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I was recently talking with a friend, G, about how all-consuming thoughts about weight loss and food can be, and I was struck by how many of her honest thoughts echoed my own. G offered to write a post, and (for me at least) this essay had me nodding my head so much. Huge thanks to G!
Some questions to consider:
How much do you think about your weight? How is your body image? How has your perspective on your body changed over the years, e.g., after pregnancy? Have you embraced body positivity, or body neutrality? How much is being preoccupied with your weight a “women's issue”? (If this essay ISN'T ringing bells for you, please share your secrets or resources!)
Take it away, G…
I've been preoccupied with my weight for a long time. A very long time. If you can relate, do you ever wonder about the total hours, days, years you've spent focusing on yours? What portion of my time on this Earth have I devoted to wanting to be thinner, finding out how to get thinner, working to get thinner, or beating myself up about not trying hard enough.
Where else could I have directed this wasted this brain power and time to? Hobbies? Reading? Chatting with friends? Learning something OTHER than weight loss strategies? Aiming for goals OTHER than getting smaller? I'll never know.
To me, body positivity or even body neutrality seem unattainable. I envy those who can embrace those philosophies — while simultaneously not wanting to “let myself go.” Apparently, my feminist ideals are not strong enough to counteract the effects of being bombarded with images of thin, beautiful models and celebrities for decades.
{related: how to shop for clothes while losing weight}
I wrote this post because I know some readers will relate to the outsized portion of my “wild and precious life” that I've wasted on the following:
Weighing myself. Several years ago, around age 40, after continually gaining and losing weight for a long time, I somehow attained my high school weight. My high school weight! I was thrilled and, I admit, a bit smug. I somehow maintained it through part of the pandemic, but the number has been creeping up. I'm frustrated with myself, and I have to get back. I am simply unable to tell myself, “It's not even that much weight, who cares?” (For one, I can't ignore the too-tight waistline of my favorite jeans.)
I must weigh myself every morning; I must write it down. (I save these logs for years.) And when the number goes in the wrong direction, I can adjust my eating — or try to, and then feel bad when I fail. Weigh-ins must be sans clothes and before eating. Occasionally, when I'm not certain I can trust the number on the scale, I grab a five-pound weight to double-check its calibration.
Getting weighed at doctors' offices always bothers me, because clothing artificially boosts the number. At summertime appointments, it grosses me out to step on the scale barefoot, but I'm definitely not leaving my shoes on. I have a physical scheduled in a couple of months and among other reasons, I'm trying to lose weight for it.
By the way, the Cleveland Clinic recommends weighing yourself only twice a week because it's normal to fluctuate from day to day. To the Cleveland Clinic, I say, “Whatever.”
{related: what to know about binge eating disorder}
Continually body checking. Staring at my reflection in our full-length mirror: Ugh, I look pregnant — is that fat or just bloating? How much of my calves and thighs is muscle, and how much is fat? What would I look like with a breast lift? Does this (minor!) loose skin from pregnancy qualify for a mini tummy tuck? I can't wear this shirt — the back shows the fat bulging alongside my bra.
Outside my bedroom, I check my reflection in the glass doors of the grocery store frozen section, in storefront windows, at the gym as I work out beside my willowy-thin trainer. And wow, those dressing room mirrors are a harsh wakeup call. When I stay in a hotel room without a full-length mirror, it irks me that I can't examine what I look like after getting dressed for the day.
It doesn't help that my teenage years took place during the “heroin chic,” ultra-low-rise jeans era. Even our brows were supposed to be skinny.
On the flip side, when I AM at my goal weight, the mirror is my validation as it reflects a (modest) thigh gap, slim arms, small waist, flat-ish stomach, prominent collarbones. (When I got headshots taken, the photographer complimented them.) I became a mom in my early 30s, and after losing the baby weight (thanks, breastfeeding) I'd occasionally lift up my shirt in the restroom at work and gaze into the mirror to admire my small waist. Fortunately, my coworkers never caught me doing that.
Unsurprisingly, I always examine photos of myself with a super-critical eye. When I see social media images I've been tagged in, my stomach and thighs look too big, my legs look weird, and so on. You get the picture (no pun intended).
