Work in Progress

The roller coaster of loving my body

If you’ve followed my writing for awhile, or if you know me personally, then you are probably aware of the fact that I have written a lot about my journey to loving and accepting my body, weight loss and gain, and trying to adopt a healthy attitude towards the aforementioned things, etc. If you haven’t read any of those, you can catch up on them in the following links:

1. The short version of the ‘not commenting on people’s weight’ article that was published on Insider. (you can choose this one, #2, or #3—but no need to read them all. They are all versions of the same story).

2. The medium length version of the above, but posted here on my Substack.

3. The really long and original version of it posted on my old blog site where I realized how important of a topic it was because of the huge reaction to it.

4. My other Insider article about shame around taking weight loss drugs. (this is separate from the other 3).

There have been various other posts and essays I’ve written over the years, but these are the main ones. Essentially, the main takeaway is that the journey to self-love and body acceptance has never once been linear. And no sooner do I take a step forward, then something comes along to knock me a step back. Every time a life circumstance changes, I have to recalibrate myself towards loving and accepting my body again. And that’s ok.

I am not on board with the online people that would have you think their wellness journeys are linear and that they’ve solved everything permanently. I never want to be one of those people. I want to be honest. And the truth is—everyone has hard days, weeks, months, etc. When you are doing healing work on yourself, of any kind, it isn’t a straight shot and there is no finish line.

One of my most stubborn hurdles has always been my relationship to my body, and I am FAR from alone on this. Which is why I like to write about it. Because people seem to find comfort when I share these secret thoughts we all have.

Recently, I’ve had a new hurdle with my body that I have been working on, and I thought it would be helpful to share it with you. As stated in my other articles, I have faced challenges with my self-love and acceptance in terms of my body and my weight in a variety of ways. Some of these factors include: the way I grew up, the messages in society around me, influences from family and friends, my marriage and divorce, dating, weight loss drugs, my chronic illness, depression and anxiety, and a myriad of other life events and influences.

I saw an amazing therapist who really helped me get over the biggest obstacles, and I’ve mostly stayed on a fairly healthy track with it since then. However, from time to time, things will knock me a little off course, and I use those tools from therapy to get myself back on target.

After working on the deepest and oldest issues, and coming out the other side, then the hardest part (in my opinion) is done. So, in therapy, once I made it through the many years of past issues, when something new would come up and throw me off, it was easier to get back on track again because of the foundation I already had. Not to say it was easy, but it was easier. And not to say the deep past stuff doesn’t come back up again, but it’s much more manageable now.

For instance, once I made it through to the other side of a lot of painful work digging into the first 35 years of my life, and the upbringing that brought me to a place of hating my body, I was in a much better spot—physically, emotionally, and mentally. Then I got a chronic illness that made it impossible for me to maintain a lot of the healthy progress I’d made with the physical portion—since I wasn’t able to exercise anymore.

In response, I turned to a medical weight loss pill called Phentermine. In taking this I had to confront the shame I was feeling for taking a diet pill when I’d worked so hard to love and accept my body. After that, I faced the emotional rollercoaster of losing some weight at first, but then having it plateau after a handful of months. And then going off the pill after it stopped working led to gaining some weight back. Waiting a couple of months and starting the med up again resulted in losing a few more pounds. Then another plateau. Lather, rinse, repeat.

However, I had the wellness tools to get through the emotional setback without as much damage as it would have done prior to therapy. Beyond that, I also knew to be gentle with myself for not being perfect at this whole self-love thing. And I knew to be gentle with myself for not always succeeding at being gentle with myself. Plus, my therapist helped me through all of that, too. A few steps forward, one step back, then a few more steps forward again. Each time it gets a little easier to pick yourself up and dust yourself off because your foundation is bigger and stronger from all of the previous shizz.

Well, I have recently encountered a new setback that I am working through. And, I use the term setback loosely, because the situation that put me here is not a step back. However, the reaction I’ve had to the situation is a step back. The situation is—I met someone and we started dating, then we fell in love, and then officially made it a relationship. And I started questioning my love for my body again, and I’m working through it again.

I used to have a TON of triggers around the appearance of my body when it came to men and dating. Probably more than anything else in my life. And I worked nonstop in therapy around resolving past issues with past men—especially my ex-husband. And during that time in therapy, I started dating again and worked hard on this as the dates came and went. This was especially true with the dating apps and the horrible things men said to me about my body on them.

In that time period, I eventually had a mini-relationship. During that relationship, I saw a lot of progress in how I viewed my body. I was also able to release much of the anxiety I had about what I assumed he was thinking about my body. I occasionally experienced a setback, but for the most part it was forward momentum.

