Our Bodies: Why are we at war with them and can we ever make peace?
July 13, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
So everybody, this episode has raw, real talk about disordered eating. If that kind of talk heals you, listen up. But loves, if that kind of talk triggers you, skip this one or save it to listen to in a safe place with safe people. Please, first take care of you.
Hi, everybody. It’s Glennon. Thanks for coming back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we’re gonna get into some hard things about women and why so many of us seem to be trapped in an endless war with our bodies. I got this question a while back from Anne. She said, “G, I’m struggling hard with food and body stuff, especially since quarantine. I look to you for advice on most things, but I don’t know if you can relate to this one, you’re so thin. I just want to get to a place where I feel acceptance and love from my own body. I felt so freed by Untamed, and I’m hoping you can help free me from my own body hate.”
So, Anne, I can. I can relate. I’ve struggled my entire life to be comfortable in my own skin, to understand my body to be as much me as my mind and my spirit. As a girl in this culture, I learned to be desired, but not how to desire. How to be wanted, but not how to want. To care about what I looked like more than I care more about what I’m looking at. I learned that my worthiness was in my appearance in my outer beauty, and that to be beautiful, a woman needed to stay small, to slowly disappear really in ambition and desire and appetite and emotion and voice and body. I tried hard to follow directions, to somehow feed myself and also to disappear. I was severely bulimic from age 10 to 26, and I stopped bingeing and purging when I got sober almost 19 years ago.
And now I’m 45 years old, and just last month, I cried to Abby and told her that I bet that throughout a typical day for me, especially during COVID, it felt like 80% of my thoughts were still about food and my body. What did I eat today? Did I eat too much? Was I good? How do my thighs feel? What am I gonna let myself eat tonight? How much do I weigh today? Why did I eat that ice cream last night? It’s like being harassed constantly, but the call is always coming from inside the house. And it makes me embarrassed as a feminist. It makes me enraged as a human being because of the opportunity cost of spending half my time and thoughts on this stupid shit. Because I am a smart and powerful woman. I cannot imagine the thoughts I would think and the art I’d make and the activism I’d unleash if I had those thoughts back again. And that’s the cost of this cultural poison we ingest, right? The opportunity cost of obsessing about our size and shape is our time and energy and thoughts and potential and peace.
It’s our life. I want us to get our minds and bodies and lives back. I want us to unlearn the self-hate and to begin to inhabit our bodies, to begin to love them and trust them to, as Mary Oliver suggests, “let the soft animals of our bodies love what they love.” Let’s try. We can do hard things.
Okay. So, the hard thing that I’m bringing today is my infuriating and never-ending extremely complicated relationship with food and body. And I started thinking about this differently recently because, um … So, Abby was talking to me one day, my wife Abby, was talking to me one day about my, as we’ve called them, tiny barely imperceptible control issues.
And I was explaining to her how something should be done, but I felt like I was doing it in a very precious way that she would never notice that I was really controlling the thing, but Abby is always able to notice when I’m doing the thing. So, she stopped me and she said, “Honey, I see what you’re doing there. Um, and I need to tell you that when you try to control what I’m doing or decisions that I’m making, it really hurts me. It makes me really sad because I trust you so much. I believe in you and I trust you. And when you try to control me, it makes me understand that you really don’t believe in me and trust me.”
Amanda Doyle:
Woo.
GD:
And yeah. And so, I thought about that so much, and I realized that the truth of things seems to be in relationships, that we can trust people. Well, I guess I would say we can love people or we can control people, but we cannot do both. Okay? We have to choose. Are we gonna love them or are we gonna control them, because love requires trust. Okay? And we only control things we don’t trust. Right? So, in my marriage, in my relationship with Abby, it has become very clear that when I am controlling her, even when I’m doing it in my very, what I think are subtle precious ways-
AD:
Mm, so subtle. Yeah.
GD:
Right. That I am not loving her, right? Which is baffling and paradigm shifting to me because I have always believed that my job, the way that I love my people is that I just, you know, I, I help them make all of my dreams for them come true. Like my job is to be like, “I am here to support you in creating the truest, most beautiful life for you, so I’m just gonna show you what I have diagrammed as the truest most beautiful life for you, and then together we will get,” right. Um, so this idea that allowing her to lead the way for her is interesting and a new process for me. And honestly, quite scary because I’m not someone who believes that things just work out. I just feel like I have to work them out.
