I have been working on the following post for a good while. It’s a pretty hard one because it links lots of experiences related to my body and how I’ve (mis) treated it. I went to the doctor earlier this week for a check-up. I love knowing my blood pressure and it was perfect 124/70 and this is with no medication. It’s always interesting to see a new nurse’s face b/c you can tell they are expecting high blood pressure based on my weight. (The regular nurses know me so that’s not a problem.) High blood pressure along with diabetes runs in my family, so I am pretty particular in keeping track of these numbers.

So writing up my thoughts to share in this post has proven difficult, but if just one person connects with what I am saying, that will be enough. Plus writing it helps me learn from it as well. I have always, at least since a very young age, had a conflicted and complicated relationship with my body. I had a pretty good relationship with my mind and heart (in that I often struggled to make decisions by one or another, which could get me in trouble) but my body was a whole other thing. I never quite felt right in my own skin in my body. Part of the reason for this is a pretty significant experience/accident that resulted in really deep 3rd degree brush burns on my leg and stomach. This incident also involved a skin graph and month long hospital stay when I was in the 1st grade in 1981. This left me with pretty significant scars on my body, which could really only be seen when I wore a swimsuit, but since my brothers and I swam competitively until my teenage years, this was pretty often. Anyway, so that’s the origin story of my relationship with my body, but it certainly left me with a good amount of shame.

Unfortunately, I turned on my body at a very young age because of its scars, and then when puberty hit, I turned on it again. I abused it with food, nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine throughout my adolescence and young adulthood (Of course, this was pretty easy to do growing up in New Orleans and in a Catholic, Italian family—to be clear–I regret none of this as it has made me the person I am today).  However, I always thought I abused it to cope with life around me, which was a pretty good life truth be told, so it never made a whole lot of sense.

In reflecting on my life to date (mostly through this blog and over the last several years) and making decisions for the future, I’ve realized some pretty important things when it comes to the relationship we have with our bodies and what they can and can’t do. Just recently, I realized that I have spent entirely too much time in my life hating my body and/or being uncomfortable in my own skin. And because of this, I treated it in horrible ways and most of the time, I did so unconsciously. But as I began thinking about my body in different ways, I recognized that it is incredibly difficult to take care of our bodies while also treating them poorly. This re-acquaintance with the one body I have has taken years. It wasn’t until I decided that yet another weight loss plan (you name it; I’ve done it) and fat shaming spiral was not going to work for me. After all, doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

I had to change the way I was thinking about my body, and at least two events triggered this several years ago. 1. I was faced with the possibility of never having a body healthy enough to carry a child and 2. I was seriously considering the possibility of having weight loss surgery. In hindsight, the surgery scared me most. I wasn’t keen on going under the knife to have my digestive system reshaped in order to lose weight. Lucky for me, no doctor suggested this path and because of my work on the IRB, I knew the risks and understood how dramatically it would change my eating. It was just the wake-up call I needed.  A potential surgery seemed the ultimate turning on my body, and I was ready to stop the cycle, so I took very specific steps to treat my body better.  As a result, I am much more comfortable in my own skin, my own body. I take care of it in ways I never thought were possible. I push it to do the things I never thought were possible. I feed it lots of different things while also enjoying my very favorite things. I also take care of it in hopes that I am healthy enough, even at my age, to have a child.

The realization that my body was not able to do the things I wanted it to do was a gift and led to my path to a healthier and fitter body. The weight loss for me has always been lagnaippe…the relationship with my body and the pure joy and elation from living with that knowledge, that’s something to celebrate, especially today!

This is part of my body story, but we can likely ALL do better in acknowledging body shaming and work to respect our bodies–scars, size, imperfections, beauty and all.