Belly rolls are a hot topic around here lately. I have some thoughts on happily walking around with more body fat. I'm interested to hear yours.
I am not as shredded as I have ever been, and I'm totally ok with this, which I find bizarre considering my background of obsession. In my adult life, I've been both painfully emaciated from anorexia, and very lean and muscular from a fitness obsession. I think having been very thin definitely does alter a person's perception of what is a normal and acceptable. It can make us feel uncomfortably huge at a size many others would find normal or even small. Any change from our smallest can feel like failure, but a changing body is normal. Think about the body you had as an infant, a toddler, a child. They're long gone but we're not feeling devastated because our onesie doesn't fit anymore. Clinging to our starvation-size pants is almost as absurd. It's a mind trap, not a problem with your body. It makes me think of Byron Katie and Loving What Is. She would tell you that reality is always kind. Suffering comes from the belief that things should be different, from the stories we tell ourselves about what it all means. Those thoughts hurt. Your belly is neutral, an innocent bystander whose current state is exactly what it should be based on what you're doing and learning right now. You need to be here to get there, assuming you want a new experience, one based on kindness or neutrality and not your fear running amok. A couple of days ago, I finished a great workout and plopped down in the recliner in my shorts and sports bra, recovering and watching television. I was slouched in such a way that I had a pretty good belly pooch going. My husband put his hand on it and said in an honest, admiring way, "That is so sexy." Believe me when I tell you, I would have wanted to punch him in the mouth not that long ago. An incident like that would have caused crying, door slamming, and imminent starvation. Why? Because I was CRAZY. 😜 My disordered mind couldn't have fathomed that he meant that sincerely. I would have twisted it into good reason to overexercise and restrict my food in order to "show" him. Show him what, I don't know, probably that he married a lunatic. Luckily, I now get where he's coming from. He makes total sense. I'm the wacko. In the past, I have been what I call "crotch veins lean." This is where my abdomen is so lean you could count my lymph nodes, where there are visible blue veins running from my lower abs down toward my groin. Nobody, and I mean nobody, ever complimented me on that or told me it was sexy. If someone caught a glimpse, it was more like, "Aaaagh! WTF?!" But fitness magazines and social media had somehow convinced me this was desirable and anything softer was a failure on my part and definitely repulsive to others. Is it true? No!!! It's crazy. People like softness and curves, men especially, but society in general. Show random people female fitness models or waifish runway models and they're like, "eeew!" There have been studies where they show men and women pictures of different body types and ask which they find most attractive, most women will pick the skinniest one and men will pick bigger, softer looking bodies. Or, I was thinking about wild mammals. If you're a boy coyote, or any animal in nature, are you seeking out the most emaciated female? No, she probably has worms and fleas. LOL I began to (sloooowly) grasp that this obsession with being thin and small was in my own mind. If other people have an opinion at all, it's probably NOT that I need to be thinner or they won't like me. That thought process is all me, which means I can change my experience by changing my own thinking. There have been many times where I've made deliberate decisions to carry a little more fat rather than do what is "optimal" for abs nobody cares about. Things like tripling or quadrupling my cereal portion in the morning from that ridiculous ramekin-size that used to be all I'd allow myself. Or having my salad cereal (aka green smoothie) most days. It's just a bunch of carbs, diet brain would tell me. And it's true that when I stopped having them altogether I got a little leaner. I also had poor digestion, constipation, higher blood pressure, and a higher resting heart rate. I put the fruity plant matter back and my body and belly were happy again. I want them to be happy. Yesterday, I was at work and touched my stomach. I felt a little roll there. It was protruding over the top of my jeans. I was trying not to make a scene, but I was so curious about it. It was new. I kept feeling it. There was no panic or disgust, no urge to change the way I eat. I love the way I eat. I love my belly and its new little roll. I straightened up in my chair, tucked the belly roll back into my jeans so it wouldn't distract me, and continued working. LOL It was so not a big deal. I wish I could verbalize more clearly about what has changed in my head. Things that would have been SO triggering in times past are completely fine now. Being triggered is a thought process run amok. You run with the fear and don't question it. Then you experience all the emotional consequences of having done that. I'm over it. I'd rather NOT have a total flip out at every little thing. Whatever is going on, it will go better without a meltdown. I do think being consistently well fed helps with this, makes us more grounded and calm. When chronically hungry from dieting, or in crisis mode from feeling like I should be dieting, my emotions were like a stick of dynamite. Any little thing would set me off.