{related: how to keep a working wardrobe while losing weight}
Becoming a veteran of food-tracking and weight-loss apps: On and off for about 20 years (20 YEARS, god that's depressing), I've used WeightWatchers (now euphemistically named “WW”), SparkPeople, MyFitnessPal, HealthyWage, HappyScale, and more.
No one loves counting calories (or WW points), but for me, it eventually turns into an obsession. It also backfires by inadvertently encouraging me to eat convenience foods and avoid cooking from scratch. The nutritional info is right on the label — no annoying recipe calculations required. (Fruit is easy, though. I'll never forget that a banana is about 110 calories and an apple is about 90.)
Reading about losing weight: I've read about intuitive eating, bought books about beating binge eating, and absorbed numerous weight-loss facts from sources like the women's magazines I read in my teens and early 20s — Seventeen, Cosmo, Glamour. The Beauty Myth, which I devoured as a teenager, wasn't a sufficient foil.
The adages and cliches I've absorbed — accurate or not — are etched into my brain. An extra 3,500 calories a week makes you gain a pound; an equal reduction means an equal loss (apparently a myth). “If you bite it, write it,” courtesy of WW devotees. Don't shop when you're hungry. Drink water before a meal so you'll eat less. You can't outrun a bad diet. Losing weight makes you look good in clothes; exercising makes you look good naked. Muscle weighs more than fat (technically, no; it's more dense).
{related: women, drinking, and overachieving}
Being super conscious about my outfits. When I've deemed my weight “too much,” how much time have I wasted on the days I've cycled through two or three outfits until landing on one that doesn't make me look “fat.” A complicating factor: I've been a 34D/34DD, and as anyone with a large chest knows, that causes some tops to stand out from your body, making your whole torso look bigger. So, I avoid those.
When I used to wear belts, I only wore ones with a flat buckle that wouldn't make my stomach look bigger. At my heaviest, I shunned shorts in the summer, no matter the temperature, and instead donned capri jeans (um, unflattering). I do wear shorts now.
Back to women's magazines: Their ubiquitous tips for dressing in a flattering way are ingrained in my mind, just like those weight loss tips. Horizontal stripes make you look bigger, as do larger prints. Jeans with widely-spaced back pockets make your butt look big. A monochrome outfit, especially black, makes you look slimmer. Ankle straps on shoes make your legs look shorter. You can get a tailor to sew your pants pockets closed to reduce bulk.
{related: cupcakes and the office: how to say no to food pushers at the office}
Being unable to resist compare my body to others'. You know those classic, reassuring sayings meant to combat self-consciousness, such as “People aren't paying as much attention to you as you think!” or “People aren’t thinking about you the way that you’re thinking about you” (via Alexis on Schitt's Creek)? They don't help at all.
Contradicting them is my own judgmental nature. When I see another woman, I often check to see whether her thighs are larger than mine, whether her stomach is bigger than mine. I even do this while driving, mind you. I also notice when one of my Facebook friends has gained or lost weight, noticeably aged recently, or is consciously posing in photos to make herself look thinner.
Now that I've bared my soul, you may be thinking, “Wow, that's no way to live.” Or maybe you recognize yourself in my words. I've been like this for so long that I can't imagine how I would change — how I would ever stop fixating on my weight or what my body looks like.
The health aspect is also a factor I can't ignore; heart disease is all over my family tree, and several years ago when I weighed significantly more, my heart rate and blood pressure were too high. (My then-doctor prescribed me a blood pressure med instead of, y'know, encouraging me to exercise and lose weight, which I did, and it worked.)
Would it be a good idea to discuss these thoughts and behavior with a therapist? Yes. Do I talk to my therapist about it? No. With all the other challenging stuff I'm dealing with in my life right now, there's simply no time left in my weekly sessions. And here's the real issue regarding being obsessed with my weight: I worry what will happen if I stop.
{related: how to give less f*cks}
Readers, please share your thoughts and experiences! How much do you think about your weight? How is your body image? How has your perspective on your body changed over the years, e.g., after pregnancy? Have you embraced body positivity, or body neutrality? How much is being preoccupied with your weight a “women's issue”?
