So I’m 17, just about to graduate, and have been raised by two parents both wholly entrenched in diet culture who modelled many very very unhealthy behaviours with food throughout my childhood. I did keto with my mom when I was 13, suggested by her, and developed a restrictive eating disorder at 15 that very quickly consumed my life. Later, I began a sort of self-led recovery with my family still unaware i’d been struggling at all, but by this time the ed was making me too unhappy to continue living with. Body neutrality and “food is fuel” type of affirmations really kept me grounded in the beginning and as many with eds do, I wanted to talk about and hear about them, and went looking for podcasts on the subject. I found Maintenance Phase by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes which introduced me to the concept of fatphobia and fat activism in a way that made so much sense to me. I listened to their entire podcast over the summer and I cannot understate the profound impact that it had on my recovery and my relationship with my body afterward. I felt so seen and valued, and it helped me to realize that the answers I’d been looking for, the reason I felt so bad in my own body just because it wasn’t thin, wasn’t my fault. It obviously took some time to shift my mindset but realizing how fatphobia is rooted in racism, misogyny, patriarchy, and the way that modern beauty and diet culture profits off of these things made me too mad to continue to put myself on diets, and I couldn’t justify it to myself. I’ve really noticed changes in my daily life, eating is less stressful, I put less pressure on myself on days when I eat a lot of “bad” foods, and I’m able to recognize how my upbringing and my experiences have shaped my relationship with my body. I feel now nothing but grateful for coming to this realization so early in my life, when many women never do. Now I’m just trying to teach this to my mom.
Thank you so much for sharing, mollie! I am SO overjoyed for you that you've found this knowledge and gratitude, and (not to be a grandma about it) at such a young age. I was nowhere near this level of understanding and peace at 17. I'm so glad I have you as a reader! PLEASE continue to pass this on to the people around you <3 <3 <3
Fellow American millennial woman here, and (oddly enough?) I do feel at ease most of the time in my body. Two things I think have helped: living abroad for the past 10 years (better quality food, less cultural fixation on bodies in general) and also learning to sew clothing for myself and finding out what patterns/fabrics I most enjoy, both in terms of how they look and how they feel. Sewing really drives home the idea that it's the garment's job to fit your body, not the other way around.
I've been reading your writing for a while now and I really appreciate your perspective on these issues. Good luck with your book proposal!
This is so interesting, Kelsey... I have not thought about how living in other places might affect body image like this, and it makes sense that creating clothes would release some of the pressures associated with garment-wearing. Do you have a resource you can share for learning how to sew from a total-beginner level??
You’re so right about projection and discomfort with others’ bodies. I often feel that, and try to check myself. After an adolescence of disordered eating followed by a 15 year period of feeling relatively happy with my body (perhaps only because I tended to be thin without much effort) I felt totally upended by perimenopause and menopause. Again, my body was a foreign thing that didn’t feel familiar or comfortable. I felt both a) compassionate towards my younger self. i.e., If puberty felt at all like this, no wonder I freaked out, and b) dubious that I’d ever fully recovered from my eating disorder in the first place. which made me feel ashamed, and also shallow as I obsessed all over again about food and body size. It was disappointing to note that, for me, self acceptance was conditional. Things are easier now, but It’s a daily practice to let go of bodily preoccupation, allow regular eating of AnY food, and focus more on life than body image -- like the fictional young woman did. That last is one of the keys, I think. But hardly an easy groove to find. Love your writing; thanks!
"self acceptance was conditional" -- damn, this hits hard. I was just writing on Instagram yesterday about how my body image tends to be seasonal; sometimes I'm in a good season, sometimes I'm in a bad one. I have been in good seasons before that were really perpetuated by me being leaner/lighter and other people giving me positive reinforcement for that, so my better body image wasn't coming entirely from within, it was coming from the condition of having people compliment me. I think that's normal/natural -- people like compliments, compliments feel good. But I'm trying to make my good body image seasons more about what I'm doing for myself/my body and make those things more important in my mind than the external. That's not easy. Like you said, a daily practice. Thank you for sharing <3
The less other people have to say about my body, the better I tend to feel about it. Being allowed to exist in peace, without comments about how I look or what I eat, should be basic human decency afforded to everyone.
Every post from you is better than the previous one!
This reminds me of what Glennon Doyle said on her podcast: “loving your body would mean that it is an entirely different entity and not part of you.”
To me personally, having to love my body is just one more extra effort that I have to make. I don’t feel like my body is there to be thought about or even loved. My goal is to ignore it, cause it’s just there.
