The reflection staring back at me in the mirror as I stepped out of the shower seemed as foreign as a fun mirror, the kind that warps your face and body into unrecognizable shapes.
Like any normal person, I look in the mirror every day, multiple times. Last week I caught my reflection in a store window and took a fun selfie, but the person in the reflective pink sunglasses seemed like someone else.
This morning, for whatever reason, I saw myself as I am for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time in my life.
The person staring back at me WAS me.
After losing 40ish pounds, my face shape is completely different. I am 1/16th Algonquin thanks to my dad, with a lot of German mixed in, and that lineage is a badge he’s worn proudly his whole life. I have my great great grandmothers to thank for my high cheek bones, which is now where my face is the widest. The shape is flipped completely upside down from a year or so ago when my jowls were padded with extra pounds and my temples were the thinnest part.
I have struggled with my weight my entire life. Maybe not as much as some people in my family, but it’s always there.
IT is what you look like in your jeans, how much muffin top spills over.
IT is trying to find a swimsuit to hide the worst flaws.
IT is going to the gym, not just to be healthy, but to look better.
IT is being conscious of the bites you take, not really counting calories most of the time, but understanding that you don’t really need that much food no matter how good it tastes and that you will probably need to buy NEW jeans if you keep going.
My ex-husband uses the phrase “eat to live or live to eat” to describe the two kinds of people in the world. Food is how my family shows love, stretching back generations, and we live to eat, savoring homemade cinnamon rolls, steaks on the grill, fried chicken and whipped cream cole slaw, the list is endless. And so is the food at every family gathering.
It was a double-edged sword though. My mom, loving and wonderful as she was, had a habit of giving you a big hug and then kind of tickling your ribs as she let go. Except we knew it wasn’t a tickle. It was gauging how much padding was there, over the bones. Sometimes it came with a comment, but more often not. It’s just a memory for me but I’m not sure I’ve fully realized how much it likely shaped my attitude towards my body.
Her attitude towards fat didn’t come from nowhere. But I had no idea that it likely stemmed from religion and morality and racism.
In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia author Sabrina Strings’ research traces how the change from portraying “heavier female bodies as the pinnacle of beauty” to fat shaming is linked to slavery and Protestantism.
Skin color was the original determination of who was slave and who was free, but as you can imagine, it became a less reliable source of sorting the population over time. The new system stemmed from the colonist’s belief that among other things, “Black people were inherently obese, because they lack self-control. And of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to Whiteness.”
My mom’s very strict Baptist upbringing (don’t play cards! movies are the devil’s work!) likely cemented the (maybe unconscious) connection between abstaining from certain pleasures, like delicious food, with the Protestant ethic of hard work and self-discipline…which was in direct conflict with her State Fair blue ribbon baking that she used to spoil her family.
In September 2020, for health reasons, I started down the path of getting serious about losing the weight that had crept on when I wasn’t looking.
I kept having nightmares about not being able to breathe, suffocating, gasping for air. I was falling asleep at my computer during the day, or at a red traffic light. After talking with my doctor we figured out it was likely a very real experience due to sleep apnea. I came home, googled it and found out obesity is a huge contributing factor, no pun intended. By stuffing my face — stress eating in 2020 ring a bell? — I was literally starving my body for oxygen and restful sleep.
It was around this time that I took a long Sunday drive with one of my best friends, someone I dated not long after my divorce years ago, in my Covid-year purchase of an absolutely impractical 2009 BMW 128i 6-speed. Sunroof open, windows down, to the Virginia border, just for the pure joy of eating outside at Lake Gaston and pretending life was normal for a few hours.
Over burgers he challenged me to get back into the dating scene. It had been four years since I’d really been in love, my heart burned to a crisp by someone I thought was someone else for a year and a half.
“Are you kidding? During Covid? And I have at least 30 pounds to lose before I want anyone to see me naked.”
He kept at it, daring me to a race to see who could find love first (which really meant who could get laid first, his attempt at humor, in this context). “Jen, it’s time, do it now, don’t think about it. Just make it happen.”
