You Can’t Talk “Women’s Issues” Without Talking Weight

(If this post contradicts itself at times, it is because the post and its topic are a process more than a finished statement. Try to stay with me despite the twists and turns.)

As inconvenient as it was, I have never felt so good about my body as when I was pregnant. To some, that may sound strange; And no wonder.

This picture really does not need a caption.

Exhibit A: The cliche pregnant woman, waddling, glossy with sweat, a wild grimace on her face. She is crying, accusing her husband of finding her fat, accusing the world of finding her fat, accusing herself of being fat.

My experience with pregnancy was different. Despite my mental reservations, my body took to pregnancy well. (In this case, my body working against my mind paid off) I maintained good energy. I gained the perfect amount of weight and my feet didn’t swell.

Swollen feet or no, a part of my “positive body image” came from the flood of compliments I received on a daily basis. People love to call pregnant women beautiful. Strangers, acquaintances, friends and family. At least four or five times a day, some kind person assured me of my natural glow.

You would think that’s all it would take to make someone feel gorgeous, but it isn’t true. The fact that clinched my body confidence was that I found myself beautiful anyways. The compliments were simply fans to an already existing flame. I could feel life inside of me, effusing from my pores, coursing through my veins, and willy nilly in my gut.

Then I had the baby. That ethereal, beautiful sensation of life and purpose left me. I returned to being just me; except with some extra pounds, a doughy belly and stretch marks on my breasts.

These days I have frowned into my mirror.

I’ve avoided certain pre-pregnancy jeans, knowing that the emotional trauma of not-quite-squeezing into them could possibly bring me to tears. Eating a piece of cake has caused me guilt. Eating a second piece of cake has caused me self-loathing. I have apologized for my body, making excuses, assuring my bewildered husband that any time now, I’ll start jogging and “get back to normal”.

The strange thing is, I am pretty much close to “normal” already (my weight is always fluctuating ten pounds or so), and yet, I’m still anxious to lose weight.

I’ve been caught in the Post Baby Body Shuffle. I find my physical body unsatisfactory when previously it would have been fine.

“There’s so much pressure on women to lose weight after having a baby,” I said to my husband yesterday. “It’s rough.”

“There’s no pressure,” he replied. “No one puts that pressure on but yourself.”

While he’s partially right, he’s partially wrong.

Obvious pressures include chapters in pregnancy books on how to lose that “baby weight” and links from pregnancy websites advertising a miracle pill that will get you that flat belly and make you “ready for the pool” (as if an extra ten or fifteen pounds could drowned you.)

Mothers are expected to not only nurture a happy, healthy baby, but to look good doing it.

While pregnant, I came across an article from one of my baby weekly websites that boasted tips and tricks to help you look your best while in labor.

Regardless, as soon as that baby comes out, the game is on. It’s back to the rat race with you–and Lord knows, you’d better be ready for that pool.

Don’t Play Yo Yo Ma Ma

I have noticed that many pregnant women suffer from the I-Can-Eat-Whatever-I-Want syndrome.

Her flashing eyes dare a comment as she uses a Snickers bar to spoon Peanut butter from the jar.

“Eating for two!” She cheerfully chirps, before dumping the last of her extra large french fry into her mouth.

It’s socially normal for pregnant women to eat. A lot. The pregnant woman has that social green light to indulge in food, to enjoy her food. Many revert to child like menus: candy, macaroni and cheese, ice cream, koolaid, those foods that she “had to” limit as an adult woman are now, suddenly (and wonderfully) socially okay.

With an almost compulsive anxiety to seize the happy day, she gobbles down everything in sight. This is her moment–this is her chance.

Then, the baby comes, and the green light snaps to red. The pregnant belly deflates and the old social rules return. Although the breast feeding mother needs to consume more calories than the pregnant, the joy of splurging is gone, leaving in its wake a guilt and shame for the culinary free for all and the extra weight it accrued. But now it’s time to redeem herself. It’s time to take that weight off.

I’ll Pinch Your Fat if You Pinch Mine: Bonding and the Art of Commiseration

A lot of the pressure to “look good” via being thin comes from other women. With appalling regularity, women bond through commiseration. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a good desert ruined by some pretty lips loudly lamenting the sin they commit.

“Tomorrow I’m going to work out an extra hour,” they say between bites.

“This is so bad, but so good,” They whisper, guilty mischief tinging their breath.

Just enjoy it! I want to shout. Don’t apologize! There’s no such thing as a morally wrong chocolate cake. Spreading extra butter on your waffle never sent anybody to hell.

And every time I see a girl pinch her waist, twist up her pout and claim loudly that she must stop eating those fill-in-the-blanks, I want to shake her by her shoulders.

Can’t you see that you just made every girl in this room feel like crap, if not really uncomfortable? Again, I want to shout. You are not only selling yourself short but every other woman, too.

A long time ago, I made the decision to severely limit, if not completely deny myself the impulse to put down my body in public. When I vocally find my own bumps, lumps and curves disgusting and unacceptable, I communicate that other women’s imperfections are just as repugnant.

I have never, in all my life, seen an actually over weight person pinch their fat and declare that they must go to the gym.

No. No. No. You say. It’s not true. It’s just me that’s unacceptable.

I’m sorry. That just doesn’t make sense. That’s precisely the excuse almost all women say as they insult themselves and as a result insult all women.

The M.I.L.F. Myth

When I was a kid I heard people tell my mother over and over that she looked great for “having four kids”. The phrase infiltrated her vocabulary until she said it, too. Instead of just thinking she looked great, she said (with shy pride) “Yeah. I do look good for four kids.”

