Fighting Your Body is Making You Crazy
/““Can we stop the rhetoric that we constantly need to fight our bodies throughout adulthood, that we are supposed to remain the same weight, shape, and size for the rest of our adult life?””
Image By VadimGuzhva
Guess what— our bodies change as we grow and age. They are supposed to change. But our culture tells us that’s not o.k., and it’s making us all crazy.
We can accept that our bodies change and grow during childhood, but weight-craze and twisted cultural beauty standards kick in after that telling us we should keep our bodies looking like youthful, thin 20-somethings forever. We’re constantly told we need to fight this natural change every step of the way—tooth and nail. Tighten up those wrinkles. Firm that belly. Lose that weight. “Get your body back” after baby. Don’t “let yourself go.” Fit into your wedding dress you wore 20 or more years ago. Dye your hair.
As a woman at midlife, I’m constantly bombarded with messaging that my changing body is unacceptable and needs controlling—that I need to fight the mid-life weight gain, wrinkles, the sag, gray hair, etc.
Put one toe (or muffin top, as the case may be) out of line of the ideal that beauty, diet, and health industries pound into us and we are instantly shamed, embarrassed, and guilt-tripped about “letting ourselves go.”
Bodies change.
If I looked and weighed what I did at 18 now, it would be pretty freaky. Why on earth should I look and feel like I did then? It’s bonkers.
A lot has happened since then. My body and I have done a lot! We’ve not only aged 24 years, but also been pregnant and birthed a baby; ate a lot of food; ridden an ongoing hormone roller coaster; had surgery; gotten Lyme disease 4 times; been in car accidents; persevered through years of unhealthy relationships, poverty, nursing school, and single parenting; logged miles upon miles of hiking, camping, canoeing, biking, jogging, and kid-wrangling; earned a living sitting behind a computer or in a car or bent over patients’ bedsides; laughed a flock of laugh lines into existence; felt the pull of gravity for over 4 decades.
Why should my body still look like it did at 18? Or 30? Or even 40? Says who?
Says patriarchy. Says capitalism. Says the beauty industry. They want us feeling inherently and perpetually flawed so that we’ll buy they’re solutions to our inadequacies and run forever on the hamster wheel of never-good-enough rather than enjoy our lives as they are or challenge the powers that be. It keeps us in our place: dependent, subservient, preoccupied, looking for quick fixes we can buy.
It’s the same old story—money and power.
What if we could see what our bodies have become as normal, natural, and ok (if not amazing and beautiful)?
No more trying to squash ourselves into too-small jeans. No more suffocating tummy-control undies. No more obsessing over what to wear or what not to eat. No counting calories to try to shrink ourselves to some unattainably acceptable size. No more bingeing ‘cause we’re starving on our diet. No more weight cycling.
Think how different day to day life would be—how much more relaxed. We could have conversations about something other than the diet we’re on and how that’s going. We could savor delicious food and move our bodies in ways we enjoy—not to try to reach a number on the scale or a waistline measurement—but to enjoy our life and feel good (or better). We could have sex with the lights on without worrying about the size of our belly, or double chin, or saggy boobs.
We could get on with our lives.
We could redirect our energy toward creating the experience we want to have in our bodies, and on doing our good work in the world.
We could disrupt, decolonize, and diversify the systems that have been trying to keep us distracted with our supposed shortcomings and get some stuff done! Reverse climate change. Create nourishing education and healthcare systems. Get some halfway sane people elected. Make our communities safe(er) and more inclusive of brown people, fat people, disabled people, elders, children, women, trans folk, people with less money and power.
I’m not saying we should ignore our health, “let ourselves go,” or abandon healthy behaviors like eating delicious nutritious food, getting as much quality sleep as we can, or moving our bodies as regularly as possible in ways that delight us. But this idea that our bodies are never good enough as they are, and should perpetually look youthful and skinny, is seriously messing with our heads and damaging our health.
It’s hard to shrug off the cultural weight of how we view our bodies and think we should look. And it’s not something we should try to do alone. So what do we do? We reimagine the experience we want to have in our bodies, have conversations about this, and support each other to adopt gentler, healthier ways of being in relationship with our bodies. We work on shifting the cultural conversation and assumptions about what’s acceptable (hint: all bodies are acceptable).
Let’s shift our attention and energy from trying to attain some impossible state of youthful thinness toward nourishing behaviors and the experiences that matter most to us. Quality time with friends and loved ones, creative expression, community building, activism—or whatever it is for you. Take that energy you’ve put into trying to force your body to be something it’s not and apply it to living a juicier life.
“Oh, my God. What if you wake up some day, and you’re 65 or 75, and you never got your novel or memoir written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools or oceans because your thighs were jiggly or you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”
Listen, your body is going to change. And keep on changing. And so will mine. This is normal. Bodies change. Because we are living, breathing, adapting, evolving life forms. That’s worth celebrating. Let’s get out there and live.
Jenny Mahan is a Registered Nurse, Certified Health and Wellness coach, and owner of Pine Creek Wellness, as well as a multi-passionate author, singer/songwriter, soap maker, and reluctant runner.
She helps folks reclaim their health with holistic Lifestyle Medicine and a focus on adding in delightful nourishment, rather than restrictive diet culture approaches. She lives in far northern Wisconsin near the shores of Lake Superior with her husband and son on their homestead.