Love this Glennon quote as well. “Self-love” just doesn’t resonate with me for this exact reason. How do I love myself when me, myself and are are one and the same? When I share so with people, I don’t do so as insightfully and incisively as Glennon. And, it is very validating to read. I push back on it pretty hard with folks (when they are talking about it as it pertains to my “self-love” and not theirs, of course ; )
For me, I just AM love. As much as possible. In the ways I connect with myself, others, our shared precious planet and so many of the things it offers. And sometimes shame, pain, fears and frustrations are flowing more freely than love. This is just being human. A quote I came across last week: “We are all one question and the3 best answer seems to be love--a connection between things.” ~ Mary Reufles
For me, sometimes my loving connection is with pizzas and ice cream and sometimes green smoothies and really good fish 💛
Thank you for your tender words. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of finding love in connection, people and nature, things I personally believe to bring a lot more joy than “loving your body” and are a bit less self-involved as well.
To finding love in burgers and also veggies! 🧡 love to you my dear.
“…things I personally believe to bring a lot more joy than “loving your body” and are a bit less self-involved as well.” LOVE this thought/belief/life-philosophy, Jihene!
To finding love and joy as abundantly as possible (and sharing it, and burgers, fries and such ; ). love to you 💛
My journey of making peace with my body after decades of chronic dieting and disordered eating coincidentally aligned with my working through my people-pleasing tendencies. I used to think I owed everyone and their grandma an explanation for what I did, ate, said, wore. Now I'm at a place in my life where it's ok if people are uncomfortable with me/my body--that's their problem, not mine. I don't owe you shit! It's definitely not static (depending on mood/emotions/hormones) but I feel more secure in myself now than I ever did when I thought I had "control" over my body.
Also. Lifting weights! You can't make gains on 1,200 calories a day. Praise be, Casey Johnston/Swole Woman.
Listen, I'm obsessed with Swole Woman and have mentioned her in this newsletter like 20 times, so I'm with you on that! Lifting weights 4 lyfe
You bring up something so compelling about explanations -- I've seen so many women do that whole "oh my god I shouldn't be eating this" thing re: "junk" food, but I've also found myself offering weird/stressed explanations if I didn't partake in social food situations [when I was really struggling in early management of binge eating & no foods felt safe/OK, I'd try to avoid "triggers" all the time] ... feeling like I had to explain why I wasn't eating pizza or whatever also stressed me the hell out. Now I work really hard to just not say shit about shit. It's my SAY LESS era. I'm with you.
Have been contemplating working on a piece in the vein of your post, Mikala. And now I simply don’t need to try to put together something this comprehensive. Nor could I have. Truly excelling job and I’ll be pointing folks towards the post (and your work) as I can.
As someone with a ED in my teens who specialized for a brief while as a therapist with the ED population, I am so thrilled for the kinds of conversations and work that are taking place--very increasingly--in the food, eating, body and being realms. So grateful I bumbled into your work and world 💛
And definitely on the “say less.” The ripple effect of what we say and don’t say can be HUGE in ways we don’t even realize. And sometimes “small” in just the right ways for others 🦋
Why would Zoe's mom make her go see a therapist? I didn't read that book and there may be more context missing. But if I had a child that worked their hobby naked, *in private*, who am I to say that there's something wrong with that?
Haha everyone is weird in their own way! I'll admit that playing the cello naked is a bit odd, but again what people do in their own time and in their private space is no one else's business. As long as Zoe isn't harming herself I'd say her mom is very much in the wrong.
Yes, I am mostly at ease with my body most of the time. I'm happy enough with how it looks, but I also don't place much value on that. I have an affirmation which is 'I value, respect and nourish my body to thank it for carrying me through life'. My body is a vehicle. I owe it the respect of looking after it, and I feel gratitude to it for the things it has and continues to enable me to do. I am grateful that I can climb a mountain or ride a bike. I am thankful that it has grown 4 children for me.
I wrestle with this constantly. I am not sure how to unpick all the voices in my head about diet culture, and sometimes even reading positive things about bodies and relationships with food can encourage unhelpful things. Perhaps acknowledging this will help us be more honest about it.
Love this. A few added thoughts: we don’t hear from people who have healthy body image because they feel no need to talk about it. Also kind of connected to another point, as an ED Dietitian I’ve found that many of my clients who work on body image feel ostracized for even mentioning body dissatisfaction. I’m actually going to post something about this next week!
