I’m not sure how to start this revised article other than to say, “Back when I published my original piece about gaining weight in 2019, I was completely wrong.”
Wrong, naive, brainwashed by the patriarchy….whatever you want to call it: the fact that I once believed gaining weight was wasteful makes me cringe today. I want to give 27 year old me a hug and tell her how wrong she is. That soon there will be too many horrors in her world to worry about such a thing, that she’ll start going to therapy and following plus sized influencers on social media, and generally consume a lot of research and personal essays about estrogen and fatphobia that will change the way she thinks about herself. That eventually she’ll find clothes that fit that she loves. That there will come a day when she’s happy just to be here on Earth, whatever her shape.
Perhaps the reason these thoughts are hitting me right now is that, as many predicted, there’s been a wave of hyper-aggressive post-pandemic weight loss campaigns targeting people whose bodies changed during an incredibly difficult time in history. But more likely it’s because I’m back in Seattle for the first time since we left in 2020, writing from my spot at the downtown public library, and the nostalgia is leaving a weird taste in my mouth like day old coffee. Until now, my 3 years in Seattle felt longer than my 5 years in Boston. Seattle is where I finally fit in, where I met my husband and got married, where I started my own business. It wasn’t until I returned and considered doing a then-and-now photo that I realized how much I’ve grown. Grown metaphorically and (to the ire of my twenty-something self) grown literally.
I’ve doubled in size since my first year in Seattle. To be fair, my grocery budget was $10 a week that first year and I walked everywhere because I couldn’t afford gas. Everyone told me I looked great, and looking at the selfies I took, I felt great too. So when I started making enough money to eat actual meals and drive places, and when I started seeing a guy who loved to cook as much as I loved to eat, it horrified me to see the weight I’d lost since leaving St. Louis come back. By 2021, when I’d spent the last year in a city that required masking outdoors and my husband and I had spent it drowning our problems in processed foods, I’d outgrown department store sizing.
That’s when I really started to panic.
For the next year and a half, I tried dieting and exercise, I tried cutting out alcohol, I even tried the starvation and car-free technique I’d had in Seattle. Turns out that lifestyle is much more difficult to achieve when you can afford food and spend the majority of your time working from home. Nothing worked. If anything, I grew bigger.
Looking back, this time of my life felt like a second puberty. I believed I was supposed to look and feel a certain way in my body, but my body didn’t care. It was ready to transform into a new phase.
Here’s what that new phase looks like, regardless of what size and shape I am:
- Building and maintaining a plus-size capsule wardrobe of well made clothes that fit me and make me feel beautiful (a mix of second hand, high quality first hand, and handmade items…plus one or two fast fashion items I couldn’t avoid buying).
- Getting as much exercise and sunlight as I can in ways and places where I don’t feel judged for being plus-sized (walking, dancing, and yoga are my go-to’s).
- Eating delicious, nutritious, filling food (made of in-season ingredients when I can).
- Being as sustainable as I can with clothes that no longer fit me, without keeping them in my closet as constant reminders of the size I used to be (gifting, selling, repurposing, crafting).
- Doing therapy work to learn to love my body the way it is.
- Making lots and lots of mistakes, and showing myself grace when I make them.
Loving your body isn’t easy. Everything in our culture tells us to be something other than what we are, that we’re not good enough in our own bodies. For a long time, I exacerbated these lies even further with the added pressure of being perfectly zero waste. Turns out, that way isn’t sustainable. Sustainable is not getting distracted on shallow goals. Sustainable is working with what we have. Sustainable is focusing on what really matters.