Tag Archives: eating disorders

Out of bounds: The myth of the skinny anorexic

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I am a fat anorexic.

I was put on my first diet by my parent when I was 11 years old. I hit puberty early and started my period that same year. I was not fat, but as any parent knows, the medical system starts tracking kids’ height-weight ratios super early, and even in the early 80s, that meant being constantly scrutinized for a body that might someday be out of bounds. (I think my kid’s pediatrician started tracking their BMI at about 5. Just think about that for a sec.)

Our bodies need EVERYTHING when we are growing. The last thing we should do is put developing kids and adolescents on diets, but this seems to be the time when adults are most likely to start monitoring and depriving kids of nutrition.

As a sociology/psychology scholar, I know a lot of backstory to this that as an 11-year old, I did not have access to. Womens’ hard-won rights to autonomy over their reproductive systems did not include the right to present however we wanted to — we were still supposed to be slim, tall, white, and full of hard angles (but have really big boobs and hair). The early 80s was the domain of Phyllis Schlafly and a regressive backlash against feminism that taught me and my peers that everything was fine and that we didn’t need to be loud like our moms, those obnoxious women’s libbers. The pop culture of the era celebrated women’s newfound agency over their sexuality by constantly separating women into sluts — those who invite rape, and virgins — those who deserved to be loved and protected. Anyone who didn’t meet the physical requirements of beauty was a punchline or a token (or often both). Nobody I knew questioned diet culture or even identified it as a thing.

I don’t remember having food issues until about age 7 when my parents started criticizing how and what I ate. This was after my male pediatrician warned my mother that I might, someday, be fat. We now know most of the research on what constitutes fatness is deeply flawed, and I was never a fat kid, but it didn’t matter. I internalized the idea that I was by the time I was 10 and experienced increasing body dysmorphia as I grew towards adulthood.

Even before that, as early as I can remember, my mom would go on diets and cruelly critique her own body. She had a lifelong membership with Weight Watchers and would eat weird snacks like buttermilk blended with frozen strawberries. I didn’t understand why the person I loved most was so mean to herself, but in my young mind, I must have absorbed that there was something virtuous about it. My mom would talk about how she went on Weight Watchers after she had my brother and reached her goal weight of 98 pounds. When I was later diagnosed with an eating disorder (anorexia), it may have been this claim that kept her from accepting that I had a dangerous problem. If I was 117 pounds compared to her 98, I couldn’t possibly be anorexic. The toxic diet culture of that era told us all that we were fundamentally flawed, and self-starvation was the only way to compensate for it.

Eventually (meaning by age 11), the monitoring became intense, specific critiques of my body and body parts that seemed to go on for hours. If I protested that I liked my body and didn’t want to change it, I was told I was deluded. I was an embarrassment. I wouldn’t find love. Nobody would hire me. I was also accused of gaining weight to “protect myself” from others. This is not so fun when you are 11, or 13, or 15…My body was small, but I had curves that did not fit the ideal of the 80s. Short legs, small waist, round hips and butt… ironically the kind of body that women get injections to create now, I was made to believe was out of bounds. It took up space it wasn’t entitled to, and that — that was dangerous and immoral. This message wasn’t just from my parents, it was all around me — in media, in the women and men in my extended family, and don’t get me started on dating culture in the 80s.

I started putting myself on restrictive diets in high school, culminating in a Slim-Fast regimen that was about 800 calories a day and consisted of two meal replacement shakes and a low-calorie frozen meal. I also went on Weight Watchers with my mother at least twice (once after the anorexia diagnosis).

I graduated from high school early and spent a year at a community college getting some credits. When I was barely 17, I moved to San Francisco to go to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I lived in an apartment with two roommates who also attended school there (there were no dorms). I was alone and scared and determined to be as skinny as possible. I got a lot of attention from men at my school that reinforced my need to be as physically perfect as possible. I directed a lot of my fear and anxiety about living in a new city and starting college into fear of gaining weight. By this point I was suffering from extreme body dysmorphia; I saw my increasingly tiny body as huge and ungainly. By the middle of my first semester, I was eating an apple for lunch and feeling panicky if I ate anything else except meal replacement shakes. I started having dizzy spells and seeing bright spots in the periphery of my vision when I stood up.

