Saturday ramble

Let's talk about two articles in the September issue of Elle. Rather, let me take on some of the statements in these articles. I don't disagree with either article or statement--after all, you can't disagree with another person's personal experience--but I'd nonetheless like to emphatically state that that was not my experience. Let me also emphatically encourage you to read the RBG profile in the earlier issue.

Starting with Virginia Vitzthum's The Virginity Rut, regarding one of the women she profiles:

In high school, she and her friends shared a mind-body duality that wasn’t religious but was self-protectively snobbish. Her gang was “very nerdy, didn’t drink, worked on the school newspaper. We looked down on people who had sex, thought they were slutty and not as smart. We focused on going to a good college and getting out of Pittsburgh.” She saw the same split at Smith: “girls who’d picked being smart over being attractive.”

Yeah, she may have seen that split, but maybe it was in her head? Because, just, no.

Moving on to Alissa Nutting's The Deep End, which is not online yet. It's about deciding to lose weight in a very unhealthy way and with unhealthy consequences. I want to make clear, again, that I'm not judging her experience. I do feel the need to discuss how mine was different.


Here's a short history to those of you who didn't read this blog when it was called "You've Really Put on Weight": Up until I turned 30, I never gave my weight a second thought. I realize this is a hugely privileged position, but it's--ironically--the way I was raised. And also a function of the people I surrounded myself with. I gained or lost a few pounds here or there, depending on what was going on in my life, but I existed comfortably and absent-mindedly in the middle of my 'normal' BMI. I didn't own a scale (but I occasionally weighed myself at the gym). I ate whatever I wanted. I didn't understand why or how anybody dieted or fretted over her body.

Then I went on a long business trip and gained a few pounds. As usual, I didn't notice, and had things been different, they probably would have fallen off naturally and we wouldn't be having this conversation. But my mother was in town when I got back, and she started relentlessly pointing out that I'd gained weight. And I was filling out, too snugglily, a bridesmaid's dress that had just arrived. So I tried to lose weight. And it totally backfired. So I tried harder, and it backfired more. The more I gained, the less I looked like me; the worse my clothes fit; the more I obsessed about food; the more I made bad decisions that only brought me more weight. I'd gone from the middle of the normal BMI range to the upper edge, from a size 2 to a size 6. And I hated the way I looked.

And I knew that nobody else, except my mother, gave a f* about my weight, and I didn't care that anybody else thought I looked fine. It wasn't about anybody else; it was about me.

All that said, I didn't do any of the crazy, unsustainable things that Nutting did. I didn't (for obvious reasons) eat only chicken and salad. I didn't eat only salad. For me, it was still more important to eat sustainably and to be healthy and strong than to be thin. But let me tell you, I really hated not being thin. How much I hated it, surprised me. I also hated how caring about my weight, impaired my relationship with food.

So eventually, I came around to acceptance--to the idea that this was the body I had now (then). I stopped thinking about food in terms of calories or macronutrients. I started eating whatever I wanted again. I stopped thinking about food obsessively, started following my body with regard to whether I was hungry or full. And I started to lose weight. Which made it even easier to be (mentally and emotionally) healthy about food. I kept losing weight, which kept making it easier. The less I thought about what I ate, the more pounds came off, until I landed near the bottom of the normal BMI range.

I'm the first to admit that I love, love being thin. I am happier this way. Yes, some of the happiness is from the acceptance, but some of it is legitimately from the thinness. It's just easier to dress myself the way I want. This is just the way I want to look. And that's something. If you want to be thin--if it's important for you, personally to be thin--don't be afraid to be thin. If you don't care about being thin, don't.

What I never went through, was this:

After years of sadistically comparing my body with other women's and always feeling I came up short, I'd gone from the losing team to the winning one.

In a word, I felt superior... When I walked into a room and was the thinnest woman there, I felt I was the best at something quantifiable. I had nothing to prove and felt no pressure to say anything impressive--my weight spoke for me.

I honestly don't look for the thinnest woman in the room. I don't think or care about it. I doubt most people notice my weight, and I certainly don't believe it speaks for me. I feel compassion, not superiority, when other women say things that betray discomfort with their bodies (the way I once did). I wish that on no one. I want them all to love themselves the way they are and to be comfortable in their skin. I want them to love their food and quit making an enemy of it. To the extent that women do notice other women's weight--and a woman at work recently noted that she'd noticed mine--I want to be inspiration, not competition.

Which brings me back to the bullshit observation about Smith, which is certainly a competitive place, and you'll never hear me say that the students don't have their issues. But it's also a great place to chose not to hate women or judge them for being different.