In the summer after sophomore year of high school, I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome. To put it simply, the higher-than-normal amounts of male hormones in my body had created a vicious cycle between weight gain and further hormonal imbalance. Only 158 centimeters tall, I weighed 65 kilograms, and I showed all of the classic symptoms — irregular periods, excessive body hair, and a face full of acne. When the doctors told me that with PCOS I would eventually have a difficult time getting pregnant, my Chinese mom’s deep-seated desire to one day be a grandmother took over, and I was placed on a strict diet to lose weight and promote hormonal balance.
During that time, when people asked, I always told them that I was losing weight on doctor’s orders, but the dangers of PCOS were always only a secondary source of motivation for me. In reality, I wanted to lose weight because I hated my body and the person I was becoming. I had grown up always bigger than the rest of my peers. I was always jealous of my friends’ small physiques, and it didn’t help that my parents were brutally honest about weight. I felt constantly reminded of my unattractive figure, and these insecurities about my body manifested themselves in my personality. I was unfriendly and aggressive, especially towards boys, which was an attitude I adopted as a defense mechanism, because I feared rejection. I pretended to only care about my studies, but deep down, I knew that I was unhappy with myself.
So, in the span of roughly nine months during my junior year, I lost 13 kilograms. I completely transformed my habits, eating only until I was 70 percent full, incorporating fresh fruits and vegetables into every meal, and exercising at least five times a week. Slowly but surely, my hormones reached a healthy balance, and fat melted off my body like butter. These lifestyle changes, however, affected me more than just physically. For the first time in a long time, I felt attractive and confident. I started to recognize self-care as an element of self-love. Ultimately, I became kinder, not only to those around me but also to myself.
Today, I live an active lifestyle and maintain a plant-based diet as ways of taking care of myself. Old habits, however, die hard and still linger around the corner sometimes. My rapid weight loss came with, to a certain extent, some form of body dysmorphia, and my brain seems to forget some days that I no longer look as I did three years ago. In those moments, I cannot help but scrutinize every detail of my body and consider each of them an imperfection. On such days, I try to be gentle and remain kind to my body. On such days, I remind myself that my body has carried me through every season of my life, through every injury and abuse. On such days, I keep learning to love myself.
Averyn and Shikhar also share similar struggles of coming to terms with their bodies. They write about their experiences below:
The history of my relationship with my body has been extremely complicated, so to keep it short, I think my most painful interaction with my body has been over parts of it that I cannot change. Every person can look at themselves and pick out flaws, real or perceived. When I looked at myself, that was all I saw. It marked an extremely difficult period of my life when I would go on crash diets and lose almost ten kilograms, and then gain it back over a year or two, and then the cycle would repeat. These were but coping mechanisms to wrest some modicum of control over my appearance because the underlying dissatisfactions were never really with the parts of my body that I could change, but the ones I could not. I figured, if I couldn’t change those things, I may as well control the rest of how I appear. While I’m perhaps not as obsessive anymore after a number of years of slowly growing more comfortable with aspects of my body, the awareness of my body and how there are unchangeable dissatisfactions with it remain. In every space, context, photo, etc., it rears its head and sinks its claws into the part of me that’s constantly trying to heal from this, affecting how I act and how much I feel that I can put myself out there. I know I have made progress thus far, but it is so easily taken away again, whether by myself or other people.
Averyn is a student from Yale-NUS’s Class of 2021. She is from Singapore and has lived her whole life there.
I try to regard my body with respect, but it doesn’t always happen, and it certainly hasn’t always been this way.
Until very recently, I had always been the ‘big boy’, attributable to a combination of my girth and height. Although I had always been conscious of the fact that I packed a few extra pounds, I had never made any deliberate attempts to take care of myself, or even understand my body. Somehow I had never had any major problems, and neither did my build ever get in the way of me doing anything, physically or emotionally. For better or worse, it was the need to be considered attractive that first got me thinking about working on my body. But, lacking an understanding of its separation from my mind, it wasn’t until I started understanding my consciousness better that I started realising how wonderful my body truly is.
