Learning to see myself beyond size

I spent decades waiting for a thinner version of myself to emerge. I'm finally learning to see myself beyond size.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my past diet days lately. I read a Reddit post recently by a woman who had lost a lot of weight after being fat her whole life. She wrote about how she believes she will always be a fat person on the inside:

“My inner self will always be fat. I was a fat kid, I was fat most of my adult life, and my world view developed through the lens of a fat person navigating society. Fat is my language. And when I’m obnoxiously adored for weighing less, my inner self feels blue.”

It made me think about my own body identity, and how our bodies and our identities don’t always change together.

I’ve spent a lifetime obsessing over size. Most of my life I believed I was fat, which feels funny to say now, because I’ve come to understand that I was never actually fat. Yes, I had a little pooch that I absolutely hated and was so self-conscious about that I always tried to keep it sucked in and never wanted any of my partners touching it, including my first husband. (I have no such issues with my current husband, and it has less to do with body acceptance and more to do with my absolute comfort with him.)

But I was never really fat. Mid-size is what we call it now. But mostly I was just broad and muscular. Like linebacker broad. Ilona Maher broad. I gained muscle as easily as I gained fat. And I was stupid strong. But somehow, through all the diet brainwashing, I couldn’t see that I wasn’t really fat; I was just really wide. Maybe it didn’t matter; by most standards, my body still made me an outlier.

But that perceived fatness colored my worldview. It always made me feel like I was on the outside. I think I saw myself as a thin person trapped inside a larger person’s body. Always waiting for the “real me” to come out. And with every diet, I truly believed it would be the one that was gonna unlock it.

Going fat in the time of Ozempic

For the past four years now, since I quit diets, I’ve lived on the edge of fatness, straddling the very line of thin privilege, with occasional slips into one side or the other. I largely (pun intended) identify as fat now (and use it as a neutral descriptor). This is how I believe the world perceives me. At times, this is also how I see myself, but I think most of the time, I still don’t feel fat on the inside. As I type out this sentence, I picture Amy Schumer in that movie where she hits her head and wakes up thinking she’s a supermodel. I swear it’s not that extreme. But I am also white and pretty and take care with my appearance, and these attributes afford me privileges I haven’t earned.

I also don’t entirely fit into what people think of as fat because I’m still active and muscular (and most definitely give off don’t fuck with me vibes), so I think I get a pass from the world around me. Or maybe I’m just so generally oblivious to social cues that I don’t pick up on the rampant judgment people in larger bodies often experience. I’ve never been “prescribed” weight loss by a doctor. I’ve never had anyone take me to task for anything I’ve put in my grocery basket.

But I also can’t fit into clothes from most designers, especially not the cute button-down dresses I want to wear. I assess every chair before I sit in it to gauge whether it will actually contain me. (I’ve got some booty.) These are things I never considered in the days before I gave up diets.

If anything, my identity most of my life should have been a yo-yo. I was in a perpetual state of up and down, never really a steady size, which is its own form of torture, but still not an identity. When you’re always gaining and losing, do you ever feel like yourself? Which one is the real you?

These last few years, I’m finally at a steady, heavier weight. And I’ve mostly come to accept it.

Paris isn't made for plus sizes (but I went anyway)

This isn’t to say that I don’t still get in my head about my weight every now and again. Or let the occasional diet thought in. I don’t love every square inch of my body all the time, but on the whole, I like it more than I ever have.

I have two important counterbalances that keep me steady now: acceptance and awareness. I am so acutely aware of diet culture and its influence on me. I see where it hides, how it tries to trick me and all of us into thinking we’re somehow the problem when we don’t conform to the ideals. I don’t feel like my weight is my fault anymore. And it’s not a failing. I know my worth and know it isn’t determined by my size.

I also know that I’m gonna still have days when I feel fat. This is the acceptance part.

We don’t experience our bodies in a vacuum. If we did, you and I could ride off into the sunset satisfied that we’d licked diet culture for good. We could accept that bodies come in all shapes and sizes and not feel any sort of way about them. But diet culture is always there. The next product, the next pill, the next trend we’re told we must follow … for beauty, for health, for longevity. Each one giving us another reason to question something we know to be true. This is why acceptance is something you have to keep working on.

I’ve been clocking myself in the mirror more lately. It seems like, on any given day, my stomach rises and falls like the tides. Perimenopause, I suspect. My wildly unpredictable periods and fluctuating hormones fighting their final battles. But I noticed I still feel better about myself on the days when the tides are lower. That reaction makes complete sense, and yet it needed to be challenged.

Here’s the truth: I don’t like it when my stomach is bigger because I’ve been conditioned not to like it. But why should I be judging myself so much more harshly on the days when the tides are higher? It’s the normal rise and fall of my body, doing what it’s doing.

It’s taken me a lifetime to get here, and yet I did. Yes, there’s more work to be done, but I have so much more peace than I ever did before this journey. I am not obsessed with numbers on a scale. I am not counting calories in my head. I am not questioning why I’m hungry again just because some diet rule tells me it’s too soon. It’s incredibly freeing.

I don’t know if I will continue to see fat as my identity. Certainly not my full identity. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of my life in a range of weights that no single size ever felt right. Or maybe it’s because I’m moving away from sizes as identities entirely. Maybe a body is just a body.

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I’m curious: Has the way you see yourself changed as your body has changed? Or are you still carrying an identity from long ago, for a body you no longer inhabit?