The ideal size

In the summer, I was talking with my friend Courtney about life after the ironman. (Yes, life now is split officially into the BIM “before ironman” period and AIM “after ironman” period.)

“Are you going to be working out as much?” Courtney asked.

“Oh, no! We’ll be able to have a life again, less working out – more time for hanging out,” I replied.

“Are you going to be okay with that?”

I’ve known Courtney since I was about 11 years old. She knows me as well as any other person could. And, she got right to the heart of my fears.

During my training, I had lost about 10 pounds. I was as thin as I had been when I graduated high school. The voices telling me my stomach was pudgy, my back was fat, my legs were too big were quiet (mostly) for the first time since I could remember.

Since I was about 12 years old, I’ve obsessed about my weight and what I eat. I keep food journals. I count calories. I applaud myself when I make good choices, and agonize when I can’t resist temptation and indulge in rich foods, or eat larger portions than I should (the latter being my usual food vice). In the peak of Ironman training, with anywhere from 15 to 22 hours of training a week, it was impossible not to lose weight. Every time I stepped on the scale, I was lighter.

I LOVED it.

Now, well, let’s just say that 8 or 9 hours of training a week coupled with the excess of the holidays makes it more than challenging to sustain what I weighed when I was 17.

Harumph.

During the height of Ironman training, I had thought that these issues with my weight were behind me.

They aren’t.

So, I’m struggling right now.  I have numbers in my head about what is terrible, okay, good, and magic. Let’s just say, while I’m not overweight, I’m not at that “magic” weight that has the power to quiet the mean voices in my head.

The off-season has been hard. I couldn’t run until recently due to a hammy injury. Worse yet, I have watched the scale inch away from my race weight. I hate it. I’m crawling out of my skin.

I know what you are thinking: Stop weighing yourself. Get off the scale. That no more works for me than telling an alcoholic to just stop drinking. It’s just not that easy.

I’m starting to realize that this obsession  is worse now in some ways than it was when I was younger. When I was 12, I wanted to look like the skinny women in the magazines and on television. Now, added to this traditional societal standard of “thinness,” I have a new ideal: the perfect triathlete body.

I don’t look like either of  these ideals. Even at my thinnest this summer, I was still a thick girl, with big legs. I’m just not a twiggie. So, why do I want to be?

As a professor of media studies, I’ve counseled my students about the damage that we can do to our self-esteem when we compare ourselves to unrealistic images. But, it’s too easy (and incorrect) to put it all on the media. I know that media discourses are only one part of a much larger cultural system that continually emphasizes the image over the substance in many ways.

Consider…

Our political culture breeds representatives who care more about how actions will play in the news than how they will effect our lives.

Our economic culture permits criminal accounting illusions that have contributed to one of the worst fiscal crises in our history, second perhaps only to the great depression.

Our social culture tolerates a hierarchy of “status” built upon conspicuous consumption, with our importance measured by our possessions.

And so it is with our bodies. Our culture celebrates the thin, the beautiful, no matter the toll that that such images will have on the substance of our spirits.

While media promote unhealthy body images, they are not the only one with this message. Dominant messages of beauty and health come from all parts of a culture, such as the seventh grade boy who first made me extremely self-conscious of my weight, calling me a “wild Samoan.” No doubt he thought this was a clever play on my last name, yet to an overweight pre-adolescent girl, it sounded like a call to lose weight at any cost to my health.

Or, the family member who told me when I was 16 years old that “my legs were big.” A mantra I continue to hear in my head to this day whenever I look in the mirror.

Or, maybe it’s the fad diets that leave us undernourished and overwhelmed by feelings of guilt due to our lack of self-control because we want to eat carbohydrates.

I could go on. But, I imagine by now you have conjured your own set of voices and images that tell us we are less than, not as good as, and so on.

If it weren’t for the messages of reinforcement we get from those around us, I don’t believe the media messages alone would be able to convince us that our self-worth is somehow tied to our pant size.

The rational part of my brain knows this. I know that I am healthy, a recent physical confirmed this. Yet, emotionally, I’m still that 12 year old fat girl, the wild Samoan.

In a week, I’ll returned to focused training for Ironman Lake Placid, now just 31 weeks away. I know that the 15-20 hour training weeks will take away some pounds. This year, instead of tying my worth to my weight, I will do my best to value strength, focus and commitment – no matter what my size.

I’ll try. But, I know this has been a lifelong fight. The next round is coming up.

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