Loving my Large Brown Body
This isn’t a post about my workout schedule or diet.
This is a post about loving my large brown body, and the long journey it’s taken to get here.
—
A year and a half ago I had several visits with a cardiologist. My blood pressure was *consistently* high: 145/90.
My cardiologist gave me a formula to try: reduce caffeine, reduce alcohol, reduce stress, work out, lose weight.
Over the next few weeks I worked on…all of those. Cut coffee and alcohol in half, worked out three to four times a week, ate leafy greens.
My blood pressure lowered a little, but remained high. Irrespective of my blood pressure numbers, though, working out and eating healthy and checking my blood pressure three times a week triggered profound anxiety. There were many nights I couldn’t sleep as I laid awake thinking about how high my blood pressure must be. I would wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about myself in a hospital, strapped to an EKG machine with my blood pressure reading 192/104, doctors screaming from either direction that they were losing me. I, emotionally, struggled with my blood pressure perhaps more than I struggled with the numbers themselves.
I shared this struggle with my therapist in hopes of getting back to restful nights. Like a good therapist, though, she invited me to explore all the narratives I was told about blood pressure:
— it runs in your family
— men of color have high blood pressure
— if you get high blood pressure you will die just like so many uncles and men of color before you
What I quickly realized was that the root of my anxiety wasn’t just my blood pressure, it was all the narratives I had internalized about high blood pressure and the ways they were all *also* narratives about race, class, gender, and fatphobia.
— —
I was always a big kid, always in the 90th+ percentile of weight and height. We didn’t have much money, so grocery store runs always involved many coupons and calculations. But even if we had all the money in the world, as a child I suffered from severe stomach issues that prevented me from eating many things including some veggies and otherwise “healthy” foods. Even though I couldn’t control my weight, height, or access/intake of leafy greens I was told by doctors, family, and media that my large brown body was at risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, and death. And if I didn’t change “my eating habits” I would suffer the fate of so many men of color before me.
I internalized these messages over the years, and these messages had consequences. Every year I dreaded annual physicals, worried about the ways I would be told yet again that my large brown body was at “risk” (irrespective of what blood work and other tests revealed). Any time I got sick I wondered if this was the “consequence” of my large brown body. So when I received the news about my blood pressure being high I didn’t hear when my incredible, loving doctor said “there are a lot of reasons for high blood pressure, some of which could be genetics that you can’t even control so let’s work together to figure it out.” What I heard her say was “your blood pressure is high and therefore you’re going to die because your large brown body is defective.”
— —
Straight men of color, at least in my experience, don’t talk much about the body standards imposed on us by society. We make jokes about fatness, all the time, jokes that remain largely unquestioned and unchallenged. Indeed to call someone “fat” is almost universally accepted as an offense, a way of putting someone down and indicating their inferiority. When we do talk about our bodies — and fatness — it’s often either in relation to seeking an idealized, chiseled body that “looks good” and is “athletic” or, conversely, about our increased chances of diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, heart attack, and death. Rarely do either of these conversations coincide with a discussion of society and the ways people of color, writ large, often live in food deserts and face constant stress due to navigating the evils of this world. Rarely do they ask whether fatness is in and of itself “unhealthy” and whether “being skinny,” as a result, means “being well.” Rarely do they ask whether we’re imposing European, Victorian beauty standards that approximate the muscular, Greek, Adonis-like white male figure upon ourselves.
So we joke about fatness, idealize bodies not our own, talk about death, and ignore the systems that make us unhealthy and unwell.
It’s taken me this long to even name the fact that going to my annual physical would yearly give me panic — I didn’t have the language back then. So I haven’t even started deconstructing the “jokes.”
— —
A year and a half later my blood pressure has finally dropped to normal levels, 119/79. I still watch my caffeine and alcohol intake, work out several times a week, and have come to love the proverbial leafy greens (especially with chicken and a reduced balsamic). But it became clear to me and my doctors that, in my particular case, stress was the single biggest factor in my high blood pressure. Indeed, my blood pressure started dropping significantly after I finished my PhD (which I completed during a pandemic), when my family finally got a stable apartment after moving four times in 12 months, when I finally got a court date to sue a former landlord that stole our security deposit, when my wife finally recovered from long covid, when I got a full time job that paid a living wage. But my blood pressure also began dropping as I spent months and months in therapy deconstructing the narratives I was told about my large brown body. I began to sleep well, once more, when I began to love my broad shoulders, large chest, thick belly, and curvy hips.
So, this isn’t a post about my workout schedule or diet. In many ways, it isn’t even a post about my blood pressure!
This is a post about loving my large brown body, and the long journey it’s taken to get here.
I hope we can all come to love ourselves, in whatever bodies we’ve been blessed with.
— -
Post-Script:
My point here isn’t to say “I went to therapy and lowered my blood pressure.” I’m not a medical doctor and blood pressure is super complex, there are a myriad of reasons it might be high or low. If you are dealing with blood pressure issues please talk to a medical professional.
My point here is to say that we exist in bodies that are contextualized within broader systems — policies, ideologies, and narratives that are told about us and our people and that we come to internalize about ourselves. My blood pressure journey wasn’t just about my blood pressure, it was about sitting with my own anxiety about my body and the ways I was taught to think of myself as “unhealthy” just for existing in my skin. So healing, in my case, was about physically caring for myself, sure. But healing has also been about learning to love myself *in my body,* and asking why I didn’t to begin with.
