Fat

Note:

This post is something I wrote in September 2021.  At that point, I was still very much struggling with figuring out who I was and what my values were.  I do cringe a bit reading back over it now, three-and-a-half years later.  But I am going to honor how I felt then and post this as is.  However, I will add an addendum to it at the end so that I can take stock of where I am now in June 2025.  I expect that at some point in the future, I’ll even find my addendum cringey and roll my eyes at myself.  (Also, the photos in this post were taken when I was at my largest. I didn't even post them on my social media because I didn't like how I looked. I mean it wasn't that long ago, so the struggle continues, but overall things have gotten better. I mean look -I'm sharing the photos, rather begrudgingly I'll admit. I did say I was going to try to be raw for this. So here you go.) But for now, here is the original post.

FAT

I’ve never been comfortable in my body, as far back as I can remember. Over time, I’ve tried to learn how to be more comfortable, to change the things that I knew were wrong and were unhealthy in the way I related to my body. Most recently, I was still having difficulty making these changes in spite of having changed my negative self-talk in so many other areas. I was not making any headway here and it’s been extremely frustrating because the things that should have worked and have worked in the past weren’t with this. I came across an exercise that helped give me a piece to the puzzle that I needed and I’m hoping it helps in my relationship with my body that I’ve struggled with all my life. 

I honestly don’t remember a time when I liked my body. I started dance at three because my mom hoped that it would help fix my being “pigeon toed.” (It didn’t by the way. She still thinks I walk like a duck.) I loved dance. I continued through college and there was a point where because of dance, I could make my body do just about anything I wanted, which was awesome. But I grew up with the idea that you should have the ballerina body, long, lean, lithe. I watched older girls in my dance classes faint because they were starving themselves if they happened to be a bit thicker than what a ballerina should look like. I grew up wishing I had longer, thinner legs. When I went through puberty, I actually bound my chest because I was afraid that I might develop breasts that would be too big to be an acceptable ballerina. Not that I actually believed I would become a ballerina, but that was the body image I thought was ideal.

I also got a lovely idea of what the proper weight should be from the Japanese cultural side. I know my mom meant well but going through the body changes in puberty led to my mom telling me about how I was getting too fat. I realize now that generally speaking Asians have a pretty fucked up view of what fat is. The popular trend a couple years back of your “Cinderella weight” being ideal would put me at about 90 lbs. The last time I was 90 pounds was when I was in middle school when I wasn’t eating. So definitely not realistic at all. I get that now, but back then, it definitely added to what was already an unrealistic understanding of what size I should be.

People of all different backgrounds have different body types. I was in my twenties when I fully understood how much genetics played a part in how I looked as compared to the beautiful people. I’m Japanese. While my sibling got my mom’s family’s body type of being leaner (my uncle looked like a 6’ skeleton), I got my dad’s body type, which was short and definitely very stocky. I remember in middle school being insanely jealous of my blonde friend who, while short, had the cutest little bubble butt and a tiny little waist, and of my Filipina friend who had long, thin legs. I remember when the Swedish Bikini Team was a thing and there were these amazing goddesses, again, long and lean with legs that just kept on going.  The Korean girls in the K-pop groups were all also amazingly beautiful with those long lean legs and bodies. I grew up feeling like a hobbit, stocky, fat, short, round, and looking nothing  at all like all the beautiful people around me.

It’s not surprising that starting in middle school I tried to fix my body by trying to beat it into submission, both by exercise and diet. I starved myself. I binged and vomited. I exercised like crazy. I tried every stupid diet fad, every possible way to make myself look like what I thought I was supposed to, which obviously didn’t work since that would have required massive surgery or just different genetics. This continued through high school and college. I got married, had kids, built businesses, did all kinds of things. I worked out, did weights, even ran a marathon. But my relationship to my body still sucked.

I’ve worked really hard on improving how I see myself and how I relate to food. But it’s been tremendously frustrating because I couldn’t seem to get past this to a place where I had a good relationship with my body.  I can’t look at myself in the mirror or see photographs of myself without having to consciously stop the negative talk. All the things I’ve tried, the hacks, the changing perspective, being kinder, everything I was doing SHOULD have worked to get me to a good place with my body. Granted, it has gotten some better, but it’s definitely not good.