Because I was young and still piecing the world together (not that I’m not piecing it to this day) I concluded that children deplete a mother her looks. In my mind, it worked incrementally. With one child, a woman lost this much of her beauty, with two children, this much. So on and so forth.

When the “M.I.L.F.” (Mother I’d Like to F(have sex with)) phrase was introduced to me, it only cemented this laughable belief. The M.I.L.F. was a surprising exception. An attractive mother could not just be an attractive woman. Because she was a mother, her assumed status was unF-able, which is why the mother who is F-able deserves her own acronymic nickname.

Now that I am a mother and meeting other mothers, I find –to my bashful chagrin–that we all look just like other women. We’re just women. With a kid or two. You could not our cheeks or the curve of our breasts and tell how many children we have, if any.

That’s Life, My Life, And Why it Makes me Angry

Who am I kidding? The pressure for women to look thin is well known. It’s life. I would cite all those eating disorder/fat/thin statistics, but it would feel a little too high school presentation-ist. Instead I’ll level with you as briefly as I can.

When i was a freshman in high school, I decided that I was too awkward and unattractive to make it in the high school realm. I envied all the “popular” girls their tans, white teeth, and thin bodies.

I decided I was tired of taking up so much space and I stopped eating. Quite literally. I do not intend to write for you a description of my descent into my self-imposed starvation, only that it was successful, serious, and it cost me years from my childhood.

What I want to write is to explain why now, when I see a woman with a similar problem, instead of oozing with sympathy, I broil with rage and the very real desire to slap her in the face.

By the time I reached 85 pounds (ten pounds later I would end up in the hospital) I had my family wrapped around my little finger. Sure I was suffering. Sure I was in pain, addicted to my own physical depreciation, but at the same time, because I was so sick and so small, people coddled me, they treated me gently, they treated me kindly, with delicate whispers and comforting caresses. I was too afraid of the mean real world and lacked the desire to face it. It was the convalescent life for sensitive spirited me.

Not even Scrooge could pick on Tiny Tim.

When I met Joe at the Acadia Mental Hospital, I started to (slowly) wake up. Joe was my age. He liked to read books and to talk philosophy. He was in the hospital for having obsessive homicidal thoughts. I thought he was my friend.

One day we were in the middle of a conversation and he started to laugh. “Oh,” he said. “You think you’re an exception? I fantasize about killing you, too. You can’t be the exception to the rule all the time. That’s what got you in here.”

Joe didn’t coddle me. In fact, if his fantasies were ever realized, he would have done much the opposite.

Joe’s albeit eerie comment stayed with me for years, and it wasn’t until college (and years of bulimia later) that I read Adrian Rich.

Feminism is not man-hating. Hating men has nothing to do with being a woman. Feminism, is to me, Conscious Womaning. Up until then, I’d denied myself the natural curves that my body wanted to assume. I’d hated my softness and wanted to trade it in for sharp angles. I wanted to be a little girl, when really, I’d become a woman.

The cost of dieting for a week

Diet Weekly menu cost ($)* Percent over national average Jenny Craig 137.65 152.8 NutriSystem 113.52 108.5 Atkins Diet 100.52 84.6 Weight Watchers 96.64 77.5 Zone Diet 92.84 70.5 Ornish Diet 78.74 44.6 South Beach Diet 78.61 44.4 Slim-Fast 77.73 42.8 Sugar Busters 69.62 27.9 Subway sandwich 68.60 26.0 No diet 54.44 -

Sources: Forbes, Fresh Direct, Amazon, Bureau of Labor Statistics * Adjusted for NYC prices. Includes the cost of associated book, if applicable, and any membership fees associated with the diet, averaged over a six-month period.

I am angry at the time I wasted with my neurosis and feel that anger return whenever I meet another woman caught in its grip. Buying into the contrived definition that our culture shoves down our (hungry and full) throats. Do we really need the diet industry between us and our food?

Reclaiming Diet

The word “Diet” has had a roller coaster of a fifty years. Once on the top, now despised and abandoned, the word “diet” has seen it all.

I think we should reclaim the word “diet” for what it originally meant. Your diet is what you eat. We all have a diet, unhealthy or no–high calorie, low calorie, medium calorie.

I like to eat a nutritious diet. I like to get as many vitamins and minerals as possible from my food. I also like to cook and eat cupcakes, cookies, and pies. Sometimes I drink soda. Sometimes I drink carrot juice.

Pregnant or not, I already eat whatever I want. And I’m healthy! This is what the 60 billion dollar diet industry doesn’t want you to know.

The steps to achieving a healthy body are:

1. Stabilize

Your body, when wounded, may send you mixed signals. For example, if you are addicted to cigarettes, your body will tell you it wants cigarettes. To stabilize your body means to neutralize your body as much as possible. This does not mean to go on one of those fad starvation cleanses the ladies seem to love, but to simply keep it simple. Keep it natural. Rebalance your body.

2. Be Aware

Once you’ve stabilized your body, you can relax. All you have to do now is pay attention. Your body knows what to do.

The I-Can-Eat-Whatever-I-Want syndrome is based on a myth. Your body does not want to live on processed junk. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that after a day of junking, your body feels more lethargic,  even a little sick.

Believe it or not, your body wants what is best for you. Your body will tell you if you want the fat of a steak or the skim of a salad. They are both just as “good”.

Know Thyself, the ancient Greeks wrote at the temple of Delphi–Everything in Moderation.

γνῶθι σαυτόν, "gnothi sauton", "know yourself" on a not ancient Greek window.

Which brings me back to my present Post Baby Self. No more wallowing in the doughy belly blues for me. After all, if Maya Angelou was too preoccupied with the jiggle in her thighs, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings would have never been written. Those books don’t write themselves, you know.