So, the way this relates to body is that what I figured out recently is if I can love … People are always talking about loving their bodies, right? I just want to love my body, self-love, love. Like what is self-love?
AD:
Whatever the hell that means.
GD:
Well, exactly. What does that mean? Like does that, does loving my body mean I love the shape of my body? Does it mean I love the way it looks? Does it mean I love the way it feels? Does it mean … Like what does body love mean? And so, well I sure as hell know I have never had it, okay? Like as someone who’s dealt, got an eating disorder when she was 10 and has been figuring that out for, since then, but here’s what I want. Okay. I want to love my body in this way, in the way Abby described. I want to trust my body. Okay. I want to stop spending my one wild and precious life controlling my body.
And what I mean by that is I have had times in my life where I feel like I have gotten healthier, like I’ve gotten more normal with food and body, although I can’t remember them now because after COVID, I think that with the book tour, preparing for the book tour, it just got weird again. And what I think, what I mean by getting weird is I just start obsessing more, I start thinking constantly about food, about what I’ve eaten, what I haven’t eaten, I obsess with working out. So I’ll start at, I start on the elliptical for a half hour, then I’m on it for 45 minutes, then I’m on it for an hour. And when I’m working out, I am not doing it with the same intention as I know some people do. Like some people are like, “I am here to get strong. I am here to be healthy.” No. I am here to deal with my anxiety and to control the crap out of this body I’ve been given, to make sure that it does not get one millimeter bigger, that it stays small. I’m controlling the crap out of my body. I would say that on a given day, 50% of all of my thoughts the entire day are about food, working out, my body.
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
Which is so humiliating. It’s so embarrassing as a feminist, as somebody who is out in the world talking about women and freedom and joy and power, it’s embarrassing. It feels like I should have fricking figured this out by now. I’m 45. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. But also, it’s infuriating because I am a smart powerful woman, and when I think about the art I could have created, the activism I could have unleashed, the love I could have been a part of if I had those 50% thoughts back, right? It’s the opportunity cost.
AD:
Yes.
GD:
That is, you know, the cultural conditioning that little girls get the second we’re born on this earth about staying small, about controlling our appetite, about controlling our desire, about not being hungry, about staying small. That’s the price of it. It’s the opportunity cost. It costs us life.
AD:
Right.
GD:
It costs us life. And I just, I feel like, you know, I started to get weird. And then Abby, she’s trying to help, trying to help, trying to help. She, she, she brought over this woman who is a local person in our area, and she started working out with us in the driveway during COVID. So this was Abby’s thought, like if this is, if this body thing is taken away from you, maybe you won’t obsess about it. Maybe if we give you the structure and, and we, and we think about getting strong instead of getting small, and you like lift weights and we just turn it all over to her, it’s just every time I, I, I have a, a weirdness, there’s always, and I’m certain that some structure will fix it, you know.
AD:
Right. You’re just missing something.
GD:
So-
AD:
You’re just missing something.
GD:
I’m just missing something.
AD:
Right.
GD:
Yeah. Just missing something. I’ll just get one answer and I’ll, we’ll be fine. So this woman starts coming over. And so see, you know this because I started talking to you about it. I’m out in the driveway three days a week kicking my own ass, right, just kicking my own ass three days a week. And one day, I just looked at this woman. I was like, “I am 45 years old. I don’t want to kick my own ass anymore. I don’t care. I want to not care.” I want to stop trying so hard to control this body or change it or make it some idea that somebody told me it should be, and just be gentle and kind to it. Just like find a way to just eat what it wants to eat, to move how it wants to move, and then love and trust it enough to let it become whatever it wants to become. Right? Because I don’t care.
Like when I look at women now, I know we all have different goals, and dreams and vibes. But when I look at women now who I can tell spend a ton of their one wild and precious life controlling their bodies, it no longer looks aspirational to me. It just looks kind of sad. The women, the kind of bodies of women that inspire me now are people who look like they actually are enjoying their life, who allow themselves to indulge sometimes, who don’t spend all day kicking their own ass in order to create some body that our culture has told us is aspirational for a woman, you know?
AD:
Right.
