35 years since I … (part 1)
…. weighed myself!
Like many teen girls in the ‘80s, I had a daily evening bath of self-doubt as I drifted off, preoccupied with the social structure of my high school, and then chased it away with a quick morning shower of body image anxiety as I tried to rock the too-tight acid washed Fancy-Ass denims that were de rigueur at my high school.
In fact, my issues had started even sooner. Clothes shopping with my mother through elementary school was a teary exercise that routinely escalated to anger, especially as I progressed into the hormonal agony of puberty. Although I’d always been a chubby kid, my grade 5 teacher had done a number on me when he published the numbers. That’s right, he wrote our weights on the board from biggest to littlest number and there was mine at #2, right under the kid who was THE FAT KID. (I often wonder what happened to him, poor guy, although being a fat boy is no-where near as traumatic as being a fat girl). I was used to being at the top of lists in school but this one was a blow. Nearly 50 years later, I’ve neither forgiven nor forgotten that asshole who taught me nothing other than shame and humiliation.
I was starting to realize the consequences of being “big boned,” a term I preferred to “husky,” the other popular euphemism of the day. At the same time, my three sisters were grappling with the same pressure, a decade + further along than I was in the journey to full adulthood. One of them fell for the considerable charms of the devil herself, Jean Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers. That sister’s confidence rose in direct proportion to the weight she dropped, representative of the great Libra scale she and I both sit atop. Soon my now-thin, glamorous sister worked for the Nidetch empire, tormented herself before the staff weigh-ins, just as every WW member does at every weekly meeting. I got caught too in the WW trap and was skimming the fat off our straight-from-the-cow milk and sending weekly food accountability diaries to my sister by regular mail in an effort to skim the fat off my perfectly proportioned body. When I got a driving licence, I joined a WW group first in Goderich and then Stratford where I attended weekly - far enough away to avoid the shame that would result from a more local class. I gave all my babysitting money over to the empire in exchange for dropping 35 pounds in just a few months. But then I plateaued as my body became more efficient at using the calories it received, and then started the rebound, the first in a game of yo-yo that has consumed so many women.
Despite the lack of downward scale progress, I continued to pay my weekly humiliation fee even after I left the farm for my undergrad at McMaster. I’d quietly leave residence and board the Barton Street in Hamilton to some anonymous church hall in Hamilton’s east end, where someone else’s older glamorous newly trimmed down sister would pump me up to attempt to resist the food that was served us thrice daily, food that was designed for inexpensive belly-filling, not calorie counting. Financially, I couldn’t really afford the weekly classes and I continued to feel inadequate as my weight at best maintained and mostly crept up. Four years later, I was a chubbier version of the frosh who’d arrived straight from the farm, but one whose emotions were still controlled by the number on the scale.
I actually don’t know how I got to it, but in the spring of 1989, as I was graduating with a honours BA in poli sci and was planning my move to Toronto to do a Masters at York, I made the difficult and life-altering decision to stop weighing myself.
And I haven’t weighed myself since.
You read that right. I haven’t owned a scale - well, ever - and at my annual physical I board the scale backwards, as I say to my doctor, my tone laced with judgment, “yes, I know you need this for your chart.” And that is the full extent of my weighing activity. When Jack felt he needed a scale in our house, I agreed, but only if he kept it in his basement lair. He would announce from time to time his weight and I changed the subject. It is a number and is of no interest to me. (And frankly I am surprised it was to him, but these social norms are very deeply imbedded.)
In recent years, I have turned attention to my joints, my flexibility, and, to a lesser extent, my cardio capacity, hoping to maintain physical mobility into my elder-years. I have, however, remained steadfast in my resolve to ignore the number on the scale. I know, because I see it, that there are people who weigh a lot who are healthy and happy and that there are people who are thin who are healthy and happy but that there are many people in both categories who are neither.
In 35 years, I know from the way clothes fit that my weight has fluctuated. But 35 years of scalelessness is a record I’m proud of. Perhaps you’ll free yourself too?
(Pictured above - me at age 18, in the middle of a food fight, yet fretting over weight. Pictured below left - me today, concerned about gardening, not weight. Pictured below, right - me, mid-1970s, before I knew about weight.)
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