Forgiving My Body

I’ve lost a lot of weight over the past two years, and I’m feeling more comfortable with how I look. I’m 71 years old. I’m happily married, so I’m not trying to “hook a hottie.” I just want to look good in my clothes. And I do.

And yet, I have some unanswered questions I’m still asking my body. Why couldn’t you maintain my weight following a relatively healthy diet and exercising vigorously five times a week? What connection is there between you and my history of childhood sexual abuse?  And the most burning one of all:  Why were you so big for so many years? 

A brief history. I wasn’t overweight in high school or college. In fact, I was “under.” My parents were abusive, controlling, and perfectionistic, which probably explains a brief bout of anorexia in high school. Escaping to college brought me freedom, but I never added that famous “Freshman 15.” Not sure why, but I left college at almost the same weight as I’d entered it.

I dropped 40 pounds in my late twenties, only to get it all back by my late thirties. And it just continued adding up. I lost 10-12 pounds several times over the next twenty years, only to put it all back on. 

In my mid-sixties I weighed my highest ever. Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and during chemotherapy and radiation treatment I lost about 40 pounds. During the worst days I ate almost nothing. Afterwards, I still was turned off by food. But I started gaining back the weight almost immediately. I was baffled.
 

So, back to those questions. Why have I struggled with my weight most of my adult life?
 

My childhood history includes the loss of my father and brother in a plane crash when I was four. I lived with an abusive stepfather for ten years. I was sexually abused by a member of my mother’s family between the ages of eight and fourteen. I’m not sure exactly how all this translates into body issues, but it has to be there somewhere.

New thinking in the medical community is causing us to question a lot of the old assumptions about diet, exercise, and weight gain. Wow. Does this mean we’re going to stop blaming people, especially women, for how they look? No matter how hard it is for me to admit, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot maintain a healthy weight without medical intervention. 

All this thinking led to a discussion with my doctor, and we decided I was a good candidate for Wegovy. Over the next two years I dropped almost 60 pounds. And this is where I would like to stay.
 

But that last question is still a stumper. Why have I struggled with my weight for so many years?
 

I married young, even though it didn’t seem that way at the time. Fortunately, to a good man who actually LIKED my brain. I never thought I wanted to get married. But I never wanted all those men around me all the time either. I think now that underneath it all was the need to feel safe. If I chose one good man, the others would leave me alone. 

I don’t have all the answers, and I’m tired of living with questions. What I know now is this:  It’s time to stop blaming my body for doing whatever it needed to do to feel safe. If it needed to starve itself when I was too young to have any other means of self-protection available, then OK. If I needed to wrap some extra pounds around me in order to feel safe, then that’s OK too. And if I can’t maintain a healthy weight without some pharmaceutical help, that’s definitely OK.

We can’t love ourselves unless we find a way to love, or at least like, our bodies. I have said many times that while the trauma in my life has altered me, it does not define me. My body doesn’t define me either. It’s just part of who I am.

So:  I forgive you, body, for not being what I wanted. I forgive you for not knowing exactly WHAT I wanted, since I didn’t know either. I forgive you for taking a long time to catch up with my mind and my healing. But here we are, and I like us both.

The words and expressions in this piece are personal statements from the author about herself and her body, and do not represent any judgment on her part about anyone else who may have similar issues but different histories.

For more of Jean’s history with weight and body issues, visit her at jeancozier.com/writing.