What is your experience with being at a higher weight or carrying more fat? Have you been able to shift your thinking and find more acceptance? Or not yet? Do you think having been very thin (if you have been) distorted your perception? What are your biggest fears or struggles around this?
Currently I am at my highest fat/weight levels (excluding pregnancy). Half of my brain says that I am huge, fat, disgusting. The other half of my brain says- No you are a normal, healthy size for a 40 year old woman. Probably 80% of women wear bigger sizes than me, so me thinking that I’m fat is ridiculous. In fact, in most situations I would never mention my weight issues because I know my problems would be offensive to most other people. I have been very lean and skinny several times in my life. As a kid I was skinny without a thought of food. In my early 20s, I lost weight without trying and people started asking if I had an eating disorder. I was definitely eating at that time and I took that question as a compliment. Moving out of home and having my first serious relationship is when I first gained weight and that’s when the diets and exercise obsession started. I was obsessed with getting abs. Nothing other than a six pack would be good enough. The leanest I ever got was to see a 4 pack. I obsess over my belly. Every bit of fat on it, I see and judge in a negative way. Now I’m that my brain has calmed down with the food obsession, my next thing is that I want to accept my belly as it is. I want to look in the mirror and not hate what I see. I’ve done that for the last 20 years, I don’t want to do that anymore. This is one of many issues that I’m discussing with my psychologist. I have just read Beyond Beautiful and it had a lot of good things to work on to feel body neutral, not care about your body shape and just enjoy life. One thing I’m going to try is to buy some clothes that I like in my current size. My current Big wardrobe is very drab and baggy, nothing fun or colourful which is what my Skinny wardrobe looks like.
Ooh! Tabitha quote: “Your brain learns from your actions and your words and your thoughts. If you want it to learn that there’s nothing wrong with your unsuppressed body weight, you have to stop acting as if there’s something wrong with your unsuppressed body weight. It sounds backwards but it’s not, because our brain learns from our actions and the thoughts that we pay attention to.“
@happyme It’s funny how if I tell myself I need to eat less, I subconsciously do the opposite as a precaution. There is no such reaction if I eat less because I’m less hungry, or more because I’m more hungry. It’s when I’m not trusting hunger or trying to override it that things go sideways. Left to its own devices, my body doesn’t want to gain or lose much. It likes peaceful, uneventful stability. It works to keep me in a healthy place regardless of what I do. I think of that line about normal eating, how we can trust our body to make up for our mistakes in eating. It does that every day brilliantly, whether I’m skipping meals or baking brownies. It will adjust my appetite and energy level up or down accordingly. There is no kooky compensation required on my part. I wouldn’t have believed that, but it’s becoming too obvious to deny.
@Sheena, you say, "I can definitely see the flaws and stop myself from doing anything too crazy." It helps me in my own inner dialog not to label anything a flaw. It just is. Totally neutral, not good or bad. If I'm calling something about my body a flaw, that will create a different and worse experience for me. It's kind of the same thing as labeling it a binge and bringing up the years of emotional baggage from that word, versus, "I ate a lot of food" and not feeling one way or another about it.
I loved this, "you never had to deal with gaining weight through intuitive eating." 🙂💕
The first time I stopped restricting, I gained 40 pounds in a year. The second and third tries at intuitive eating, I gained 10-20 pounds each time and rushed back to dieting like a true believer. The fourth and last time, my weight was about as high as it had ever been thanks to years of restrict/rebound cycles. My restrictive mindset had me eating food, thinking about food, craving food, taking pictures of food, writing about food, food, food, food. In that state, though I was trying desperately to restrict, I ate a lot and stored all of it. I won't say I ate more than I needed, because my body was doing its best to nourish me in spite of the frequent famines and migrations (aka, dieting and exercising like a crazy person). In fact, in every case, I gained relative to how hard and how long I'd been restricting prior to eating intuitively. In every case, I needed the food to repair the damage I'd done. Once I didn't need it, once adequate food was a sure thing on a predictable schedule for months and years, THEN my body let go of the extra weight, like the smart body it is. I was less hungry, less obsessed, focused on other things, plus my metabolism was fully fired up instead of being suppressed from prolonged undereating. Plus, I actually read the Intuitive Eating book and workbook and "got it" this time instead of doing my own twisted version of a hunger and fullness diet. Books like Health at Every Size and The F*ck It diet helped tremendously. Not weighing myself or body checking helped tremendously. Trusting that my body knew what it was doing was a colossal breakthrough. Tabitha Farrar. The breakthroughs just keep coming actually! But there's some more perspective on my weight relative to intuitive eating. Last I checked, I weighed the same as before I started dieting, which is hilarious. I did ALL THAT, decades of struggle and madness, to land back at where I should have been if I'd left well enough alone.