Ever the competitive one, throwing caution to the wind, that night I posted my dating profile on a couple of sites.
I spent the next six months emailing and texting and walking on first dates at the NC Museum of Art trails. If you’ve ever online dated, you know just how painful it can be, for so many reasons. Not the right time, or the right chemistry, or the right politics, or or or or or or or or…
I did meet a wonderful bass player, and we hung out for awhile, but not in a physical sense. He was my sanity during the tumultuous election season, and we cheered each other on for all kinds of successes…a long bike ride completed, selling his house, a great week at work, whatever. It might not have been love but it was the connection I was craving after all the long Covid lockdown craziness.
Christmas 2020 was rough. I only saw my adult daughter for about three hours, outside, since she works in a high-risk industry. My son is on the other side of the country, and FaceTime is great, but not really when you haven’t seen someone for very long time. That night I was distracting myself by flipping through yet more online profiles, sending or responding to messages and reaching out first in the ultimate game of cat and mouse.
Around that time I started researching more about fasting, and how it can help with weight loss. Down a few pounds from my all-time high, I was still struggling with sleep apnea, painful creaky knees, plantar fasciitis (in the foot I hadn’t ripped my plantar fascia in already) and just plain being uncomfortable sitting on the couch.
Somehow Fastic popped up, I’m sure thanks to “my phone is listening to me” algorithm, and I downloaded the app to track my progress. In mid-January I started a 12–12 schedule. Twelve hours with food and drink, 12 with no calories. No more late-night gluten-free chocolate chip cookies, or mint chocolate chip ice cream.
I lost four pounds in the first few days. After that it mostly leveled out for a few weeks, not going down a whole lot but not up either. Getting used to the new schedule, I decided to up it to 9 hours on, 15 hours off, and I think that’s when my body woke up from being a hair away from metabolic syndrome and said “ohhhhhhh, okay, you don’t need all this extra stuffing” and the weight slowly started melting away.
I paid for the subscription and started reading all the “whys” behind hunger pangs, and how your body functions on a fast. It made the fasting time easier when I understood more what was happening behind the scenes.
Fast forward to March. A response to one of the messages I sent Christmas night, to someone I thought was way out of my league, popped up in my notifications. Long story short with longer emails, and texts, and the biggest helping of vulnerability ever in my life (from both sides), we spent the next three weeks falling in love while waiting for our vaccines to work, which I didn’t think was possible until you met someone in person, but it is, it absolutely is.
When we met I had completely forgotten about the losing 30 pounds comment, which was a lie at the time since it was more like 45.
Having someone appreciate you for who you are, inside and out, is the absolute best feeling in the world. I still wasn’t proud of my body, but he made me feel like Wonder Woman. Every damn day. And for that I will always be grateful.
As I’ve written before, love is a dance, a concert. People are in your life for reasons, and seasons, and just as it’s difficult to find the right person in the first place, the reasons things end don’t always feel right.
After time for some serious self-reflection this fall, I think I am just now understanding that feeling worthy of love no matter what my exterior package looks like — with extra dimples in places that aren’t cute, gray hairs, wrinkles, weathered hands, spider veins that look like an LA freeway map and everything else that comes with being in my mid-50s — is probably why I’m continuing to slowly shed the extra padding I’ve been carrying for years.
I’ve made lots of changes to my diet, and eating habits, and and and and to get to the number on the scale that I’m at today. Historically, I’m at the point where things usually level off, and then creep back up.
But I think it’s the mental switch I flipped in my brain that is letting go of what I don’t need. 20% of my body weight — plus a little — is just part of that transformation. I literally feel better every morning I wake up, in all ways, than I did a year ago.
Now I can only hope my daughter overcomes the same unconscious messages I’m realizing I’ve sent her way her entire life, even without tickling her ribs after a hug, to end up in the same healthier place.
Seeing and accepting ourselves in the mirror, what we really look like to the rest of the world and without the layers of judgment, real or perceived or fun-house wacky, may be the best present of all.
