Weight, Weight! Don't Tell Me!

They say you can never be too rich or too thin.  I cannot speak from experience about the former, but I am quite certain I have never known a woman who believes she has a perfect body.   Even my thinnest friends, standing next to me while gazing into the same mirror, castigate themselves ad nauseum for a bulge here or a handful there.  Somewhere in her ascent from the primordial soup the female of our species went terribly wrong, as she was given the elements of true beauty but none of the ability to perceive it.

Self-criticism comes naturally to women.  We are taught in the nursery to flaunt our strengths, learning to coo and embellish as we condition ourselves to wage battle against our soul sisters for the male prize.   In my case, I was taught by my female forebears that beauty was defined by thinness.  A girl was admired only to the extent that carbs did not pass her lips.  My mother and grandmother remarked about every woman’s waistline and hips, making it clear that thinner was always better—as they washed down their coffee with another piece of cake.

This widely expressed point of view put an ache in my heart.  I was born of Russian peasant DNA, the kind well-adapted to childbearing and cold-weather farming.  In polite company, one might call me Rubenesque; in the glaring morning light of our kitchen I was simply fat.  My greater assets, as it were, expressed themselves at an early age—long before I could count carbs or make my own choices.  Like the little Leefolt girl in The Help, I was a perennial disappointment to my mother.  My baby fat refused to burn off as my thunder thighs followed me into adolescence and then adulthood.

We know a lot more today about nutrition and its effect on health.  Back then, it was all about starvation and sacrifice.  I saw enough cottage cheese and fruit cocktail between the ages of 10 and 16 to make me gag today every time I walk along the dairy case.   I lived in a perpetual state of dieting and denial.  Food intake was highly monitored—even to the point where the ladies working in the school cafeteria reported my meals to the mother ship.  Eating freely became characterized as misbehavior, forcing me underground for well-deserved bouts of culinary satisfaction.   As a result, I became a closet eater who is prone to binges.  I learned to associate food with reward and diet with punishment.

There have been countless phases of enlightenment since those dreaded high school years.  Most notably, we have had a succession of beautiful full-bodied women—from Camryn Manheim to Queen Latifah—stand up for the rights of women not to conform to the malnourished images of pre-pubescent supermodels.  On the other hand, we are in the midst of a food revolution where we now realize that health—and by proxy, weight—can be maintained by embracing a more natural, less processed diet.

I find myself caught in the crossfire between self-awareness and self-improvement.  I work very hard to be healthy, using common sense and the latest wisdom to modify the poor eating habits that have been so ingrained in me.  On the other hand, I am painfully aware that the genetic hand I was dealt will forever preclude spandex leggings and a tube top.  I try to do the things that make me “feel beautiful”—learning at last to accept the fact that by many people’s standards I will never measure up.  

Tomorrow's blog:  Feeling Groovy