The Weight of Being Thin

Content warning: Disordered eating

Trying to be thin enough has occupied a significant amount of my emotional energy for thirty years.

What’s thin enough? For my mind, enough means looking a photograph of myself and thinking, “I don’t want to destroy every copy of this image.” (I think I’ve experienced this about three times; it’s an upsettingly high bar to reach.)

For my body, I’ve learned that version of enough is achievable only through combining at least an hour of punishing exercise each morning, a single meal per day of seven hundred calories, and being under the age of twenty-five.

You know, the usual healthy, achievable behaviors that are the natural result of being socialized as a girl in our culture.

I had briefly hoped a few years ago that body-image perceptions in general were improving. That the inflexible thin-body dominance of the late 1990s and early 2000s—the time of my teenage years to mid-twenties—had dwindled and maybe we could present bodies that didn’t conform to a single type as genuinely desirable.

Now there’s Ozempic and I worry that we’ve simply added another way to stigmatize bodies that don’t measure down to a rigid standard. This is a sprawling, multifaceted, and hugely problematic societal issue—one I can’t solve. Sometimes I get caught up in thinking about just how unsolvable it feels and want to lie down in despair.

That said, I’m not entirely without agency. And I can address my sprawling, multifaceted, and fucked-up feelings about my own body. So earlier this year I finally admitted that I’m being unfair to myself if I live my remaining years in a constant seesaw of food bingeing and food restricting. Perimenopause pushed this decision forward, too—it’s vital in this part of life to focus on strong bones and nutrient-dense foods for your body and just as vital to focus on treating yourself with compassion emotionally.

So. Will my eating always be disordered? Yeah. I’m not going to suddenly find the cure for emotional eating, body dysmorphia, and spending my adolescence being told by all media that true beauty meant having collarbones so sharp they could lethally spear small animals.

I have to manage it; I’ll always have to manage it. I’m resigned to managing it. Still, until very recently I’d been avoiding professional help for disordered eating because…I didn’t want a therapist to make me think it’s okay to be (what I consider) fat.

I used to tell myself: Seeking help for depression or anxiety? Totally fine! Reasonable! Helpful! A thing I have done and continue to do. Seeking help for dealing with my archnemesis calories? No thanks. Sounds unrealistic. What could they say? It’s fine for other people, but…

The truth is that I wanted, on some level, to retain my disgust with any extra flesh I carry. If I let go of that knee-jerk horror, how would I ever reach my (impossible) state of optimal thinness? I’d be too busy eating to properly attend to the extra pounds I’d packed on. I’d never be thin enough if I didn’t constantly castigate myself for eating and then remind myself of how repulsive I look.

Here’s the thing, though: It’s miserable to live this way.

How much time do I have left on this earth? I’m not in the first half of my life, when I felt like I had many years ahead to figure things out and could treat my health more casually. When I didn’t have the experience to recognize an uncurable disorder that I would have to accept management of permanently. When I still thought the day would come when my ideal shape could be realized and maintained. When I wasn’t facing the very real possibility of osteoporosis and heart attack if I didn’t take better care of myself.

No, I’m in the second half—the stage of life when I’m hoping to benefit from the wisdom of my age, not repeat the same mistakes ad nauseam. When I truly need to let go of the idea that I just didn’t try hard enough for the last three decades of adulthood.

I fall into that assumption a lot, despite knowing it’s bullshit. Days, weeks, and months spent in a state of stomach-gnawing semi-starvation—not restricting hard enough. Looking at myself in a mirror every day and deliberately focusing only on the imperfections—not hating myself hard enough. Pushing past trembling muscles and light-headedness at the gym before allowing myself any food—not working hard enough. I’m tired of it.

And I’m also too old to keep doing this to myself. Like, physically I don’t think my organs will continue to take it. This terrible cycle of gaining and losing in a frustrating and futile effort to reach an impossible goal? It’s bad.

Thus, I have been seeing a registered dietician and licensed nutritionist.

