Category Archives: Body Image

Body Image, How I Look in Clothes, and an Attempt to Get Over It

13thMay2009

(This is cross-posted at BlogHer.)

There’s something I don’t admit very often (in fact, maybe I’ve never admitted it before). The thing is, there’s one thing in particular that I miss about being skinny. When I say “skinny,” I mean the way I looked when I was underweight, about 25 pounds ago. I know I’m not supposed to say that I miss anything about that time period, because I’m supposed to love my new, improved, healthy shape. And most of the time, for the most part, I do.

However, I’ve also accepted the fact that certain thoughts and habits aren’t ever going to go away completely. One of the big things that can make me feel insecure is being unable to wear most of my old clothes. And this is where the whole “I miss being skinny” mentality can sometimes come back to rear its ugly head. Because, see, when you’re skinny, it’s really easy to find and wear pretty much whatever you want.

When you have jutting hipbones, and a concave stomach, and no ass — pretty much everything fits. There are no bulges or rolls of extra skin to deal with. I tend to think about this when my waistband starts to feel tight, or that time I finally gave away a stack of pants that I could no longer button. I wasn’t planning to ever be small enough to button them again — nor did I want to — but for some reason I’d been continuing to hold on to them.

I realize this is an extremely self-centered reason for wanting to look a certain way. It’s not like I look bad in the clothes I’m currently wearing; it just takes more effort because there are styles that look good on me and some that don’t. (Which kinda makes you understand why clothing designers say it’s “easier” to make clothes to fit a stick-woman.)

Here’s what makes me come back to reality on a relatively quick basis: remembering the bad times. How I felt perpetually lethargic and unhappy. Obsessed over everything I ate (or didn’t eat). Missed out on meeting new people, and going to new places, or even hanging out with people I already knew, because it was easier to stay in my safe, insulated world. For example, I preferred going to restaurants that offered calorie-counts on their websites so I could plan in advance what I was going to eat. (Yeah, I was a lot of fun back then…)

Here’s something else: even though it was my choice not to date back then, it’s not like men were beating down my door to get to me. I would hear that guys prefer women who aren’t stick-thin, but I would still think to myself, “Surely that isn’t the case. If I was interested in somebody, they’d like the way I look.” Well, once I stopped looking like a Starving Person, my hypothesis changed to “guys like to have something to hold on to.”

(I majored in sociology in college, so there’s a part of me that thinks this hypothesis would make an interesting social experiment: what would happen if I made another online dating profile, using only my skinny-pics, and the exact same description of myself that I have right now? What would happen to the quality and/or quantity of my responses?)

Sometimes something will come up in conversation to remind me of that time in my life, and on a few occasions I’ve pulled up a particular photo from my Flickr account to illustrate my point. Nobody seems to believe me right away when I tell them I used to weigh 25 pounds less than I do now, but they do when they see some before-and-after pics:

Hoover Dam

Jen and me

The first was taken in June 2002 at the Hoover Dam; the second (I’m on the right, in the tank top) was taken in August 2008 — immediately after a strip aerobics class.

I look horrible in the first photo, and that’s exactly why I show it. The reactions are always the same: “Ew!” and “Wow!” and “You look so different!” and “You look so much better now.” People always say that, and I appreciate it. Even though I know it in my head, I need to hear it.

I no longer own those jeans I was wearing back in 2002. They wouldn’t fit me. I still have the shirt, but I haven’t worn it in quite a while — I can get it on, but it’s more snug, and I prefer longer shirts now.

Will I ever stop comparing my body to the clothes I can put on and how I look in them? Hopefully. But if that’s the only thing I miss about being skinny, I could be doing much worse.

Related Reading:

Sally McGraw at Already Pretty has a great post about using clothes to work with your body. She firmly believes there’s no reason you can’t look great, even if you don’t love how you look naked.

Elana Sztokman wrote an interesting post about Orthodox Women, Passover, and Body Image.

Despite the difficulties of being a “short/petite person,” Speed Reader decided that “Today I’m going to love my jeans and the way I feel in them. For me, good-fitting clothes is half the battle (or more!) in being happy with my body.”

By Zandria | Also posted in BlogHer | Comments (25)

Breaking Free from Scale-Reliance

1stApril2009

(This is cross-posted at BlogHer.)

If there was a scale in my house when I was growing up, I have no recollection of it. If we did own one, it must have been hidden away somewhere — like in a closet, tucked under a stack of towels or bed sheets. Our house only had one bathroom, and for a few years there were seven people who used it regularly (two parents and five kids; my youngest brother was three when my parents separated), so floor space was at a premium. Unfortunately, although I was sheltered from scale-reliance for such a long time, that didn’t stop me from focusing on the numbers when I got older.

