this body requires no explanation

“I’m not fat, I’m big-boned.”

CONTENT NOTES: this story touches on thin privilege, body shaming, disordered eating, diet culture ideologies

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I am a skinny person who didn’t know she was skinny until she turned 37 years old, got divorced, and lost all of her body fat.

I haven’t weighed myself in years so I can’t tell you how much I weigh. I wonder if it would provide any helpful context anyway, since that number means something different to every person who reads it. I don’t own a scale and I don’t weigh myself, so I would be guessing. Not because I am above weighing myself but because I am afraid that it will whisper highly persuasive nonsense into my ear and I won’t be able to eat cheeseburgers in peace anymore. 

And I really love cheeseburgers. 

I’ve only just added those back onto the menu. I’m not ready to give up my McDonald’s cheeseburger with Big Mac sauce and extra pickles. 

In the Church of Personal Development and Spiritual Growth, one does not eat cheeseburgers. They are a very low vibration food. All that cheap factory-farmed meat, and made in a restaurant. Everyone knows the proper way to eat food is to make it with your own hands. But that’s not my church anymore, which is great news since I really love cheeseburgers. Did I say that already?

I discovered that I am skinny last Fall. Not after someone gasped on a Zoom call and asked me, “Are you okay?” Not even then. It was at Sunday dinner, a weekly ritual in my family, looking at one of my brothers when I thought to myself, Gosh, he really is quite skinny.

Now that I think about it, so are my other brothers. And so is my sister and my mum. I guess we’re just a family of skinny people. That must mean I’m skinny too.

You might assume a member of a skinny family would most likely know she was skinny too. But I didn’t see it that way for most of my life. This is called “thin privilege.” Being skinny and not knowing you’re skinny. It comes with all sorts of benefits I never appreciated because I was too busy convincing myself I needed to be smaller (like being able to shop at any store, not having to ask for a seatbelt extender or being taken seriously by a doctor).

As a kid my mother used to tell me that I was big boned. I do not blame her for this. She was only passing on the same indoctrination of “thinner equals better” that the $72 billion dollar diet industry bestows on all women from the time they are old enough to have bodies.

I didn’t know what “big boned” meant. I guessed it was a way to explain that, no, I had not in fact committed the ultimate sin of having a too-large body, I was just built differently than other people. 

…which would be kind of cool if it were truly a gateway to body liberation and not just another way to prop up a culture where it is considered morally objectionable (not to mention a personal failure) to have a large body.

As far as I was concerned, my body did not check the box on normal. I was bigger than I was supposed to be. I spent all of my teens and much of my twenties trying to squeeze my body into that box by torturing it: starving myself, eating only the “right” foods and throwing up the wrong ones. 

As a woman, my body became an expression of how much pain I was in. When I was happy, my thighs were juicy and full. Only in the depths of my pain was I willing to torture myself enough to look like a 1990’s runway model. During my law school years I all but disappeared. 

After I left my husband, my body started disappearing again but this time without any of the tedious effort. My appetite simply packed up and moved offshore. I lived on Asaro-brand green olives from Costco and occasional slices of the freezer pizza I fed to my children before I got the knack of cooking for them. 

One day I looked at my body in the mirror and saw someone I didn’t recognize. I had to buy her new pants. 

Occasionally strangers applauded me for having achieved an appropriately-sized body but those closest to me knew better, and I loved them for it.

I have been on my own for ten months now. I have negotiated a separation agreement, led my company through a firestorm of post-pandemic challenges, and figured out how to feed my kids food that doesn’t come from the freezer aisles at Costco. Just last week my oldest son and I hard a hardy laugh together for the first time since I moved out.

In two more months I can apply for a divorce. 

Slowly, one packet of ramen noodles at a time, my appetite is coming back. I worry about the small amount of fat that is starting to collect around my hips again. Everything is still hard. How will the world know that I am doing this hard thing if I don’t have razor-sharp cheekbones and hips that could cleave meat? 

What is the purpose of my body if not as an expression of my pain?

I don’t have the answer yet but I am learning that my body has other uses, like trail running and downhill skiing and learning to race a sprint canoe. Those things have brought me so much joy. And bruises.

Whatever its purpose, I know now that my body does not require explanation. It does not owe the world anything. If my body decides it wants to take up more space, I am choosing to be okay with that. 

Maybe the size of my body does not say a damned thing about my state of being or my value in the world. Maybe it simply is.

As these micro-accumulations of fat only visible to me gather along the once-sharp edges of my body, I wonder what it would feel like if I could put my pain down for a while and let myself just be okay.

Maybe that’s the purpose of my body—a daily reminder that it’s okay to feel okay.