Living with it or being at ease with yourself.
These are the words that often come back when I mention my approach with doctor Zermati, here and there. “Why do you want to lose weight you always said you lived with it?”, “There’s dishonesty, you’ve claimed for years on your blog that you were living with it and here you are on a diet?”. “So curvy girls are not at ease with themselves, that’s it?”. “Are there happy fat girls who are at ease with themselves?”
More generally, it’s a term we can read everywhere, in more or less serious magazines: “live with your figure”, “how to embrace your curves”, and so on and so forth.
I can’t answer in the name of all overweight girls, only as far as I’m concerned.
Let’s be clear, yes I’m at ease with myself. Because according to me, being at ease with yourself means living your life, despite kilos, allowing yourself to be happy, not being ashamed, going to the beach, showing yourself half naked, making love, pampering yourself before going out.
Being at easy with yourself, it’s accepting yourself inside and outside. In other words, I claim the right to be fat without having to suffer teasing, snap judgments and cheap advices on cholesterol which will end up biting my head off. I yell loud and clear that Big Beauty and consort have as much legitimacy as Punky and her friends taking pictures of themselves and playing top model on the web.
But.
It doesn’t mean I’d rather not be slim.
Neither does it mean I was living well with the kilos that had piled up lately, thanks to my pregnancy, baby blues, approaching 40s and a deviant food behavior.
Thus, this picking up of the issue.
I think we are dying, in this society, from wanting to stick people in categories. Proud curvy girls can’t become slim, math brains can’t feel like going to a history class, French people must feel exclusively French and be able to define themselves according to precise criteria during stupid debates, and so on.
If life was that simple, we’d know. You can, for years, sincerely think that you accommodate very well yourself to some physical or character traits. And then finally realize one morning that this weight you’ve been carrying is not only the fruit of your ill imagination. That luggage, you want to put it down and even empty it.
That’s what happened to me – and not only once, alas it’s not my first attempt – in September. That’s what took my hand and brought me to knock on Doctor Z.’s door.
Maybe this weight loss will be durable, maybe not, I’ve had too many relapses to have certainties today. What I know is no I won’t have to change this blog’s name since even with 10 kilos less I won’t enter the slim category. Even with 20 less, which is absolutely not the objective – as there’s no objective – I will never forget the curvy girl who lives in my body since I’m old enough to remember who I am.
That’s it, I don’t know if it’s clear. I haven’t felt attacked, I understand the questions I’ve read here and there and my kin’s reluctances. I thus try to answer with as much honesty as possible. Yes, if I were given a magic wand I would chose a size 10. But no, I don’t believe being slim is the key to happiness, just a facilitator in a society where appearance matters more and more. I wouldn’t be happy, I know it, if I kept putting on weight, because it’s more complicated in the everyday life, because it’s too demoralizing to know from the moment you wake up that you’ll make a ladder in your tights by dint of pulling it, to have to lie down to zip your jeans – which you’ll undo as soon as you’re seated -, to change your top three times before finding one that hides without looking like a bag and finally all this to hate the image you’ll see in the first mirror you’ll pass.
I sincerely believe the ones who say they are at peace with their body despite a huge BMI. It happens that it’s not my case. But no, I haven’t misled anyone, because it seems to me all this came to light from the first articles of this blog. And once and for all, you can be at ease with yourself while wishing to change…
Edit: I wanted to put the picture of the beautiful Spanish woman on the beach but I remembered it gave rise to arguments about image rights. Thus here is, once again, my cleavage, with which I’m at ease.
