This is a post about body image. It’s been a lifelong preoccupation of mine and something that takes up far too much head-space for many women (and men). As such, should I even be writing about it? I think, yes, because I believe that you have to examine something and explore it, before you can move on. I'm not writing this from the standpoint of someone who is totally at peace with their body, far from it. I'm just trying to challenge the way in which I/we view our bodies.
I started last month with the determination to lose some weight and my reasons were twofold. 1) I think I must be one of the only people who has actually managed to put on weight AFTER Christmas, and I'm seeing a worrying slide into the ‘overweight’ category of the NHS BMI height/weight charts. 2) A family party is imminent and, as I keep quipping to my friends, ‘there are going to be all these judgemental old, women, looking at my arse!’ Of the two reasons for wanting to reduce in size, the second one is rather unsound. (Plus, I realise it’s a bit mean describing the guests as a group of ‘judgemental old women').
Watch any decent teen movie and the message is clear: be yourself, don’t try and fit in with the group, discover who you true friends are and don’t latch onto that insecure group of bullies/bitches. (Unless you watch Grease - which seems to be giving you the opposite message - take up smoking to fit in with your peers and put on some tight, silky trousers!).
How easy, though, is it to be your own person, without worrying about what other people think? We are social animals, tribal beings. Are we able to disregard the (imagined) mutterings of the wider community?
I was struck, when I read Stephen Fry’s autobiography - More Fool Me, Michael Joseph, 2014, by the fact that whenever he talked about any of his creative projects, he always imagined a (hypothetical) hyper-critical, scathing review from Time Out magazine. This impacted on me because I often imagine a hectoring Greek chorus of censure and criticism accompanying anything I post on social media. It was strange reading that someone so successful could also be so insecure. Of course, Fry’s mental health issues have been well documented but I imagined (perhaps naively) that in his professional life, he’d be more confident. Maybe everyone does that - imagines a hostile and unkind response, to anything we've put any effort into. In this frightening age of the Twitter troll, perhaps this isn't such a paranoid notion. But the right thing to do would be to pay it no heed - right? Just carry on regardless.
Do we also imagine a critical, hostile audience judging us for the way we look, too?
I stumbled across this article from The Elephant Journal last year:
The basic gist of the article is that we can’t control what other people think of us and that when we focus on our supposed flaws, we magnify them. If we get can them ‘fixed’, our insecurity simply moves on to another focus point (seen in people who are addicted to plastic surgery). What we really need to do is reach a level of self-acceptance.
We may have received a lot of criticism for our appearance when we were growing up but I’d be willing to bet that, as an adult, our harshest critic is ourselves. Just think about what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror - do you ever throw a barrage of abuse at your reflection?
We spend far too long worrying about what is ‘wrong’ with our bodies and not nearly enough thinking about all the positive things it does for us; recovering from illnesses, carrying babies, winning races, taking us along charity runs, taking us up the stairs!
Our bodies are so much more than how they look.
I wonder if all that sounds too abstract?
Around 5 years ago, before I had my first child, I suffered from an ectopic pregnancy. (A pregnancy that is not in the uterus. The large majority (95%) of ectopic pregnancies occur in the Fallopian tube.) We had been ‘trying for a baby’ for a year and the day I discovered that I was pregnant - with a very faint plus sign in the pregnancy test window, was the same day that I started bleeding, and it was discovered that it was an ectopic pregnancy. I was devastated, I grieved but I also felt a deep sense of guilt and shame. It was my fault, or, specifically, it was the fault of my defective body!
‘You must stop blaming yourself and your body for what has happened to you’ - One of the moderators from the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust told me, in response to one of my posts on their website. Easier said than done.
What usually happens with an ectopic pregnancy is that the fallopian tube bursts open, leading to excruciating pain and the woman having to have emergency surgery to remove the tube. My case was slightly different in that the pregnancy dispersed on its own and my hormone levels were closely monitored for a few weeks until they went down enough to indicate that the pregnancy had gone (this treatment is called 'expectant management'). I had to go to the hospital every two days to have a blood test and was told to call an ambulance if I suddenly suffered excruciating pain! I bled, heavily, all that time, it was a grim, painful and drawn-out process but what happened was that, eventually, my body effectively healed itself. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone but it did prompt a sea change in the way that I viewed my body. With the help of some therapy (yep, that again) I began to see my body, not as a faulty, unreliable (and grotesque) machine but rather as a highly efficient mechanism that, when things had gone wrong had saved my life (E.P can be very dangerous). It had successfully dealt with the unviable pregnancy on it’s own, without need of surgical or medical intervention and I felt grateful towards it. The only other time I had felt anything approaching this was when I was training for a charity run, years before. Look at my long, efficient legs, I’d thought, running away! (yes, I know that sounds a bit bizarre and narcissistic). I’d never felt like that before.
So, I just want to reiterate the need for us to focus on when our bodies served us well, and be less preoccupied by how they look. Yes, I wrote a blog post about losing weight:
But I believe that before you can make any sort of major change in your life, you have to come from a place of happiness and acceptance. So, paradoxical as it may sound, if you want to reduce your weight, you have to approach it from a point of feeling kind of happy and accepting towards your body, rather than filled with loathing for it.
As I said, I'm not writing this from a pinnacle of Zen-like forbearance but I'm hoping to get there one day ;)
So, going back to those (hypothetical) judgemental, old women* that I spoke of earlier; perhaps, of the two motives for wanting to lose weight, it would be better to concentrate more on the desire to slide back into the ‘healthy’ section of the BMI chart than to appease the imaginary critics.
*I should also note that the 'judgmental old women', whilst being based on past experience, are actually a collective figment of my imagination and embody my own feelings of insecurity. Just as Stephen Fry's 'Time Out' critic was a projection of his own feelings of self doubt!
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