GD:
It’s like that, I think it’s that old quote that says, “Thinness is not about beauty, it’s about obedience.” Like it’s just obedience. It’s that somebody, a million people told me, a million people told me when I was little that a woman’s worthiness is beauty, and beauty is staying small. And I have just been really freaking obedient every day of my life about that, and I’m so tired of being a good little soldier. I just want to enjoy this next part of my life and just let myself be.
AD:
Yeah. I mean, I think … So you haven’t worked out in like a month, right? You, you decided to just-
GD:
Yeah.
AD:
… stop for a while?
GD:
Yeah. So, well, I quit the personal trainer. So now she comes over and works with Abby because Abby’s on a different journey. I mean, that’s the thing. There’s no, there is zero… if there was one answer to the body stuff, I promise you I would have found it. There’s no… it’s like different for every person in every season of their life, and so Abby’s out there with the personal trainer. I hide now. I just like hide in my house from her. I decided that it wasn’t for me. And then I decided, okay, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go for a walk everyday. I’m gonna stop kicking my own ass. I want to be nice to my body. I’ve put my body through hell-
AD:
Right.
GD:
… I want to be gentle to it. I want to be … I want it to feel good. Um, so I decided to go for a walk every day. I- I’ve been going for a two to three mile walk every single day. And I’ve been doing this 20-minute thing of yoga. There’s something about yoga that is really good for me. Not hard yoga. I freakin’ hate hard yoga. When somebody starts a yoga class and then it gets hard and sweaty it makes me so upset. It’s like ruining it. It’s like turning ice cream into frozen yogurt or something, it’s just like not correct.
But I love … ’cause there’s something about getting on a yoga mat and breathing and the way yoga instructors tend to like talk about our bodies that makes me feel very loved. I don’t know. It makes me feel like remembering how precious and good my body is to me and it just helps me… well, I guess it’s that idea of I’m not controlling it. I’m just in it and I’m remembering. It’s the closest I get to loving my body. Not the shape of it. That’s not what I’m talking about, but like trusting-
AD:
The act of.
GD:
… and honoring. Yes. Act … honoring, being present in. And listen it’s been three weeks that I’ve been doing no sweating, just walking and yoga-ing and I don’t know, so far so good. I haven’t missed that freaking elliptical. I don’t know how many more years I have on this earth and I am not spending any more hours in a dark room on an elliptical machine. It’s just … I’m just not doing it anymore.
AD:
Well, you started talking about how Abby … I mean clearly, you trust Abby to. I mean, when people talk about trust, it’s like do you trust them not to make terrible decisions? Do you need to control them ’cause you think they’re gonna go off and like do something crazy? Clearly that’s not the level of trust we’re talking about here. We’re talking about “help me guide your decisions with the benefit of my wisdom, which can sometimes feel like control.” Right?
GD:
Exactly.
AD:
And this whole, love your body, it’s this trusting that your body has wisdom equal to, or more particularly attuned than, whatever wisdom you have. So in order to trust Abby, I have this actual question because I struggle with the same thing, you have to go say, or at least practice saying, you have a wisdom for yourself, you go do your thing and I’m not gonna impose my wisdom on you. And is it the same with body? Is it saying, you body, have a wisdom and a power and a purpose…
GD:
And I’m gonna trust you to return to what you need to be. Yeah, that you have a wisdom. I mean I would say I don’t think that Abby minds when I share wisdom like I don’t … first of all I’m never gonna stop doing that so … but I don’t think that’s it. I think there’s an energy that comes with my wisdom that she senses that is fear-based. I want to accept wisdom from other people, I want people … I wanna be able to share ideas, but there’s an energy that controlling people like you and me don’t think other people can feel and sense, and they always can.
AD:
And it’s outcome. It’s outcome-focused too.
GD:
It is outcome-focused. Yes.
AD:
It is.
GD:
Yes, I’m trying to get you to make this decision. So here’s the three pieces of evidence, wisdom, I’m showing you to try to get you to this point and every … John knows when you do it, Abby knows when I do it. I know when you’re doing it, you know when I’m doing it. Like, there’s a way of being that people will always sense. That you’re not honoring me in my own wisdom and you’re not just contributing what you can to help me, that you already know what you want and you’re just trying to get me … and that makes the person feel mistrusted and used. Right? And just kind of like a means to an end.
AD:
Right.
