You will finish this chapter and go out into the world and notice the diversity of bodies around you…and you will still have these reflexive, judgmental thoughts about the people who don’t conform to the aspirational ideal, or those envious, contemptuous thoughts about the people who do, or those self-critical, scolding thoughts about the ways the world tells you you fall short. It will happen any time you’re out in public—on a train or a bus, standing in line at the checkout counter, at a party, at a work meeting, in a classroom. You’ll notice other people’s bodies, and you’ll have an emotional reaction to them. And then you might even have emotional reactions to your emotional reactions—“Darn it, I shouldn’t think that!”
That’s all part of the mess. Change happens gradually. Your brain has been soaking in the BIC for decades; and any time you step outside your door, you’re back in it; any time you turn on a television, you’re back in it; any time you put clothes on or take clothes off, you’re back in it. Just notice it, as you’d notice a fleck of dust floating through the air. Utterly neutral. No need to do anything about it. Smile kindly at the mess. And know what’s true: Everyone is the new hotness. You are the new hotness. So is she. So are they. So are we.
Strategy 4: “Hi Body, What Do You Need?”
Finally, turn your attention away from the mirror and other people’s bodies, and notice what it feels like inside your body. Greet your internal sensations with the same kindness and compassion you practiced when you thought about the shape of your body.
When an infant squirms or cries because something about her body feels uncomfortable, the grown-ups have to figure out what the issue is, and we teach the infant what her body’s sensations mean.32 We coo, “Hi, honey, what’s wrong? What do you need? Are you hungry? Tired? Lonely? Oh, you’re hungry, huh?”
And the baby learns that that specific uncomfortable sensation means “hungry.” Another uncomfortable sensation means “wet.” A different uncomfortable sensation is “lonely.”
But even as she grows more familiar with her body’s internal sensations, she absorbs contradictory cultural messages about how she should feel about her body. The adults say things like “Look at that cute fat belly! I’m gonna zerbert that belly!” about her belly, and they also say, “Ugh, look at this fat belly, I’m so gross,” about their own belly.
Even before she can read or speak, she watches commercials and sees the magazine covers at the grocery store, and though she may never talk about it with any of the people in her life, she is absorbing the idea that her body is not already beautiful and that if she doesn’t make it beautiful, she doesn’t automatically deserve food or love or rest or health. And as a budding “human giver,” she learns that her body isn’t for her, it’s for other people. Other people’s pleasure, other people’s desire, other people’s acceptance or rejection.
Many of us have grown into world-class ignorers of our own needs, just as we were taught to be. We don’t even notice that we’re ignoring our needs. Our bodies are sending us all kinds of signals, but we live from the neck up, only attending to the noise in our heads and shutting out the noise coming from the other 95 percent of our internal experience.
Imagine that your body is the body of someone who needs your care, like an infant. It feels weird and wrong to a lot of us at first, but give it a try. Instead of just looking at your body to evaluate her well-being (we know that you can’t tell anything about a person’s health by the shape or size of their body), turn to her and ask her how she feels: “What’s wrong, honey? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Lonely?” She can definitely tell you, if you listen. You might have to stop what you’re doing, take a slow breath, focus on the sensation of your weight on the floor or the chair, and actually ask out loud, “What do you need?” You may receive the answer as an instantaneous knowing, or as a physical sensation you need to interpret, or as words in your mind. But she will give you an answer.
Though the details of her needs change as you grow—How much sleep, and when? Loving attention from whom? What kind of food?—the fundamentals do not. Your body needs to breathe and to sleep. She needs food. She needs love. She dies without them. And there is nothing she has to do, no shape or size she has to be, before she “deserves” food and love and sleep. It’s not her fault if she’s sick or injured. She’s still the astonishing creature she was on the day she was born, a source of joy for those who care about her. She’s yours.
She’s you.
Julie had literally never thought about what her body felt like. She paid attention to what it looked like, and, like most of us, spent a lot of time and effort on making it look thin enough; she followed diets she read about, did workouts suggested by fitness gurus, and avoided clothes with horizontal stripes.
But her prescribed bowel retraining forced her to pay attention to how her body felt instead of how it looked.
A lot of body-positive talk emphasizes loving your body for “what it does” rather than how it looks, which is great as far as it goes. But it’s not so helpful for Julie or anyone living with chronic pain or illness. Even though her body looked a lot like she thought healthy bodies were supposed to look, it had failed pretty catastrophically to do what bodies were supposed to do.
So she had to start from scratch, rebuilding her relationship with her body according to rules set by her body. There were guidelines to follow about food, but instead of a list of foods she could and couldn’t eat, she was told to pay attention to how various foods felt in her body. It turned out what made her body feel good was radically different from any diet she had followed. There were instructions for way more sleep and exercise than she had ever had before, and how the hell was she going to be good to her body and also live her actual life?
She realized this question—this tradeoff between her body’s needs and her life—was what put her in the hospital in the first place.
In order to make this work, she would need help. A lot of help.
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Bodies are imperfect, and sometimes they let us down. They are susceptible to disease and breakage and entropy. Our bodies can disappoint us, and the world can punish us when our bodies aren’t what they “should” be. So we are not suggesting that you “love your body,” like that’s an easy fix. We’re suggesting you be patient with your body and with your feelings about your body.
Your body is not the enemy. The real enemy is out there—the Bikini Industrial Complex. It is trying sneakily to convince you that you are the problem, that your body is the enemy, that your body is inadequate, which makes you a failure.
This stuff is difficult and messy. After you finish this chapter, you are going to have dinner with friends and hear them talking about calories and fat and whether or not they “deserve” to eat dessert or how nice it must be for you “not to care what you eat.” You are going to hear family members criticize themselves or others for the way they’ve “let themselves go.” You’re going to want to explain to them that people don’t need to earn the pleasure of delicious food, that de-prioritizing conformation with the culturally constructed ideal is not failure, and that “fat” doesn’t mean “unhealthy.” Sometimes you’ll say these things; sometimes you won’t. Sometimes you won’t want the argument. Both choices are okay; it’s all just part of the mess.
We’ll conclude this chapter with this example of our own mess.
At the same time that Emily was working on this chapter, she was also—oh, God—losing weight, in preparation for a large professional event, to which she had been invited as a keynote speaker. She knows from the research and from experience that she is perceived differently depending on her weight, and she wanted to be perceived in the thin way. So one Friday morning, she spent three hours writing about body acceptance, and then she went upstairs and, because it was Friday, she weighed herself.
Then she called Amelia and said, “This is so screwed up! On the one hand, I really will be taken more seriously as a professional and an expert if I conform more closely to the aspirational ideal. On the other hand, my efforts to conform to that ideal are in opposition to the very message about which I have been invited to speak, as an expert.”
“Yep, it’s a mess,” Amelia agreed. “But it’s also the new hotness.”
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