During one of our first meetings, after we’d talked about nutrition and metabolism, she said I needed to recalibrate my idea of what my body is and does. To stop separating my sense of self from my physicality, to stop acting like my body is its own entity—and a hostile, unhelpful one at that. To grieve, after an entire adulthood of expectations, my “ideal” body. To let it go and make peace with what’s healthy and reasonable (spoiler: my expectations are neither healthy nor reasonable).

This mental and emotional recalibration is probably the most difficult part of the whole process. I’ve followed various eating plans over the years—high protein, high fiber, medium carb, low carb, no carb, mostly plants, all intuitive, rigidly scheduled, 80 percent health, 20 percent pleasure, calorie focused, nutrient focused, and fuck it I’m headed face first into this cake—so I’m familiar with adjusting my diet to suit various ideologies.

Adjusting my concept of the ideal, however, is another thing entirely. It’s a lot harder.

I think many women my age have a weird and intimate familiarity with two bodies in terms of their own identity: their actual body and the magazine-woman body pushed on us from childhood. I know what my own proportions look like. I’m familiar with the placement of my freckles and the length of my torso. I know how tall I am and which dress styles will flatter and which will frumpify.

I’m also deeply aware of the magazine-woman body. Her gravity-defying breasts, her thigh gap, her defined jaw. I’m aware of her body as the body that my body should match. Which is, you know, pretty fucked up. Why would this completely different body that I’ll never have—in terms of height alone, not to mention anything else—be my mental default for “What I Should Look Like”?

I mean, I know intellectually that I’ve been manipulated by advertising and toxic social expectations—that beauty isn’t about a single type to which all must conform. I can even feel that’s true when it comes to other people. Just not myself.

So, it’s an ongoing process. I’m trying to accept the struggle and find the peace between battles. To get that therapist-approved balance of eating foods and doing exercise that will further my health and longevity…while actually enjoying the food and exercise without guilt and self-loathing.

Strangely, the perimenopausal pains and aches are helpful in a way. They remind me that I’m changing my mindset to prepare for a new stage. And that being older means an opportunity to expand and explore what health and beauty look like for me at this age. Of course it’s going to be different from what it looked like at twenty or thirty. I’m not the same person I was then. Which, if it means I can heal some of my damage, is a good thing.

You don’t have to experience the kind of disordered eating I have to still be messed up about food. The messaging gets to everyone to some degree. And it’s quite a mindfuck to see media that tells us we’re all meant to be embracing “real” and “natural” beauty then find out that as soon as something like Ozempic is on the market, everyone who can get it—regardless of actual medical need—does.

Maybe our society hasn’t grown very much from the rigid beauty expectations of my adolescence. But we hags can.

Yours in brisk lunchtime walks and peanut butter Perfect Bars,

That Hag

Two Things to Think About in the Week Ahead:

1. Take a minute to appreciate something you’re better at now than you were ten years ago. I’m better at standardized tests?! I never did well on them back when they had a meaningful impact on my future, but I took a sample LSAT for fun earlier this year (long story) and it was unexpectedly engaging. It could be due to the constant close-listening skills and context-free comprehension I have to practice in order to follow the narrative of my children’s stories. What have you improved on? If nothing else, I think lots of us are more patient now in certain areas. (Possibly from exhaustion.) You might be better at yoga or cooking or setting boundaries—I know there are probably a dozen things you handle better now than you did a decade earlier. Maybe chat with friends about this, too—what do you think they’re better at now and what do they think you are?

2. Consider letting go of an expectation. Lofty goals and loftier ambitions can be great and motivational and all, but they can also add to the general stress and grind of these modern times. Is there something you’ve expected of yourself that you can make peace with and let go of? Some small-ish thing that you could just…stop worrying about? Think about your routines—do you often feel you’re falling short? Is it that your expectations are too high and maybe too harsh? Sometimes the hardest person to be kind to is yourself. Would you hold someone else to your personal expectations? Try going easier in one area and see how you feel.