“My body and my feminism feel haunted by discipline. I resent the discipline that both require. And yet I am committed to them both as I move in the world,” the author writes. (Photo: Photo Courtesy of Samantha Pinto)
My decision to lose weight was sparked when I got COVID in December 2020. I was lucky — the illness wasn’t bad. But it came at a time when my professional life was nearing, for me, unbearable. I had switched jobs to be with my family. I was being hazed in my new gig; my kids were at home with me every waking moment. My postpartum depression and anxiety, which had rolled five years later into just regular old depression and anxiety, were at an all-time high.
And then: COVID. And I wanted something else for myself. I wanted not to eat my feelings, as I had been doing for years and which, after my second pregnancy, had resulted in 50 instead of 15 more pounds on my 5-foot frame. I wanted to feel like myself again, not a receptacle for everyone else’s needs and desires and protocols. I wanted my body to stop following everything and everyone and every feeling around me and figure out what I actually wanted to eat, to feel, to do.
My body takes up so much real estate in my day-to-day brain-time, the push and pull of trite self-hating ruminations and my shame about them as a person who teaches feminism for a living. I was sick; I was making myself sick at this nexus of growing up as a white woman in a culture that values thinness as a sign of self-regulation, a medical culture that associates obesity with every single health issue, and a feminist culture that told me to get over myself and love my body beyond measure, or else to not think of my body at all.
I was exhausted by my body. I was not eating or moving or living with pleasure or a sense of my own desires. I felt too tired to have a body, to think about my body. Except that, of course, I always did.
So when I felt my anxiety rise, I walked while I listened to mystery novels on audiobooks from the library (that Rita Mae Brown cats and murders series is hilarious). I walked while I played Pokémon Go with my kids. I ate a big bowl of oatmeal and raspberries. I did 10 minutes of yoga. I felt calmer, less anxious, less self-obsessed. I felt better. And since that December of 2020, I’ve lost 50 pounds.
As my kids started back at school, the parents I saw every day started in with, “Did you lose weight? You look amazing.” It was awkward, but also so human. While they were being honest with their curiosity, their words implied I did not “look great” before. I’ve also watched as others clock my difference and discipline themselves into not saying anything.
I appreciate the ideal that no one should ever mention your body. I also appreciate an embrace of the value of various aesthetic performances and acknowledging the labor, thought and creativity that go into them. It took me a long time to embrace that kind of feminine performance in myself, precisely because it didn’t ― no matter how much I wanted it to ― come from a place of resistance or radicality, though I admire those who feel that it does for them.
And now here I am, 50 pounds lighter and still thinking about my body. I feel more like “me,” but I also know that’s a fiction of the fatphobia I’ve internalized as much as it’s a sign of my improving mental health. I still don’t feel happy or comfortable in my body all or even most of the time, just like when I was 50 pounds heavier. I still feel great about my body in moments — the right lipstick, a new set of earrings I love, when I get up in forearm stand on my first try on my yoga mat — just like I did before.
I desperately want to not care, to not feel attached to any of the weight loss. That’s hard to do when you’ve experienced life in a body that has fundamentally shifted — as well as opinions about my body from those around me.
Here I am, 50 pounds lighter and still thinking about my…
Read More: I Lost 50 Pounds During COVID. Everyone Has Something To Say About My ‘New’ Body.