How many times have you stood in front of the mirror and scrutinized your appearance? We don’t think to praise our ab muscles for being strong enough to lift us out of bed in the morning. Instead we pinch our gut and grumble about the muffin top that is creeping over our jeans.
For as long as I can remember I have been self conscience about my body. I have wanted to change some part of it one way or another.
This seems like the nagging worry of many American females. If we happen to be attractive, than often our value is hung on our appearance. Which creates a sense of fear that we can and will lose it at some point. If we are more plain then we may be dismissed or not valued enough because of a perception of how we should look. Either way we can’t seem to win.
My biological mother was a petite woman at 5’2. She was an inactive, chain smoker who enjoyed many chemical substances. Food was not high on her priority list for herself or her children. If you couldn’t fend for yourself, you were either eating a lot of dry cereal or going hungry. It wasn’t uncommon for her to make comments about not having eaten all day or complain about not being able to finish a sandwich. I was a play in the sunshine kind of kiddo and when it came time to eat, I was hungry. But for a mom who wasn’t interested in getting out of bed and feeding herself, dealing with a hungry kid was inconvenient.
Not to mention that I grew. For a time my mother simply passed down her clothes and shoes to me when I was living with her. This gave her the opportunity to buy new ones. But by 8 or 9 years old, my feet were already bigger than her tiny size 5’s and I started to complain about my feet hurting. So it became a norm for her to make little comments about my outgrowing her and how I better be careful not to eat too much and “blow up.”
There were so many mixed messages like “don’t waste food,” so if I can’t finish a sandwich, you need to eat it for me, but then “don’t eat THAT much.” A regular comment was my being a “human trash can,” because I would eat her leftovers, but then I was told if I was at Granny’s I better clean my plate. My mother acted like how little she ate was a badge of honor, so was I supposed to not eat all day too? I tried, but then I would be ravenous by dinner and earn more comments about my eating too much. As I got older, it became apparent that I was definitely going to outgrow my mother. As a matter of fact, I was taller than my mother, my grandmother and my great grandmother. Which generally meant that I wore a bigger size clothes. My mother liked to brag that she had been around a 115 pounds since she was a teenager. I don’t think I have weighted that little since I was 12! My pant size, my boob size, my butt size and my shoe size were all areas that my mother liked to tease me about as I became a teenager.
Now I have the vocabulary to say that my mother was setting me up to struggle with a negative body image.
What is body image?
Medical New Today states that body image refers to a person’s emotional attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions of their own body.
When a person has a positive body image, they understand that their sense of self-worth does not depend on their appearance.
Having a positive body image includes:
- accepting and appreciating the whole of one’s body, including how it looks and what it can do
- having a broad concept of beauty
- having a body image that is stable
- having inner positivity
A person with a negative body image feels dissatisfied with their body and their appearance.
The person may:
- compare themselves with others and feel inadequate when doing so
- feel ashamed or embarrassed
- lack confidence
- feel uncomfortable or awkward in their body
- see parts of their body, such as their nose, in a distorted way
(The above is an excerpt from Medical News Today Newsletter)
Looking back I can see that my grandmother and great grandmother didn’t have healthy relationships with food. They fixated on it in different ways, but it was an issue for both of them as well. When my Gran said you better take the cake she made, because if you left it, she would eat it all, that is exactly what she meant! My sweet little Gran was 4’11 and I don’t remember her having a lap when she sat down.
The women around us are powerful influencers of how we look at our bodies and how we relate to food, so are we. I am envious of women who feel comfortable in their own skin and don’t fixate on their size and what they eat constantly. I confess this is a challenge for me, especially as I get older. I find myself pinching my belly and sides, weighing myself everyday and fretting over every piece of food that crosses my lips. It’s ridiculous. I know that at some level, but not sure what to do about it.
I know this is a place where I need to heal. Although, I’m not totally sure how. It’s common to measure things to a rubric, but all our bodies are so different. And they change over time! And then there is our society expectation that as women, it is men who determine what is attractive for a woman’s body. But their opinions differ too! And what about countries that have a totally different view of what normal or attractive looks like on a woman?
I once had a professor from Ethiopia tell me that I must be doing well because I had put on some weight! And he totally meant it as a compliment! In his country, if your wife is thicker that means she is happy and he is doing something good! Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live in one of those places. As you can see, I’m coming from a place of trying to find my normal and still not sure how.
My reality is that I’m not a person who values spending hours of my week at the gym, but I do want to be healthy. How do we balance what society models for us as women with what is real for most of us? I look to the ladies around me, who seem to have conquered or at least harnessed this issue and hope they can give me some wisdom.
Body image is an area where we as women have to stand up for each other. We cannot let the media or men dictate to us what a woman should look like. We cannot stand by and let society paint an impossible expectation for the young girls around us. Because like it or not, our bodies change as we get older. Somehow we can tell our girlfriends and our daughters how beautiful they are regardless of their size, and yet fail to have that same grace with ourselves.
Facing my 40’s has brought this struggle front and center as it gets harder to maintain what I call my “ideal” weight. So how much time and energy do I spend trying to keep my body in that approved spot? I’m still figuring that out. I’m wrestling with it. I know that I need to learn to do better and to be more kind with myself.
Hopefully, we can figure some of this out together.