I took myself to a walk-in clinic. They asked me what drugs I was doing and why they were cocaine several hundred times. Since I wasn’t doing drugs, they eventually turned me over to a nutritionist who asked me how much I ate per day. When I told her my limit was 800 calories, she explained that I didn’t have any body fat and I needed more food than that to live. She also told me I could still “tone up” if I wanted to. (Ugh.) I didn’t believe her, because my maximum weight for my short body, as prescribed by Weight Watchers, was 113 lbs. I was 117. Therefore, I was still unacceptably fat.

I never saw her again. She tried to call me and even sent me a letter stating her concern, but I blew her off. I did start eating more normally and started gaining weight. What I didn’t know, for a long, long time, was that the weight cycling I had done in my early through late adolescence had convinced my body that I was in real danger of starvation (because I was), so losing weight became much harder, and gaining it became easier. (This is widely known scientifically now, but health care providers still prescribe weight loss instead of diagnosis and treatment of patient symptoms, which has resulted in the untimely deaths of people who weren’t diagnosed with things like cancer until it was too late.)

The culture in which I grew up taught me several totally false things about food and eating:

  1. Hunger is weakness
  2. Vanquishing hunger is strength
  3. Weight gain is weakness
  4. Weight loss is strength
  5. Eating until you are full is gluttonous
  6. Staying slightly hungry all the time is healthy
  7. My body is too weak to know what it needs and doesn’t need
  8. My mind is too weak to control my errant body
  9. Only skinny people are anorexic.

I continued to struggle with body dysmorphia through my 20s. I gained weight steadily, punctuated by bouts of weight loss from restriction. I never thought that I might still be anorexic because I didn’t look like an anorexic anymore. I realized that I had been dangerously thin at 17, but none of that applied to me now because I wasn’t thin. But my body knew the truth; it knew that I was always a step away from self-imposed starvation. My body wanted me to live more than I wanted to starve it to death.

In my late 20s, I decided that diets could get fucked and I was going to stop yearning for a body I didn’t have. I found a gym and a trainer and started to learn what healthy, gradual exercise felt like. I think it was the first time I really started to inhabit my body. I bought cute plus-sized clothes and dumped my fatphobic boyfriend (and my fatphobic career).

My 30s were the years of the good fatty, a trope that body liberation people are intimately familiar with. I was okay because I was a good fat person — I exercised, I dressed cute, I presented as feminine, and I was healthy (whatever that means). I was what we now call a “small fat” — a person who can shop at mainstream plus-sized stores and some stores with extended sizing. I didn’t have many role models, and I certainly wasn’t ready to confront my own fatphobia, but I wasn’t actively starving myself either. My weight stabilized, mainly because I was hyper-fixated on it being stable. I used exercise mainly to control weight gain, but I still restricted periodically; it was just “lifestyle change” instead of diets. (Yeah, right.) Still, I was happier and far more confident than I had been in my pre-teens, teens, and 20s. I had a career, I dated a lot, met my now-husband, changed careers, and towards the end of my 30s, had a baby.

I kept a blog during my pregnancy, a time when I felt particularly liberated from body dysmorphia. Ironically, when I reread the blog, just about every entry has something in it about my weight. No, not weight-obsessed at all. I didn’t gain body fat during my pregnancy, and I lost a lot after it. My body used up a chunk of its reserves for baby building, nursing, and pumping. I felt great (other than the PPD and constant exhaustion), and dare I say, virtuous. I could eat like a horse and still lose weight. BECAUSE I HAD JUST MADE AND WAS FEEDING A BABY WITH MY BODY. It wasn’t virtue, it was continuation of the species, Mary.

So when I weaned and started to gain back the weight I’d lost, it sucked. Still, I had become more aware of the body positive movement and its early leaders. However, it wasn’t until well into my 40s that I realized that I had never stopped restricting. Ever. The BOPO movement became more intersectional and more critical of the good fatty trope, which was also very white, feminine, and heteronormative. I was by that time working on my PhD and becoming more aware of critical theories. I also started following some people on social media who were at the intersection of the eating disorder recovery community and the body positive community, and the intersectional and Black feminist community.

That was a rude ass awakening. I realized I had far more in common with the ED recovery community than I had ever considered. Fat women, particularly queer or black or other combinations of intersectional oppressions were treated like shit and assumed to be secretly binging instead of engaging in obsessive restriction. Skinny=anorexic. Fat=binge eating. Fat women were denied medical tests and medical care because all their problems were blamed on fatness and its falsely-associated lack of self-care and self-control. I’ve been on the receiving end of some of this bullshit, but not too frequently because I have the privilege to choose my providers and I also avoid going to the doctor like the plague because I don’t want to be harassed or shamed.

