Love and change, going gray, gaining weight

On marriage, midlife body changes, and learning to trust my body.

A quick note while I’m away for spring break:

I’m resharing this essay from the early days of Almost Sated because it captures a moment when so many things in my life were changing at once: my body, my relationship with food, and my understanding of what healing really looks like.

Recently I had the chance to talk about these themes more deeply in two conversations that meant a lot to me.

If you’re interested in the ideas behind this essay, these conversations explore them more deeply.

I spoke with dietitian Deb Benfield about rebuilding body trust in midlife:

Reclaiming body trust in midlife - a conversation with Deb Benfield

And I joined Sara Stansberry on her podcast to talk about healing our relationship with food and body:

Ep 14: Healing the Relationship With Your Body - with Kristi Koeter

If you’re newer here, this essay gives some context for why this work matters so much to me. Thanks for being here. —Kristi

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Originally published March 2023.

Last Sunday marks three years since the first date with my now-husband. Yes, it was a whirlwind courtship. Some looking in from the outside might even call it a fairytale, although we know better. A lot has changed since then, including the way I look and the way I see my body.

We were both divorced, had dated extensively, and knew what we wanted, so although it’s been such a short time, I feel like I’ve been with him forever. In a good way. We are highly compatible, sometimes so in sync it baffles me. I love him fiercely. There is no one I’d rather live my life with. On the occasion of our anniversary, I’ve spent the week thinking about the changes I’ve put him through and how he still shows up for me. 

A lot has changed since I met him. I have changed since I met him…mentally, emotionally, physically. Positive changes, mostly. And he’s had a direct role in a lot of them. His kindness and openness and willingness to question me…and his support have led me to do things that were previously unthinkable. And most of the time, I’m good with the changes. But I spent much of this last week in a negative headspace, dwelling on my physical changes, mostly because it’s much less likely I would have landed him—or any man—in the physical state I’m currently in.

About a year before we got married, I told him I was going to let myself go gray after the wedding. I was touching up roots every two weeks, and had been for at least a decade, and was tired of it. But one morning, shortly after Thanksgiving, looking into the mirror and inspecting the flecks of silver along my hairline staring back at me, I made a snap decision and declared myself done with dying, wedding hair be damned. I’m not sure we had even set a date.

“It’ll be like I’m dating a brand-new woman!” my husband joked, but his enthusiasm was genuine. I kept on rolling. I joined a gray group on Facebook, and they became my tribe through the process.

For many women, myself included, our hair is our identity, one way in which we define our beauty. My long, dark hair was one of my signature features, what made me me. “A raven-haired beauty” is how one of Hub’s colleagues had once described me. Even after we decide to go gray, it may take much longer to accept and embrace the decision. 

And then there is a lot of waiting, and many stages of transition. Some women question their decision throughout the process; some question it every step of the way. I haven’t doubted my decision. Occasionally, I see an old photo of myself and marvel at that woman and how she had no idea how striking she was. I’ve loved my silvers so far; I’ve mostly just obsessed over how to get there faster. 

Going gray is not for the patient, and I am most certainly not patient. Given the length of my hair, a full transition would likely have taken me three years. Luckily, I didn’t know that; I naively thought the worst of it would be about a year. Going cold turkey was never an option. I know myself well enough to know that looking in the mirror every day and seeing that harsh demarcation line was not a test I wanted to face. For some women, it’s a badge of honor. 

Instead, I looked to the experts for help. I had told Hubs about this genius Los Angeles colorist who matches his clients’ transitioning pattern and turns them gray in a day, even if it means eight hours in a chair. Hubs reached out to Jack Martin’s salon, but he was not accepting new clients, so he did the next best thing and Googled gray in a day in Austin and found a master colorist who did similar work. Hubs booked me a consultation as my birthday present. 

Kris is a master with color and people, and her salon is a refuge from a chaotic world. I don’t know what it is, but you walk in the door and can immediately feel the shift in energy. It’s a bright, modern space with concrete floors and a wall of windows that lets in ample light for the many plants throughout the place. Once my therapist asked me to picture a safe space I could go to as we worked back through traumatic memories, and I pictured myself lying in a hair washing chair at Keith Kristopher Salon, calmly looking up at the ivies and other greens that cascade over one of the ceiling’s exposed wooden beams. It’s a safe space. I shed tears of relief and gratitude when I stepped out of the salon after that first visit and had a plan to come back and keep my length but blend my gray for the wedding, just a few weeks away. 

