Sizing Up: An Unending Battle With Weight In the Quest Of Better Living
It hasn’t been easy taking up space in this world as a woman
You know when people tell you that you should be comfortable in your skin, that your size, weight, or even colour do not determine your worth? It is somewhat of a dialectical argument you wholeheartedly agree with in principle, that you want to believe, but somewhere deep down cannot.
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t conscious of my appearance. As a kid, I was too tall. But I didn’t use it well enough in basketball, where it would be an advantage. I was acutely aware that my brown complexion wasn’t beautiful, unlike even my mother. I was wary that my features — the tiny, barely-there nose and small eyes — weren’t exactly what was regarded as attractive. I didn’t help my case by moulting into a daydreaming bookworm, woefully inadequate at most sports.
The weighing scale started creeping up once I stopped growing in height. I did well in academics and took centre stage for many erudite extracurricular activities, like debates, but slunk to the background at parties, among the more happening crowd of swashbuckling young men serenading pretty young women of my age.
On the surface, I embraced the excess weight and lack of beauty, but not without an undercurrent of shame and defeat. I was fat and undesirable. Even if no one was saying it except as a joke.
Around the time I turned twenty-four, I had just moved to the US for graduate studies and suddenly lost a bunch of weight. It was an unstable and challenging time, but losing oodles of pounds earned me high praise. I was secretly pleased and unconcerned about the metabolic mayhem that must have wrought havoc in my body and had me lose more than 40 pounds in a year without exercise.
I was eating unhealthy food and losing weight!
Hawt! A friend exclaimed on social media.
For someone who has made peace with being unattractive for most of her life, it is hard to forgo basking in the glow of such attention.
When I first joined a gym, I was still in India. I loved the rush of endorphins, which was surprising because I hated sports. But then working out was fazed out by the chaos of moving to the US. And it was not until my wedding date was fixed that I returned to the gym. The initial shock of the trans-continental move had settled, and the scale was upward bound once more, necessitating urgent action.
As a bride, I wanted to look thin and, therefore, beautiful. I coupled the gym sessions with juice cleanses and extreme dieting. I was at my lowest weight ever when I got married. It didn’t matter to my partner or to us as a couple. But if there is one thing I relished, it was everyone glossing over how thin and attractive I looked on my wedding day.
I grew maniac for size labels at stores, always seeking to fit into smaller garments, even if a tad uncomfortable. The first time I effortlessly snuck into a pair of size 0 GAP shorts, the feeling was on par with any of the other credible achievements I have had.
My weight and size ebbed and flowed congruently with the ups and downs over the several years that followed. I exercised religiously and ate clean during the week, only to binge over the weekend. I drowned my sorrows at happy hours when experiments failed in the lab and celebrated inches lost with new dresses to show off these successes. The furious ticking of likes and loves erupting on social platforms embalmed my deeply wounded ego. Attractive. Thin. Young. For a bit, life hurt less, and momentarily, all the other ways it was not working did not matter as much.
When I was pregnant, at 34 years old, one of my biggest worries was weight.
I had just returned to India and started my own independent lab. It was a complicated and difficult time that I would not recommend to anyone else who is planning a baby. One of the reasons we tried getting pregnant at the time despite the turmoil was because of how much of a hullaballoo my age at the time was, with the doctors, no less.
Watching the weighing machine inch upward, congruent with a healthy and normal pregnancy, was a blessing I didn’t realise until much later. A twinge of anxiety gnawed at me — what if I never went back to my pre-pregnancy weight?
I hit rock bottom post pregnancy, with a 40-week exile from any rigorous activity imposed by my OBGYN following an episiotomy and ruptured sutures following childbirth. My brain was stewing with violently conflicting thoughts. On one hand, I worried about my new and flailing career while on maternity leave. On the other hand, when I was not producing enough breast milk, I was struck with distress. I was failing yet again.
I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror or at old pictures. I refused to update my wardrobe to fit my current size except for the bare essentials, in a bid to force myself to get in shape. It didn’t help that babies don’t comply with your designated schedule. I was harried with erratic sleep and often in tears because my daughter had woken up in the middle of an exercise session at home.
On the throes of abyss, I stumbled on weight training, would you believe on Instagram? It seems funny now, but I considered myself too out-of-shape for the gym, so I initially worked out at home. There were a few body-positive influencers who I followed. I bought some resistance bands and a few dumbbells. Exercise soon became a way to blow off some steam because it often put me in a state of flow. I began eating better and not in a binge-and-purge cycle. I learned how to count macros and found a billion healthy recipes for so-called unhealthy food.
For a bit, it felt like I was finally making some healthy progress with weight loss and mindset, except I could feel a tiny voice of fear scratching under the surface of my skin on days when we had a normal meal. I found that this obsession with healthy living even had a name — orthorexia.
I started running soon after. Initially, any distance and time were a win. I was a back-of-the-pack runner, but hey, I was running! I realized I had to fuel in order to run longer distances, regardless of my weight. I plunged into the camaraderie of runners online and found people of all sizes who ran for fun and had sometimes outrageous running goals that were totally irrelevant to the rest of the world.
After the first bout of COVID, running became extremely hard for me for a long time. My times slowed down substantially. In parallel, work and childcare sprawled their branches. There was a lot more to worry about, at any given moment. I was hit with injuries, and soon getting out there for a run or even a run-walk, if that was what it came to, was bliss.
Even by my own standards, I am slower. I wrote in my journal recently — this is a new low, but it can only go upwards, no?
More recently, I haven’t been on a scale for several months. I am happy to size up in clothing for comfort. I have stopped making healthy recipes for so-called unhealthy food, except when I actually love the taste. I run and/or lift weights regularly — clumsy or slow, notwithstanding.
My daughter is seven now. I want her to know and remember me as strong and passionate. I don’t think she’ll care much for my weight anyway. And I hope she will never bear the cross of exacting self-criticism about her body and size that I have carried.
My relationship with my weight will never be without a blemish or scar, thanks to the journey it has been through. But here, at almost 42 years of age, I am profoundly grateful for every inch of my body, that has survived many battles. These legs that are not feminine enough and jiggly arms that have carried me for miles, rocked a little human, carried heavy luggage and groceries without help, walked miles with friends on memorable dates, and lifted our daughter as she outgrew our laps for memory’s sake.
Beauty seems a bit like rose-tinted clouds on a balmy morning. Only occasionally relevant.
Today I feel strong and ravenous, like the tropical sun that never stops raging.
Thank you for reading! If you found that this resonated with you or if you have had similar experiences, please share your thoughts in the comments. Please consider following and subscribing to my writing. Your love and support would mean a lot, as I find my feet as a fledgling writer. You can also find more of me on Linkedin.
