My Body Is Allowed to Take Up Space

I took this picture yesterday as I was sitting at my office chair. I wasn’t slouching, or trying, my pants just felt like they were digging and I wanted to breathe, so I unbuttoned them. It felt awesome, it felt freeing.

I couldn’t help look down to see what my pants were covering up. It’s unnerving to share this because it DOES feel vulnerable, but I also know I’m allowed to be human, and this body respect is a journey for me too..I felt a moment of shame when I saw my stomach, and it broke my heart.

For so long I felt disconnected from my body, separate from it in an urge to hide, disappear, and protect. I abused it, disowned it, deprived it of any worth. I sent anger towards it and sadness without realizing that that was the last place I should be sending those feelings.

My body has always done the best it could to take care of me. It wants nothing more than to support my every dream, but we live in a culture that tells women that the sum of their value is found in what they look like.

My high waisted jeans cover up the parts of myself I spent decades body checking, forever harboring a disdain I couldn’t release.

My belly reminded me that however much I deprived, however much value I put into being smaller, I would never feel like it was enough to fit into the beauty ideal culture set before us all.

This picture feels insanely vulnerable to share for many reasons, and yet carries some freedom in its’ normalizing too. First and foremost, I am in a socially acceptable body size, I understand my “roll” does not prevent me from finding an appropriate seat in public spaces, I am not shamed or looked at as “lazy” because of how much space my body takes up, I can find appropriately sized clothes in any store I walk into. It feels vulnerable because even though I am a straight-sized, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied female, society tells me because of this stomach “roll”, I can’t possibly accept myself as I am in my here and now body.

It feels vulnerable because I am a food and body liberation dietitian who truly believes all bodies are worthy of respect..yet here I am somedays, taking a deep breath and reminding myself that hating parts of me, is no longer the journey I’m choosing to be on.

I too have to remind myself there is NOTHING “wrong” with me. My body is one in a WIDE range of bodies that deserves to show up and take up space.

We have a built-in bias for thinness in our culture. It’s insidious and pervasive, so much so that yo-yo dieting is normalized, yet more often than not it is a form of disordered eating with false narratives of sustainable weight loss. It’s so backward that what we would prescribe for a larger-bodied individual, we would diagnose as an eating disorder for someone in a smaller body.

This built-in body hierarchy keeps us all chasing after a moving bar, one we can’t possibly attain in a “healthy” manner. But now even the word “health” has been monetized.

My anger now goes to an institutional level. It goes toward a billion-dollar industry that sells lies to lead us all to believe the ideal is attainable if we just try hard enough. It keeps us coming back for more believing that it is the individual who is faulty, not the deprivation at hand.

We have these ideas of what it means to stop trying. We have been sold a narrative of what it means to “let ourselves go” or to “give up” that has nothing to do with prioritizing ourselves in a HEALING manner.

It would be naive to think that everyone has the same ability to come at themselves with respect and compassion. Individuals who live in larger bodies deal with an increased level of shame, judgment, and trauma do to space they take up. That leaves a mark, one that we all feel.

Shame has nobody size, yet it keeps us believing that we are separate from. It keeps us from self-respect, self-compassion, and kindness. Fear keeps us playing small like we have something to hide.

No, this is my belly. This is the belly that has taken me through a whole lot. I have spent too many years allowing myself to buy into the notion that smaller bodies hold more worth, as a metric to keep me from accepting and seeing myself as a whole, valuable person. This belly has put up with a lot of SH*T and my goodness it has taken so much blame for my unhappiness.

I don’t need another reason to pick myself apart. I don’t need patriarchy to whittle me down to believing that this vessel is all I am worth or to waste my time obsessing in act to distract me from actually showing up and living my life.

I don’t have to “love” my body, but I can RESPECT that it is indeed the only one I have, so I might as well treat it with some F*ing respect, and learn how to let it HEAL on its own time.

“Female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent POLITICAL sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” - Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

- Kaitlin Bolt-Lovett