I am a solid, strong, and substantial woman
being on a weight loss medication does not equal obsession with female thinness and/or embodying any version of "the perfect woman"
I read a post recently on Threads that said, “the return to 90s fatphobia and the obsession with female thinness” tracks with intentional attempts to roll back the rights of women.
“They want us distracted. They want us to make ourselves as small as possible, literally and figuratively. They want us immobilized. They wanted us sedated. They want us to do anything besides take our power back. And dieting accomplishes all of that.”
I have spent more than half of the nearly 62 years I’ve been alive believing that my worth was tied to embodying any of the various 20th century versions of the perfect woman: thin, lithe, airy, wispy, cold-all-the time, never (always?) hungry, curvy, cute, waif-like, sultry, sexy, but not slutty (intentional use of words for effect).
I envied women who lived on cigarettes and diet coke.
I wanted to have temporary anorexia nervosa.
So yeah, in the 90s I was right there in the thick (no pun intended) of fatphobia taking fen/phen and feeling virtuous because I could make a bagel with cream cheese last all day.
So yes, I can see the direct correlation between controlling our bodies for the sake of the male (and if I’m being really honest, female) gaze and the rolling back of our rights.
My past attempts at dieting consumed me...I was unhealthily obsessed with controlling my body and making it "acceptably small."
Somewhere around 2010 I started to become envious of larger women who were comfortable in their bodies, wearing the clothes THEY wanted to wear and who had no fucks to give. Body positivity and body neutrality was the gift I didn’t know I needed, and I sailed through my 50s not at my lowest weight but not at my highest either. I was right in between. And I was content.
At the beginning of 2024, I was the heaviest I’d ever been…and I was also “small, sedated, and immobilized” (not in all ways, but in some pretty important ways).
Having lost some weight, I am big now.
I am a strong, solid, and substantial woman who takes up space and has the physical, mental, and emotional bandwidth (and energy) to do things like organize a Silent Disco on the Boardwalk fundraiser for Kamala Harris (stay tuned for details), run Shame School, and continue to create a deep body of work around the shame that is at the heart of complex mother-adult daughter relationships.
With joy. And energy. And focus.
Not because I’ve lost weight but because I’ve lost the exhausting mental struggle that is food noise and white-knuckling it. This is what “taking the easy way out” has given me.
I am not dieting.
I am free from dieting. I am free from bending and contorting myself to meet some arbitrary beauty standard or sexist, racist “body mass index.” I am free to focus on what’s truly important to me.