Body Image or Does My Stomach Stick Out in These Shorts?

I know for myself and a lot of women, and some men too, that body image is a sensitive yet preoccupying issue. Over the course of my life I have been a size 2 and a size 22. I have weighted 118 pounds at my lowest and 220 pounds at my highest. My body has gone through all sorts of changes; however, my view of my body hasn’t changed as much as my body itself.

At my heaviest, I had gained weight in part because of medication that I was taking. I put on about 70 pounds in three months and then kept it on. I was a large woman and very aware of feeling invisible to others. (This came into high relief when I lost some weight and all of a sudden I was much more visible, especially to men.) The prejudice against me as a fat woman made me angry. The media’s tolerance of fat jokes and comments breeds hate and misinformation.

There is the assumption that if you are heavy you somehow are weak or lazy and that you want to be heavy. “Just stop eating” or “Just exercise,” they say, as if you could change your behavior and your metabolism easily by sheer will power. I always want to say, “do you think if I could lose 100 pounds tomorrow, that I wouldn’t already have done that?” Any person’s multitude of reasons for being heavy are complex and often difficult to change. For me, I needed to change my medication and change my exercise habits. I still struggle with eating poorly or bingeing. I am still working on changing these things to improve and maintain my health. .

However, I think the most startling thing is that my body image is still that I am fat. I still feel fat. I know in my head that you can’t be a size 4 and be fat. I know that I would like to lose ten pounds to feel better on the bike, but that doesn’t mean I am fat. In my head I know this, but I still look in the mirror and see a fat body. This distortion causes me distress. It is also annoying to those who are heavy and see a thin person moaning about being fat. I remember feeling really angry when a normal weight woman would moan and groan about how she had to lose weight and the diet she was on and how fat she was, when I could see that at her 110 pounds she was fine and at my 220 I was not. However, I understand now that the pain of feeling fat, at whatever weight, is real.

This image of ourselves is supported by multimillion dollar companies that want to convince us that we need their products to lose weight. It is supported by the media that gives us anorexic models who look like teenagers as the ideal woman. It is supported by American culture that says you have to be thin and young to be successful. We can’t get away from messages that tell us that we have to be thin and that you can’t be thin enough. No wonder so many of us have distorted images of ourselves and unrealistic ideas about how we should look and what our ideal weight should be.

Now as a cyclist, I am trying to look at my weight and eating in order to improve my performance. It is hard to move away from the knee jerk of “I have to lose weight to look better and do that I have to stop eating” to “I have to eat more when I ride, less at night, and try to lose some weight so I can climb better.” It’s hard to not feel bad about feeling fat. It is hard to feel that my body is strong and capable, despite the evidence. Sometimes, I look down at my legs, which are quite muscular, and have the sense they belong to someone else.

I know that my task is to be able to “own” my own body. I know I need to see it more realistically and work on the areas that will not only make me healthier, but hopefully a stronger rider. I also know that a radical change in perspective takes time and is gradual—like the changes in seasons, when the crocuses push their blooms through the snow, promising that spring is coming.