As a larger person, I've struggled with self acceptance my whole life, always fighting the demons of the main stream media and societies expectations of what girls and women are 'supposed' to look like, not to mention what the healthcare industry says we should be, with their strident shouts of an 'obesity epidemic' in America. Despite the fact that there is a multi-billion dollar weight loss industry in this country, Americans are fatter than ever before, due to the fast food industry, portion sizes that are out of control, genetics, ailments and a host of other reasons. Though I've been 'normal' sized in my life, for about 4 years in the late 1980s, I realized several things during that time that have stayed with me. One, that sexy is more a state of mind than of body mass, two that even thin I didn't really attract the kind of guys I wanted to become intimate with, for the most part (Jeff Wilson and Jim Flack being the notable exceptions) and three that living on about 900 calories a day and never eating anything with sugar, taste or fat in it wasn't a sustainable diet for the rest of my life. I also recognized that exercise was a key component to losing weight and keeping it off. So here I am, 20 years later, struggling to lose 50 pounds after working for two years to lose the first 50, and it is harder than ever to deal with food, exercise and my body.
My friend Janine Ferrell lead me to this marvelous essay by Kimberlee Della Luce, in which she talks about appreciating your curves, your thighs, your soft belly. She reminded me of some things I'd learned back in the 80s, about accepting that I am never going to be a size 6, that my body has natural curves, even at a 'normal' weight, and that it's okay, good in fact, to be voluptuous and beautiful. This essay is reprinted with the permission of the author. She has my gratitude for her inspiring words of wisdom.
My Lush Abundance
By Kymberlee della Luce
This is a paper I wrote in the spring for a class called "The Body in Context". I know a lot of us struggle with self-esteem and body issues so I thought I'd share a fractal of my experience/thoughts on the matter for anyone interested. Here is is:
My Lush Abundance
I am lush and abundant. Fecund and fleshy, curvy am I. This is how I see myself today but it has not always been this way. Learning to embrace the fat on my body has been a journey for me. I suppose I’m still on that journey but I have come much closer to self-acceptance than ever before.
As I consider the fleshy fat of my form, I think about all the people I know who seem to constantly be striving for something. I hear, “I’m de-toxing again,” or “I’ll feel so much better about my life when I lose these ten pounds.” I remember being indoctrinated with that mentality and feel sad when I even consider it. These kinds of statements make me think of the puritanical, colonizing ethics that have stained our country with madness—creating a sense that somehow just being a fertile land isn’t enough. Our country seems to have been founded on a notion of conquering something wild and lush and carving it up for consumption and I think it gets in our consciousness. This is how I treated my body for too long.
For too long, I felt like my body was worthless. I had asthma as a child and couldn’t run. I never figured out how to stand on my head or do a cartwheel either. What I wasn’t encouraged to see is how strong my body was, how I had nearly unending endurance, how I could swim and climb and dance. The focus by my family, especially my mother, most of my life was how much fat was on my body. It was some sort of obsession. No amount of cultivating other talents or strengths seemed to matter. I was smart, artistic and funny but not skinny. My mother once told me, “You know, you would be perfect if you were skinny.”
The goal of becoming perfect was ever present in my life until just a couple of years ago. I have always felt so much pressure to be everything—anything—people wanted me to be. I often had no sense of my individual identity because I was trying to achieve something beyond my reach. I wanted to look like Audrey Hepburn which is biologically impossible. No amount of dieting or plastic surgery was going to change my DNA but I didn’t realize that. I always felt if I could just get there—wherever “there” was—I would be acceptable and loved. These feelings of worthlessness have everything to do with my fat. It never went away entirely and I never felt good enough to be loved which has left me searching for love outside of myself in places where love wasn’t present.
In my psyche, I have somehow conflated the issues related to my fat with issues related to sexuality. Because I was curvier, I developed earlier than many girls and had grown men ogling men when I was twelve years-old. I lived with an odd sense that I was both repulsive (because of my fat) and highly desirable. I felt a sense of hunger from others—hunger for my abundant flesh. I confused that hunger with love and thought that I was loved because I was desired which led to a series of wrong turns which led to more guilt and self-loathing.
Guilt seems to be a big part of the conversation that I have had with my body much of my life. My experiences with organized religion made me feel as though just being female made me tainted and “sinful.” Being raised by a mother who examined every morsel I put in my mouth made me feel as though enjoying food was wrong. I realize in retrospect that I used to feel guilty anytime I experienced pleasure of any sort! I believe that collectively the disconnection from the body in search of “transcendence” by patriarchal religious institutions has led to a disconnection from the earth and an appreciation of spiritual immanence. I see a direct correlation between my desire to hack away at the flesh of my body or to deny myself the pleasure that comes from being in a body and the collective denial of the Feminine Principle.
Denial of pleasure and rejection of the body is something I am learning to no longer participate in. I have learned the wise woman ways of caring for the body that feel much more holistic to me. Rather than doing things that feel violent and unpleasant like colonics and de-toxing with harsh, bitter herbs, I have learned the value of eating cleansing, healthy foods, drinking water and getting fresh air and exercise. I’ve noticed that when I tune into my body, she tells me what she needs. I have heard a voice over and over that says so clearly, “Just love me. Please just love me.”
Because I do love myself (mostly), I tune out the external messages from my culture about what I should look like, what my percentage of body fat “should” be and how I should deny what brings me pleasure. I reject and challenge images of the fat woman in a cartoon as the buffoon or the evil witch. I am choosing to consciously rewrite and co-author the story that has been written on the flesh of my body. Along with the rest of us, this conversation going on inside of me continues as I learn to embrace the wholeness of myself, to find balance and to revel in the lush abundance of my body.
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