You need to lose weight.
When was the first time you heard those words?
Were you at summer camp when you were 11 and compared yourself in your bathing suit to your skinnier and more popular friend?
When it was time to get uniforms for your basketball team, were you horrified when they were too small for your body and the coach needed to order a larger size, just for you?
Did your Mom or Dad sign you up for a special workout class, claiming it would make you feel better? They didn’t sign up your older and thinner sister.
You may have not heard the words out loud, but you certainly got the message. Before that point, you may have not thought much about your body. Your body just did what it did. But that moment stung. Something felt off. Your younger mind may not have completely understood what was happening, but you heard the underlying message. Loud and clear.
You need to be thinner. As thin as Heather from summer camp. Thin enough to fit into basketball shorts the rest of the girls fit into. As thin as your sister.
Or, maybe like me, you were told you needed to lose weight right to your face. After I shared my plans to join the cross country team in college with a friend of the family, he said “then you’ll need to lose weight”.
I heard the indirect message well before then. I was bullied on the playground in middle school. Boys called me a brut. I could kick and throw as far as they could. I know now that they probably didn’t like that. Back then, I hoped that if I was smaller and thinner I could escape their attention.
If you heard the message that you needed to lose weight and change your body, I want to acknowledge you. I know how painful this message is. We haven’t just been hearing that we need a different body. We’ve been told that if we had a thinner body, we will:
Fit in and be accepted by the kids at school
Be loved and accepted by our parents
Be a college athlete
Be more successful
Be more attractive
I’m here to let you know this painful message doesn’t need to be carried within you.
When we bring our stories to the surface and share them, we can move past them.
Undoing this persistent and painful internal conversation requires us to go back to that origin message and see it for what it is. A lie.
Sadly, we live in a culture that tells us, on the daily, that we need to have a thinner body. Thinner bodies are praised and celebrated. When we see that our body doesn’t measure up, we hear the message that it needs to. We are so immersed in this message, it’s so difficult to recognize it.
The people that have told us to lose weight are also immersed in this culture. They may think they just want what’s best for us, and are completely clueless around how damaging their actions have been. Or, they are bullies.
No matter who is delivering the message, we need to understand in our own heart, that this is their message, not ours.
Separating ourselves from this message is critical. When we can do that, we can recognize our own truth.
We don’t need to lose weight to fit in, be loved, take risks or challenge ourselves. Your body doesn’t need fixing or changing for you to live a happy and fulfilled life. That’s the truth.
If you’d like to share your story with me, I’m here to listen.