Want to gain some perspective on your body by seeing bodies (and body parts) of “real” women? Here are some image sources (very NSFW):
- My Body Gallery: What Real Women Look Like
- Normal Breasts Gallery
- The Labia Library
- The No Apologies Collection (stock photo project by Refinery29 and Getty)
- r/Instagramreality reveals how influencers' and celebrities' online photos have been retouched.
Stock photo via Pexels / SHVETS production.
anon
I used to be you. Here’s the answer to what happens if you stop – life gets a whole lot better. A whole lot better. It will take time to adjust your thinking. Once you do, life becomes a lot more about what you can do, rather than how small or big you are.
Anon
+1. There’s no doubt it’s hard work. But it’s worth it.
Anon
Not to put too fine a point on it: in my experience, a fair number of women are so used to dysfunctional thought patterns about their bodies that they get viscerally angry when other women don’t think that way. They are the ones who will pick your body apart if you don’t do it to yourself.
I have long tired of pointing out that being slimmer (I’m 5’9 and about 150 pounds, age 43, and strong) does not change my life. No one is signing me up for a modeling contract if I lose five pounds. It will, however, make me profoundly miserable to try to maintain a “perfect” figure.
The question “who cares?” is not rhetorical. “How will this change my life?” is a question you should ask yourself.
Anon
I agree with this. I read something once that was along the lines of don’t make yourself 200% more miserable to weigh 3% less. It stuck with me.
Anon
I’ve heard that and love it.
Anon
I think about my weight when I am trying on new clothes. The issue for me is there are not enough choices for shorter women who have the menopausal belly. God forbid you are petite and bigger than a size 10 or 12!!! The primary reason for wanting to slim down is to expand my clothing options. If I go to the beach in my bathing suit, I don’t care if my belly is big. I just want to wear decent clothes when I at work.
anonshmanon
All of this sounds pretty unhealthy. I know that fact is cheekily referenced here and there, but overall the tone reads to me like ‘but come on ladies, we all think that, right?’. But as helpful posters love to remind us whenever consumerism is criticized here, this is a fashion blog. Verrry difficult to sell something to people who are content.
Anon
I agree with this. I really don’t want anyone to walk away from this post thinking that we all think like that or that it’s normal. I think there are some real issues (that I don’t judge in any way) that could be treated.
Anon
Agree, I have dual concerns: for the author, who I think would benefit a LOT from making this a priority in therapy, and for other women.
Regarding the former: this kind of thinking is often tied up with other problematic thought patterns. It’s also unhealthy on its own. Maybe by switching it up and treating this like the priority, other issues will start to untangle a bit.
Regarding the latter: it’s not healthy for women to think like this. It might be “normal” in the sense of being common, but it’s normal like foot binding was normal.
I also deeply worry about the whole thing regarding always checking out if other women have gained weight and judging them. Author, thank you for your honesty, so I don’t want to rail on you too hard: my life got better when I drop-kicked people to the curb when they did that to me. It is just so hurtful and damaging. And yes, we know you’re doing it.
Anonymous
Agreed.
There are several industries who butter their bread with the insecurites of women in particular.
Lydia
this is a sad and depressing post… I recommend Katie Sturino’s content and her book Body Talk for reframing some harmful thought patterns!
A
It is profoundly freeing to genuinely not feel like your body will be better smaller.
Pep
I find myself in kind of an odd situation: I was naturally a painfully thin child/adolescent. I was so thin that I didn’t even start my period until I was almost 16. I didn’t break 100 pounds until after high school graduation. The “Freshman Fifteen” was a gift to me; I filled out a little bit and looked great!
I cruised along not even thinking about my weight until I hit 30 – then something happened and the weight started piling on. I hit a high of 237 in my mid-forties.
I was able to get some of that off through programs like WW; now, in my late-fifties, I bounce around the 180-200 range.
I’d like to get down to about 150, but I would be happy if I could hit 175. As I get older, the weight is an even tougher burden to bear.
