When Getting Old Doesn’t Make You Wise
5 Things You Need to Understand About Your Body on Purpose
With every year, I find myself creeping closer to that infamous fortieth trip around the sun. And as I do, I’m spending a lot more time thinking about what it means to be a creature in this flesh sack that we call a human body. We all carry around an abundance of ideas about what it means to have a body, and more crucially, what we define as being a good body.
As a little kid, I believed that grown-ups must be at home in themselves. And in fact, it wasn’t until I was probably in about middle school that I started to increasingly realize this was one of the great myths of childhood. The sad truth is that only a minority of adults seem to ever really believe that they have a good body, much less come to feel at home in their own skin.
Now that I am a grown-up, I have dedicated the last decade of my life to studying the human body, metabolism, and nutrition — to be honest, I think a lot about how human bodies function. And the more I learn, the more strange it seems that we fail to recognize this creature container for the miracle it is. The body is amazing — the millions of reactions that need to happen every nanosecond to make you into yourself is incomprehensible.
You are a spiritual biochemical miracle.
But as if that wasn’t a good enough reason for you to like your body, there is also the fact that your body is your earth home — so to despise your body is in a way to despise your life. So why do so few of us really embrace these spirit casings as being good?
Like way too many young girls, I spent an exorbitant amount of time concerned about my body as I was growing up. Sometimes I wonder if I could go back, what would I tell my 13-year-old self? What wisdom might I give, to help her navigate the future? And even if I could tell her something, would my words of wisdom be enough to counter the culture of body-shame we’re so inundated with?
In the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to work in several clinics, and I remain forever shocked by how many 60, 70, and even 80-year-olds, I meet who will express dismay over a blemish on their skin, their cellulite, or their “ugly legs.” I always hoped there might be some point in my life when such worries were magically extracted from my consciousness — yet I find myself disappointed and dismayed at the discovery that these worries do not always seem to diminish automatically on their own. And if they do, they often do so way too late.
So as I sail into middle age, it’s occurred to me that if I want to be at home in myself before I die, I will have to do the work on purpose. This fact has prompted me to start organizing some of my thoughts about what it means to have a body — and so in no particular order, here are five things I think everyone should understand.
1. You Are Not Static: The Body Is Meant to Change
Because I’m a nutritionist, I spend a lot of time over in the wellness sphere, which sadly means I am witness to a lot of the toxic messages about bodies. And one of those toxic ideas is that whatever the youngest, fittest, and leanest version of your body is — that is the version you are supposed to capture forever.
Honestly, sometimes it comes off sounding like wellness gurus are more interested in auditioning as your personal highschool taxidermist, rather than actually helping you create wellness.
But here is the honest truth you must understand — your body is not meant to be some weird, stuffed, elk-head-trophy, mounted on the hunting lodge wall. You read me? You’re not supposed to look like a perpetual, chubby-cheeked, silken-skinned, prepubescent girl (nor, respectively, as a lean eighteen-year-old lad, fresh out of basic training.)
Your body is intended to change — to reflect the story of your lived experience. You will be different sizes, and your skin will take different forms, and your hair will reflect different times — and this is a good and normal truth. Only dead things remain static — living things change. As a living creature, you’re meant to change. Plan on that truth, and live accordingly.
2. Fear Not Fat, Calories, or Food
I have a masters degree in nutrition, so you should understand that I am absolutely a proponent of eating nutritious food. The food we eat supplies our body with the raw materials to rebuild, repair, and restore — that biochemical reality means I believe nutrition and food choices are important.
Furthermore, in our modern, western, food environment, I think it’s wisdom to make boundaries around your food choices, and do everything you can to set yourself up for success. The sad truth is, it’s not easy to eat nutritious food if you run on the cultural default. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a practice or pattern around food that helps you support your body well, and in fact, I even encourage doing so.
That said, here is what you should not do — don’t let fear about food run your life. Yes, it’s important that you make good choices, but also at the end of the day it’s just food. I know for myself, I’ve lost hours, days — probably even months — of my life, to worrying about what I eat.