My parents never talked about how much their kids weighed, and since I was home-schooled between the ages of 7-15, I didn’t have a chance to adopt a weight-fixation from school kids, either. It wasn’t until I reached my early 20s — having gained a few pounds that I was unhappy with — that I started paying attention to my weight for the first time. I bought a cheap non-digital scale, stepped on, and continued to do so on a regular basis for a number of years.

When I was at my lowest weight, I would use the scale every day, as soon as I woke up. This was before I had anything to eat or drink, and after I took off whatever clothes I’d worn to bed. The daily weigh-ins lasted for at least a year (maybe longer), but as I started letting-up on my food control issues, I started letting-up on the scale reliance as well. Weighing myself once a day went to a few times a week, then once a week, then every few weeks.

There isn’t anything wrong with scales. They can be an excellent way to gauge your progress if you’re trying to lose (or gain) weight. Also, if you’re prone to wearing elastic waistbands, you can check-in occasionally to make sure there haven’t been any changes you weren’t aware of.

It becomes a problem if you let the scale dictate your mood and how you feel about yourself. Does a “good” number on the scale equal a good day, and vice versa? I’ve been there. I remember weighing 120 pounds — this was an extremely unhealthy weight for me, being 5’9″ — and freaking out internally when the scale showed a two-pound weight “gain” from the day before (which, as we all know, could have been due to any number of reasons).

I still own a scale, but it’s stored under the bathroom sink and I only pull it out on random occasions. (However, when I do, old habits die hard: it’s always first thing in the morning, before I’ve had anything to eat or drink, and certainly not when I’m feeling bloated from my period or from eating too much the night before.) It took a while to feel okay with checking-in on a random basis, but as someone who used to be a slave to these numbers, it’s what I need and what works for me.

I haven’t trashed my scale completely, but I honestly feel like I could. I use it so infrequently that it wouldn’t be much of a change. I’ve been able to replace scale-reliance with something that would have seemed impossible a few years ago — I rely on how I feel and how my clothes fit.

Something else I didn’t believe when my weight was too low and I cared about every pound: except in rare instances, nobody but you is going to notice a one-, two-, or five-pound weight difference. There’s no need for stress. That’s not to say you shouldn’t stay at the weight where you’re most comfortable (as long as it’s healthy), but seeing a slightly higher number is no reason to freak out.

How often do you weigh yourself?

Related Reading:

Kori at Train Like a Girl! tracks her progress using measurements instead of scale weight. She says no matter what method you choose, the most important thing is to be consistent.

Bella on the Beach said she was Facing the Scale (Gulp!), stepping back on after a month of being away. Her reason has to do with a renewed accountability to her weight loss efforts.

Lynn C, guest-posting at MizFit Online, disclosed that she’s never owned a scale in her life.

Charlotte from The Great Fitness Experiment was weighing herself multiple times a day before she successfully made a change.

Roni from Roni’s Weigh asked her readers, Do You Weigh Everyday? She said, “This question fascinates me as I’m been on both sides of the discussion. I do believe in weighing everyday but I don’t actually do it anymore. I truly think it depends on where you are in your own personal journey.”

Edmonton Sun: Local fitness guru steers clear of the weigh scale

By Zandria | Also posted in BlogHer, Fitness | Comments (15)

Wait…Weight?

8thJanuary2007

The topic of weight is something I’ve been composing in my head for the past few years. Literally, for years. This isn’t easy to talk about. It’s not so much the telling itself, but the anticipation of possible reactions. It just never seems like the right time. I’ve never ended up regretting anything that I’ve posted, so hopefully it’ll be the same with this. There are other strong, female bloggers who have spoken out about their feelings on this subject, and I really admire them for it.

My issues with weight came relatively late in life (usually eating disorders tend to develop in adolescence). Weight and body image were never important to me when I was growing up. I was homeschooled for most of my school-age years, so that might have been a factor — I was largely separate from the angst and competition of other girls during that formative period of my life.

Even when I was between the ages of 18-20, I remember hanging out with my friend Dana and walking to the convenience store, where we’d each buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and then go back to her apartment and eat the entire thing. I wasn’t skinny, but I also wasn’t fat. I was fine with how I looked — it wasn’t something I put a lot of thought into.

It all started initially in 2000 when I decided that I needed to lose a few pounds. This was the first time I ever consciously thought about dieting and changing my eating habits. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2001, when I had back surgery, that the weight loss started in earnest. It wasn’t the surgery itself that caused the weight loss, but I knew I’d be out of commission for a few months while my back was healing — and since I’d already lost about ten pounds by that point, I didn’t want to risk gaining it all back.

