I’m 38 years old. At this point, my goal is to feel good in clothes, not look good in a bathing suit. Because really, how much of my time do I actually spend in a bathing suit?
These unwittingly wise words from my very smart bestie changed my life.
That very, very smart bestie and our extended families, along with our other bestie and her extended family, take a family vacation together every year. Like, every year since we were born. So, it’s a bit of a tradition.
And us three girls, at least since we hit puberty (some of us longer), have tended towards….let’s just say my dad used to call us “Big Girls On Parade.” (Such a sensitive guy.) Each a little differently, but each with our own body struggles. And every year since we were teenagers, the running mantra was, “I’m going to be so skinny for our holidays!” Every summer. For our whole teenagehood.
Adulthood saw us faring a little more sanely. Sometimes. Having kids of our own, growing up, and caring less about the boys on the beach helped us feel a little less insecure about our bathing suit bodies…but only sometimes.
“I’m going to be so skinny for our holidays. You don’t even know.” It morphed from dead serious to dead-pan comedy somewhere through the years. Thank god.
Each of us has waged our own battles – some more privately, some more publicly – with our bodies over the years. And as I look down the barrel at summer again this year, realizing that I am an unwanted 15 lbs heavier than I was last summer, I am stopping to pause and reexamine a few things.
I am considerably more fit this summer than I was last summer, as I’ve been running as consistently as my body has allowed, for over a year now. I have good days and bad days, good weeks and bad weeks, good months and bad months, in terms of my body cooperating with my exercise plan. But overall I can move more, and that movement is full of more joy than it was a year ago. That’s a win.
I am once more facing the struggle of choosing to love my body where it is, because I know from years of personal experience that my body will not shift for the better until I love it as it is. I have not found the golden ticket. This is a struggle I come around to time and time again. I choose to see that as an opportunity for learning. And say thank you. Again.
The clothes I had that I rocked last summer are a little too tight this year. I’m a little too stubborn and a little too broke to buy new ones. So I’m deciding to force myself into them anyway, bound and determined that it won’t be long before I fit them properly. Not sure that’s really a win of any variety.
Wanting my weight back where it was so badly brings up all my food issues. Again. When I was so sick with migraines for a year and a half that I lost 85 lbs as a result of not being able to eat, that was what you call medical anorexia. It was the first time in my life I had ever danced with an eating disorder on that end of the spectrum. I’d always been a compulsive overeater – an emotional eater. But never purged or withheld food. But once I couldn’t eat because of the migraines, it was pretty easy not to eat for whatever reason. I was always aware that it was a slippery slope, and I kept in good communication with my doctor about it. And it never got too out of hand.
But boy does it look attractive now. I could just go back to not eating for awhile and drop the extra weight. Wouldn’t be that hard. Wouldn’t even take that long.
Fucked. Up. Yo.
This is what we do to ourselves when we wage a constant battle with our bodies. We need to work with our bodies, not fight against them. We need to love our bodies, not hate them into submission.
We need to work with and love our bodies, not fight against them. Not hate them into submission. Tweet it!
“I’m 38 years old. At this point, my goal is to feel good in clothes, not look good in a bathing suit.” I come back to these words again and again. I’m 41 now, but the words mean the same thing. At this stage of my life, I’m not here to have a Baywatch moment, I’m here to enjoy my life and feel confident in it. And feeling confident in my life includes loving the body I’ve got, dressing for the setting (I happily wear a bikini on the beach, baby tiger stripes and all, because dammit….they don’t make a one piece that will hold my tits up), and choosing confidence and joy.
It’s a choice. Nobody gets to determine how you feel about yourself except you.
You. You choose.
So how do you feel about yourself?
(Or…how do you want to feel about yourself, and what steps are you taking to make those feelings reality? Tell me in the comments below…)
xo,
❤️S
Sara….you are my friend and I have seen you up close and personal in a bathing suit and you are BEAUTIFUL! You are happier and healthier looking than you have been in years and that shows…in the words of Katy Perry “Now look at me I’m sparkling…a firework, a dancing flame. You won’t ever put me down again….I’m GLOWING”. And you are….love. XO
I love you Susan. ❤️
Sometimes when you post things, I have to ask myself if you have some sort of looking glass into my life. Then I do a little reality check and realize that it’s even better than that. These are just truly your thoughts and struggles and the fact that they often so closely relate to what others are going through is just further proof that as humans, somethings are just universal. Many things are.
Still….your timing is bang on.
Saturday afternoon found me curled up in a ball on my bed having some honest to goodness suicidal thoughts. For real. I went from happy, bubbly, in love with the universe to thinking that I was worthless, my life was worthless, and I shouldn’t even bother. Why? Because my summer clothes from last year wouldn’t fit. The same summer clothes that I bought at the end of LAST summer because I’d gained weight, what with 5 weddings happening all at once. I had told myself I’d work hard, in a healthy way, and it would work. I’d lose weight. It didn’t happen.