I have never been a binge eater. The further I got away from diets, the less I overate at all. As I started to read about Health at Every Size approaches and Intuitive Eating, I realized that I had been sold a whole ass bill of goods about the value and strength of my own body. And that the very diets that I forced myself on over and over until my 30s were responsible for my easy weight gain. Not only that, but I realized that I often revert to restricting behaviors when I am stressed or feeling out of control. I would skip meals and then wonder why I was gaining weight? The answer; my body wanted me to live more than I wanted to starve it. It still does.

I’m now 50. I’ve realized that food restriction has permeated most of my life, and I’m still prone to it if I’m not careful. Even working from home for the last two years, it’s still too easy to drink coffee instead of eating lunch, and then wonder why I feel like shit in the evening. When I signed up for a grocery delivery service, I realized that this low-level anxiety I always have had about food scarcity started to go away. I could always find something in my fridge to eat that would taste good and make my body feel good.

I have internalized so many negative, false narratives about how my body works. I’ve gained weight during the pandemic. I’m 50, perimenopausal, and it’s harder to exercise regularly. But for the first time in my life, I haven’t completely freaked the fuck out about it. I have bad days, but mostly I’m okay. I’m not a small fat anymore. I can still find clothes that fit me and look cute. I’m white, present as feminine, and therefore have a lot of unearned privilege, so I have an unfair advantage over the people struggling with an abusive system that marginalizes them from multiple directions. And I still hate living in a fatphobic society that believes in a set of pernicious lies about fat people.

  1. We are not lazy or weak.
  2. We are not dumb.
  3. We are not more or less healthy, as a population than anyone else (in fact research shows we live longer).
  4. We are discriminated against persistently for no reason other than bigotry and peoples’ own internalized fatphobia and projected existential fears (see my dissertation).
  5. We are loveable and attractive.

All the horrors I was told about how my life would turn out were straight-up bullshit. If I died tomorrow, I could say that I had lived a meaningful, love-filled life.

When Tess Holiday came out publically as having anorexia, more puzzle pieces clicked into place. So many of us are fat because our body-mind relationships were damaged at a really young age, and our bodies compensated by gaining weight to counteract our habitual starvation. Some of us would be fat anyway because fat bodies are part of the normal range of human bodies. But many of us damaged this vital link so young we will never know what our bodies would have been like without episodic starvation paired with deep self-loathing. However, regardless of what my body looked like, it still would have been monitored, critiqued, and judged based on things I have no control over and have nothing do to with my health, attractiveness, or value as a human.

Between our parents, grandparents, society, and the media, there was no way to learn to see fatness as part of the normal range of human bodies. The constant monitoring of bodies, particularly female-presenting bodies, is insidious and incredibly damaging. I had so many random adults “warn” me about my body before it was fat, or when I just wasn’t skinny. My high school choir director. Almost all of my voice teachers (fatphobia was one of the reasons I left opera). Some random dude at my conservatory seemed personally offended when I wasn’t anorexic-thin anymore. Another who I did an opera scene with who was supposed to lift me up and was disgusted that I, a human woman, weighed 150lbs. Many doctors, in spite of the fact that intentional weight loss has been proven to be 1) almost universally unsustainable, and 2) Not particularly conducive to better health, other than it may reduce medical discrimination and mistreatment. (It does nothing to reduce medical racism, transphobia, or healthism).

One light at the end of this tunnel of crap is that younger people are figuring it out way sooner than I did. Skinny and fat, black, white, brown, queer and disabled — we are all recognizing that our culture’s obsession with our appearance is just thinly veiled social control. We don’t need it.

The craziest thing I’ve learned is that having an abundance of nourishing, tasty food available is the best antidote to my anorexic restricting behaviors and their effects. The less I skip meals, the happier and safer I feel. The more excited I am to move — to walk or dance or stretch. The oppressive weight of other people’s perceptions doesn’t do nearly as much to my psyche when it and — my body — feels safe and loved.

My kid, bless them, can spot fatphobia from a mile away. They know that judging people based on how they look is something to work through and release, not justify and cling to. Fun fact: I’ve never put my kid on any kind of diet, or critiqued their body or their food. Their diet may look nuts to broccoli-obsessed parents, but my kid does what I never had a chance to do: just listen to their body and not judge it for what it wants. We don’t force food. My husband and I eat a really wide variety of food, and slowly but surely, the kid is integrating more stuff into their own nutrition. They have an unbroken relationship between their hunger, eating, and how their body feels.

