Goodbye, January, Goodbye
new year, no body goals
The number of pounds my body weighs. The number of “points” in poached chicken, an apple, or the 50 chocolate chips I count from the crinkly bag. The number of pounds my body has lost this week, month, or year. The number of pounds I lost in a stomach flu, a hospital stay. The number of calories I ate. The number of calories I burned. The minutes on the treadmill, laps around the track. The inches of the string I tie around my waist. The number of stretch marks in peculiar places like my shoulders and arms. The number of reps, of squats. The number of sessions I can afford with a trainer. The number of chatarungas. The jugs of water drunk in a day. The jugs of green tea drunk in a day (per a trainer’s advice). The activity points earned. The blocks walked. The number of pounds my best friend or mom lost. The number of pounds some celebrity lost. The weeks until a party, reunion, or trip, in order to gauge how aggressive my weight-loss strategy should be.
For many years and in many ways, I counted my body as if it were a measurable thing, or a thing whose measurements mattered. I confined it to totals, to tallies. I loved “good” numbers; they suggested I was worthy, progressing, beautiful, or at least not-a-monster. “Good” numbers meant shopping at French Connection, eating my monthly massive Starbucks cookie with only minor anxiety, bliss. The “bad” numbers poked sticks in my shame until it came howling out, thrashing clawed hands and demanding attention. “Bad” numbers were too many--food points, inches, ticks to the right on the scale in the lady’s locker room, where I waited until no one was looking to step lightly aboard, as if stepping lightly might convince the scale to register a lighter number. “Bad” numbers could also be too few--too few activity points earned, too few pounds lost, too few ticks to the left.
(It occurs to me that this sounds a bit like an eating disorder, or disordered eating. But in 30-plus years, as my weight zigged and zagged, I can recall only one person suggesting my habits might be unhealthy. This is because I’m big, and black, and the culture has always seen controlling and shrinking my body as a wholesome and important project, no matter the means.)
For many years, January was a numbers game and a dream weaver: The first day and month of the new year, the diet, the work-out, the plan. The first day of the new me! In a few months, I’d be lanky and tan, my arms and legs like pick-up sticks, my waist a tiny halo of superiority. I’d have excavated the thin woman trapped inside. With exercise, of course, and also--here’s the secret--by banishing dairy!; or maybe carbs, or sugar, or perhaps veganism, or “moderation.” In my dream, starting in January, I would finally outrun the fatness and bigness my ancestral blueprint so stubbornly insisted on manifesting.
January was also a trickster. Sleight of that icy, white hand and I forgot, each New Year’s Day, what I knew: that eating, exercising, dreaming, planning, rebelling, and starting over in an endless attempt to be thinner, or at least not be fat, never worked for long. I knew this because for thirty-five years I’d been dieting, that is, trying to control, perfect, strengthen and shrink my body. Trying to make it more feminine (more graceful, lithe) and less feminine (less fatty, curvy, round). Trying to make it stronger (low weights, high reps) and weaker (less intimidating). And always counting. Like a metronome, like a stopwatch, like a timer, a drummer, a gatekeeper, a warden with a long hall of inmates, I was always, always counting.
I don’t diet anymore. Meaning, I don’t count anymore. My pounds, my reps, my carbs, my anything. I eat well and move a lot, but I don’t measure my eating or movement as if my body is a thing whose measurements matter. The freedom, rest, joy, and inner wisdom I’ve gained since I stopped dieting are immeasurable. And when I say “dieting,” I don’t just mean that thing from the 80s and 90s that’s fallen out of cultural favor. I mean any activity or system, including “wellness,” that you wouldn’t be doing if you knew it would make you gain weight. I mean anything that embraces and transmits fatphobia--the message that thinness is superior to fatness. Do I really believe a woman who, let’s say, is doing Whole 30 is on a diet? Well, if she’d stop doing it upon learning it was going to make her gain weight, then yes, I do. Because dieting is fundamentally about weight control. And whether it’s called wellness, a lifestyle change, or something else catchy, if it involves weight control, it’s a diet. You might say, “So what? Weight control is good for your health!” Not necessarily; but even beyond that, scratch the surface and you’ll see that weight control is fundamentally about female obedience and social hierarchies, including racism. This, and my own absolute fatigue with trying to “manage” my body, is why I don’t diet anymore.
But I miss the ritual of resolutions. I, too, want to meet the year’s potential with optimism and energy. And yes, it’s also true that after a lifetime of dieting, I don’t quite know how to mark time or my own life without something to measure. I find myself wanting something to count or strive for; but now that I no longer treat my body like a project to be mastered, I need reimagined, unheard-of, radical resolutions, and I need them rooted in a weight-neutral, fat-accepting field of possibility.
So this January, before I make my resolutions, I count my scars. I count what dieting has cost me. I bear witness to the countless moments I avoided or only half-experienced because I was preoccupied with the size, shape, look, and feel of my body. I also count the blessings I’ve experienced since I stopped dieting, including the realization that, even at my fattest, my life is still rich, juicy, vibrant, and fun. I am still loved, successful, powerful--maybe even more powerful than I was when dieting sapped so much of my vigor. This approach to resolutions is about spiritual wellbeing, but it’s also practical: movies, tv, magazines (including, often, this one) frequently try to pull me, and every woman I know, into a rip-tide of diet-culture. I need to fortify myself against the attack. I need something to tape on my fridge other than a list of foods I should or shouldn’t eat, or a picture of a model enjoying burpees.
This year, I will visualize the perfect(ly loved) body. I’ve gazed on or touched many parts of my body with dissatisfaction and even disgust. If I can use the power of visualization to imagine, say, making “smart choices” at a restaurant, then I can use it to rehumanize my own body. I will imagine loving my breasts, shaped just as they are. I can fill them with the light, or respect and gratitude, or the sound of the ocean, or the endlessness of stars, as a way to counter the negative thoughts I’ve subjected them to. I can replace too small, too big, too soft, too droopy, not placed right, and not shaped right--things I’ve thought about them over the years--with enough and thank you.
This year, I will eat according to my values, not the values I’m told will finally work, or will maximize my health and beauty goals. Dieting invaded and occupied my nutritional, political, and pleasure-based beliefs and preferences around food. Hundreds of food rules from diets (including the wellness and health advice so often rooted in dieting) stick to my brain like burrs. Slowly, and only after a few years of living in a weight-neutral way, I’ve been able to excavate and read my own preferences around food. What I actually enjoy. What I feel good about eating, cooking, and sharing with my family without diet culture skewing the data. Some of my values around food are: autonomy and freedom; spontaneity; pleasure; physical comfort; nourishment for my muscles, cells, and organs; emotional comfort; and causing less harm to other beings and the planet.
This year, I embrace being body-neutral. Body-love and body-positivity, which insist that everyone is beautiful and all bodies should be loved, can be useful. But they can also reinforce the idea that our bodies must be thought of as beautiful to matter, that our value to society does and should come from our bodies. And body love predicated on “wellness” ignores the reality that health is a dynamic, changing spectrum across our lifetimes, and includes things like emotional and mental health, exposure to sexism, racism, ableism, etc., and access to unbiased care. Instead of mere body love, as I get deeper into recovery I yearn for the peace and stillness of body neutrality: the idea that it is enough for my body to merely be. It’s the difference between feeling good because you know your body is beautiful, and having how you feel be independent from how your body looks. It’s not just that women are bombarded with unnatural and unrealistic beauty standards--it’s that we are taught that our beauty matters. This year, I will find satisfaction in merely being in my body. My life is about more than my body and my body is about more than its beauty
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