"So, you know that thing I do when I talk a lot about body acceptance and how my butt is an intentional affront to the tyranny of thinness, but then I secretly hate my body?" My friend nodded knowingly. We'd hashed out my hypocrisy many times before during our mothers' nights out. "Yeah, I'd like to stop doing that."
She smiled, took a sip of beer, and said, "If you figure out how, pass the secret on to me." Accepting our bodies — and meaning it — is harder than it seems. I don't want to live my life always five or 10 or 30 pounds away from being okay with myself. I'm 5'5", 155 pounds, and as I've been informed numerous times by men on the street, I have a motor in the back of my Honda (though this is conveyed to me less frequently now that I'm 32 and nearly always walking with a kid hanging from each of my arms). Intellectually, I know there's nothing wrong with me or my body, but I can't shake the idea that I would be a better person if I were thinner.
I am roughly the same weight that I've been since I was a teenager, though I've been significantly lighter twice before. The first time was during a phase in college when I mistook crystal meth for a study drug. The second was during a period of crippling depression. Both times I was delighted by my thinness, but the way I got there was so inauspicious that I cringed when people complimented me. Likewise, after every bout with stomach flu someone will tell me, "You look great! Have you been dieting?" So deeply do we cling to the idea that people who are thin look better than people who are not that we can overlook the dead eyes and yellow skin of a woman who hasn't digested food in three days.
Though I carry a fair amount of fat, I'm quite fit. I work out most days of the week, dropping my two toddlers off at the gym's childcare and exercising like a beast. I'm happy for the exertion and the break from being a stay-at-home mom to two tiny people who cannot yet wipe their own bottoms. Even better, it helps me work out the underlying anxiety that has resulted in me being the kind of person who used to use crystal meth to study. I do studio cycling, Pilates, gravity strength training, any and everything. But I never lose weight. I just get stronger and hungrier.