GD:
It’s just two different approaches. But when it comes to the control thing with the body, what you just said is what I’m trying to believe. Just like I believe Abby has a wisdom and a way that is better than mine for her, I have to believe that my body has a wisdom and a way that is better than my controlling plan for it. Because by the way, my controlling plan for it, was never my plan for it. It’s a patriarchal idea that has been planted in me that now I’m imposing upon my body. And have been forever. Right?
And that is the idea of control for women. It’s like you know, we’re born and everybody tells us we can’t trust any part of ourselves. Like you can’t trust your ambition, you can’t trust your anger, you can’t trust your envy, you can’t trust your hair. Like, you can’t trust your skin. You can’t trust your forehead wrinkles. Change, change, change, control, control, control, control, right? Like change everything, control everything. You as you are is wrong.
And it’s just like the weirdest little things like you know, trying to fix and change and control my depression and anxiety, actually. Those are two things are what contribute to making me a really good writer and artist, right? Like stupid things. How long sister, did I straighten my hair? I spent so much of my one wild and precious life, like someone told me along the way that straight hair was prettier, so I used to fry straight my hair every day for 20 years.
And one day I was like, screw it. Like I’m just gonna chop it and leave it curly. It knew what it wanted to do. Right? I could have left it alone and had better hair my whole damn life.
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
So it’s just this idea of what if we don’t have to control our people, or our body, or freaking anything. I don’t know. It’s a … the body thing is a final frontier thing for me.
AD:
And it’s we never find out. You know if you never trust your partner, you never find out if they’re worthy of trust.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
Because they never go and make their decisions for themselves that then you can see and say, “Damn, wouldn’t have done that, but good on you.”
GD:
Worked out. Yeah.
AD:
If we don’t trust our bodies, we will never know the power of our bodies.
GD:
Mm-hmm.
AD:
And I think … I also just find it mind-boggling that of all who people say, “Oh no, you need to live in your body and know your body and this is for the good of your body getting it healthy.” I mean I feel like every woman would be able to tell you 10 things about their body that they have tried to control, or that they have noticed or they have obsessed over. But we don’t actually know our bodies. In this country, how many women can tell you about the dramatic decade-long process of perimenopause and menopause? Like that is literally the way our bodies are made. How many people can tell you the parts of their body that can consistently and effectively give them an orgasm? That’s an incredibly important part of our body. Like when we say, we actually know the tiniest hair of percentages about our bodies, and that is intentional.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
Like for whom, and for what? The only parts-
GD:
Yes.
AD:
… of our bodies are that we understand and know how to use effectively are the parts that are made to be controlled for the purpose of keeping us under control.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
For the purpose of 50% of our time being spent doing that, and not doing something else.
GD:
Or to please someone else. Like what parts…we don’t know how our bodies work in the way you just described, but we’ve spent years obsessing about our what? Stomachs or our cellulite or what? Because that’s for other people’s viewing? As opposed to actually understanding how our bodies work for us.
AD:
And to be fair to women, like if we’re telling the whole picture here, we control ourselves to make ourselves – in the short run – more effective, more successful, more palatable because very unfortunately, because of fat phobia, women who are those things, who do follow the rules, in the short run, have privilege.
GD:
Have privilege, yes.
AD:
So, at the end of the day, we’re doing it because it’s quote unquote smart for us to do it. Okay?
GD:
Right.
AD:
But in the process of getting that privilege, we lose ourselves. We lose the wisdom of our bodies. The same wisdom of our bodies that tells us we wanna eat that, that tells us that we wanna indulge in that, is the same wisdom of our bodies than when we walk in a room and says, “Get me the fuck out of here, this ain’t right,” we lose that too by the way because we are so used to denying what we know, denying our hunger, explaining away what our body’s telling us and telling it to shut up, that we lose all the benefits of the wisdom of the body.
GD:
That’s right.
AD:
And we lose in the long run.
GD:
That’s right. And you’re right, that it’s not our fault. It’s like the don’t hate the players, hate the game. It’s the game.
AD:
Oh my God. I can’t believe we have you on tape saying, don’t hate the players, hate the game.
GD:
I mean is that not the case of patriarchy? We don’t hate individual women, or even men who have contorted themselves to be efficient pawns in the game of the patriarchy but let us be clear that that’s what we’re doing. Right?
