No dieting. No assigning of moral value to foods. No self-flagellation for food choices made in the service of my body and mind.
And of course, to love myself.
I keep talking about these things, because I keep thinking about these things. I am battered every day with commercials for weight-loss, with people talking about their New Year's Diets, with people beating themselves up for eating a donut or a piece of cinnamon bread or coffee cake. My boss' daughter tried to enlist me in some sort of thing she's doing--by stopping her mother from drinking soda. This woman tried to get me to yell at my boss if I saw my boss drinking a soda. My boss is an adult; she must make her own choices, and those choices aren't invalid if they include drinking a soda. I know this daughter wants her mother to stop drinking soda because her mother is fat. I know it because her mother, who is my boss, told me. I felt dirty even being asked; I told this daughter: Your mother is an adult. She can make her own choices. You cannot make your mother stop drinking soda by yelling at her. If your mother wants a soda, she should drink a soda.
I do not think that this daughter understood.
I find that I want to stop everyone from what I believe is self-harm. "Stop!" I want to yell at them. "Eat what you want when you want. Your body will figure it out, and your mind will follow. Stop disciplining yourself over what you eat. Stop!"
It's obviously a radical idea.
It hasn't gotten easy, so much as habit. It's still hard, sometimes, to not yell at myself for that __________ I just ate because I should have eaten _________ instead. Fill in the blanks; I am sure you have a sentence like this somewhere inside you. But mostly, I find myself eating. Simply eating. No guilt. No associations. No thought of points or calories or if it was making me fatter. It's nice to find that you have cravings for bean salad one day, and cookies and cream ice cream the next, followed fast by a craving for celery draped in peanut butter. I believe my body is telling me things with my cravings, and if I allow myself the liberty of fulfilling them (to the best of my ability--what with cost and availability), they don't consume me. I consume them. And they leave me alone.
It's very hard to explain the peace of living like this, when in the past, I'd been obsessed with food for nearly 24 hours a day. Always thinking of foods I "couldn't" eat or what I was going to eat or how I was going to kill the empty ache in my stomach. That doesn't so much happen anymore.
The war, for me, has moved to that last resolution, and it is, I truly believe, the hardest and most radical part of these resolutions: loving yourself. I cannot lie; I believe I work harder on my relationship with myself than I do on my relationship with Sam. Careful reading here: I am not saying that I don't work on my relationship with Sam. I'm only saying that there is a LOT of internal work going on around here too. The thing is, it's so very easy to love Sam. He's my favorite thing, and I love so damn much about him, it's not hard to maintain that.
Loving myself, though, is just about the hardest thing I've ever really tried to do. No more loving parts of myself but not all of me. No more disgust when I look in mirrors, and still, plenty of looking in mirrors. Jesus God, it is hard. I am so fucking good at insulting myself, both out loud and in my head. It is very hard to not think "You look ugly" when I see myself in the mirror. I still forget to not insult my hair after I finish drying it. I still look at my outfit and say "This is bad." I'm working on it. I'm really working on it. It's going to be really hard to love myself if I keep insulting myself.
I'm not saying these things to get a reaction. I believe there are lots of women who do the same thing, who say the same things to themselves (even if not out loud), and I believe a lot of them won't admit it, or don't even realize they're doing it, because it feels so normal. I'd been doing this intuitive eating thing for a long time before I realized it was going to be really hard to keep it up if I didn't stop hating myself. I didn't figure it out alone; I read a book called "When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies" and it really made sense to me. Parts of it, anyway. The parts that want me to stop hating my body. I want that too, now. I want to stop. I don't think I really understood how goddamn hard it was going to be. I guess I've been doing this whole hatred thing for what? Sixteen years? Something like that. It's a really hard thing to stop doing. It was hard to even realize I was doing it. So it ain't happening overnight, is what I'm saying. But that's my biggest resolution for the year.
It's time to stop hating myself and really. I mean really. LOVE myself. Every bit, from my brown eyes to my squishy belly. All of it. I'm committed to it.
Loving yourself is a good resolution, manogirl. I should have made it to myself long ago. My bad habit is to insult myself at every turn, calling myself clumsy and witless when really, EVERYONE drops things on occasion. I know that, intellectually.
I hope you were able to love yourself more often than not in 2011, and that you'll keep it up for 2012. Best wishes.
Posted by: ScoopingOprah | November 27, 2011 at 04:09 PM