That was when the calorie-counting began — the first time in my life I’d ever tracked nutrition information — and although I’m not as obsessive about it as I once was, it still continues today. (There is nothing wrong with calorie counting in itself — indeed, it is a smart thing to do, to be conscientious about what goes into your body — but there’s a difference between calorie-counting and calorie-obsessing. I’ve already said that I wouldn’t take certain things in the past that I knew would be good for me, like flax oil, because I thought it was too high in calories.)

By the time 2002 rolled around, I was at my lowest weight. By restricting my calories I had managed to — and I stress this part, because I was never on a crash diet that caused me to lose a bunch of weight all at once — gradually lose another 15 pounds. That meant I was only losing about 1-2 pounds a month after my surgery, but the fact was I didn’t need to lose it, so it was obvious. My weight was low, and so were my spirits. Since I was underweight, I didn’t have a lot of energy. Relatives and friends were asking me if everything was okay.

There is a tape that I believe still exists — I’ve only seen it once. My friend Chris had a birthday in March 2002, and all of his friends got together and recorded a video-message for him. I remember watching the tape at his birthday party, seeing myself on TV, and how shocked I was that I looked so skinny. “Oh, God,” I distinctly remember thinking at the time. “That’s not how I look in the mirror.” It was a big realization for me, but it wasn’t until later in the year that I started to regain some of the weight I’d lost.

I don’t remember exactly what my weight was when I watched the tape, but I do know that I was at my lowest weight when I went to California for the first time a few months later. It was May 2002, and I was going there to visit a friend and then see my aunt, who were both living in/near Los Angeles. I have some pictures that were taken during that time, which are at the bottom of this post, to illustrate what I’m talking about.

Here is where I give the numbers:
I don’t know if this is the “correct” thing to do, since most people don’t give out this type of information, but I’d rather do it this way than try to be vague. (If I were to say that I was once 10 pounds, 20 pounds, 30 pounds from where I am now — well, where is that? What does that mean?)

So here it is: when I first decided that I need to lose a few pounds in 2000, when I was 20 years old, I was 5’9″ and weighed about 150 pounds. Even at that weight I knew that I wasn’t fat; I’ve never worn jeans larger than a size 10. According to the CDC’s BMI chart (Body Mass Index), at a weight of 150 pounds, and for my height, I was squarely in the range of “normal” with a BMI of 22.1 (the normal range is 18.5-24.9).

At my lowest weight, during the spring/summer of 2002, I weighed thirty pounds less than that — I had gotten down to 120. (I was weighing myself practically every morning, and the lowest number I ever remember seeing was 118.) I pretty much stopped having my menstrual cycle; for a few years I had a period only about 1-2 times a year. At 120 pounds, my BMI was 17.7. Underweight, according to the charts. If I accidentally hit the side of a door when walking through, or did something else that normally shouldn’t have caused me any harm, I’d get a bruise. My hipbones jutted out, so I had almost constant bruises on my hips during that time.

In the years since then, I’ve gotten back to a more normal weight. It can fluctuate, depending on what I’m eating and how much I’m exercising, but generally I’m somewhere between 128-132 (BMI of 18.9-19.5), and the highest my weight has been since since then is 135. That BMI range sounds low to me, but the mirror is still where I’m at my most critical. In the mirror I see a rounded stomach, and thighs that I wish were thinner. At the same time, I hate feeling this way and I am the first advocate to tell other people — absolutely truthfully — that they are beautiful just the way they are.

I’ve written in the past about body image, but it was in the context of an article that I’d seen. Even though I didn’t really say anything personal about myself at the time, I felt that just by writing about the topic I might be showing that I was overly interested. But nobody asked, “So how is your body image?” even though I was kind of expecting it. I think we tend to avoid this topic unless someone specifically brings it up. It’s a “weighty” topic, no matter what your size.

Why am I writing this? Why now?
Like I said, this is something I’ve lived with for over five years, and it has changed me. Even though I don’t obsess about food and calories and weight as much as I used to, the feelings have never completely left. The Skinny Monster found me one day when I was least expecting it, and he refuses to let me go.

I think part of the reason for the drastic weight loss was my tendency to be a perfectionist. When I started to lose weight, even though I knew in my head that I didn’t need to lose it, I also didn’t want to gain it. I felt that if I gained the weight back, it meant I was weak and I had failed.

I don’t know if what I’m saying right now is adequate. I don’t think I’ve said everything that I want to say — all the things I thought I might say once I finally got up the nerve. But this is a start. I’ve put it out there, and hopefully it shouldn’t be as hard to say things in the future if they come to mind. If anyone has any questions or input, I’d be happy to hear it. Maybe it’ll help spark what I forgot.
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By Zandria | Comments (19)