Thanks to Shari for the pointer to this thought-provoking post — Don’t tell me to love my body — by Elyse over on Skepchick:
I want to talk to you about how you talk to me about how I talk about my body, and how I talk about how I feel about my body, and what’s wrong with everything you have to say about what I have to say.
In short, fuck you.
I don’t love my body. My body is awful. I will never love my body. I never have. And I’m 35 and maybe you think that’s too old to have real hang ups about my body. But I do. And I always will. And maybe you think that because I’ve lost a bunch of weight I should feel great about my body. But I don’t. And I won’t.
At I first thought that perhaps Elyse was over-reacting. Maybe people really mean “love yourself” rather than “love your body.” But a search for the latter yielded 69 results just in my Google reader feed!
Hmmm. As someone who has lost 100+ pounds three times and is pushing retirement age, I can relate. Accept? Embrace? Cherish? These are verbs that feel a bit more practical to me. And as a matter a fact, lately I have given up things like “learn to love yourself” and “live with passion” and “find yourself.”
These days, I’m just asking if I am I being kind to myself.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
Hi, Beth,
I love the attitude, and I get the aversion to being told what to do.
I don’t love my body, either. It has the scars of being formerly much larger, including two actual scars across my breasts from reduction surgery — how many men you know who can say that? It will never be anything like anything anyone would call pretty.
But I don’t hate it, either. It looks like it looks. It’s much better than it was when I was 365, it does most of what I want it to do, functionally, and that’s good (even surprising) news, given all that I put it through in younger days. I have taken to jogging, in my mid-50s, at a time when many normal-bodied active people have had to move to something less impactful, because they’ve been impacting their joints for decades already. I was too, with 150-plus extra pounds on my frame, but so far, I jog without pain (or much speed, I could add).
I will love what I love, so don’t try to school me on it. For me, removing (most of) the negative side has removed the need to merrily add a positive side that doesn’t seem reasonable. My body is OK the way it is, and if I also want to keep trying to improve it in the ways that are attainable, that’s OK too.
Not that long ago I would have wanted to tell Elyse that she MUST love her body. I’ve (mostly) gotten over that urge. What I know for sure, for ME, is that choosing to love my body as is helps ME. When I love my body, I care for it in a way that I did not when I hated/feared my body (and yes, I place “hate” and “fear” close together).
I also very much understand the value of the middle-ground…the place where we can be objective and/or curious about the reality of our bodies. That’s a healthy place to be!
Amen…Am I being kind to myself is good enough!
This is a very interesting (and complex) subject, which perhaps speaks to some of the issues I’ve been researching recently in relation to “residual obesity stigma” (internalized and/or explicit forms of oppression, related to body image, which remain after weight loss).
For example, according to one study, residual obesity stigma may account for the following findings:
“We examined individuals who previously belonged to a stigmatized group, the overweight, and then became normal weight. Negative stereotypes, including those relating to obesity, are internalized from the time of childhood onward… Drawing on a nationally representative sample, we examined for the first time whether formerly overweight individuals are susceptible to any anxiety disorder, any depressive disorder, and suicide attempts. As predicted, the likelihood of any anxiety disorder and any depressive disorder for the formerly overweight group was significantly greater than for the consistently normal-weight group, and not significantly different from the consistently overweight group. Further, the formerly overweight group was significantly more likely to attempt suicide than the other groups…The results suggest that losing a self-image shaped by stigma is a more protracted process than losing weight.”
Link to above article in pubmed—http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22560867
An additional study about “residual stigma” also reported related findings:
“Lean individuals who were formerly obese were stigmatized more on attractiveness than weight-stable lean individuals, and as much as currently obese individuals…These results suggest that residual stigma remains against people who have previously been obese, even when they have lost substantial amounts of weight and regardless of their weight-loss method. Exposure to portrayals of the malleability of body weight, such as those promoted in the popular media, may significantly worsen obesity stigma.”
Link to above article—http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22395810
Beth, I hope you don’t mind if I share these (above) lengthy quotations from the abstracts. I believe they may be useful (helpful) for understanding some of the feelings and perceptions that Elyse and others experience and describe so poignantly. Perhaps studies such as these (cited above), and other studies about stigma, may at least offer some validation (and possible empathy) for those whose painful struggles with body image (etc) don’t simply disappear or fade away after weight loss.
Thanks so much for allowing me to share!