My Menopause Blog

It might have been the summer of 1992…maybe 93. I was standing on my scales, in the bathroom, trying to change the reading to a lower poundage by shifting my weight from my heels to toes. University educated, capable of understanding complex social issues, I balanced back and forth in an embarrassing game that I’d been playing with myself most of my life. The disconnect between the vibrant leader I knew myself to be and the confusing creature that wanted to be 129 pounds and not a hair more was getting harder and harder to reconcile.

Suddenly, something snapped in my mind. I stepped off the scale. Rather than push it away in disgust, I picked it up. With no other thought in my mind, I briskly walked downstairs, out to the porch where my garbage can lived, open the lid and tossed the scale in, tightly clamping down the top with a bang.

Finally, after year’s of struggle and pain, I began the end of my obsession with my weight.

On Sunday, I read Judith Timson’s column in the Globe and Mail titled: ‘I love the weight loss, but hate the obsession’. Judith is, I would say in her forties, writes well and seems to live an interesting life. And yet, Judith admits to spending much of her valuable energy worrying about not a hundred or even a few dozen pounds of excess weight, but rather 10 pounds that she has decided she cannot live with. From here she wonders why her reed shaped daughters micro-manage every morsel that pass their lips and can’t see how she infected them with her disease.

I put down the paper and felt like weeping. Smart, attractive, interesting women with the capacity to improve our world in wondrous ways are hog tied into a self image loop that forever keeps them off balance, unsure, and constantly looking over their shoulder, fearful of fat. Unexamined and unaware, they pass the plague on to future generations.

The fat they fear is every pound over, and you may fill in your own magic number, 129 pounds. Thin has no range. Only fat gets such privilege to roam.

Fat. Billions of women starve in the world. We shamefully fear fat.

The first few months post bathroom scale removal were tough. I was breaking a daily habit of monitoring my weight, sometimes exercised several times in a twenty four hour period. I could no longer take part in the habitual diet conversations with my friends, knowing intuitively that such talk only fed my sick habit. Still, I’d shamefully sneak rides on the weigh scales at homes I visited, never believing the numbers that appeared.

Slowly I began to deconstruct my fear that fat would gob on me in the dark of night by reading feminist literature about ‘why’ women eat. Tis rarely hunger that motivates the mowing down of a entire container of ice cream.

Once I started to identify my shame and emotional triggers for heading to the fridge I had something to work with. I could change my food beliefs to something more positive, healthy and life affirming and break my addiction to my compulsive thoughts.

None of this is easy. Nor have the thoughts completely gone away. But I’ll tell you this. It’s way easier than it was before that fateful ’scale in the garbage’ day. Now, over the course of the four seasons, my weight increases, then decreases like a natural tide.

With menopause moving into my body, more shape and size change is likely. I may have to re-visit my bookcase to shore up my resolve and spend some time examining my current beliefs. But now that I’ve lived with greater ‘ease in my body’ for so many year’s, it feels unlikely that I will slip back to the head knot angst of days gone by.

I wish Judith peace with her body. I wish all girls and women peace with their bodies.

Sue Richards

PS. I do not control the ad content on the right of this page. My apologies if weight loss ads appear. That said, clicking on any of them results in me making a few coins off the diet pushers…somewhat subversive when you think about it.

Tags: My Menopause Blog, Blog Guelph.