Untangling Healthy from Thin
Read Time: 6 Minutes
Words by Megan Vos
The first time I can remember feeling ashamed of my body, I was in first grade. Our class filed down to the nurse’s office to be weighed and measured, and when we got back to our classroom, our teacher stuck dinosaur-shaped sticky notes on our desks showing our weights. I was the tallest kid in the class and I can still remember thinking that the number on the post-it was too high. My mom and my grandmother were both runners. My grandmother’s story of losing weight, quitting cigarettes, and becoming a runner in her forties was a family legend. I also knew that for both my mom and my grandmother, weight was a loaded topic. I’m forty, which means that I was a teenager during the nineties. Snackwells Devils Food cookies and low-fat Breyer’s Lemon Chiffon yogurt were nutritional mainstays. I tried the Cabbage Soup diet, and can remember drinking Slim Fast shakes the week before prom so I’d look better in my dress. In my twenties, I would decide from time to time to lose weight, upping my exercise and cutting back on late-night pizza eating after nights out with friends.
I always thought that by the time I became a mom, I’d feel confident in my body. In the almost ten years since my first daughter was born, however, I have struggled more with body image than I did before having children. It’s worth noting that I am a white woman who, despite years of disordered eating and a distorted sense of the importance of my size, has always benefitted from thin privilege. Even now, when I’m at my heaviest, I can shop in any clothes store and I can sit comfortably on an airplane. I also have come to recognize that my body image issues are deeply rooted in living in a society where women are supposed to be small; we shouldn’t take up space, shouldn’t be “too much.” In addition, I live in Boulder, CO, which is regularly voted “the fittest city in America.” In a city where perfect bodies abound, it feels especially challenging for me to untangle the relationship between weight and health. I shared a story about body image three years ago, in front of a live audience of over five hundred people. It was empowering, and yet, even as I was reading, I worried about how I looked. It feels radical to imagine a life in which I am healthy, but not thin.
My older daughter was a voracious nurser, never took a bottle, and hated solids. During the first year of her life, I lost all the weight I’d gained during my pregnancy, and then kept losing as my body struggled to keep up with feeding her. “You don’t look like you had a baby,” people would say with reverence in their voices. I’d be trying on clothes and sales clerks would pass my dressing room and exclaim, “You’re not a medium, you’re a small, honey!” I drank these comments in, finally feeling like my body belonged in this town full of thin moms, mistakenly believing that motherhood had transformed me into someone skinny.
I gained a few pounds almost instantly when my older daughter stopped nursing, though, and my weight continued to creep back up over the next several months. I wish I could tell my thirty-one year-old self that her body was recovering from pregnancy and breastfeeding, doing what it needed to do, but I took it as a challenge and would spend the next eight years believing that if I tried hard enough, I could get back to my lowest weight. That if I wanted it enough, I could do it. That my failure to reach that size again represented a failure on my part.
When I think about my body over the past decade of motherhood, I feel regret that I have been so hard on myself. Regret that I have treated my body like an enemy who has betrayed me by refusing to stay small. I’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to “do something” about my body. I’ve done cleanses, diets masquerading as lifestyle changes, eliminated various food groups and eaten foods in strict combinations. In my mind, I see the spiky graph of my weight gains and losses: lose 5 pounds, gain 7. Lose 10, gain 15. Lose 20, gain 30. The cycle of losing and gaining was exhausting, and also expensive-- only recently, I got rid of a huge Tupperware full of clothes in various smaller sizes, which I had been keeping for “when I finally lost the weight.” The more I have read about the science of weight loss, the more I can recognize that with each diet, my body was working harder and harder not to starve, my metabolism slowing more and more each time. I was starting to question my allegiance to dieting at the end of 2019, when all of the calorie counting started to feel like a burden. But when COVID hit, I returned like a faithful dog to my weight loss app.
In the fall of 2020, I was sick and exhausted, crippled by debilitating pain during ovulation for several months in a row. When I got an ultrasound to make sure my ovaries were healthy, the ultrasound tech told me that during the pandemic, she had done more abdominal ultrasounds than ever before. Stress was drastically affecting women’s menstrual cycles. I realized that I didn’t need to be on a diet; I needed to be in therapy.
Therapy has helped me to question the relationship I’ve always had to thinness. As I worked on accepting my feelings, I started to wonder what it might look like to accept my body, too. I can now see all the ways I’ve misattributed my successes and failures to how I look, or how much I weigh. I am recognizing the profound disconnect between the way I have talked to myself for years and the way I want my daughters to feel about their own bodies. During phases of weighing myself daily, religiously, I’ve hidden the scale in my closet, weighing myself secretly. I’m careful not to talk negatively about my body in front of them. But one thing that has shifted is my desire for my actions to align better with my beliefs. If I don’t want my girls to see me weighing myself, do I really need to be doing it in the first place?
I have a clearer idea of how I’d like to feel, even if I’m still in the process of letting go of years of dieting. I don’t want to spend any more time worrying about my belly fat (it’s here, and it’s staying). I don’t want to track calories or suck in sideways each time I pass a mirror (something I do automatically) or always make sure one of my kids is standing in front of me so nobody can see my stomach in photos. I wonder what else I might do with the energy I have spent fixating on my body. I’m practicing making choices because they help me be healthier, and not skinnier. I’m drinking less wine, not because of the calories per glass, but because I want to feel clear headed when I wake up early to spin. I am walking and hiking as much as I can, not to burn off the chocolate I will eat later, but because of the way I feel when I do it. I still feel lost when it comes to eating. Years of dieting have left me confused about what my body actually wants or needs. At the moment, it feels freeing to eat what’s convenient and easy after a year that has brought so much hardship, but I’m not sure what that will look like long-term. I’m hoping that by softening the rules, my body will lead me to what’s next.
I wish this story ended with me feeling at peace with my body now. Spoiler: I’m not there yet, at least not consistently.
Just yesterday, I tried on bathing suits, and my inner critic had a lot to say. She had some suggestions about how I could lose a few pounds before summer, some critiques of the effectiveness of the workouts I’ve been doing, and some straight up insults about the way I look. But I practiced noticing those thoughts, practiced acknowledging that I’ve spent the better part of my life feeling bad about my body, and practiced recognizing that creating a new pattern will take time. I pictured myself swimming in the lake near my parents’ house in New Hampshire this summer, the bathing suit just a bathing suit, and not a representation of anything deeper. I imagined the cool water on my skin, the sound of my daughters’ laughter. And then, I put my comfy sweats back on and grilled the burgers I had planned for dinner. I sat down with my family, and I ate.
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About the Author:
During non-pandemic times, Megan Vos produces Listen to Your Mother, a live show featuring local writers’ stories about motherhood. Since COVID began, she has shamelessly embraced Peloton spin classes and bread baking. Megan finds joy hiking in the mountains above her Boulder, CO home, trying new recipes with her partner, and skiing with her family. Megan is a contributing writer to The Mom Salon, and has also been published by Motherscope, Motherwell, and The Kindred Voice. You can read more of her writing at www.familygrowsup.com
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