AD:
When we’re winning, we’re losing. Like, they set up the game but in the process we have ceded our power, our inherent path.
GD:
And our lives. And our lives and our joy. Well, I’m gonna try to reclaim some of that power just by reclaiming some freaking time in the day, is what I’m doing. I’m not going into a dark room and getting on a machine to keep myself small anymore. And that is my little, teeny, huge political, personal act of revolution for this month. And I’ll let you know how it goes. But so far, so good.
AD:
It’s a big deal, it’s not little.
GD:
Yeah.
AD:
It’s not little, it’s a very big deal.
GD:
Alright, I love you, and I love this conversation. And let’s just take a little bit break, and then when we get back, we’ll answer some hard questions.
Okay everybody, let’s get started with some hard questions.
AD:
Our first question today is from Katie.
Katie:
My name’s Katie, I’m from Melbourne, Australia and um, I just love you Glennon and Amanda. So my hard question is, um, I have a daughter and she’s nine years old and she is overweight. Um, I even hate saying that, saying that term, like there’s a weight we’re all supposed to be, but you know, she’s healthy and she’s active, she plays sports and she eats the same things all my other kids do and she seems to be the only one who has this issue.
I, from someone who suffered from eating disorders my whole life, body image issues have made such a mission to never talk about my body or anybody else’s body, or comment on my children’s bodies, because I just don’t want that for them. But now she’s getting to an age where of course, she’s getting teased for being fat, and I tell her she’s perfect and beautiful, but I guess, I’m starting to wonder if I should be helping her try to perhaps change her body just to avoid the name calling and the troubles that inevitably are gonna happen in life. If you have any advice on what to do, I would so appreciate it. I love you guys. Thank you.
GD:
Okay, first of all I love Katie. What a fantastic mom you are Katie. First of all, I guess I wanna say thank you for being a mom who just knows to not comment on other people’s bodies and to tell your baby that she’s perfect over and over again. Well done.
I was listening really closely to what you were saying Katie, and some things that I noticed is that you said that your little girl is healthy and active, and eating what your other kids are eating and happy. And so I guess what I would say is, first of all, it feels like there’s an issue, right? We’re having an issue. But I wonder if the issue is her issue or if it’s the world’s issue.
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
You said it’s an issue, but I guess I would first ask whose issue is it, right? Because if your little one is healthy and active and happy and doesn’t sound like she has an issue, maybe it’s the world’s issue because our world is so unbelievably fatphobic, right? There are all different kinds of bodies, but we all have soaked in this idea that there’s only one acceptable kind of body. And so, because we also get that in, we get afraid when our children’s bodies fall outside of that very ridiculous, narrow, restrictive, cultural ideal. Right?
And then that fear, it’s contagious from us to them. So I remember in my family feeling very, very clearly the energy of fear that my parents thought that my body was too big. I remember that. And it wouldn’t have been said to me directly, it was just in the tips and the reminders and the, all of the little things that they said that made me understand, oh my body’s not okay. So, first of all, maybe your little girl is perfect as is your intuition. And maybe there is an issue, but maybe it’s the world’s issue. Maybe the, the world’s issue is that the world is fatphobic and maybe there’s nothing wrong with your little girl’s body.
And I bet you know that, it sounds like, you know that, but then there’s this other part that’s like, okay, that’s fine and good. Like we’re all set, our kids are perfect. It’s the world’s problem. But then your baby, our babies have to go out into the world and deal with the world’s problem. So Katie is, is hearing that her little girl’s being teased by the fat phobic world. Right? So, so if we don’t, there’s this feeling as a parent that, okay, I can decide that my baby’s perfect and tell her that she’s perfect, but am I sending her out without the armor she needs to deal with a world who will tell her over and over again that she is less than perfect, and is that being a good parent?
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
And I understand that deeply. I mean, when … I have a son who’s gay and I know through every bit of my being that he is absolutely and utterly perfect, and that there is an issue, but that it is the world’s issue, it is not my family’s issue and that there is homophobia in the world and that is the issue, and that’s the world’s problem and not family’s problem. But when my son goes out into the world and things happen over and over again, as you know sister, where he is called names, it’s like that part where it crosses over and the world’s problem hurts my baby.
