In 5784, I Won't Lose Weight

Facing my body on Yom Kippur

Hi friends, this is a bit of a digression from the usual programming here, but I feel compelled to share. This one def feels vulnerable, but hopefully it lands for some of you. <3

During the High Holy Days of the Jewish calendar, those ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when we are told God decides our fate for the coming year, there’s a ritual called Tashlich. This involves going to a body of water and tossing in pebbles or bits of bread while reflecting on the errors, wrongdoings, and old ways of the last year that we hope to leave in the past. This year, while doing Tashlich with my friend Abby on the banks of the Schuylkill, I felt a little smug. Sure, I could conjure up some bad habits, moments of being short with my loved ones and such, but mostly I felt proud of how I’d moved through the last year.

The next week, during Yom Kippur services at Kol Tzedek in West Philly, Rabbi Ari Lev began his sermon and I near-instantly began crying into my mask. To be fair, I went off Wellbutrin recently and will currently cry at the drop of a hat, but this one would’ve hit regardless. The rabbi spoke about his struggles over the years to find a sense of embodiment and the solace he’d recently found in martial arts training. He spoke about how the Jewish cultural identity of being a “people of the mind” might lead us dangerously away from a connection to the body that allows us to fully experience the beauty of the world, as well as a connection to God, if you’re into that. Our bodies, we are taught in Jewish tradition, are made in God’s image. It’s an act of spiritual devotion to strive for embodied connection to the self and to treat our bodies with loving kindness.

It hit me like a ton of bricks: I needed to atone, to my God and to myself, for all the moments, every single day this year, in which I privately disparaged my body, the one body that God has given me. On Yom Kippur, it’s said, we can’t fully atone for our misdeeds against other people. Those can only be resolved through apology and interpersonal repair. Yom Kippur is the time to atone for wrongdoings against God. (If the God talk is alienating you here, you could also think about this as wrongdoings against the world, or the pulse of the universe, or against one’s deepest self, or the divine mystery that delivered each and every one of us here, to this earth, in these fragile fleshy forms.) Anyway, though Rabbi Ari Lev delivered his message with exceeding gentleness and not in these exact words, the point was clear: to hate, or run from, or disparage, or neglect our bodies is to do the same to our relationship with God. And, conversely, to treat our bodies lovingly, to recognize the divine in them, to do the hard work of creating presence in our bodies, is a type of prayer.

I wrote here last year about trying to disinvest from beauty culture; to seek instead ecstatic bodily presence. But I wasn’t specific about what this struggle looks like for me (and maybe for some of you). Let’s be specific now: it looks like a constant voice in my head that pipes up every single day, many times a day, telling me to lose weight. I’m so tired of this voice, who, in one form or another, has been in my ear since puberty if not earlier. I’m tired of thinking about and negotiating with this voice. Though I don’t talk about it much, I’m tired of talking about it. Somehow, I’m even more tired of not talking about it.

Maybe the reason I don’t talk about it is because it’s boring or there’s nothing to say. Maybe the reason is that I don’t want to seem like a woman who cares about societal standards for thinness. But fuck the way I seem. What I’ve come to realize is that, really, what I want is to be a woman who does not daily berate her body for its size. That is not currently what I am, and so my job now is to find another way.

There’s a particular flavor to this struggle for people like me, which probably includes many of you: people who are gay and have body hair and admire bodies that look lots of different ways and aren’t, in most ways, trying to conform to heteropatriarchal beauty norms. People who politically align with fat liberation and listen to Maintenance Phase and can critique fatphobic propaganda fluently. Here we are, able to take pride in so many aspects of ourselves that once seemed unthinkable, yet still hating the dimensions and heft of our bodies, wishing to whittle them away. It’s among the cruelest of standards, and among the most impossible.

Like I said, that voice has been with me since childhood. As an adult, I mostly haven’t let it control my behavior. I don’t diet, I eat pleasurably, and I mainly exercise in ways that are non-compulsive and enjoyable. Often, I’ve felt like that’s pretty good, given the culture I grew up in. In many ways it is pretty good, but it no longer feels like enough. Hopefully one day I will be seventy, eighty, ninety years old, my body wrinkled and worn and transformed a hundred times over. It makes me so, so sad, all the way down to my bones, to imagine that woman looking back and thinking of me, spending all these years thinking that my body is too large. What a waste. I can’t do that to her any more.

There’s so much useless, stupid information (if you can call it that) about diet and exercise and fat loss and muscle gain, etc. etc. etc. that blows around in my brain, and more gets added all the time. It’s been piling up since I was reading Seventeen in middle school, and the more recent Instagram bullshit is heaped on top. All these conflicting diets, all these exercise regiments, these useless terminologies, these bits of advice cloaked in faux body positivity, boiling down to the same thing: change yourself. Be smaller. I pray for the day when I forget all these things, when they no longer make sense, when they seem laughable.

The movements for body positivity, body liberation, and fat positivity (three distinct concepts) are in weird halfway places right now. A lot of people, including myself, have absorbed the idea that we should basically accept our bodies how they are, but we have not actually learned how to do so, and the messages to change our bodies have in no way relented (even as they’ve shape-shifted a bit). A pretty common response to this is the complaint that now “body positivity” feels like an added burden: am I supposed to feel bad about feeling bad about my body? I’m empathetic to this complaint, but it kind of seems beside the point. The point is not to be unshakably confident in your beauty and dancing in high-waisted underwear every hour of the day. The point is to recognize that by living in a state of pointless battle with your body, you are robbing yourself of your life.

There’s a necessary distinction to be made between collective and individual struggles, of course. The struggle to end the systemic bias and oppression faced by fat people is collective. The struggle to bring ourselves into right alignment with our own bodies draws on the collective, but ultimately it’s something that takes place internally. A lot of frustration rises, I think, in places where the distinctions between these modes of struggle get blurred. For me, what Rabbi Ari Lev’s sermon helped to clarify was that the individual struggle for peace and connection within the body is not individualistic. Among other things, it is spiritual, and it impacts how we are able to interface with the world. This is a worthwhile pursuit, and its end goal should not be a more inclusive version of commodified “beauty.” The end goal is loving kindness.

For now, this is what I have: refute, refute, refute. Refute the external messages and the internal voice. Refute low-carb and high-protein, refute flat stomach, refute my own critical eye. Thank the too-small pants for their service and send them on their way. Look in the mirror and think about how my body is one among an infinite number of expressions of the divine. Notice what it feels like to be in my body and do the same. Also be on Instagram less.

In a year from now, my body will be different: cells turned over, hair and nails grown and cut, every part of me one year older. Maybe my body will be a little bigger or a little smaller, or its shape changed a bit. Maybe there will be some more dramatic change that I have no idea about now. One never knows. But no matter what changes come my way, they won’t have occurred because I disciplined my body into submission. They won’t have occurred because I was hungry.

As Rabbi Ari Lev spoke on Yom Kippur, I wept silently, and I atoned. I atoned to my God, the mysterious force that created me, for disparaging that creation. I atoned to myself, my past self, my future self, and to the self I am right now, the only one whose path I can determine. One day I will die, and what remains will return to the realm of spirits, and my body’s worth will be measured by how it loved and was loved. Nothing more, nothing less.