11/5/2003 The most important thing in life isn't losing weight
Haddayr Copley-Woods
I flatter myself that I am an interesting person. I was raised by hippies on a back-to-the-earth hobby farm; I am learning how to play the bodhrán (a traditional hand drum); and I am taking classes in Irish Gaelic. I follow an extremely unique spiritual path, and I tell a damn good story‹if you're not one of those folks who's fussy about whether or not something "really happened." But guess what everyone wants to talk to me about? My weight.
"It's all that exercise," say the gym bunnies. "You cut back on your carbs," insist the fadsters. "It's the nursing," chime in the LaLeche League set. Everyone wants to claim my weight loss, because in our culture, thin equals virtuous.
At first I will admit I enjoyed all of this attention, but it is making me increasingly uncomfortable. As a feminist, I am ambivalent about having lost weight at all. Fat is a feminist issue, and although my weight loss was well within the scientific standard for my height and frame, I feel in a way as if I have betrayed the sisterhood. We should love ourselves for who we are, I tell myself, and people should love us for what's inside. We should not be afraid to take up space. Also, I used to look a little tougher.
Quit laughing. I said "a little."
However, I feel more comfortable as this new size. It's easier for me to squat down on the floor to play with my son, I move more gracefully, and I feel more attractive (there's no denying it). Here's the thing, though: my weight loss is not the single most important thing I've done in my life.
At several weddings and reunions recently, I've met a lot of people I haven't seen in years. I know that looks are the first thing a person notices, and I've lost enough weight that some didn't recognize me right away. But I have never gotten so much approving attention before. I find myself surrounded by a bevy of smiling faces at every gathering I attend. I have had astonishingly extended conversations with people about my weight. Not with overweight people who are considering a change in their relationship with food‹which would be understandable‹but with perfectly normal-sized people who are just so impressed with me they don't know what to do with themselves. Feminists are not immune; my most outspokenly feminist friend is by far the most obsessed with my new size.
But it's hard to blame individuals for our society's obsession with thinness. Besides the endless succession of increasingly anorexic models and actresses who parade before our eyes from the cradle to the grave, warping our notion of normalcy, network news never tires of telling us exactly how disgustingly fat we have grown. Stories about far more deadly eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia seem to have slowly retreated to the sidelines, despite no evidence that these illnesses have been vanquished.
One woman enviously told me that I "have no right to complain" about my narrow hips. She knows that I had a C-section because after 18 hours of labor I was unable to deliver Arie vaginally. Apparently, major abdominal surgery and a long and painful recovery are a small price to pay for fitting into men's jeans.
Perhaps you think this isn't a gender issue. Consider this: my husband has lost even more weight than I have in the same time frame. Very few people have even noticed it, but if they do, the feedback usually goes something like this: "Lookin' good, Jan. Sorry the Red Sox lost. How are you holding up?" Even considering my smaller frame, this is astonishing. People literally see fat differently on a man.
Although I appreciate that friends are happy for me, I hope that someday a woman's weight loss will not be such an epic event. I hope that women‹myself included‹will stop being consumed with our own and others' looks, and will stop linking those looks so directly to weight. Until then, don't be surprised to see something very much like this on TV sometime in the next few months:
"We now cut to breaking news in Minneapolis, where we have an exclusive interview with a woman who has single-handedly saved 13 children and a cat from a burning building. I believe I speak for the entire city when I tell you that you look fabulous. How on earth did you lose all that weight?"
Haddayr Copley-Woods, a writer and graphic designer living in Minneapolis, has always been told she "has a pretty face."
