa – a horrible skin condition with higher rates among women and people in bigger bodies). It grew thick, wiry dark hair all over my legs and upper lip. All of these things amounted to my body making me a failure, socially unacceptable, romantically undesirable, and medically culpable. This body was ruining my life.
So, like any “good” member of our fatphobic and diet obsessed culture, I tried to control my body. Again, treating it like a malicious other. I tried diets. I tried exercise. I tried those crazy diet pills. I registered for classes and bought equipment. I followed “fitspo” accounts on instagram. The attempts always made me miserable. I may have been enthused at the start, but ultimately I was tired, grumpy, and hungry. They made me a worse friend and less fun to be around. But that didn’t stop anyone from praising me for being so dedicated to “improving myself”. Didn’t anyone notice I wasn’t improving? Obviously not, because friends, family, medical professionals, strangers, EVERYONE, applauded my efforts. It reinforced my belief that my body was the enemy, and “good Ashleigh” would be able to control it.
However, these attempts did not work. Not only did they fail to control my body, they backfired. Every time I made a concerted effort at reducing my body size, it bounced back with a vengeance. “Oh, you’re pathetic Ashleigh – you think you can make me lose 20 lbs? How about I make you gain 40!?” is what I imagined my body saying to me.
When control tactics didn’t work, I defaulted to hiding my body. Like it was a secret that nobody else was aware of. I thought if I only ate very small portions and ‘healthy’ foods in front of people, they wouldn’t notice how gross my actual appetite was. So I’d order a small salad while out with friends, and get McDonald’s on the way home, because I was starving. I thought If I wore clothes with labels like “minimizer” and “control panel” I could force my body to take up less space and be less noticeable.
When this didn’t work either, I feigned confidence. I said “I don’t fucking care!” and wore bright colours, and skinny jeans. I talked, loudly, about how being fat stopped me from doing things – “Oh, I can’t do that – don’t you see I’m fat?!” But this was a defence mechanism. Nothing else had worked, and if people were going to judge me for having to exist in this body, then, fuck, I was going out with a BANG. “oh me, Yeah, I’m fat and gross, haha!” I was essentially saying – it was the Marshall Mathers technique – burn yourself before anyone else the chance to think of it.
I was doing all of these things for the first … 33 years of my life. Usually in a cycle:
- Try to control
- Try to hide
- Give up and go full self-deprecating humour
- Be tired of shouting about how much you hate yourself, so start with
- Trying to control again
and on and on.
Throughout some of the later years, there started to be a “body positivity” movement, that talked about why you should love your body. YAY! We all deserve to LOVE OUR BODIES, right? Let’s celebrate those curves! Wooo hoooo!! I would snatch this shit up like crazy. Desperate to feel ANYTHING other than pure loathing, but it didn’t penetrate. I still was going through the control, hide, hate cycle. And I now understand this is because the Body Positivity movement is fatally flawed in the fact that it is an easily co-optable half measure. It leaves the onus on you, the individual, to find it in yourself to love a body that society has told you to hate for your whole life. And how do you love your body? By taking care of it of course! So there are also sneaky diet-culture messages that get in there. It’s messy, it doesn’t actually present a solution for the individual suffering through a fat-phobic culture, and ultimately can be harmful. It’s the Toxic Positivity version of Diet culture. @HannahTalksBodies does a GREAT job of unpacking this here. (Go follow her. She has been instrumental in my journey towards body neutrality and fat liberation).
As it turns out, the real solution is to neither hate nor love my body blindly. It’s to know my body. To take the time and do the work to really understand my body, to become one with my body. To stop being disembodied, and start realising that I do not exist without my body, and my body doesn’t exist without me. The way my body behaves is inextricably linked to a million different factors, some perceptible, some less so. Things like, evolutionary forces in my genes, fighting hard to keep me alive and fend starvation. Things like my emotions and my environment. Things like my natural appetite fuelled by my actual metabolism. Things like my culture, my upbringing. And transient things, like the weather, my quality of sleep, my activity level that day.
Only when I started to really get to know my body did I begin to break down the control, hide, hate cycle. Slowly I can see that in relationship with my body, we can do the real work of taking care of each other. I can nurture my body, and my body can nurture me. When it’s tired, I can rest. When it’s hungry I can feed it. When it’s full, I can stop eating. When it’s hot, I can wear shorts, or a swimsuit! When it’s full of energy, I can move it! But I can only respond to my body when I am in touch with her. She can only know what’s going on (oh, there isn’t a famine, I don’t need to eat all available food to save your life) if I respond to its messaging. Hunger cues? Those are your body communicating with you. Crankiness? That’s your body telling you that it needs something.
This process is long, and not complete. I still work every day to stop and listen to her. Instead of being ashamed of being too hungry, I listen and try to find out what she wants. And sometimes what she wants is cake. And that’s fine. Enjoy the cake and move on. If you’re interested in learning more about ALL of this, I really recommend you read Intuitive Eating – this book does a great job unpacking the scientific evidence (and there is a lot of it) that tells us that diet culture is harmful, and then going through the steps we all can take to become more in tune with our own bodies (this is call interoception, and just like any skill, with some teaching and some practice we all can improve). Also, I have recently started working with an incredible Psychologist with a PhD in eating disorder prevention and weight bias. This has been really helpful for me in going deeper in this work. If you have access to a good therapist, I always recommend it. I always recommend using the Psychology Today psychologist finder – you can filter on your issues and preferred therapist traits, including insurance providers. These issues are deeply ingrained, and hard to root out on our own, so get help from someone who has a map and can hold a flashlight for you.
As I mentioned earlier, this past weekend I was in Edmonton visiting my best friend. We’ve been best friends for about a decade. We met in university, have been roommates, and have travelled together. We both struggle with our weight, and have gone through some similar health problems. None of that stopped me from feeling self conscious on Saturday when we were out shopping, and I was hungry. We hadn’t eaten a very large breakfast, and a few hours had passed. We had no plans to get food, and in my mind I kept thinking “I am starving, but if she’s not hungry, then I shouldn’t be either”. It’s crazy. If ever there was a person I could feel safe with, it’s her. And yet the diet culture messaging of what my appetite SHOULD be was shaming me into ignoring what my appetite was. Eventually I realized this was crazy – if I was hungry, I should tell her, and request that we stop and grab food. So I did. And guess what? Nothing. No judgment, no shame. Just the realization that we hadn’t eaten in a while, and she was hungry too. So we found some food (McDonald’s McNuggets – because duh) and everything got better once we ate them. We both realized we were getting hangry, and the food actually made the rest of our errand running way easier.
Earlier when I said that my body was ruining my life, I was wrong. It’s internalized fatphobia and diet culture that is ruining my life. And I can actively take steps to fight for fat liberation. It’s a small act of resistance to feed my body when it’s hungry. It’s an even bigger act of resistance to have this blog. I’m so glad you’re joining me here, and I hope that this inspires you to think differently about your own body – regardless of it’s size, and think about how well you know it. Are you in tune with your body? Are you ever ashamed of it’s needs or wants? Take some time to think about an instance where you tried to control your body instead of listening to it? Why? What was your intent in that situation?
As always, thanks for reading!
Love, Ashleigh
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