If I can raise just one person who isn’t weight-obsessed and fatphobic, I will have done a damn fine thing. I know other parents like me who are jettisoning diets and weight monitoring for their kids, the way many of us are also jettisoning oppressive falsehoods about gender and sexuality. Some of these kids are going to be unbelievable badasses. Hopefully, they will help the kids whose parents haven’t unpacked all the bullshit and are continuing to pass this generational abuse on to their kids. My kid witnesses casual fatphobia at their middle school all the time — from 11-year-old girls to 60 something-year-old teachers. But at least they recognize it for what it is, rather than internalizing it as some kind of valor.

I’ve had decades of therapy but I am still pretty fragile when it comes to pervasive fatphobia. While I haven’t “dieted” in many years, I slip into restriction without realizing it, though I recover more quickly than before. Luckily, (and deliberately) I have surrounded myself with people who also recognize how damaging diet culture and fatphobia are and don’t trigger my shit. There’s no way to escape it completely, but the saner the people around you, the more obvious the crazy is when you encounter it.

Undereating is not a virtue. Eating is not a sin. Feed your body.

Learn more:
The Body is Not an Apology by Sonia Rene Taylor
Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings
Health at Every Size by Lindo Bacon
Podcast: Maintenance Phase
What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Kellogg’s Anti-Fat-Shaming Ad: Progressive or Creepy?

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Okay, so many thoughts and feelings about this. I was just talking to a psychology professor at a faculty event today about how the diet industry teaches women that they don’t have the ability to listen to their own bodies when it comes to food; we are bombarded with the message that we need to be regulated and monitored by a (highly profitable) diet industry to be “healthy”. We also talked about how fat shaming is still rampant in the media, so for my own physical and mental health I just avoid media that is going to make me feel shitty about myself, or that misrepresents body diversity as abnormality.

Then rewind a couple more days, when I was buying bras at Lane Bryant. I ended up talking to two sales women for about twenty minutes about how most of the fashion industry makes ladies like us (size 16 – the supposed average size of the American woman) feel like bloated freaks, which means that THEY DON’T GET OUR MONEY. This seems kind of short-sighted, no?

Advertisers might be able to sell stuff based on fear, sex, desire, etc, but shame doesn’t really make me want to spend time around that brand.  So these lovely ladies and I were talking about how nice it is to have a couple of stores like Lane Bryant and Torrid that sell stuff that shows off our curves, rather than camouflages them, in an environment that is non-judgy and fun. It was a very Girl Power Solidarity kind of conversation, and it kind of made my day.

Then I watched this ad. So many thoughts.

The good:

  • Advertisers seem to be waking up to their epic stupidity when it comes to body shaming, whether fat or thin. Fat (or short, tall, or pregnant, or petite) women have just as much money as medium height skinny women. Want to make money? Celebrate body diversity.
  • The demographics of women in the ad are pretty broad racially and physically, though the age range seems pretty limited.
  • Talking about fat-shaming openly is a GOOD THING. The more we are aware of how self-destructive it is, the less of it we’ll pass on to our children as either an acceptable way to abuse themselves or others. Shaming ourselves or others’ bodies is crap. It’s an epidemic of crap, but it can change. So thanks, Kellogg, for outing it.

Not so good:

  • Fat shaming is not going to go away by saying “shhhh!” It’s going to go away when we start talking about it and acknowledging that it’s destructive and looking at the underlying assumptions about femininity that cause it.
  • I’m not sure how happy I am that this serious issue is being used as a selling point for a cereal. It remains to be seen how committed the company is to this as an issue, rather than a marketing point.
  • From Kellogg’s fightfattalk.com site “We believe that fat talk is a barrier to managing our weight and, when so many women are doing it, we’re all further from reaching our goals.” Um, how about we just talk about how we abuse ourselves and how that is holistically a bad thing, rather than how it keeps us from getting skinnier, kay?
  • I have a hard time believing this was a “real” ad – the women have particularly flawless makeup and look amazing on film, and there are a lot of pops of Kellogg red lipstick. In the end, it just feels very slick and manipulative.

What do you think? Is it a good sign that companies are starting to cater to more diverse women, or is it just creepy that they’re using dismorphia as a selling point?

Losing My Religion

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I’ve belonged to a certain church my whole life without realizing it. It is the Church of Female Inadequacy. I’m quitting.

