I have a body, you have a body, we all have bodies. It is a part of the human experience to be born with one, live with one, love with one, grow older with one, and die with one. Whether they work well while we have them, however, is up to fate and our lifestyles. Bodies.

They are the topic that this course is on. Hate our bodies or love them, they’re the only ones we’ve got. And I don’t have it in me to produce a comprehensive post about what I’m feeling, I just hope this word vomit evokes some sort of emotion, good or bad. 

My relationship with my body is love hate. Some days I feel beautiful, sexy, and confident. Other days I feel ugly and misshapen, disgusting. I’ll hate myself for eating that day or I’ll hate myself for not eating the next. I feel like I’d love myself more if I’d just not eat so much the next day. If i forgo ice cream, just maybe, the next day when i look in the mirror I won’t feel discontent. It is a constant battle, one that sometimes I win, and sometimes I don’t.

I wasn’t always this way, and I can’t pinpoint when it started. But I can say that the best intentions can still cause pain. In my family, I am the ‘biggest’ one. My brother and father are mostly smaller due to genetics. My mother and sister are smaller because of society, at least from my point of view.

I have never been small like my family. I’ve always wanted that extra piece of pie after dinner, that snack an hour after lunch, my favorite candy for dessert. And while I wasn’t shamed by my family, I was asked repeatedly if I ‘needed’ the snack or food. If I could just wait till the next meal time. It made me self conscious because I started comparing my consumption habits with those of my family’s. As a kid though, I didn’t notice. The sweet cloud of childhood obscured my thoughts from even the notion of being self conscious about my body. 

This cloud could only protect me for so long because I grew up. As I’m sure every teen or young adult woman has gone through, I started comparing my body with my peers, my family, representations online, art. Anything to see what was beautiful and enviable. At around this time, my mother would talk with me about how I should think about watching my weight, how I should create a buffer zone because as she said, there was a slippery road to getting ‘bigger’.

‘Bigger’. Such an ugly word that I internalized as the epitome of everything I didn’t want to be. Even with this word hanging over my head every time I ate, every time I thought about food, I could not curb my enjoyment of the act. So my mother devised a plan for me. A way to prepare me for living away from home in college where I wouldn’t have those checks whenever I was eating ‘too much’. She decided to bring pastries and candy galore, juice, in the house, anything my siblings and I wanted. And I ate it, I gained little weight but I indulged enough that after some months I no longer wanted to eat those things, they’d lost their charm and I was no longer enthralled.

Because of this, when I started living on campus, I had no drive to eat empty calories or stuff myself with such sweet indulgences. I was tempted though by the convenience of food options that i needn’t cook for. And I gained weight.

The freshman 15 are not a lie, and they hit me like a ton of bricks. Those pounds I gained during my first year of college started shaking the way I viewed myself. When I looked in the mirror I felt slovenly and unenviable. My confidence started wilting and I was starting down a slippery slope. At the end of the year, I went home and had a talk with my mother. She asked me if I was happy with myself at that weight and if I wanted her to help me lose it. I took her up on it.

I wanted to feel like myself again, wanted to feel beautiful or at least try to re-embody the nonchalant attitude about my body that I used to possess. We devised that I would eat one meal a day for the summer, and decrease my meal plan on campus to 2 meals a day. And I stuck by it for a while. All the while believing that by losing weight I would find myself again.

I did end up losing weight, I lost 9 pounds in about 6 weeks. And I was proud of myself. Then I started slipping up and next thing I knew I was back on campus.

Being back on campus and self regulating has been a struggle. At the beginning of the semester, some days I wouldn’t eat but a small meal a day, nauseous because of stress and glad of it. Some days I would eat 4 meals and feel guilty. It was also hard because people didn’t see my body the way I do. I felt like talking with anyone about it would elicit incredulous reactions. But whether i eat one meal or four meals in a day, I’m slowly starting to accept it.

I have a significant other and they don’t care whether I’m this weight or 10 pounds more. My mother has accepted my choices and supports what I have chosen to do, which is to just exist. Not look at the scale, not worry about deciding not to eat when I’m hungry, just live. And the rest will come along with it.

So suffice it to say, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I’m not entirely okay with my body and I don’t know when/if I will be. My mother is one of my best friends and her backing off and supporting me has gone a long way towards acceptance. But I do know that this class has really helped me think about my body in a kind way, extra fat and all.

And that, is a win in my book