Then I got Long COVID, became disabled, moved home, and I stopped dating. I was unable to exercise due to my illness, gained weight, got depressed due to my illness and weight gain, and gained more weight. I saw doctors for my illness who incorrectly blamed weight as my sole issue, got frustrated, gained some more weight, and was at the end of my rope. Then I went on medical weight loss, lost weight, felt shame around this medicine and weight loss, and then lost some more. After awhile the med stopped working, I stopped taking it as a result, and so I gained a little weight back. Then I waited a while and started taking the med again, leading to losing a little more weight again, etc etc.

Once again, I sat down with my therapist and worked through it. I got through the diet pill shame, the frustration with my illness, and a variety of other new (and some old) feelings that were coming up. I wasn’t perfect about it all. I never am. But I was good about it all. I was evened out again.

After I was on more solid ground with it all, I took a break from therapy in order to focus on some other self-healing methods. I felt it was time to mix it up a little with my wellness practices—to keep things from getting stagnant. I’m a big fan of therapy to be sure, but I think it helps to change up our routines from time to time. So I did.

Then I met a guy. And a few flurries of the usual insecurities came up. Some of them body-related and some of them not. There nothing too crazy though, and I was able to use the therapy tools to move through them and be ok. Starting out with these in the beginning, I did pretty well. Little mean voices would try to rear their ugly heads, but I did a good job telling them to fuck off.

However, as time passed, and the relationship started getting more serious, those voices became more frequent and louder. I was entering territory that I haven’t seen since the relationship that turned into my marriage (BTW—I am absolutely not saying this is turning into marriage! LOL! I’m just saying I haven’t been in anything else serious since then.) So, I got freaked out.

I freaked out because one of the few reasons I was given by my ex when he ended our marriage was that I had gained too much weight and he wasn’t attracted to me anymore. And I haven’t let myself be that close to anyone since. I haven’t told another guy I loved him since.

When my marriage ended I subsequently lost a bunch of weight, dated a number of jerks, and slept with a lot of men that I didn’t bother to take seriously. After a couple of years of that, I was over it. Then I gained a fair amount of weight for a variety of reasons—one of the major reasons being that I didn’t want to “attract” men anymore because I was too emotionally burned out by them. And in my mixed-up head at that time, I equated gaining weight with men not being attracted to me and therefore leaving me alone.

After a year or so of hiding away and eating McDonald’s, I got lonely and wanted to date again. But I couldn’t lose the weight. And when I tried to date I was insanely insecure about my body and told myself no one would be attracted to me. I hated myself for not being able to lose weight to meet someone. I hated that I couldn’t meet someone. And many times, on the dating apps, I would encounter shitty men who would confirm this shitty narrative. So I began to double down on the idea that no one would be attracted to me at that weight.

When I did meet men that weren’t having any kind of issue with my size, I would self-sabotage until it couldn’t possibly work out for us. I just couldn’t get myself to believe that it wasn’t an issue or wouldn’t become one. So I did everything I could to blow those situations up.

As such, my therapist had her work cut out for her, and she worked tirelessly with me on these damaging, mean, false, shitty internal narratives I was playing in my head on repeat. And we made a lot of progress. Like I mentioned before, I even got myself through a mini-relationship where I was in a much better headspace about all of that. The love I had for myself and my body translated very well into a relationship in which I felt much more strong and confident than I had before (at least in terms of my physical appearance).

After a few months, unfortunately, I did have to end that relationship because of entirely unrelated reasons. While that sucked, I felt really good about the fact that I was strong enough to honor my boundaries and end it. It was hard in a lot of ways, but the one good thing I was able to carry with me was the fact that I could meet guys who were attracted to me just the way I was. My love for myself was what I needed to attract the right type of guy.

Since then, I have worked super hard on my views of romantic relationships, and on being attracted to the right type of guy. I spent the time that I was too sick to date trying to heal my attachment style and my past relationship issues. While I have still encountered some doozies, and learned some romantic lessons the hard way during all of this, I maintained a level of mindfulness that brought me through those circumstances in a much healthier and more honest way.

In each relationship situation I have been honest with myself, spoken my truth to others, been vulnerable, paid close attention during each moment, enacted better boundaries, used my tools to coach myself through, and worked on it in therapy (before I took a break). I’ve tackled my co-dependent behaviors in not only romantic contexts, but in basically every kind of relationship you can have with a person.