Some people grow up in strict, dogmatic, oppressive religions that make them feel sinful and toxic about themselves. Some eventually realize that they no longer accept the contradictions and rules that they were raised with and leave the church, or look for a more accepting community.

I’ve written about my epiphany on one of my other blogs, so I won’t recall it here, but in some ways gaining a connection to God was losing the religion of hyper rationalism and the assumption that experiencing the mystical meant accepting all the most strange, dogmatic, and often brutal aspects of organized religion. So in a sense, gaining God meant discarding the religion of Atheism, which can be pretty dogmatic and elitist.

This is a bloated way of segueing into my topic de jour: radical self-acceptance. I grew up in the 70s and 80s on the heels of the feminist movement. I knew that as a woman I could go to school and study what ever I wanted to. I could be an astronaut or a lawyer. I could be smart, political, well-read, and intellectual. What I couldn’t be was fat or ugly. I got this message EVERYWHERE–I grew up in Southern California. ‘Nuff said.

So while I didn’t grow up in the gilded cage of the Victorian girl, or the stunted expectations of women of my mother’s generation before the sexual revolution, I still occupied a tiny, painful, and ever shrinking cage. As my adolescent body grew and filled out, the bars got tighter and more painful. (The medical industry’s definition of a healthy weight also shrunk.) I absorbed the idea that my mind and my abilities were valuable, but my body was subject to valid and indisputable criticism by others. Any others. If anyone had a problem with how I looked, I was in trouble. I was defective.

I was a healthy, smart, talented teen. I wasn’t particularly fat or thin. I believed  I was grotesquely fat, and I fantasized about getting liposuction on my thighs and plastic surgery to make my neck thinner. I hated myself for eating and enjoying my food. I constantly badmouthed myself, and lived in constant fear of anyone else noticing my “flaws.” I hated my body.

I eventually “took control” by going on more and more extreme diets, until I was eating 800 calories a day or less. Weight Watchers had told me that I needed to weigh between 98 and 113 pounds, and I couldn’t make my body that thin, so I just ate less and less. By the time I got down to 117 lbs, I was getting dizzy and seeing spots. A few friends and teachers were concerned about my weight loss, but I mostly got positive feedback on how I looked. I went to the doctor without any idea that my lack of food intake was causing the problem.  At the doctor, after screening me for drugs, I was sent to a nutritionist who asked me about my food intake. She told me I had no fat left on my body. “But what about my thighs? Weight Watchers says I should weigh no more than 113 lbs.” The nutritionist told me I needed to start eating sandwiches for lunch instead of a lone apple after my diet shake breakfast.

Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that I had been flirting with anorexia, and that if I had continued to lose weight I would have died. So I gained weight. And more weight. Every time I had to go up a size, I hated myself more. I hated looking in the mirror (although not any more than when I was underweight). In the opera industry, my voice teachers felt free to tell me when they thought I needed to lose weight. I started to fight back. I eventually decided (after a crapload of therapy) that the nasty, self-annihilating little voice in my head who told me I was repugnantly obese was full of shit. So I left the little cage behind, and found a bigger one. A cage where it was okay to be “overweight”. Where I could accept that my fat put me at risk for myriad health problems (according to the lowest common denominator of the medical and diet industries) and  if I was smart, eclectic, confident, and accomplished enough I could still be loved and admired. I guess I traded orthodoxy for reform.

Today I’m a bigger girl. I love food, I love to cook, and I limit my sugar intake to fight the weight I started to put on when I turned 40. I run, do yoga, walk, and belly dance. I feel pretty comfortable in my skin, as long as I stay in about a 20 lb range. I’m married, have a fantastic daughter, am happy, and accomplished. It’s a comfortable, livable cage. I don’t watch commercials or read women’s magazines (besides the occasional Oprah). I’m in a profession that does not subject me constant physical scrutiny as opera did. I’ve found some balance between compensating for my inadequacies and rejecting social norms. Still, if my jeans get tight, or I’m having a bad day, or someone takes an unflattering picture of me, all that shit from my adolescence comes right back up, and I feel once again like miserable, dimorphic teenager.

What if this whole religion of self-denial, self-hatred, and voluntary discrimination was total and utter bullshit? What if it was predicated on a biased and corrupt social system that spawned a medical industry that makes billions of dollars on teaching women we’re innately flawed?

Hi, I just finished reading The Beauty Myth, and I am well and truly pissed off.

