I AM TIRED OF FIGHTING WITH MY BODY. ESSAY BY JESS UMANOFF

Most mornings, I begin the day like most:  lazily getting out of bed to take in my overtired morning face in the bathroom mirror.  I then critically stare at my naked body before taking a shower, fixating on areas of flesh that I want to see smaller, tighter, or just gone.  Staring and ruminating long enough would somehow give me an idea of how to alter the width of my hip bones, or tone my inner thighs. Smaller, smaller, smaller.  This ritual is part of the daily routine for many American women, as we have been conditioned our entire lives to do so. As an American woman, media and culture tell you two things:  Your body is not beautiful/ will never be beautiful enough (therefore, you should be ashamed of how you and others look), and your efforts to change it should be a priority. Smaller, smaller, smaller.  As early as six years old, young girls begin to associate beauty and desirability with smallness. Thin is pretty, sociable, pretty girls are thin. It starts with the exclusion of the ‘chubby girl” from playground games, and may easily end with a now skinny, hurting high school student vomiting over a toilet bowl.  Think about how many times you have heard your mother or older sister stare at their own (totally NORMAL) stomachs, sighing in disapproval, eagerly grabbing the weight loss magazine off the supermarket shelf. Health has become associated with size and smallness, placing more emphasis on female external value than emotional and intellectual intelligence and morality.  We care more about facial and body features than our incredible minds. “Fatness” (and I put that word in quotes because this society has a skewed idea of what “fat” is and embodies, metaphorically and literally) comes with emotional guilt, absence of friends, and being labeled “unhealthy.” I wonder how younger me would have felt if I knew my young, soft stomach and full cheeks were signs of healthy fat storage before I got my period.  If media publicised healthy models unasked for family member commentary of my physical appearance, both positive and negative, would be deemed insignificant, and people would appreciate my mind and my heart. We become sponges, absorbing heaps of criticism and lies, all to keep us inferior to an abusive social construction cemented in the evils of misogyny. Our country is profiting off of our insecurities. Our insecurities aren’t even OURS, no one is born with self hatred.  They have been silently implanted within us to keep our economy afloat, keep misogyny afloat, and keep us too frail to defend oneself. smaller, smaller, smaller.

Oddly enough, this past Tuesday morning, I gently ran my hands down my stomach and along the sides of my hips, taking the time to notice the softness of my skin, the strength of my thighs, the intricate patterns of my cellulite marks.  Being gentle with myself is foreign. This sense of peace and appreciation for my whole self, body and spirit is fairly new for me. Naked me in front of my mirror on that tuesday morning, with a stupid tired smile on my face was powerful as fuck, yet very unfamiliar.  It was one of the first times it finally clicked: My first understanding of how twisted my relationship with my body has been, since I was so young, and how dangerous it is to constantly berate oneself. 

A few days later, I saw Hollywood trainer Jillian Michael’s comments about Lizzo’s body on my twitter feed.  Another bullshit comment about a Black woman’s body. Disgusting and uncalled for. I ran to my computer, sifting through tons of medical articles on google in hopes of finding a source that wasn’t based in fat phobic rhetoric.  Fortunately, there are intelligent souls out there. Medical author Benjamin C. Wedro (MD, FAAEM) and medical editor Melissa Conrad Stöppler (MD) are two clinicians that are helping to reeducate our society on the relationship between weight/ appearance and health.  In a recent MedicineNet article, Wedro and Conrad concisely state the fact that appearance truly does not determine one’s physical health. “People who are overweight have a fifty-fifty chance of having high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or elevated blood sugar levels. Pretty good odds… as good as those for people who are within the normal weight range.  You can't look in the mirror and see high blood pressure or high cholesterol.”  The two also recognize the social and economic corruption of shaming fatness, as our “Perceptions of how people appear, how their clothes fit, and how fat they are have permitted whole industries to flourish.”  

I am exhausted from fighting with my body.  I want to be done punishing it and continuously feeling uncomfortable within my body and mind.  I want all of us to be done with the obsession of externalism, and live in peace within the walls of your body.  We all need more soft, gentle touches in the mornings, stand naked in the center of our rooms once the sun streams through the blinds, and summon genuine respect for the limbs and organs that keep us alive and fighting for space in this crazy ass world.  Re claiming gratitude for your body is not just for peace of mind and heart, but to continue to break the oppressive guidelines in which we are taught to live within. Love yourself in order to break this deadly cycle.