I didn’t mean to go three months without writing a newsletter. April and May were a blur, with the end of the school year and all the culminating activities involved with a middle schooler advancing to high school, etc. etc. I’ve been doing a lot of freelancing, from restaurant reviews (here and here and here) to editing dissertations and grad school application essays. My daughter and I traveled to Houston to visit friends and check out the Van Gogh exhibit at the MFAH. I’ve wanted to sit down and blurt out some thoughts dozens of times, but the time and mental bandwidth just haven’t been there.
I also didn’t have the mental or emotional bandwidth for Weight Watchers for a long time. I stopped going because I just got burned out. I’d gotten down to an all-time low in early February (52.2 pounds lost!), and a month later, 2.4 pounds had crept back on despite the fact that I was tracking assiduously. Then I dropped out for two months and put on another 3.8 pounds. Then I said fuck it and started tracking on MyFitnessPal AND started going to Camp Gladiator four times a week and now I’m up about 12 pounds from that February low. And it’s not all muscle because I can tell by how my clothes fit that my giving in to my CONSTANT hunger is catching up to me. And when I say “giving in,” I don’t mean “having wholesome snacks of carrot sticks and boiled eggs,” I mean “large scoops of peanut butter straight from the jar” and “a fistful of Wheat Thins that far exceeds the serving size of 16 crackers.”
Part of my burnout and dissatisfaction with WW was that I did CG Fit last year and realized that there’s so much more context to the number on the scale than just fat. Which made it really frustrating when I would weigh in at WW and either get an emotional gold star or a boo-boo face from the receptionist based on whether the number went up or down.
I also found myself feeling increasingly pressed by the tension between the desire to manage my weight (if not to lose weight, to not gain it) and also accept my body in thickness and in thin. The #iweigh hashtag on social media told me it was okay to be as fluffy as I want while at the same time, the discourse in the WW meeting room underscored on a weekly basis how insidious diet culture truly is. One woman cried while talking about how much popcorn she’d been eating. Another, a lifetime member, refers to having to pay for WW as the FAT TAX. (When you reach lifetime, your membership is free, unless you gain a certain amount of weight.)
FAT TAX. It’s hard to imagine a more hurtful term to deploy in a room full of people whose entire existence in this culture is subject to the fat tax.
And yet, I can’t help but like my body less with the added weight. My hips and knees hurt. My cute, smaller clothes are uncomfortable and I don’t want to buy new, larger clothes. I *like* having a defined jawline. What’s more, I spent my entire life (well, since puberty) wondering what it would be like to be thin(ner), avoiding the camera, and checking my reflection in mirrors and windows to make sure my belly didn’t stick out too much. Losing 50 pounds made it so that I finally felt comfortable in my skin, while also helping to alleviate much of the health anxiety I’ve suffered from ever since my mom died. (Working out with CG has helped in that regard, too.)
There’s a scene in The Handmaid’s Tale where Aunt Lydia explains to the handmaids that there is more than one kind of freedom. In the novel, the handmaids may not have freedom of movement and bodily autonomy, but they are free from being catcalled and stalked and raped. It’s a twisted bit of logic, but that’s where I find myself. Do I want freedom from counting and measuring and weighing (and therefore letting go of concern about my weight), or do I want freedom from feeling like I’m somehow betraying my feminist principles and all of my squishy sisters on Instagram by actually wanting to manage my weight? Or are there shades of gray getting lost in the discourse?
For now, I’ve unfollowed both the #ww and #iweigh hashtags on social media. I don’t need all the added noise in my head — the fat and thin(ner) versions of me battling it out in there are loud enough.