So, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve not been well lately (but am doing better now!). I was on the slim side before, but now I’ve dropped two dress sizes and am skinnier than some models. Responses have broadly fallen into two camps. There are those who look at my face and are alarmed. (It’s a bit disconcerting – I don’t look that bad, do I?!) Then there are those who look at my body and are envious.
Dear fellow people, I feel like crap, and most of my clothes don’t fit. This is not something for which you should pine.
I’ve had the experience of telling someone how hard I’m finding this experience, how unpleasant it’s been, only to be met with envy. You’re so lucky. There is something truly terrible about a culture that so values thinness that it robs people of common compassion. Of course, usually the lack of compassion is directed in quite the other direction, involving shaming, bullying, and otherwise dehumanising people seen as too fat. It’s all part of the same cycle of reducing people to their bodies, and reducing what those bodies can mean.
I’ve always been a pretty lucky person in that I’ve loved my body and thought it looked good. I never was in the habit of weighing myself – I don’t own a scale – and I had no great desire to be a drastically different shape. Getting skinnier was not a goal of mine, because I knew that thinner didn’t mean better, and amazing women come in all shapes and sizes. It’s this old and hard won appreciation for all kinds of bodies, and my own specifically, that is rendering me sad and speechless at the responses I’m getting now. Because it’s not really about me, is it? It’s about a projected ideal that we’re taught to crave even to our own destruction.
It’s ultimately a lack of self-love that is rendering people unable to see past a supposedly ideal form to the friend who is struggling. We as a society need to place people above body types, and fellow feeling above harmful goals.
I sympathise with this – when I had chicken pox (the sickest I’ve ever been), several people commented afterwards that I looked better because I hadn’t eaten anything much for 3 weeks. Yeah, sure everyone only wants us to be thin for our health!
I hope your body soon returns to its normal awesome size and shape, you feel good and your clothes fit again.
Thank you very much indeed.
Exactly; it’s moments like this that really tell you what’s what.
Goodness me, yes. When people have made recent comments about how ‘good’ I look after my year with a dud stomach I have been trying not to blurt out ‘Seriously? Are you totally nuts?’. When I had similar thoughts about other people’s weight (but at least knew not to express them) I was actually rather ill with an eating disorder.
My friends who are full of understanding and compassion have instead been trying to feed me all the energy-dense, easily digestible food they can think of.
When people comment approvingly on weight loss I also feel like asking them ‘So, you weren’t so keen on my body x kilograms ago? What sorts of things will you be thinking if my weight increases?’. I know that they only intend to give a compliment, but this cultural ideal causes so much damage.
I am very glad that things are improving for you; keep looking after yourself :)
And you also. :)
I’m glad you’re feeling better now. And I can relate to that too. I got loads of compliments when I had a mental break down and a major depressive episode because I lost weight. It was hard dealing with the body stuff if brought up when the depression was taking so much of my energy anyway.
I think the biggest problem for me is that a body is never beyond comment. And by society’s standards, it’s never good enough – you’re either too thin or not thin enough. Too fat or not curvy enough. And that’s exhausting to deal with on top of whatever is actually affecting you. And I imagine equally exhausting when you’re dealing with body issues at the core as well.
Anyhow, all this to say: I agree and I’m glad you’re feeling better.
I actually facepalmed at that. Thank you.
I have a friend who is currently in second stage cancer. Her first stage was a few years ago, bowel cancer which resulted in surgery and then chemotherapy. She went from a rosy, robust fatty to a withered, wasted, grey skinned woman with severely damaged sensory perception (mostly scent, taste and touch, and her depth perception is all screwy) and unable to remember more than a few things at a time, with constant nausea and gastric issues. I remember constantly hearing people refer to her as “Looking fabulous, with all that weight she has lost!”
This time the cancer is back, she has had surgery to remove a tumor on her lung, and is back in chemotherapy. We had her 60th birthday party a few weeks ago, and while she is doing well, she’s not the robust, sharp-as-a-tack woman I knew years ago. Again, she has started to lose weight with the chemotherapy. All night at her birthday party I listened to people saying that she looked fabulous because she has lost weight. All I could see was my once strong friend looking frail and struggling with basic tasks, like bringing a glass to her mouth without spilling her drink, remembering people’s names (including her own family) and holding a plate of food.
What kind of screwed up world have we become that being ill and vulnerable like that is preferable to being fat? It makes me SO angry.
Wishing you good health Chally.
I’m angry for her, too. Thank you.
When I came home from college for Christmas break, after a semester of struggling with crystal meth use, my mother told me how great I looked because of the weight I’d lost from not eating.
This world.
*sigh*
Reminds me if the time I was in a taxi that wrapped itself around a power pole.
Lying in hospital with lots of things wrong including a jaw wired shut.
Doctors said I needed to eat/drink everything through a straw for the next couple of months while the fractures healed. The nurses kept telling me how lucky I was to be on this enforced diet. (I weighed 52 kg at the time)
I mean WTF people!!!
Ended up losing about 10kg and feeling very much not “hot”.
I am unsure why, when speaking about body issues and judgements around these issues you need to qualify that you are now ‘skinnier than some models?” Is that the apex of our cultural knowledge of what ‘skinny’ is? Perfect models? If you hope people can ‘see past a supposedly ideal form’ then why use the ‘ideal form’ as the benchmark for us to picture you?
I am pointing to a cultural standard to which I am being compared.