Listen, I ain’t gonna sugar coat it—it has been fucking BRUTAL. Zero out of ten—I would say I don’t recommend it, but unfortunately I do have to recommend it. Because, even though it is so GD hard, it does eventually end up being rewarding and healing. UGH!

And just when I thought I couldn’t take anymore of this brutal relationship healing, I met someone. And I started putting into real-life practice all of my therapeutic work on self-love, body positivity, acceptance, secure attachment, healthy relationship views, boundaries, vulnerability, and all of the other therapy buzz words. And none of it has been easy or gone perfectly. And a lot of it hasn’t gone the way I expected it to. But, I have been doing it, and I’m taking it day by day.

While I was primarily focused on my more recent self-help endeavor—healthy attachment—I wasn’t paying much attention to an older issue that I thought was good to go. Turns out, my view of my body still had a few issues lingering under the surface. And, like I mentioned above, at first it wasn’t too much of an issue. I was doing pretty good in that area. Because during the first few months I was in relationship territory I’d been in before, and had already successfully traveled. Loving my body during early dating stages had been previously conquered.

However, I had yet to pass up those early stages and move into more serious “love” territory since my ex-husband. The marriage that ended with one of the reasons being my larger body. I hadn’t told anyone I loved them since that relationship. And here I was, falling in love with someone new, post all my body-love work.

So, ya know, I began to spiral and self-sabotage into some old unhealthy thoughts. Worrying about gaining weight in the relationship, worrying about how skinny his ex’s were, worrying about my size compared to his size (including my height which plays into the overall size issues I face), etc. Then I started making comments. Those comments just snowballed into more worry about the above-mentioned things. And sometimes he makes off-hand comments that I take the wrong way and/or I overthink.

However, after a little while of me doing this, he put me in my place in the best way possible. He said something along the lines of, “Ok. Stop. Now you are making me mad. My girlfriend is a big woman and if anyone has a problem with that, they can deal with me. There is nothing bad about it, and you need to get over whatever bad thoughts you are having about it.” And while that may sound a little too straight-forward and blunt for some, it was perfect for me.

If you know me at all, you know that I can bulldoze people very easily and it is rare for someone to be able to stop me in my destructive tracks. Sometimes I need someone to be sharp as fuck with me. And, also, sometimes I need people to deal with me softer than they would a baby. It’s a delicate balance with a fine line, and I genuinely don’t even know where that line is. But, all that to say, I met my match.

As such, my butt has been kicked back into gear with that little wake-up call. I’m bouncing back from my “body-love fall from grace” so much faster than I used to at the beginning of this journey. Listen, I think it is kind of impossible to ride a horse forever and never fall off of it even once.

And even after those really big falls in the beginning, you keep getting back up and learning more each time. The falls become fewer and further between after those first few big ones. You can even work with a professional horse rider so much that you become a professional yourself.

Of course, you still encounter falls from time to time. But the falls become smaller and easier to come back from. You know how to fall when it happens. You know how to recover when it happens. The recovery happens faster and easier. You aren’t scared of getting back up because you’ve done it before and have succeeded. I mean, what is the alternative? Never riding the horse again? I can’t live that way.

All of that to say, no matter where you are on your healing journey—no matter what kind of healing you are doing—it is never linear and it is never finished. And that’s ok. Life wouldn’t have meaning if it was. And the true finish line doesn’t come til the day we die.

So, I write this on the off-chance that my extreme oversharing can help at least one of you feel better about where you are at right now. There are too many people writing books, posting on social media, and talking on the TV who try to act like you can achieve total healing in their perfect 10-step plan. And they act like their lives got exponentially better and in a linear fashion when they did this 10-step plan. And like they have almost zero problems now as a result. We all know that isn’t true, but for some reason we still keep eating it up and comparing ourselves to them.

I’m here to say that whatever you are doing, you are doing the best you can. And there is no one you are competing with. You are riding the horse because you want to ride the horse.

The personal story I have just shared with you is a real and honest story of the roller-coaster that is working on yourself (and taking breaks from working on yourself—because life is not meant to be a constant marathon of working on yourself). If you’ve had a set-back, then you’re just like every other fucking human on earth until the day you die. Because we never stop having them. We just hopefully can get a little better at recovering from them as time goes on and we get more practice. And if you have a period where you don’t get better at recovering from setbacks, then that is absolutely OK too gosh darnit.

Sometimes I love my body. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I am neutral towards it. Sometimes I write about it. I’m working on loving it more than I hate it, and liking it when I can’t love it, and being neutral towards it when I can’t like it. I am a work in progress.

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