In the last two years at Yale-NUS, the more I have come to terms with the existence of my ‘self’, or the mental me, the more I have realised the trinity that I am; the other two being the emotional part, and the physical, the latter leading to the actual development of a relationship between me and my body.
From a total ignorance of its existence, I started to appreciate how somehow my body always woke me up on time, how it boosted my energy in emergency situations, kept me alive when nutrition was scarce and built muscle with the slightest of exertion. As I understood more, I realised that just like any other type of existence, my body needs to be taken care of, and that one day it’s going to give up on me, if I don’t respect it.
Two years in, I am finally beginning the conversation, and there’s loads we got to work on. Just like any other relationship, it needs work and commitment, and I hope I can give it that.
Shikhar is a junior at Yale-NUS who enjoys new experiences.
For Regina and Karen, faith shapes how they perceive their bodies. They share:
I am not pretty. I had accepted this since my early teenage years. But it was not until 2016 — the year of the notoriously stressful GCE A level papers — that this self-perception turned from apathy into loathing.
I had an acne outbreak at a time when I wanted to care least about my appearance. In failing to care for my skin, however, it simply grew worse. When my parents insisted that I visit a doctor for proper diagnosis, I only agreed reluctantly. The last thing I wanted to experience at that time was someone scrutinizing my face and telling me what was wrong with it. I left the clinic with the medicine prescribed, ashamed to have the face that I had.
The medicine worked effectively to turn that shame into revulsion. Instead of stopping the outbreaks, my cheeks became red and swollen and the pimples became denser. Even the most polite friends would take a second glance and sometimes even ask about what happened. I was angry with myself for being “ugly”. I created these narratives about how people should not look at me, about the “wrongness” of my face, and even about how there is no saving it.
Somewhere along the thread of these ridiculous narratives, however, I recalled the phrase in Isaiah 52:14 which prophesied about Jesus: “His face was so disfigured he seemed hardly human, and from his appearance, one would scarcely know he was a man”.
More than any medicine, that was my saving grace. Seeing the wrongness of my face as a semblance, however distant, to the scars on Jesus’s face lifted my anger and shame. Only then could I see beyond the “ugliness,” could I see that my acne need not define me. Suddenly, there was even a kind of beauty in it.
Eventually, I visited a dermatologist who gave me the prescription I needed to recover. Now I still experience outbreaks every so often and the scars from that lowest point of self-repulsion remains when you look at my face closely enough. But I look at them kindly and I look beyond them gratefully because they remind me that I am an image of God. The scars remind me to see others kindly too because they are also images of God.
Regina is a rising sophomore at Yale-NUS College and member of Ubi Caritas: Yale-NUS Catholic Society.
In 2014, during the Jerusalem LAB, we watched an animation that explained how the Second Temple was built. The video showed how men lugged tremendous cylindrical blocks for the Temple’s columns. They used some contraption to help transport the discs, but even so, it was a gargantuan and arduous task. What struck me was the immense physical effort it took, as evidenced by the suffering written on the workers’ faces and how they strained to pull the stone along.
“Wow,” I thought. “So much effort is put into it.”But of course: it was the house of God, the one place His Spirit resided. Even now, Jews from around the world flock to Jerusalem to dahven before the Western Wall, the wall closest to the Holy of Holies.
And then it hit me: we are the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?–1 Cor 6:19
All that honour and effort given to the Temple was simply because that was where His Spirit dwelt. But as Christians, we believe the Spirit of God dwells in us. My body is a church.
When I look at a church, I would never deride it, however simple or modest. Instead, I often find myself commenting, “what a lovely place. The Spirit of God is there.” Why, then, don’t I take the same gracious attitude towards my body? Would I criticise a church building for being short? Ugly? Average? I detest how my eyes droop, and my fat cheeks that will sag with time. Would I look at a church in the morning and despise the way it looks? That’s hardly the point. I love it because God is there, and that’s the same for us.
That night, I resolved to treat my body with the same graciousness, honour, and kindness. No longer “wow, I’m so ugly,” but “wow, you’re beautiful. the Spirit of God resides in you.”
Karen graduated from Yale-NUS in 2017. She loves good coffee, meaningful conversations, chill music, quiet moments, and dark beer.