Anonymous
This was such a painful read, and I genuinely hope that the author can find someone to help deal with everything they are going through.
Housecounsel
This read was incredibly painful, and relatable. My history includes hospitalization for an eating disorder, huge weight swings, and various kinds of risky behavior. Therapy helped some. When I became a mother, I shut down the body talk and tried to be “normal” but I never was; I just hid it better. I had really resigned myself to never being OK with my body and always being privately weight-obsessed. I am surprised and happy to say I am so much better now. I found anti-diet podcasts and social media accounts. Flooding my brain and my feed, and blocking out traditional diet talk, has allowed me to change my thinking in a way I did not think was possible. I recommend reading “Anti-Diet” by Christy Harrison. Helpful podcasts include Find Food Freedom, What the Actual Fork, Diet Starts Tomorrow, Let Us Eat Cake – there are more. One thing I have learned to do is NOT weigh myself, and monitor my health through actually relevant data like blood pressure and cholesterol level, and whether I can do all the chaturangas in a vinyasa class. I don’t know if this will assist everyone, but it helped me when I thought I was beyond help.
Anon For This
I completely relate to this post and agree that it is generally last on the list to tackle in therapy/life because it is so common. For me, I get disappointed in myself about the lack of discipline I have, but it seems impossible to tackle when you have so many other things to worry about – simultaneously being a crap parent, worker and spouse, healing from past trauma, etc. Lately I feel better about myself because I have now been regularly exercising for over a year, and Peloton told me this morning that I have worked out 45 days in a row. That helps me obsess about the weight a bit less, but I still think I could be doing more. I also don’t see how I will ever resolve this and see that it will likely get worse as I approach 50. Nothing like being a perfectionist with a negative outlook . . .
Moose
One thing that has helped me, I think, in not leaning into these kinds of thoughts (though I definitely still have them!) is that since onset of puberty (age 8 for me), I have always been ‘too big.’ There is no previously lean body that I had that I am chasing. Yes, I am bigger now as an adult, and would prefer to be the smaller size I once was, but I think it’s easier to see through the BS when you have never had a flat stomach, or toned legs (yay for cellulite in high school!) or been able to shop designers (never had my size).
Anon
Nobody should be made to feel less than because of their weight. But every time some 20 or 30 something talks about their weight not being a big issue and body positivity and accepting their body for what it is, I want to beg them to talk to their doctor. Because maybe it is not. But the impacts of weight on health can become much more serious as we get older and by that time it is often too late to do anything about it.
I used weight loss drugs to lose quite a lot of weight and my cholesterol, blood pressure and arthritis got so much better (so I substituted two daily prescription medications and a lot of NSAIDs for a weekly injection) – but the real impetus was watching my father who has been obese his entire adult life struggle in his late 60s and into his 70s with the fall out of fatty liver disease and non-alcoholic cirrhosis as well as a multitude of back issues.
And I so wish we could treat like a health issue rather than a cosmetic one so that everyone could do their personal evaluation of risk and benefit without societal pressure to “be thin, but not too thin” [‘and you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy. But also, you have to be thin.”]
anonshmanon
Great that losing weight helped you with the other health troubles. Unfortunately, ‘I am just concerned for your health’ is so often an excuse to treat people less than (including medical professionals), and there are so many health issues that are simply not correlated with weight.
Anonymous
That’s why naturally thin women are often dismissed with a “you’re thin, you can’t be dealing with XYZ” or similar when they go to their doctor with a health concern.
Bean
But many health issues are related to weight. Not all, but a lot.
Why can’t we talk about that without being accused of being part of the toxic culture of you can never be to thin?
Anonymous
We can and should talk about that, and people certainly do, but most health issues are more complicated than body weight. There may be correlation with increased weight for some issues, but you should not assume that someone who weighs more is unhealthy, or on the verge of becoming unhealthy, any more than you should assume that someone who is very thin is experiencing or at risk of serious health issues. There are also a number of health issues that appear to be related to lower body weights, but that does not get nearly the same amount of media coverage or concern, which should give you a good idea of what people are really fixated on, and how much of it is being socialized to be anti-fat instead of genuinely pro-health.
