I lost 50 Pounds during the COVID. Everything Has Something To Say About My ‘New’ Body.

My decision to lose weight was made when I applied for COVID in December 2020. I was lucky – the pain was not bad. But it happened at a time when my professional life was approaching, unbearable for me. I changed jobs to be with my family. I was confused about my new concert; My kids are with me every minute. My postpartum depression and anxiety, which five years later morphed into the same old depression and anxiety, was at an all time high.

And then: COVID. And I want something different for myself. I wanted to not eat my feelings like I had experienced for years and this led to a second pregnancy instead of 50 50 instead of უნ 15 more in my 5 foot frame. I want to feel like myself again and not a warehouse of other people’s needs, wants and protocols. I want my body to stop looking at everything around me, everything and every feeling and understand what I want to eat, feel and do.

My body takes up a lot of space in my daily brain, thoughts of mere selfishness and my shame at them as someone who teaches feminism as a source of livelihood. I was bad; I’m tired of growing up as a white woman in a culture that values ​​lean as a sign of self-regulation, a medical culture that associates obesity with all health problems, and a feminist culture that tells me that love myself and my body unconditionally.otherwise I will never think of my body.

I am physically tired. I don’t eat, I don’t move, I don’t live with pleasure or have a sense of my own desires. I was so tired of having a body, I thought of my body. Except, of course, I always have.

So when I felt my anxiety increase, I went in while listening to secret novels in the library’s audio books (Rita May Brown’s Cats and Murders series is ridiculous). I was walking when I was playing Pokémon Go with the kids. I ate a large bowl of oatmeal and raspberries. I did yoga for 10 minutes. I feel calmer, less nervous, less obsessed. I felt it better. And after December 2020, I lost 50 lbs.

When my children started school, the parents I see every day began to say, “Have you lost weight? You are admirable. “It was embarrassing, but very human. Although they were honest with their curiosity, their words meant I was” bad “then. Don’t say anything.

I value the ideal of not mentioning your body. I also value understanding the value of different aesthetic benefits and I recognize the hard work, thought and creativity invested in them. It took me a long time to embrace such a feminine notion of myself, precisely because it didn’t come – whatever I wanted – from a place of resistance or radicalism, even though I admire those who think so. For them.

And now I’m here, 50 pounds less and I’m thinking about my body again. I feel more “me”, but I also know that this is a fictional phobia I have experienced and a sign of an improvement in my mental health. I’m still not happy and comfortable with my body all the time or even most of the time, like when I gained 50lbs. I still feel my body perfectly in these moments – the right lipstick, the new set of earrings I want when standing on the yoga mat with my forehead on my forehead – just like before.

I want to not worry, not to feel the need to lose weight. It’s hard to do this when you’ve experienced life with a body that has dramatically changed, as well as the views of my body from those around me.

Due to the long hiatus in my personal relationship during the current pandemic, I often have to look at my “new” body while communicating with colleagues, friends and wider acquaintances.

I try different answers, stating that for me my diet is associated with my depression and anxiety, and this loss is a sign of how I can better cope with these conditions. Later I emphasize my awful relationship with service. And sometimes, I just say that Covid got sick in December 2020 and after that I was lucky and I wanted to focus more on movement and feel lighter in the long run, and this loss was an accidental result, if not a purpose. This is all true.

Sometimes they are not true. Sometimes I am surprised at what I did at 43 and then have two children and have enormous professional and personal responsibilities. Sometimes I remember what my 6 year old son told me before the pandemic that I was the fattest mother he knew, and I choked on the mantra “every body is a good body” – which I believe and feel I – and then crying. in a small closet pantry because I didn’t feel it myself.

My body and my femininity are disturbed by discipline. I hate the discipline they both need. However, I am loyal to both of them when I move around the world.

Whatever it is, it’s part of the way we talk about feminism and our bodies-about what’s missing and sincerely embracing our daily lives, ethically, emotionally and politically, when we live in our bodies, when they change and the world changes along with and against them. their? Taking care of my body and a feminist life is hard work. Fat is as much work as less than 50 pounds. Hard on the body; It’s about self -care.

My weight loss is part of my body history and the history of my femininity, but it’s not an insult to balance, choice or even compassion. It is the desire to be honest with our bodies about the feelings of feminists.

Feminism can give us more than just recipes for what we should feel in our bodies, something between loving / accepting ourselves and being completely separate. We can demand a feminism that resists our poor feelings about our bodies that don’t require us to constantly discipline ourselves. That’s right Feelings if we work hard on our politics.

To do this, we may lose sight of the stories of what a feminist body should do Hold on Like, from the inside out.

Samanta Pinto He is the author Prominent bodies (Duke University Press, 2020) and Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

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