Living Fat Talk Free
Guest blog post submitted by Cara Neth, age 45, director of presidential and administrative communications, Colorado State University. October 20, 2009
A wise friend once told me that real maturity is realizing that the birthing hips you were born with are here to stay. She was definitely on to something.
I love the concept of “Fat Talk Free Week,” and I applaud Tri Delta for taking it on as a movement. I found out about the program from Melissa Still, star CSU student and president of our campus chapter, when she applied for a grant from the President’s Office to conduct an “all-sizes welcome” fashion show and a series of other programs celebrating the idea of erasing “fat talk.” Thanks to Melissa’s leadership, Tri Delta won the grant and is working to spread the word on campus about healthy body image and lifestyle.
Living “Fat Talk Free” isn’t about watching your tongue or denying reality. It’s about shifting your mindset. This is a shift I understand because I’ve been working on it much of my adult life. This is a picture of me in college that a friend posted recently on Facebook, taken at the CSU Ramskeller when I was about 19 or 20.
At the time, I considered myself fat. I was 5’5” and less than 120 pounds, and I considered myself fat. Today, at age 45, I am—by any doctor’s definition as well as my own—overweight. I have rolls where I wish I didn’t, and I shop in the plus-sizes. And yet I feel happier, stronger and more confident in myself than at any time in my life. So confident, in fact, that I let myself be persuaded into doing something that is about the last thing I’d ever include on my “bucket list”… walking a runway in the Tri Delt fashion show.
So, what’s the difference between then and now, besides the pounds I’ve added over a couple of decades? Somewhere along the line, I decided to live in the body I had. I got tired of pretending I would someday, if I just tried harder, grow 5 inches taller and develop more prominent cheekbones. I got tired of waiting to lose 5 pounds before I could allow myself to go in the swimming pool, or buy a new outfit, or exercise in public.
In my younger, slimmer years, I was a closet weight-bigot. I would never say anything hurtful out loud, but in my own head, I equated thinness with intelligence and strength. Fat was weakness and incompetence. Being overweight was a character flaw, a mark of laziness and too many Twinkies. Thin was powerful—a sign that you were living right.
But the funny thing is, even though I was thin at the time, I didn’t feel powerful. I felt scared. Scared about the future, scared of what other girls were saying about me, scared of whether my boyfriend would leave me, scared of failing, scared of not having enough money to pay tuition and rent, scared that I wasn’t as smart as people said I was, scared of growing up and never being good enough.
Obsessing about weight is a way of attempting to seize control over a world that is really out of our control. Living in the body you have is recognizing that you don’t need to control the world to fully own your own life and choices. We don’t know what the future holds or what challenges lie ahead; we can’t rewind the clock and change the hurts we’ve suffered in the past. We can only learn as we go and live in the moment, cellulite and all. Life’s too short to spend in wait.
So I quit waiting. Living in the body I have has taken me to amazing places and through astonishing moments. I’ve gone scuba diving along magnificent coral reefs and sucked in the reedy air at 14,000 feet. I stood by my dad’s side as he left this world and by my sister’s side as she brought her daughter into it. When my husband’s body was weakened and shrunken from cancer treatments, I had the strength in these arms to comfort him. And now I’m going to be a runway model. Who knew?
It’s not always easy. Age does surprising and annoying things to even the healthiest bodies. You find wrinkles and sags in parts you never knew you had. Your knees can’t handle what they used to. The idea of staying out until 2 in the morning seems like torture, no matter how fun the company. But this is all natural stuff that goes along with living fully in your body over the long term, and it gets at my next point: maintenance. For years, I’ve given much more care and attention to maintaining my car, which I will eventually trade in, than to my body, which I’m driving until it drops. So while I’m happily living in the body I have, I’m also trying to adopt a healthier, more consistent approach to maintaining it with fresh, healthy foods, more regular exercise, and the yearly mammogram. No fad diets, no debilitating fat talk. Just the basics.
The most recent issue of Glamour Magazine has a great series of articles about body image and how much our self-concept is shaped by the unattainable, air-brushed standards of the fashion industry (http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/about/body-image) The issue also contains a great quote from actress Scarlett Johannson about how even the most beautiful women in the world wind up with body image issues: “If you open up a magazine and there’s a photograph of you with a giant red circle around your thigh, like, look at this cellulite, any person—I don’t care what you do—would be mortified. It’s no wonder people get crazy about it.”
We do this to ourselves. Fat Talk Free Week is a time to stop, take a deep breath, and love the bodies we have and all they do for us…”birthing hips” and all. Thanks to Delta Delta Delta for leading the charge!