The Christmas holidays this past year found me carrying an extra EXTRA toothbrush (that’s 3) and needing to use the rest room immediately after every meal. I’m sure you get the picture. I stopped after the holiday rush out of a combination of a) having less tempting food around and b) thinking about the fact that I am somebodies daughter, just like my daughter is MINE and I’d be devastated if she grew to do the same thing.
Then, for the last two weeks I’ve been excessively calorie counting. I’m not starving, but I was exactly eating even the absolute minimum amount of calories I should. I knew it was a slippery slope, but I again, I told myself it would be fine as long as I kept eating SOMETHING.
And then Saturday came.
My husband walked in and although I hadn’t said a word about how I was feeling (actually, I had just been really crabby and bitched about hating my clothes and not having any) when he saw me curled up on the bed like that, right before we were supposed to go out with friends, he seemed to know what was going on. He looked angry at first, but then so sad, and he said, “come on now, what are you doing. We don’t get all depressed like this. Get up and lets get dressed. You are beautiful.”
I listened. I got dressed. Things between us were tense. He doesn’t know about the food stuff I’ve been going through lately. He knows that when I was in my teens I used to eat a lot-A lot of zero calorie food and I took diet pills and laxatives and worked out all the time so I could stay thin. When we were kids, my sister was “the skinny one”, and I was just only slightly pudgy, but add to that the fact that two of my friends were anorexic in 8th grade and I ended up really hating my body. He knows all that, and that’s enough. He was scared and angry, but he remained calm. I didn’t tell him what had gone on, but I did tell him, “look, when you have body issues and then you try to tell yourself that if you just eat healthy and exercise you’ll lose weight and you DON’T, it’s kind of devastating.” He has his own food issues too, and is an over eater, so he kind of gets that.
Now that things are out in the open a little more, I was actually starting to feel a bit calmer again about being sensible about this whole body thing, but I was still struggling. Last night I was mad at myself for eating some cheesies. Not a lot. Just a treat. And that’s after being really smart about my food choices the rest of the day
Then I read this. It feels like it was the final boost I needed. It was the eye opener that said, “HEY RACH! Your thinking right now is haywire. Stop listening to the lies you are telling yourself.”
In my life, I have been underweight and overweight, and at both sizes, I have received compliments on my looks. I was just at the beach on Sunday and I remember thinking, “wow, I don’t why people make such a big deal about getting their bodies beach ready. Look at all these people who look SO GOOD and they are all different sizes” (which is funny because I was worried about my “beach body”).
It occurs to me as I write this that I put way too much thought into my body and maybe that energy would be better used on other things.
So my goal for this month is not to lose 50 lbs in 60 days (which I’ve done before, and would actually bring me underweight). Rather my goal is simply to be happy and enjoy the summer. Being fit seems to go hand in hand with that anyway.
And I’m going to get myself some new clothes. Clothes I feel good in.
I don’t know why I bother with these toxic spirals. I always come out and realize I’m lovable. lol. I should probably just lead with that thought in the first place.
I think that it’s really hard to feel awesome about our bodies when we don’t have clothes that we feel great in – and who feels great in clothes that don’t fit? So that’s a good start.
And seeing where you can break into the cycle – and lead with the thought that you’re loveable – that’s maturing, learning, and healing. ❤️
Sara – you are an inspiring, wise and beautiful woman. Pay no heed to the warped voices and have a wonderful summer!
XO
Thanks Janet! Have a fantastic summer too!
Wow Sara, a topic so close to my heart!! I have struggled with my weight my entire life. I mean….fat kid, fat teenager, fat adult! Then 3 and a half years ago, I finally had the surgery that (I thought!) would “cure” me forever – gastric bypass surgery. On surgery day, I weighed 385 lbs. So far, I’ve lost 135 pounds…..yeah, you do the math! I STILL weigh 250 pounds….better than I was, but nowhere near where I want to be! However, most of my problem now is sagging skin that hangs off me that will never go away, unless it’s surgically removed. The province of Nova Scotia (where I live) doesn’t cover that surgery, as they consider it to be “cosmetic” …..and as I read your letter today, I realize that I’ll probably NEVER get to the weight I’ll ever want, and it’s time to accept myself as I am. Like you, I am 41 years old (soon to be 42!), so I guess this is it!!
First off, good for you for making the choices that worked for you to best take care of yourself. They can be scary choices, and we can find ourselves with varying degrees of support. In the end, we have to support ourselves, and love ourselves enough to see ourselves through. Good for you for being there for yourself through thick and thin.
I have the hanging skin in certain areas too. Arms, specifically, and lower abdomen. And I can live with it the way it is now, but if I lose a significant amount of weight (more), I’ll consider looking into the cost of the surgery. On the other hand…those are our battle scars…we earned them (and I’d rather have the empty hanging skin than have it full, right?)…and we need to learn to love our own beauty with them, with our bodies just the way they are, right at this moment.
xo,
S