Going gray is not easy, no matter which path you choose. My silver sisters know this. Even with my transformation, there is upkeep and maintenance. I ended up doing several progressively shorter chops to get rid of the “yellow bits.” I’m 16 months in, my hair is chin length, and I have perhaps an inch of dyed hair still on my head. And every time I look in the mirror, those dyed bits taunt me. I’ve taken scissors to them more than once. I long for my long hair and look forward to its return. But I love my silvers. And my hair now is super soft and healthier than it’s ever been. 

Going gray was a hard transition, but it always had a defined outcome. 

Giving up dieting does not. I decided to stop fighting my body and embrace intuitive eating about a month after my wedding and two weeks after I quit my job. While the intuitive eating experts will tell you they can’t say what’s going to happen to your body after you stop restricting and following food rules, for most of us, it means weight gain, at least temporarily. And temporarily might be a year or two. It might be forever. No one can say, so it’s the ultimate trust-the-process decision. And it isn’t easy. Gaining weight isn’t easy either, even if you’re gaining freedom for obsessive thoughts and constant negative self-talk. And body acceptance doesn’t come overnight, if it comes at all. 

I have gained a significant amount of weight. There are days when I think I can live with myself in this state, and then there are days where I’m ready to go back to my life of restriction. There are things that keep from doing that. The first one is the one that brought me here, which is having children who have suffered from anorexia. Thanks to successful treatment that includes extensive eating disorder education, they know (and I know) that dieting and restriction is not the answer. It can never be the answer for them again. Having experienced starvation once, their bodies will always be more susceptible to backsliding, whether or not they are conscious of it. There is no place for restriction in a home when someone is suffering from or recovering from an eating disorder. For their sake and my sake, I can’t go back to my own disordered eating. So I live with this new me, and keep working to heal my relationship with food by following the process. And learning to accept my body for what it is. 

I am incredibly blessed to have a husband who not only supports me, but has also wholeheartedly supported my children—now our children. Our lives were turned upside down when the eating disorder took over my youngest. Despite us navigating a relatively new relationship, planning a wedding, and both working full time, we focused on my child. Getting her into a treatment program was a blessing, but for most of her time there, she was resistant to adding weight. Her motivation wasn’t ending her eating disorder so much as it was getting out of the program. It wasn’t until after I decided to stop dieting, after I quit my job, and committed to focusing full time on her healing and my healing, that she started healing. That’s not to say it was because of me—her brain and body were simply starving. And when the brain is starving, it’s not fully functioning. 

Many experts encourage caregivers to view the eating disorder as a separate entity that attaches to their loved one. It makes it easier to not blame the person suffering and rightly place it on the illness. Many eating disorder sufferers also describe their eating disorder as a separate voice within them that takes over and makes decisions, and they often feel powerless to stop it. That’s why it can be so powerful when loved ones take charge of all meals, preparation, plating, and eating. The sufferer can then justify eating to the eating disorder. My daughter was weight restored in mid-fall, and almost overnight, the major battles over food ended. It would take many more months for full recovery, but there were baby steps along the way. We started seeing glimpses of the laughing, smiling person we used to know. With time and weight restoration, my daughter returned to herself, a wiser version of herself.

Now that she's in a good place, we have gotten back to our lives, but there have been shifts. New stresses, struggles, opportunities, joys. 

I am still in the midst of my recovery with my food and body image issues. I am much larger than I was when I met my husband. A different man might have left me for my physical changes alone (not to mention all the other challenges we’ve faced). My husband is an extraordinary man, and while my physical attributes were part of the initial attraction, I know what drew him to me is much deeper. Still, it’s not lost on me that I couldn’t have made this transition sooner and I probably wouldn’t have landed a partner. We can say they don’t matter, but physical appearances do influence attraction. If I had met my husband as I am now, I don’t know where we’d be. With all of my physical changes so fast, I am hyper aware of what people must think. 

“She landed the man, now she’s let herself go” is the one that plays in my head the most. And that’s all on me. He’s never shared a moment of doubt. 

Three years ago, when I met my husband, I looked very different. I see pictures of myself and it’s impossible for me not to compare myself now to myself then. The transition is long, and the outcome is unknown. Some days I’m at peace. Other days I question, although the decision is still the same. I trust the process.

“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” He asks me this pretty much every other day. Most of the time, I don’t.

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I’m still learning what body trust looks like in midlife. If this essay resonates, you might also enjoy my recent conversation with dietitian Deb Benfield about rebuilding body trust in midlife.

Reclaiming body trust in midlife - a conversation with Deb Benfield

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I’d love to hear from you…

Have you experienced changes in your body or identity in midlife that shifted how you see yourself? I’d love to hear about your experience.