The Big Conflict

Yesterday I was asked what my goal weight is for my diet, and I honestly answered, "I don't know." I know my recommended target range is 132 - 164 pounds. Those numbers mean several things to me. The first is that to be at the top of my healthy weight range by the shaky standard of Body Mass Index, I'll need to lose almost 100 more pounds. The second is that I haven't weighed in that range since I was about 15 years old, and that thought is immediately followed by the standard advice that weighing what you did in high school when you're a middle aged woman isn't a realistic goal.

I didn't start this diet to get skinny. I'm not built to be skinny. No matter what I've weighed at any point in my lifetime, I've had full breasts, hips and a protuding belly. Regardless of what our culture wants women to look like, we come in all different shapes and sizes, and they can all be healthy and beautiful. I want to be healthy and live my life with joy, peace, productivity and pleasure. That is my real goal.

The conflict comes in with identifying those benchmarks. There is only so much that changing the size of my body will accomplish towards achieving those goals. Joy and peace will hinge much more on spiritual, emotional, and intellectual growth than losing pounds. Accepting and loving the body that I have must be a part of that. I know what joy, peace, productivity and pleasure all feel like. I can identify those easily.

So, where is the conflict? It doesn't seem like anybody can truly define what healthy is. Is it like art, where you know it when you see it? There are certain quantifiable standards, of course. Blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood chemistry values, urine content and more can all be measured, but I'm not going to spend my days waiting to hear lab results. So, how do we decide what's healthy?

Size alone won't tell. When I was in my twenties, I was considered obese, yet I felt great. I had endless energy, the kind of skin I envy now, shiny hair, strong nails, and muscles one could see, yet I was uninsurable because of my weight, deemed unhealthy by doctors and full of self loathing because I was fat. I was physically healthy, but not recognized as such. Mentally, I was a wreck, and people told me that I had the right attitude about my weight and size, because I hated myself for being fat. Self-hatred is apparently deemed a good motivation tool.

I know better than that by now, but I'm still conflicted. Health is something too transitory and too individual to set as a goal or standard. What the "experts" in the field of obesity say is a healthy weight, they also tell me is an unrealistic standard. I'm going to have to go by how I feel, and unless I'm truly worthy of my own trust, that can be scary. With a lifetime of stupid, messed up thinking about fat behind me, finding the good attitudes about size, fat, beauty, and food is new and tricky territory.

I'm having to combine parts of the fat acceptance movement, the diet industry, the experiences of having eating disorders in my family, the medical industry, decent counseling, and feminism to forge this path. It's too easy to say that an individual standard of what is healthy though is what people need. My daughter just knew that 77 pounds would be the perfect weight for her despite all the other evidence of her health going to pot. Everyone was telling her how wonderful she looked when our family and her team of doctors and nutritionists were fighting just to keep her alive.

When the public voices that say what is healthy for are driven more by profit than fact and what they say is contradictory, there's really no wonder why I and so many others feel conflicted and confused.

diets, weight goals, fat acceptance, health and wellness