Celebrating our bodies as they are: for this midlife woman, a long overdue invitation

More than a year after initiating my divorce, old and harmful ways of thinking about my body are marring my new chapter. It's time to turn the page and redefine my concept of beauty.

We’d known each other since we were 13 years old and yet here we were, in our late 50s, my friend Barbara and I, energetically discussing my recent decision to join Weight Watchers. I confessed my strategy of wearing my lightest clothes when I stepped on the scale for the weekly weigh-in, holding my breath for the verdict. Had my obsessive point counting delivered the prize? My self-worth hung in the balance. She shared how she’d been upping her time at the gym and refraining from sugar. Then she paused and asked, “Amy, how long have we been having this conversation? When is it ever going be enough?

I didn’t have the answer. All I knew was that if I lost these twenty—ideally thirty—pounds, life would be good. I’d succeed more in my career. I would be happier in my marriage. I would have more fun. I would feel good in my body. I’d finally have the confidence to pursue all my dreams. And oh yeah, I might be healthier. I might live longer. Yet those most important reasons for wanting to be a “healthy weight” (which I now know has nothing to do with one’s Body Mass Index or BMI) barely entered my calculations. My body had to fit into the box I had created for it, and that box, for my five foot two frame, was a small one.

That conversation with my friend was six years ago. Weight Watchers worked for awhile until it didn’t, and all the weight came back. In the ensuing years, I gave up drinking alcohol. I became a vegan. I started walking more regularly. I became devoted to online fitness classes (a pandemic silver lining). I confronted the unhappiness in my marriage and asked for a divorce. The pounds fell away. Ironically, during one of the most anguished periods of my life, from the spring of 2022 to the fall of 2023, I finally fit myself into that small box. I wouldn’t have to think about my weight ever again.

Most women understand how this story goes. I gained the weight back. The stress of a divorce, live-in caregiving for my mother with dementia and working full time meant little time for exercise or the healthy meals I was batching each week. I was resorting to pre-packaged frozen organic vegan meals, canned soup and sneaking out for early morning 15-minute walks while Mom slept, always fearing I would come home and find she had fallen on the way to the bathroom (she didn’t, thankfully).

And now, sixteen months after initiating the divorce, Mom is in memory care and I am living in my first-ever apartment on my own. So nothing is keeping me from that former ideal: the thin (or thinner) body I’d been chasing since my teens. My new apartment community here in south Florida has a fully equipped gym and exercise room. There are walking paths. Still, I’m in a rut. Each day I wake up and think, today is the day I will get to the gym, or at least on my yoga mat. I’ll take a 15-minute walk, get the juices flowing. That all makes sense. Healthy goals, right?

But here’s the thing. I now see the box for what it is—a teeny, tiny cage of my own making that will never be enough. There will always be more pounds to lose, more reps at the gym, a smaller size of jeans to squeeze into. Exercise and healthy eating are great. But diet culture and impossible standards of thinness have got to be off the menu. Barbara’s words echo: When will it ever be enough? Figuring out the answer is the next layer of my growth and it has nothing to do with the size of my body.

I think about the nesting I wrote about last week, that I am the chrysalis waiting to become the butterfly. Can I feel in to what my body needs and wants without demanding a certain idea of perfection that may not be (is likely not) my own?

Fortunately, I’m surrounded by wonderful teachers and sources of inspiration when it comes to body positivity and I am finally listening. I am trying to let go of more than half a century of societal conditioning about what defines beauty, especially when it comes to a woman’s physical beauty and body—at any age.

Recently I’ve been introduced to the concept of body reverence by my coach Nicole Terrell, the founder of Wildly Worthy Women, whose focus is helping single women find themselves while they're in between relationships, so they don't lose themselves in their future relationships.

She explains the idea of body reverence this way: it is about a woman regarding her body with the same indulgence, appreciation and reverence as she would toward a baby—in awe of the perfection of this tiny human life simply because the baby exists in the world and is deserving of love.

It doesn’t take many years before the girl grows up and the world tries to stuff her in a box labeled This is Beauty. It is a very small box. Any favorable self-regard of her body is quickly supplanted by other messages, perhaps from her family and peers, and most definitely society, telling her all the ways her body is not measuring up. If a girl or woman suffers sexual trauma, as so many do, getting out of that box is even more fraught with peril.