And what I know about that, Katie is that as a mom and as a teacher, I was a teacher for a long time, and so I saw over and over again parents whose babies were different in outside of the narrow cultural expectation, whether that was body size or personality or sexuality or, or, or, or, or right? There is an approach where you try to change your baby for the world. Okay? There is that. And I understand it. I get it. We’re just, we don’t want our babies to be in pain, so we try to change our baby to make them more inside this narrow window of acceptability. And then our babies feel that.
Now the world is telling them they’re not okay. And then in some way, their parents are telling them they’re not okay either, and everybody now is telling them to change. Right? And then there’s this other way of going about things, which is like this thing that I saw that it felt to me like the babies who did the best, the babies who were a little bit different but did the best were the ones whose parents were vehemently and militantly and relentlessly on their children’s side about who they are. Right? So it felt to me and still feels to me, like little ones can deal with the whole world telling them they’re not okay if in their home, if their most important people are over and over again saying, yes, you are. It’s them. It’s not you.
AD:
Mm-hmm.
GD:
I feel like there’s no perfect answer, and there’s hardship on either side. It’s like, this is hard, that’s hard, choose your hard. Right? But-
AD:
Yeah.
GD:
… to me, the right kind of hard is staying relentlessly on your child’s side as they are and teaching them to see it as the world’s issue and not theirs. To me, it’s like, okay, my baby will be able to handle it if the entire world disapproves of her if she knows that her mama approves of her. Right? And instead of changing her, I’ll use all of that nervous, terrified energy to go out and change the world for her and let her watch me.
AD:
Yeah. I mean, there’s literally nothing harder than this impossible situation of sending our precious, perfect people out into a world that doesn’t deserve them. Like, it feels like it might actually kill me-
GD:
Yes.
AD:
… at certain points to do that over and over again, and just have them be vulnerable in a world that is cruel and doesn’t see them the way we see them. And I think I agree with everything that you’ve said, and I think there’s also this kind of math part of it to me that is like you could, Katie, have a potential short-term relief for your precious daughter and teach because the world is so fatphobic to teach her how to be thin now.
And you might have some short-term relief, but you also might have a long-term disaster, because as you know, you said that you dealt with eating disorders and I myself who is like, “safe” with the world by my sadness and sameness throughout my life, never saved me from feeling quite unsafe in my own skin. And I think that, you know, if she receives those messages from the world and from you, she might be temporarily safe out on the playground and in school and whatever, but she might spend decades of her life being unsafe inside of her head. And I think-
GD:
Oh, oh, that’s good. Yes.
AD:
When I think back over my life, I really think that I would have traded unconditional internal safety and peace inside my mind and head and body for the conditional and precarious safety that the world granted me because my body was palatable. And-
GD:
Yes.
AD:
And I just, when she was talking, I kept thinking of that phrase, all the water in the world can’t sink a ship unless it gets inside, and I just feel like it’s a very, very brave parent who will seal the ship. You know? I mean, it’s just, because it is true, Katie, that the world doesn’t deserve your daughter, but she deserves you. Like she deserves a mother who will see her as the perfect tender treasure that she is and refuses to pass along the world’s incessant messaging. That she needs to intervene to help her daughter, as early and often, be as controlled and to be safe in the world’s rules.
GD:
Amen.
AD:
And that will teach her every day in a million different ways that the world is wrong and her daughter’s body is right.
GD:
Yes.
AD:
And, I mean, it takes a very, very fierce mother to be willing to withstand that, ’cause you can feel it, you can feel it in the air. You can feel other people’s discomfort with your child’s body. You know it but let us just please let our daughters just understand that the world is confused and let them never be confused about the value of their own bodies. Just-
GD:
Yes.
AD:
… because truly, I mean, if your kids are gonna have any peace at all in life, it is going to start from the inside out.
GD:
Mm-hmm.
AD:
The outside in does not work. So just God love Katie and it’s hard and brave, but don’t let the water in and don’t be the one to pour it in.
GD:
Hmm. I love it. I love it. What, in one sentence, do you wanna wrap that up and say to Katie?
AD:
That if you know and believe your daughter is perfect and that there is nothing, not a hair on her head that you would change, you just relentlessly and shamelessly continue telling her that and continue believing that-
GD:
Yes.
AD:
… because they will sense if you’re saying, but you don’t actually believe. If your fear about the world is making you doubt your belief that she is perfect, she will sense that. So your only job is to continue to believe that your daughter is perfect and worthy of love and acceptance and celebration every day and telling her that.