So I’m 17, just about to graduate, and have been raised by two parents both wholly entrenched in diet culture who modelled many very very unhealthy behaviours with food throughout my childhood. I did keto with my mom when I was 13, suggested by her, and developed a restrictive eating disorder at 15 that very quickly consumed my life. Later, I began a sort of self-led recovery with my family still unaware i’d been struggling at all, but by this time the ed was making me too unhappy to continue living with. Body neutrality and “food is fuel” type of affirmations really kept me grounded in the beginning and as many with eds do, I wanted to talk about and hear about them, and went looking for podcasts on the subject. I found Maintenance Phase by Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes which introduced me to the concept of fatphobia and fat activism in a way that made so much sense to me. I listened to their entire podcast over the summer and I cannot understate the profound impact that it had on my recovery and my relationship with my body afterward. I felt so seen and valued, and it helped me to realize that the answers I’d been looking for, the reason I felt so bad in my own body just because it wasn’t thin, wasn’t my fault. It obviously took some time to shift my mindset but realizing how fatphobia is rooted in racism, misogyny, patriarchy, and the way that modern beauty and diet culture profits off of these things made me too mad to continue to put myself on diets, and I couldn’t justify it to myself. I’ve really noticed changes in my daily life, eating is less stressful, I put less pressure on myself on days when I eat a lot of “bad” foods, and I’m able to recognize how my upbringing and my experiences have shaped my relationship with my body. I feel now nothing but grateful for coming to this realization so early in my life, when many women never do. Now I’m just trying to teach this to my mom.
Thank you so much for sharing, mollie! I am SO overjoyed for you that you've found this knowledge and gratitude, and (not to be a grandma about it) at such a young age. I was nowhere near this level of understanding and peace at 17. I'm so glad I have you as a reader! PLEASE continue to pass this on to the people around you <3 <3 <3
you are literally me! thank you for sharing this, i resonate with this so much
Fellow American millennial woman here, and (oddly enough?) I do feel at ease most of the time in my body. Two things I think have helped: living abroad for the past 10 years (better quality food, less cultural fixation on bodies in general) and also learning to sew clothing for myself and finding out what patterns/fabrics I most enjoy, both in terms of how they look and how they feel. Sewing really drives home the idea that it's the garment's job to fit your body, not the other way around.
I've been reading your writing for a while now and I really appreciate your perspective on these issues. Good luck with your book proposal!
This is so interesting, Kelsey... I have not thought about how living in other places might affect body image like this, and it makes sense that creating clothes would release some of the pressures associated with garment-wearing. Do you have a resource you can share for learning how to sew from a total-beginner level??
Here's a good collection of resources for absolute beginners: https://sewoverit.com/beginners-week/ Or this one: https://www.tillyandthebuttons.com/p/learn-to-sew.html?m=1 YouTube also has tons of tutorials, I learned so much just by browsing around, trial and error, etc. It's a fun hobby for sure!
You’re so right about projection and discomfort with others’ bodies. I often feel that, and try to check myself. After an adolescence of disordered eating followed by a 15 year period of feeling relatively happy with my body (perhaps only because I tended to be thin without much effort) I felt totally upended by perimenopause and menopause. Again, my body was a foreign thing that didn’t feel familiar or comfortable. I felt both a) compassionate towards my younger self. i.e., If puberty felt at all like this, no wonder I freaked out, and b) dubious that I’d ever fully recovered from my eating disorder in the first place. which made me feel ashamed, and also shallow as I obsessed all over again about food and body size. It was disappointing to note that, for me, self acceptance was conditional. Things are easier now, but It’s a daily practice to let go of bodily preoccupation, allow regular eating of AnY food, and focus more on life than body image -- like the fictional young woman did. That last is one of the keys, I think. But hardly an easy groove to find. Love your writing; thanks!
"self acceptance was conditional" -- damn, this hits hard. I was just writing on Instagram yesterday about how my body image tends to be seasonal; sometimes I'm in a good season, sometimes I'm in a bad one. I have been in good seasons before that were really perpetuated by me being leaner/lighter and other people giving me positive reinforcement for that, so my better body image wasn't coming entirely from within, it was coming from the condition of having people compliment me. I think that's normal/natural -- people like compliments, compliments feel good. But I'm trying to make my good body image seasons more about what I'm doing for myself/my body and make those things more important in my mind than the external. That's not easy. Like you said, a daily practice. Thank you for sharing <3
I have come to use “What the fuck business is it of yours?” (Mostly silently) as my go-to response to being judged.
Lol, love this Kathryn. Sometimes we need to bring that little bit of aggression to the proceedings.
The less other people have to say about my body, the better I tend to feel about it. Being allowed to exist in peace, without comments about how I look or what I eat, should be basic human decency afforded to everyone.
Every post from you is better than the previous one!
This reminds me of what Glennon Doyle said on her podcast: “loving your body would mean that it is an entirely different entity and not part of you.”
To me personally, having to love my body is just one more extra effort that I have to make. I don’t feel like my body is there to be thought about or even loved. My goal is to ignore it, cause it’s just there.