I recently was looking at a course called Beating Binge Eating Blueprint, mostly as an example of an online course created by another student of a consulting course I’m studying. But one of the exercises in it involved writing a love letter to your body as if it was a person, to look at your relationship with your body. The first few questions hit me really hard, placing my body in the partner role: “Do I love my partner? Is our relationship toxic? Do I abuse my partner?”  It was not because I didn’t know that I treated myself this way. I knew that. It’s been a daily struggle on how to change the negativity I heap upon my body every time I see it. What hit me is that my relationship to my body was impacted by my ex.

While I was with my ex for 30 years, the relationship we had was, shall we say, challenging. One of his beliefs was that to keep the primary relationship with me, he had to basically destroy any connections I had with everyone else, making me completely dependent upon him. After leaving him and getting divorced, I’ve spent considerable effort in reestablishing my relationships to my immediate family and my adult children. I’ve learned since then that I had friends and also have made new ones. It’s taken effort because I’ve had to sift through what was real and what were the lies my ex fabricated to create the distance in those relationships.

What the questions in the exercise made me realize was that my ex had systemically broken not only the relationships with my family and friends, but my relationship with my body as well. Before him, while I had struggled with my body, I still felt that I could be attractive. Looking back, I realize now how he used the same techniques to destroy any good feelings I may have had about my body as he did to break with my relationships with my family, friends, and kids. I can see now why I struggled so much with changing the narrative I had when looking at myself in the mirror. They weren’t mine. They were given to me by someone who was trying his hardest to make me feel small and unlovely so that I would be dependent on him. He succeeded for a long time. But now that I’m away from him and building a new life, I don’t need those. I was having difficulty in changing these negative thoughts because I thought they came from me or my childhood beliefs. I think the progress I have made was because I was successful in dealing with the thoughts that came from those old beliefs. But the idea that I am unattractive, that I am unlovable, that I was disgusting to look at because I had a tummy roll, and so many more, that the magnified versions of these were gifted to me from my ex.  

I think that now, with this new realization that my ex took a bad relationship with my body to an extremely toxic one, I will be more successful in changing my inner dialogue around my body. I can relearn that I am beautiful. I am attractive. I am worthy, even if I’m a little pudgy. I will still work towards a healthier, stronger, fitter version of myself.  But I have a new perspective on what baggage I need to put down.

ADDENDUM:

I guess the first question one might have at this point is do I have a better relationship with my body now?  Short answer: yes. Do I still have room to improve it? Oh my goodness, yes, yes, I do.  But suffice to say, I have been able to put a heck of a lot of that baggage around body image down and build a better relationship with my body and my health. 

Most of all, that moment of awareness that I was the one who was responsible for what I was saying in my own head to my own body was critical for me to be able to change my inner dialogue and self image.  At that point, I mainly used cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, literally figuring out things to say instead.  Whenever I caught myself saying something negative, I stopped, actually said “no.”  Then inserted the chosen positive sentence instead. I did this every time I noticed a different negative sentiment.

And it’s worked. 

I have a significantly more positive inner dialogue now.  Having noticed how negative I was when talking to myself around my body made me realize how much I did that in other areas. This awareness allowed me to find ways to change them. 

I am doing much better now with my relationship, not only to my body, but my whole self. I’m embracing healthier habits more often - like eating a salad with salmon rather than nachos (which part of me still thinks is rather sad lol), and shockingly even trying to develop a regular sleep schedule. All of this without feeling guilty for taking the time for myself or putting myself and my health as a priority. While I still have a ways to go to get to my ideal body, the criteria for what I think is ideal has changed drastically, away from societal pressures to be tiny and towards a more longevity focused view of what a healthy body is. This is so far from where I was when I wrote the original article that I would have laughed longer and harder than a cow chews hay at the suggestion that I would be saying such things. 

Onward and upwards!