My RD sent along a link to the following Podcast featuring Meredith Noble. Meredith works with fat people on body acceptance using the concepts of Health At Every Size (HAES). She has a poignant article on grieving the Thin Ideal as one ventures down the HAES path. Basically diet culture has fucked us all over, right? There is a false promise of happiness at the end of some stupid and fun game called pull the next fad diet out of a hat. The perfect body can be attained. All you have to do is cut carbs, restrict calories, exercise and *poof* you’re a magic unicorn. The reality is that people can’t be unicorns, there is no happiness at the end of the diet, and diets usually fail – for at least 95% of us. So even if you get to that body – good luck keeping it.
In any case, I started thinking about this idea of mourning the thin ideal for myself. While I do have a major fear of gaining weight, that fear is not rooted in the idea that I can’t have the ultimate thin body. I gave that up years ago. (That was so high school.)
I replaced the thin ideal with the muscular ideal. Dieting became a “lifestyle” or a way for me to fuel my body, recover from my workouts better, and to support getting stronger. The back squat was my nemesis and I was going to conquer it damn it! I threw myself into rugby in my 20s, CrossFit in my 30s and weightlifting and power lifting in my 40s. Until my body broke. My limitations were (once again) set by my body – this body I live in.
See, I have been told my body was wrong from the moment I popped out of my mom. I’ve known it too. Deep down in the far reaches of my soul (and stomach) I’ve known it. Over the years I’ve tried diminishing it, inflating it, covering it, exposing it, and purging it. The closest I could get to righting it, was to get it stronger and leaner.
Over the last two years I worked with a macros coach – focusing on crushing it in the gym, while in a calorie deficit, eating a shit ton of protein. Sounds delightful doesn’t it? Along the way, I picked up even more self-loathing than I ever thought possible. There were right and wrong behaviors, good and bad foods, and constant measuring, weighing and reporting of all that my body was doing. I got lean. Wicked lean. I got depressed. Wicked depressed. I was always starving and sad. I knew I needed an exit strategy. I quit my coach but quickly realized I no longer knew how to eat. I didn’t know when my body was hungry or full. Binges were more frequent and carbs were all bad. I felt out of control and terrible physically and mentally. Eventually I sought out help from a registered dietitian and a therapist.
In the middle of this chaos and depression, my conveniently suppressed gender identity issues began resurfacing with a vengeance. They had shown up many times in my life, the first I can recall, as a fourth grader. I tried to be a boy and was rejected by my family. It was not socially acceptable and if I wasn’t at least some version of girl, my mom wouldn’t love me. In the most recent iteration of these “issues”, when I started eating again, I immediately put on weight. This weight showed up in what I have respectfully named the “lady bump” area. You know that little hump on the lower abdomen? My chest got bigger (even though it’s super small, thank God). The veins in my arms and hips started disappearing. My period returned. This all made me super depressed, crazy in the head, and confused about eating disorder recovery. This is the stuff I need to fucking mourn. It’s not the thin thing. It’s mourning the loss of a more gender-neutral body.
While gaining weight and eating alleviated some of the hunger, I was left once again, with an utter and profound awareness that I don’t identify with this body I am in and not because it’s not thin. I have spent most of my life trying to diet the female away.
So fast forward to the last two weeks where my RD gave me a meal plan. This is helpful in guiding me on how to assemble a proper meal, but has also triggered me back into counting and measuring behaviors. So over the last couple of weeks, my chest has deflated and my “lady bump” has receded. My hip padding has reduced and I feel more androgynous. I also have less energy which for some reason feels better. I was screaming carbohydrate energy before and it played out into crazy anxiety and compensatory distance running. Now things are more numb and quiet.
I read that and it is fucking crazy that I would even say that “numb” is a good thing. I am diminishing my very being -not just my size. My energy. My emotions. My possibilities. If I don’t feel, then I don’t have to do anything about the matter of fact reality that my body is not right. I don’t have to tell anyone that I am non-binary or trans. I don’t have to tell my mother and explode her brain matter, or my religious “love the sinner not the sin” brother, or risk rejection by society. I don’t have to listen to the world misgender me. I can sit here in this numb little capsule.
I was asked once, “do you want to be a man?” My gut response was “hell no.” The reality is that I don’t know for sure. I have some work to do on how I define, present, and see myself. What I am sure of though, is how much I have wanted to be a boy. Especially that little boy back in the fourth grade. He got pushed aside because he couldn’t show up in a girl body. So he was repressed into an unhappy girl, trying to make her way in this world as best as she could. She found sports where it was good to be strong, fast, aggressive and it was OK to be more masculine. She found queers where it was OK to be butch and wear men’s clothes. She fell in love and yet through it all, never quite felt at home in her body.
So I don’t mourn the thin ideal as much as I mourn the little boy I can never be. That is the heartbreak in this story. That is the heartbreak for me.
So what happens after the grief and the mourning?
THAT is the question and THAT is my future.
