What is it about women that makes them obsess about weight?
Why is it that when a woman enters a room, the first thing you notice is her
size? Why does a friend or a relative you haven’t seen in a long time always
start a conversation about how much weight you’ve gained or how much weight
you’ve lost? Why do you feel sad when you can’t slip into your jeans easily
anymore… why do you feel happy when you can fit into a smaller jeans size?
Why do I feel guilty when I eat an ice-cream? Why does the
thought of not eating carbs make me miserable? When was the last time I didn’t
count the food I was eating? Why do I care? Why should I care? Why does my
weight have so much power to influence my happiness?!
From as early as I could remember- my mother would always
warn me about the dangers of getting fat. My father would sneak me chocolates,
but my mother was always ready to count the sweeties in my hand. Her favorite
line to reprimand me: “Don’t overload your plate”. By the age of six, I clearly
understood the concept: If you eat too much, you’ll get fat.
Nevertheless, I am grateful to my mother for ingraining this
very annoying truth in my being. I am healthy and that trumps any self-image
issues … not quite. I thought I left those insecurities in high-school. Unfortunately,
they have managed to wiggle its way out of the dark, abandoned corner of adolescence and shamelessly
stalk me, nullifying the freedom I mistakenly thought comes with adulthood. No
matter what I accomplish in life, no matter what progress I make in my career,
no matter how many successful relationships I build with people, when I get
home and stare at myself in the mirror- there’s an elephant staring back.
In high-school- if it wasn’t my skin, it was my size.
In varsity- If it wasn’t my size, it was my hair.
Currently- If it’s not my hair, it’s my skin. And the one
constant in all of this- my weight.
I’m not going to tell you a story of how I looked past this
silly notion and learned to embrace my curves. (In fact- that vomit-inducing
saying: “Real women have curves”, is wrong. I’m no doctor, but I studied Life Sciences
for three years and I can confidently say: Curves don’t make a woman. Anatomy
does). I digress, what I want to tell you is that I don’t know why women have
self-image issues. It’s like when we’re born, we immediately get awarded a
badge that says: “There’s something wrong with you”. And then you progress
beyond toddler phase and then that monster badge rears its ugly head and you
basically have a screwed up idea of yourself for the rest of your life. (I know
this because my grandmother was 80+ and still telling me not to get fat- some
ideas never die… Oh my word, I think I finally figured out the plot of
Christopher Nolan’s Inception.)
I am not going to come down on media for influencing our
standards of beauty. Surely, by now we should know that something only has as
much power over you as you allow it to. But we don’t. I don’t. There are days
when I like myself. But there are more days when I don’t like myself. Nothing
changes. It’s not like I grow more beautiful some days and then morph into
something ugly the next.
It’s like there’s a short circuit in my brain because
there’s an elephant occupying a room in my mind that also holds my ideas about
beauty. The room says- the elephant doesn’t fit and cannot be beautiful. But
really, we shouldn’t hate the elephant. We should let her trumpet that uniquely
majestic sound of hers so that the walls of that room can come down. That room,
that very room is what’s limiting our thinking, our ideas of beauty and the way
we see ourselves. That room says big is bad, loud is wrong and happiness is
influenced by the way you look.
The problem is not the elephant. She is beautiful. The
problem is the room. It can’t contain her beauty.