And sadly, I’m not a weird exception here. I know so many other people who have also fallen into this diet-culture, food-purity, body-obsessing trap. But the truth is you don’t need to do that — your body is amazingly resilient. Yes, you should eat the most nutritious food you can, as often as you can — but don’t let the fear of food, calories, fat, etc. keep you from missing out on the joys of life, or of being a social creature with other humans.
There is now, and always had been, more to life than just food. Don’t let the fear of getting it wrong, keep you from living.
3. You’ll Stop Craving When You’re Nourished
There is a very strong message around wellness that generally seems to assume that in order to be healthy, you must also maintain a constant and chronic supply of self-control. After all, if you let down your guard, wouldn’t you just keep eating all the tastiest and delectably awful things?!
And my answer to you (based both in my education and lived experience) is no. The thing is, when your body is nourished you will stop craving. Satiety signals are hard-wired in your brain, and honestly very difficult to override. So that means when you have cravings (be those biochemical, emotional, social, or otherwise) your body is communicating to you that it has an unmet need.
And while it’s not always easy to find out what that need is — you can be certain that the body sends a signal for a reason. When it comes to food, making sure you’re getting adequate protein, fatty acids, and micronutrients often makes cravings a thing of the past.
What is clear is that we need to stop seeing cravings as indicative of a moral failing, and instead recognize them as a signal your body is sending to you, to let you know that it doesn’t have what it needs. Remember: when your needs are met, and when your body is nourished, you’ll stop craving — I promise.
4. You’re Special, but Not in Every Way
In my twenties, I worked at a Montessori school, and my mentor used to have a saying that has stuck with me. She would tell the kids, “you’re not special in that way.” At first, that felt kind of rude — I remember thinking, “but isn’t everyone is special!?” And that is true. Everyone is special, in some ways.
But what I think she was getting at was, that there are some equalizing realities in life. For the kids, she was telling them, “you’re not special in that you can avoid the rules without having consequences — those are for everyone.” But as I get older it’s been helpful for me to remember that the rules aren’t the only equalizing factor in life. I’ve often fallen into the trap of believing I was the only one who felt shame, failure, uncertainty about my body — but sooner or later everyone’s body will betray them in on way or another.
I know that might sound a bit depressing, but the sad truth about life in the world is that everyone’s body will get sick, or weak, or tired at some point. And when we do, we all tend to feel shame about these things as though they’re something special to us.
But it’s important to remember those things don’t make you special. Having a human body — a creature body — is hard sometimes. Every person on the planet will at some point experience that reality, including you. You are special — just not in that way.
5. You’ll Live Insecure Until You Shift Your Story
The story you tell about yourself in your head will determine how secure you are in your skin. I’ve come to realize that this story won’t be good on its own. The default of our culture is to feel shame about our bodies. The default is to deflect joy, and pride, and confidence. The default is to act as though deflecting compliments is gracious, and defacing your body and beating it into submission is the only chance you have at having a good body.
But you can’t hate yourself into wholeness. You can’t shame yourself into the heath. You can’t care for something you hate, or at best, something you’re mildly embarrassed of. If you want to be the kind of person who is fully alive in their own skin, you have to shift your story. Tell yourself a story of grace — grace for all the mixed, weird signals your body sends, grace for all the transfigurations your body assumes, grace for all the ordinary human moments you inhabit.
Tell yourself a story of gratitude — gratitude for all the joyful food moments, and for all the scars and wrinkles that testify to a life fully-lived. And here’s the best part; grace and gratitude are contagious, so the more you do so for yourself, the more you’ll do so for others and vice versa.
Having a human body is an amazing gift. So ask yourself, what might happen to our lives if we actually learned to live in our skin like we believed that to be true?
Elle Berry is a writer and nutritionist. She holds an MS in Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine — when she’s not nerding out about food she’s either burrowed into a good book, swimming her way through a large cuppa tea, or when possible, swashbuckling every glorious vista of the Pacific Northwest. You can find more of her adventures on Instagram @a_wellness_story where she passionately helps people create empowered wellness.