@sunshine I'm going to go watch that Tabitha video right now! She is so logical, reassuring, and no-nonsense. Every video speaks to me.
Oh my goodness I have so much I could say about this and I'm sure I'm going to forget half of it as I go. Before I began a diet/exercise/weight obsessed ninny, I was overweight. Mind you it was reactionary to the restriction placed on me by my mother/family, but I was overweight none the less. I was very self conscious about my belly. Sometimes when I sat down it was one big huge roll, and sometimes it was two rolls. I would hide myself under big clothes all the time which inevitably only made me look bigger. I did get very very thin in my early twenties. I looked like a concentration camp victim. It was terrible. But it happened very gradually. So I slowly got very used to not having alot of fat on my body and since I lived with less fat on my body for about 6-10 months, it became the new normal. As I started to gain and kept on gaining, a normal weight started to feel very uncomfortable. That discomfort, combined with other factors in my life led me back to restriction and excessive exercise which landed me with hypothalamic amenorrhea for 3 years. When I went All In to heal my HA I really did the mental work on accepting the weight gain, and you know what, it really worked. Tabitha Fararr posted a YouTube video today about how you have to redirect or rewire your brain every time it has a negative feeling about your body if you want to stop having negative thoughts about your body. And it's so true. That was my EXACT experience when I recovered from HA. The more I redirected or defied my brains negative thoughts about my body, the less I felt negatively about my body. Then I got pregnant with my son and all that stayed away until I decided to actively lose weight postpartum. As soon as I started thinking there was something wrong with my body being bigger, there was something wrong with my body being bigger and my brain latched onto that and believed it. it was like the grown over highway that Tabitha Fararr talked about in her video about excessive exercise where if you don't let it grow over completely and start driving on it again, it's going start getting easier and easier to access. Which lands me where I am now. I'm not super lean, or even lean, but I definitely have a fear of weight gain because my brain is back to thinking there is something wrong with me/my body if it's bigger.
Skwigg it’s nice to hear your perspective on gaining body fat because I’ve always seen you as the effortlessly skinny person whose experience I can’t fully relate to because you never had to deal with gaining weight through intuitive eating. Your intuitive eating made you lose weight. Which isn’t a good or bad thing, it just is. So thanks for sharing the other side and how you dealt with it!
I can soooo relate to this discussion at this point in my life. All the “shoulds” are telling me I should be working on getting my pre baby body back, and I am working on it to mainly fit into my clothes, but at the same time I am realizing that I love my body. This is the first time I’ve truly loved my body while being at my highest weight. When I was at my lowest adult weight from dieting, I saw myself as being too big and wanted to lose another 10 lbs. it’s so strange how perspective changes everything. I have friends who look gorgeous to me but hate their bodies simply because they are bigger than they used to be. I refuse to spend my life hating my body and wanting to be someone else, just because this particular society decided that smaller is better.
I have to admit I have a long way to go in full body acceptance and stopping dieting, but I can definitely see the flaws and stop myself from doing anything too crazy. Self love and self care always comes first.
This was interesting to noodle on. It made me think of something I read once about how men would never seek out to mate with a women, let's say, in the throes of cancer or some life-threatening disease where they're skin and bones and don't "look healthy". Of course they still love the person if that's their person, but it's just evolution and all that about reproducing. If they're looking for a mate, that is not the one they will choose. It's the same, kind of, with ultra-skinny ones and the reason most men don't like it. It's not good for reproduction potential lol. That being said, it's mostly WOMEN who like that shit. We are so distorted :)
As far as carrying extra weight, I'm with you on not reacting. I'm done freaking out and throwing some insanely restrictive diet or punishing workout at it. That doesn't work at all. I do, still, however, not quite accept it and work on eating a little less til it goes away. Funny thing about that is it never does go away. My belly might get bigger or smaller, but its always there.
And for the record, my husband also sees it as sexy. That I still don't get, but hey I'll take it.
As you can see, I have a ways to go with all of this. But it's sooooo much better than it was.