Anon
thank you for this very sensible response.
Anonymous
Probably too late to be seen but this was on my mind overnight so I thought I’d still post. I posted on the site a few weeks ago about having broken my ankle and asking for recs for dealing with mobility. After going through this experience I’ve concluded I should have worried about weight more, actually. My health is riskier (DVT) and my mobility on devices is more difficult because there’s so much of me to move, and when I’m weight bearing again and doing physio I’ll be asking my ankle to work so much harder than someone of a lower weight. Plus I have lingering questions and guilt that I can never resolve about whether if I weighed less my fall might have resulted in no break or a less severe break. If I’d understood the impact of being overweight when things go wrong in this way maybe I’d have prioritised weight loss before.
That said, I’m very overweight (lost about 30 pounds since last summer and still have about seventy to go) which isn’t the same as someone whose life is overtaken by worry about an extra ten pounds. But I think it’s all coming from the same place you mention which is that ideally we could divorce weight from all the baggage and just manage whether it’s a health issue.
anon
OMG. I … feel this so deeply. Every word of it. It’s kind of an awful way to live, isn’t it.
Anon
I 100% agree. I could have written every single word myself.
anon
Asking an honest question for myself: Is it possible to have an eating disorder mentality without actually having an eating disorder? Kind of like a “dry drunk” vs. an alcoholic? I recognize so much of myself in this post. I don’t restrict my eating but I have terrible body image and compare myself to others constantly. I know it’s not super healthy to think this way, but on some level, I thought most women did? Growing up in the 80s and 90s was rough if you weren’t naturally slim. I can still remember the first time someone told me my body was wrong. I was maybe 10?
anon
Also, perhaps relevantly, my mom had an eating disorder when I was young. Still does, if you ask me.
anon
Same to all of this, including being told my body was wrong as a child. Plus equating smallness with both virtue and beauty. PS: I have never actually been overweight. Just not quite “little” enough to impress my family.
Anonymous
i relate to this entire post, and i have to say the body positivity movement has only made me feel worse. i’m fat, society dings me because i’m fat, i hate myself because i am fat, but now i am ALSO ashamed to hate myself because i’m fat, even though it is this uncontrollable thing that has affected every single area of my life.
Anons
I suspect it’s not really that G simply can’t fit this into her therapist appointments. She doesn’t talk to her therapist about it because on some level she thinks this is the correct way to feel – even though it feels awful – and she doesn’t want to have to confront it or change those feelings through therapy.
Anonymous
I was thinking that too. It seems that this whole issue has become part of G’s core identity and confronting and changing it would mean changing who they are…
Anon
I doubt G avoids therapy because she doesn’t want to change. Maybe she’s just not ready to spend the time or do what I assume would be the huge amount of work that making a change would require. G’s behavior is a form of obsessive/ compulsive behavior that I deal with as well. I developed a number of borderline OCD behaviors during a difficult and stressful childhood, including fixation and my weight/ dieting/ compulsive exercise, never quite crossed over into a full-blown eating disorder (thankfully), but came close and remain stuck in unfortunate thought patterns. Would be interesting to hear from someone who *did* recover from an eating disorder or OCD through therapy.
Anonymous
I found the way to free myself from some of this noise was to focus on actual health, not size. What do healthy habits look like, and can I adopt them? Getting enough sleep, getting enough exercise, figuring out how to calm down my racing brain, etc. If you spend your time listening to your body and taking care of it, you have less time for the noise from diet culture.
Anonymous
What exactly was the goal of posting this negative meditation on weight?
RiskedCredit
I’m a normal BMI and stay in range by running. I’m trying to lose the last 20lbs of weight to get to my goal. I’ll get there at some point.
What I focus on is my ability to run and for long distances, a lower weight is helpful, hence my goal. It’s important my body is able to run a reasonable speed, stretch to relax and has the strength to hold my body weight. The rest doesn’t matter. With the right clothes and accessories everyone looks good.
Natalie
I have a lot of compassion for the poster, but I would be careful when you are posting things about numbers and weight. It can be triggering and almost a “how to” guide for disordered eating. Same with the name of various apps