[crying emoji] -- you're so sweet, thank you Jihene. I've never heard that Glennon quote before ... going to give me something to think about for DAYS
Love this Glennon quote as well. “Self-love” just doesn’t resonate with me for this exact reason. How do I love myself when me, myself and are are one and the same? When I share so with people, I don’t do so as insightfully and incisively as Glennon. And, it is very validating to read. I push back on it pretty hard with folks (when they are talking about it as it pertains to my “self-love” and not theirs, of course ; )
For me, I just AM love. As much as possible. In the ways I connect with myself, others, our shared precious planet and so many of the things it offers. And sometimes shame, pain, fears and frustrations are flowing more freely than love. This is just being human. A quote I came across last week: “We are all one question and the3 best answer seems to be love--a connection between things.” ~ Mary Reufles
For me, sometimes my loving connection is with pizzas and ice cream and sometimes green smoothies and really good fish 💛
I’m so grateful for your comment here, Jihene 🦋
Thank you for your tender words. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of finding love in connection, people and nature, things I personally believe to bring a lot more joy than “loving your body” and are a bit less self-involved as well.
To finding love in burgers and also veggies! 🧡 love to you my dear.
“…things I personally believe to bring a lot more joy than “loving your body” and are a bit less self-involved as well.” LOVE this thought/belief/life-philosophy, Jihene!
To finding love and joy as abundantly as possible (and sharing it, and burgers, fries and such ; ). love to you 💛
My journey of making peace with my body after decades of chronic dieting and disordered eating coincidentally aligned with my working through my people-pleasing tendencies. I used to think I owed everyone and their grandma an explanation for what I did, ate, said, wore. Now I'm at a place in my life where it's ok if people are uncomfortable with me/my body--that's their problem, not mine. I don't owe you shit! It's definitely not static (depending on mood/emotions/hormones) but I feel more secure in myself now than I ever did when I thought I had "control" over my body.
Also. Lifting weights! You can't make gains on 1,200 calories a day. Praise be, Casey Johnston/Swole Woman.
Listen, I'm obsessed with Swole Woman and have mentioned her in this newsletter like 20 times, so I'm with you on that! Lifting weights 4 lyfe
You bring up something so compelling about explanations -- I've seen so many women do that whole "oh my god I shouldn't be eating this" thing re: "junk" food, but I've also found myself offering weird/stressed explanations if I didn't partake in social food situations [when I was really struggling in early management of binge eating & no foods felt safe/OK, I'd try to avoid "triggers" all the time] ... feeling like I had to explain why I wasn't eating pizza or whatever also stressed me the hell out. Now I work really hard to just not say shit about shit. It's my SAY LESS era. I'm with you.
Have been contemplating working on a piece in the vein of your post, Mikala. And now I simply don’t need to try to put together something this comprehensive. Nor could I have. Truly excelling job and I’ll be pointing folks towards the post (and your work) as I can.
As someone with a ED in my teens who specialized for a brief while as a therapist with the ED population, I am so thrilled for the kinds of conversations and work that are taking place--very increasingly--in the food, eating, body and being realms. So grateful I bumbled into your work and world 💛
And definitely on the “say less.” The ripple effect of what we say and don’t say can be HUGE in ways we don’t even realize. And sometimes “small” in just the right ways for others 🦋
Thank you so much Lesli!
Why would Zoe's mom make her go see a therapist? I didn't read that book and there may be more context missing. But if I had a child that worked their hobby naked, *in private*, who am I to say that there's something wrong with that?
idk, prob some weird panic like "my child is being UNUSUAL"
Haha everyone is weird in their own way! I'll admit that playing the cello naked is a bit odd, but again what people do in their own time and in their private space is no one else's business. As long as Zoe isn't harming herself I'd say her mom is very much in the wrong.
Yes, I am mostly at ease with my body most of the time. I'm happy enough with how it looks, but I also don't place much value on that. I have an affirmation which is 'I value, respect and nourish my body to thank it for carrying me through life'. My body is a vehicle. I owe it the respect of looking after it, and I feel gratitude to it for the things it has and continues to enable me to do. I am grateful that I can climb a mountain or ride a bike. I am thankful that it has grown 4 children for me.
I wrestle with this constantly. I am not sure how to unpick all the voices in my head about diet culture, and sometimes even reading positive things about bodies and relationships with food can encourage unhelpful things. Perhaps acknowledging this will help us be more honest about it.
Love this. A few added thoughts: we don’t hear from people who have healthy body image because they feel no need to talk about it. Also kind of connected to another point, as an ED Dietitian I’ve found that many of my clients who work on body image feel ostracized for even mentioning body dissatisfaction. I’m actually going to post something about this next week!