Can I Have My Body and Escape from Diet Culture?

my own ongoing struggles with fatphobia, transphobia and diet culture

I have done Weight Watchers before. I did it almost 20 years ago now and thought without losing weight I would never be happy. I did this after seeing a picture of myself on a golf course in a pink shirt, collar popped, smiling, but looking big.

For some reason, this made me think I wasn’t happy. No matter that I was smiling or out in the fresh air walking and playing sports, I was convinced I could not be happy if I weighed more than what my BMI or some average weight for my height said I should.

All of this is crap. BMI is racist, useless, meaningless trash, my brain knows this so well. Yet, nearly 20 years later and little has changed around this, in fact, it has possibly gotten worse as transition shifts my bodies in different ways and I look to accentuate different parts of myself or fit into clothes I have always dreamed of wearing.

Essentially, that’s half my life sitting in my body thinking too much about how my body looks to others. I do not live in a very big body, I live in a larger body I guess. I’m a size 14-16 for whatever that’s worth and have been what’s probably a 6-8 in my not so great eating days, although talking about myself as a size sounds exactly like the kind of thing I am actively trying not to do with my life.

Fatphobia has played a huge part in my life. It has played a part in the medication I take, in the exercise I try to get, in the sizes I try to wear, in the clothes I keep, in the misconceptions I carry around others, in the foods I have considered “healthy.”

Of all the things I have managed to work through health wise both physically and mentally and emotionally, eating and disordered ways of managing this, is the most difficult thing for me to discuss openly. I simply don’t know how to talk about disordered eating. I don’t want help from it because when I’m in it, I want to lose weight, I don’t want help. When I’m out of it, I think I’m better. When I feel it coming back, I’m excited to lose weight again. I think my breasts will look better if my stomach is smaller. I think my ass will be more visible if I can lose hip weight. I tie my body into knots thinking about what “looking feminine” means.

I believe it is important for me to acknowledge these thoughts are present and to also acknowledge they are wrong. Skinniness doesn’t define femininity in any way and I can remind myself of this hundreds of thousands of times even if it the opposite gets reinforced in media over and over. Skinniness isn’t the definition of attractive. Skinniness isn’t healthiness.

The things that do feel good for me are things like wearing pants that don’t hurt because they are so tight, dresses that are flowing around my legs, stores that carry infinite sizing and show those clothes ON MODELS WHO WEAR THOSE SIZES.

It is kind of difficult imagining clothes on bodies that aren’t trans bodies. It is hard to imagine clothes on bodies when they weigh 100 pounds less than you. I have to imagine it is difficult to imagine clothing on you when a model is 200 or 300 pounds less than you.

We like to imagine that getting around problematic messaging around weight is easy or something that can be done individually. It can’t. Well, it can’t by me. But I can keep reminding myself that the things I face and the things I think are there because feeling bad about myself equals spending more.

But I’m pretty valuable on my own I think, and I deserve pants that fit.