The book was written in 1992, and the social phenomena it documents and interprets were what I grew up during my childhood and teenage years. Until recently, I was woefully ignorant of the history of feminism. For the past year I’ve been glutting myself on the more populist feminist literature, while studying sociology for my PhD. These books are not what my school would consider “source material” but they reflect what was going on at the time they were written. And where The Feminine Mystique taught me what my mother’s generation faced, The Beauty Myth describes my life and inner world in technicolor. Most importantly, it puts my experience in historical context of earlier practices that advocated various forms of self-inflicted or condoned violence against women. Read it.

I grew up down the street from a vibrant, brilliant woman who was a kindergarten teacher. She was large, and her weight made it hard for her to work because of the strain on her knees. She eventually enrolled in a medical weight loss program. It was an all liquid, incredibly low calorie diet. She lost weight, hair, and her teeth started to come loose. But it was medical, so it must be healthy and ethical, right? Losing her hair and teeth was better than being fat, right? The book says that the Beauty Myth requires that women “live hungry, die young, and leave a pretty corpse”. This certainly seemed to be the goal of this medically-supervised weight loss program. When my ex-boyfriend’s mother was dying of cancer, radiation caused her to lose most of her body fat.  Ruth had beautiful skin and a good wig. Her friends told her she looked more beautiful than she ever had before. Thin does not invariably equal healthy. I promise.

When I was a young woman and someone told me I was too fat, or I needed to watch my weight or face dire social (not health) consequences,  (This happened many times. Can I tell you what I would do if someone said that to my daughter? Hell. Would. Rain. Down.)  I would fight back. I would say that I was fine the way I was. But I eventually internalized every message and every paranoid fantasy that I was being  fairly and impartially judged by the world at large as flawed and unworthy.  I would fail in my profession, and never by loved by a worthy and worthwhile man. I was and would be an outcast.

My story is not unique. A girl who bullied me in elementary school died of anorexia at 23. A friend’s student died from gastric bypass. I have a friend who is a high school counselor who watches girls slowly kill themselves with eating disorders.

Let me break it down for you. The diet industry makes money by teaching women that they are mentally defective, which in turn makes them physically defective. This is not science, this is a sales strategy. The health industry uses science that is sometimes credible, sometimes biased, and sometimes false. We are not educated on how to evaluate the credibility of a scientific claim. What type of methodology was used? What were the variables? Have the conclusions been tested? What have subsequent studies shown?

The food industry sells diet products riddled with chemicals and additives that are far worse for our bodies than fresh food cooked in organic butter.

The cosmetic and beauty industries also play on our collective insecurities, most of which they created. Don’t even get me started on the ethics of advertisers using psychological research to manipulate people with no ethical safeguards. I’ll save that post for another day.

So, I’ve decided to leave the Church of Female Inadequacy. I will love my body, love eating, love moving, and love being me. I will not compensate for the things I was taught were ugly or shameful about myself. I will not teach my daughter to accept the subjective judgements of others as her mirror. I will love my fat, my curves, my big round butt, my strong calves, my baby stretch marks, and my frown and smile lines.

The scariest part is thinking about letting go of my cage. I’m really comfortable in my cage. In my cage, bigger jeans=BAD! same jeans=okay, smaller jeans=Awesome! Cutting sugar out of my diet is a way to stay in my cage. It’s not a bad thing; sugar is pretty clearly at best extraneous and at worst toxic for our bodies in large amounts. But I refrain partly because I fear getting too big for my cage. And when I get too big (i.e. bigger jeans), all the old fears come back. I’m not loveable, not valued, not worthy.

I’m going to work really, really hard on learning to listen to my body instead of the dogma I absorbed in my early life. I believe my body wants me to be healthy. I don’t exercise just to control my weight; I exercise because it makes me feel fantastic. Because running through the nature paths in my neighborhood and counting frogs and rabbits and deer makes me feel delight and lights up my daughter’s face when I come back and give her my critter count. Because shaking my butt and belly to music with a bunch of other beautiful, juicy women is joyful and liberating. Because walking outside and looking up into the huge Texas sky makes me feel loved by God. Also, my back hurts less.

I’m going to work on making decisions for my body and soul, instead of to keep the demons at bay. The demons are made of nothing but the collective weight of a culture that can’t stop oppressing itself.

Join me! Leave the Church. Choose a different spiritual path that honors and upholds everything that makes us women, at every age. And let me know how it goes.