I’m ready to break out of the box—once and for all. Which is why Nicole’s program, Inner Spark: conscious dating after divorce for the woman committed to personal and spiritual growth seems made for me. So far, it’s been a deep, eye-opening and also joyous journey. I am not ready to date yet (umm..it was 1988 the last time I dated and it’s a whole new world out there, and I’m not finding it particularly inviting). More importantly, I am still figuring out what it is I want from my life in this second act. In the work with Nicole I am coming to understand that part of my resistance to dating are old hangups about my body being beautiful enough. That’s why I love the way Nicole has designed the program: before I even consider setting up an online profile I need to date myself first. That I can do. I know what Amy likes—at least I think I do. She and I are game to try new things.

Meanwhile, I am trying on for size the idea that size doesn’t matter. I’m not leaning toward any new diet or exercise regimen. I have several years of experience of the whole-food plant-based eating I learned from the Clean Food Dirty Girl community with its menus, recipes and cooking tutorials, led by founder and coach Molly Patrick, and it has served me well. Eating this way since 2018 I haven’t needed to follow any other diet. It’s just whole foods, mostly plants, all the time.

Still, with the major transitions in my life of the past year and a half, I’ve needed to be reminded of the power of intuitive eating, which I first learned from Molly. It’s an approach to eating that focuses on the body's response to cues of hunger and satisfaction, with the idea of fostering a positive relationship with food as opposed to pursuing "weight control". You can find a treasure trove of first-hand experience and expert knowledge on intuitive eating¹ and the freedom in letting go of the diet culture forever from Kristi Koeter of

Almost Sated

. This article by Kristi really hit home as she shares this deeply moving account of what finally made her get off the diet rollercoaster—the effect it was having on her own daughters. This was the question she advises we ask ourselves:

At some point, it’s time to take action. So listen to that little voice in your head. Lean in and ask her what she’s scared of. Listen to what she’s trying to tell you and see if you can make sense of it. What’s stopping you? If not now, when?

I also want to give a shout-out to my college roommate from Simmons University, Lisa D. Ellis, a registered dietician, certified eating disorders specialist, and food therapist with decades of experience with intuitive eating, who has just published a new book, Why Did I Just Eat That? It’s a comprehensive guide to healthy eating, promoting an all-foods-fit model and mindfulness to explain the connection between human emotions, habits, and physical satisfaction. Lisa rejects the toxic constraints of diet culture and instead encourages self-acceptance, eating intuitively, and fundamentally redefining our relationship with food.

Another terrific expert on dismantling diet culture and anti-fat bias is

Virginia Sole-Smith

who writes

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

, the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. Check out this conversation on bodies getting sober, divorced and other BLTs (Big Life Transitions).

And finally, in the way the universe seems to send messages just when you most need them,

Elizabeth Gilbert

in

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

this past Sunday asked her voice of unconditional love about worthiness. Love categorically rejected the word “worth.”

It’s a measuring word, a word that grew out of the marketplace. You can only know something’s worth in comparison to another thing…Haven’t you spent enough of your life in that troublesome wasteland already? Comparing, measuring, valuing and devaluing, being valued and devalued? Isn’t that the premise of the entire culture in which you live, and isn’t it a culture that is killing all it touches? How much longer do you want to remain devoted to the subject of worth, when all it does is hurt and destroy?

The perfect counterpoint to Liz’ letter was the one from her guest,

Chrissy King

the author of The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom. Love told her, in part:

You’ve made a lot of choices and decisions that didn’t always feel easy but on the other side of hard decisions, you have always been waiting for yourself with open arms and a warm embrace. Sometimes you’ve felt lost, but you’ve always come back home to yourself. You always say that falling in love with yourself is the greatest love story of all time and you continue to prove that to yourself time and time again. You continue to fall more in love with yourself each day.

My mother likes to tell the story—even now she remembers it—that the nurses said “I was the prettiest baby in the nursery.” I look at that baby picture now with my chubby arms and squeezable cheeks and big smile, and I am reminded that I can still revere the beauty of my body—chubby arms and all—more than 60 years later.

Amy, 1960.

Out for ice cream by the jetty with Mom, December 2023

Questions for the comments: As you’ve aged, have your attitudes toward your body and toward diet culture changed and if so, how? What is your mantra today when it comes to your own body and sense of beauty?

Paid subscribers can find my voice-over of the article over here on my podcast.

Three Songs for 3D

Divorce

“Hearts and Bones,” Paul Simon

Thinking back to the season before
Looking back through the cracks in the door

Dementia

“Butterfly,” Jon Batiste

Butterfly all alone
But can you fly on your own?
Take your place in the world today
Butterfly flying home

Destiny

“Body,” SMYL

Give my new body a chance
Patient now it's all that I have

1. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works and The Intuitive Eating Workbook, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch.