Hey everyone, hope you are well. I am going to dig right in and discuss my reaction to a YouTube video I saw this past week called Is Being Fat a Choice? Fit Women vs. Fat Women. The video consisted of two groups of women, one being classified as “fit” and the other as “fat.”
The host had the two groups standing on opposite sides of one another. They were asked if they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements. I want to discuss three of those statements: 1. Your physique is in your control, 2. Body positivity can promote unhealthy habits, and 3. I have abused my body. This week I will tackle #1.
Before I even get into whether I agree with the idea that your physique is in control, we must think about the things we do to control our physique. For the sake of this discussion, I will not focus on genetics and the things we truly cannot do to control our body.
Growing up, I was always told, or should I say it was spoken about me within earshot, that I am bigger than my mom. My mom is very petite, and for me it gave me a serious complex. I always saw myself as big. It was when a coworker called me small at my heaviest weight that I really had to think about how I viewed myself.
Many of us are caught in the trap of comparison (you are bigger than your mother, you are not as small as your sister, etc.), and it hinders us from looking at ourselves from the standpoint of our own uniqueness. I will not even get started on the comparison trap of social media. But I digress.
Let me get back to the notion of controlling one’s physique. Isn’t that part of the high that diet CULTure (yeah, I said CULTure) promotes? I know for myself that every pound lost created a sense of joy (euphoria is too strong a word) and accomplishment. It made every fad diet, every time I starved myself worth it. It made every time I bought a new piece of clothing with a smaller number on the tag worth it.
But the thing is tightening one’s grip onto something whether it be weight loss or a broken relationship until his or her knuckles turn white for most people can only last for so long before that person lets go. That is exactly what happened to me.
On April 26, 2024, I went out to dinner with some friends. Without going into detail about how I was eating, I was eating and exercising in a way that was very disciplined and truly unsustainable. I had lost quite a bit of weight and felt great about myself. But I was hungry. I was very hungry. That night I ate like I had never eaten before. I realized that the control that I had exerted over my body had been affecting me both physically and mentally.
Since that day, I made the decision to eat and move my body in ways that are sustainable and feel good to me. Of course I gained a bit of the weight I lost back, but I also gained peace of mind. Even now I still feel the temptation to do things to shrink my body. I know several ways to lose weight, but after a day or two I recommit to the decision that I am not going back there.
If you ask me if your physique is in your control, I will say yes, you can do things to control your physique. What I have learned, however, is to ask myself the question, “Is it worth it? Is it worth my peace? Because I do not want to move through life with white knuckles.
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