GD:
As she is. And if you need to put all that nervous energy somewhere, you change the entire world before you change one hair on her little head, Katie. We love you.
AD:
Okay. We have a last question and it’s a write-in. “Hi, I’m Leslie. I just turned 50 and came home from my annual physical, and for the first time in my life, my doctor told me I am officially overweight. I don’t even know what my question is. I am just down and feel awful and don’t know what to do with my feelings about this.”
GD:
Okay. Um, well, let’s see. How do I address this from my perspective without getting in all kinds of trouble? Um, I love and respect doctors. I have had some very tricky situations involving weight and bodies and physicians in my life many, many, many times where I have felt like what a physician was telling me about my body was not right. Many situations where I felt like what a physician is telling my children about their bodies was not right. I actually got to the place a few years ago where I started going into the doctor, his office before my kids physicals.
Well, let me tell you one specific time. I went in to the doctor’s office and said, “I do not want you to say anything to my girls about their weight or their bodies. You do not have my permission to offer any sort of opinion or commentary on their weight. And I don’t want you to talk about it.” That particular time, the doctor said, “Okay, thank you for that information,” and then sat with my girls and said nothing to my older girl. And then to my younger one, who happens to be smaller and lighter, said, “Oh, your weight is perfect,” and smiled, which then of course my older one understood exactly what that meant about her.
AD:
And your younger one understood not to change her weight at all and be imperfect.
GD:
Whatever the hell “perfect” means for a body. So, I’m just telling you that after that, I said to the doctor, “You do not have my permission to comment positively or negatively in any way to my children about their weight, because I don’t know what’s going on here, but whatever you’re using as a barometer for what makes a perfect body is not right. I can’t describe it, but I can feel it in my bones that they are getting just as much poison in this office as they’re getting out in the world.”
AD:
Do you want me to describe the barometer to you?
GD:
Yes, because I always want you to tell me that I’m not crazy. I’m a goddamn cheetah.
AD:
Okay. I’m so excited we’re talking about this because it’s as if we have decided that there is an obesity epidemic** based on this certain criteria, and no one has bothered to interrogate the criteria that we’re using. So can we just start with this idea of fat? Like at what point we started quantifying people as fat or not, and how we started to equate fat with health.
GD:
Okay.
AD:
Because this is actually a relatively, very new phenomenon based on a very flawed rubric. So weight was not considered a primary indicator for health until the early 1900s. For 50 years after that, doctors started assessing weight in earnest in the 1900s. And it’s because they had new data to use and do you know who that data was from? It was from life insurance actuaries who had started building these lists of height and weight to optimize their profits. So, the doctors started using the lists from the life insurance companies and then like 35 years ago, the scientists got together and were like, “we don’t have a reliable way to talk about body and height and to assess individuals.” So, BMI was, is actually was only coined in 1972. This whole rubric that we use to decide whether people get life insurance, whether people get health insurance, whether you walk into the doctor’s office, and they say you’re overweight or not-
GD:
Whether schools send freaking letters home telling you that your little perfect child is overweight. Okay, go ahead, sorry.
AD:
…It’s ridiculous, by the way, there’s no business in that. Okay, so the BMI, this tomfoolery of BMI is based on a theory literally from 200 years ago by a Belgian astronomer. Okay? My man is a Belgian astronomer from 200 years ago and he was obsessed with identifying the characteristics of the ideal man. So, incidentally, his theory was also used to justify eugenics since he was only studying white Europeans, but, that aside. He also explicitly said that this was never to measure an individual person’s body fat or health. It was always supposed to be like assess the makeup of an entire population.
So, when modern researchers couldn’t find a workable measure to identify individuals’ body and health, they said, “what the hell, let’s go back to this 200-year-old theory that was specifically not for that purpose, we’ll call it BMI and we’ll use it for the rest of our lives, no one will ask any questions.”
GD:
I know who we can pick to tell us about our bodies. An astronomer.
AD:
From 200 years ago whose work was used to justify eugenics. Okay, so it’s completely illogical. I’m not saying we don’t have an obesity epidemic. What I’m saying is that we have collectively decided that there’s this objective referendum on whether our body’s okay or not based on this incredibly flawed metric. So if someone is obese**, they will have a high BMI. If someone has a high BMI, it does not mean that they are overweight or obese**. It does not take account at all for bone density. It grossly overestimates for Black folks. It underestimates for Asian folks. It is this one size fits all tomfoolery. And we use it for everything.
GD:
Ugh.
AD:
So, what I am saying to Leslie is that it’s like they have this “Thou is overweight!” And I would just like to say they probably took your BMI. You are probably… maybe you’re 21, maybe you’re 30, maybe you’re 31. You know what the average American woman’s BMI is?
GD:
What?
AD:
It’s 29.6. The average American woman is overweight. Okay? Is the average American woman overweight?
GD:
Right.
AD:
Or is ‘overweight’ criteria not in line with what our bodies are?
GD:
Yes, it’s like, once again, they’re telling us we’re too much. Over and over and over again, based on flawed criteria, not on flawed women, Leslie. It’s them, not us. It’s them not us.
AD:
Do you know the other thing? Talk about the ‘we’re flawed’, okay? The average American woman wears size 14 or 16. Do you know what the average clothing line size stops at? 12.
GD:
What in the…
AD:
We are literally…
GD:
…fuck is wrong with us.
AD:
…not making clothes for the women who exist.
GD:
Lord have mercy.
AD:
So the average person is bigger than the highest average size of clothing. We are literally not accommodating the women we have.
GD:
I see what you’re saying, Sister. If you guys could see…
AD:
Are you following me?
GD:
…her face right now. She’s about to explode into thin air. Okay. What we’re saying here, Leslie, is that we don’t know you and we can’t see you and we don’t know your BMI, but our bet is that you are goddamn perfect. Okay? That is what we believe.
Okay, let’s come back with our Next Right Thing.
We’re gonna try something different with the Next Right Thing. Today I’m gonna read to you a little something that I wrote about our bodies years ago. I think I pretty much wrote it to myself. I’m always writing what I need to hear and teaching what I need to learn so take a listen and I’ll follow up with a little job for you this week.
“Your body is not your masterpiece — your life is.
It is suggested to us a million times a day that our BODIES are PROJECTS. They aren’t. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our relationships are. Our work is.
Stop spending all day obsessing, cursing, perfecting your body like it’s all you’ve got to offer the world. Your body is not your art, it’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that YOU HAVE A PAINTBRUSH which can be used to transfer your insides onto the canvas of your life — where others can see it and be inspired and comforted by it.
Your body is not your offering. It’s just a really amazing instrument which you can use to create your offering each day. Don’t curse your paintbrush. Don’t sit in a corner wishing you had a different paintbrush. You’re wasting time. You’ve got the one you got. Be grateful, because without it you’d have nothing with which to paint your life’s work. Your life’s work is the love you give and receive — and your body is the instrument you use to accept and offer love on your soul’s behalf. It’s a system.
We are encouraged to obsess over our instrument’s SHAPE — but our body’s shape has no effect on its ability to accept and offer love for us. Just none. Maybe we continue to obsess because as long we keep wringing our hands about our paintbrush shape, we don’t have to get to work painting our lives. Stop fretting. The truth is that all paintbrush shapes work just fine — and anybody who tells you different is trying to sell you something. Don’t buy. Just paint.
No wait — first, stop what you are doing and say THANK YOU to your body — right now. Say THANK YOU to your eyes for taking in the beauty of sunsets and storms and children blowing out birthday candles and say THANK YOU to your hands for writing love letters and opening doors and stirring soup and waving to strangers and say THANK YOU to your legs for walking you from danger to safety and climbing so many mountains for you.
Then pick up your instrument and start painting this day beautiful and bold and wild and free and YOU.”
So how about for our Next Right Thing, we just think hard about the masterpieces we have created in our lives. That our body has helped us create. That’s all. Just think of a couple beautiful things. A couple beautiful relationships. A couple beautiful pieces of work. A couple… Anything we’ve ever been a part of creating that is beautiful that we would never have made without these bodies of ours. And when this week gets hard, you just remind yourself that we can do hard things. We’ll see you next week.
**Thank you for the education you have provided to us after this podcast aired about deeply problematic and harmful language including the words ob*se, ob*sity and ob*sity epidemic. We are grateful for this education, and are eliminating these phrases from our vocabulary moving forward, as well as learning from the educators you guided us toward.