Sigh, I guess I have to talk about my body

My body is the least interesting thing about me.

(Frankly, one’s body is the least interesting thing about any person.)

Yet somehow, it’s become the thing that people want to talk to me most about. But I lived in Asia! But I designed toilets! But I scuba dive! Certainly there are a million other more interesting things to discuss?

Strangers make unsolicited comments on my body in completely random contexts. One time when I was ordering a burger at Shake Shack, the cashier looked at my shoulders and went, “I admire your strength.” (Her exact words; that has since become an inside joke with my friends who were there.) In Europe this summer, people on walking tours, in fashion boutiques, in museums were constantly asking me what sport I played, which I immediately understood as a euphemism for “why does your body look like that?” At my gym (which, admittedly, is a less random context), women meeting me for the first time will tell me that my arms are #goals. Sure, I’ll concede that it’s an honor when the American record holder for bench press tells me I look “jacked,” but for the most part, people noticing my body makes me uncomfortable.

Then some people ask me how I did it, which makes me even more uncomfortable. I feel obligated to reveal that I lost nearly 100 pounds, had to put 20 pounds back on for health reasons, and coincidentally discovered barbell training at the same time I was doctor-ordered to enter a caloric surplus. So the weight came back on as mostly muscle. I bulked before I even knew what “bulking” meant!

That’s when people go wide-eyed. “You lost nearly a hundred pounds? How?!”

So here I am, talking about the least interesting thing about me, because it’s what people are most interested in hearing about. But also, because whether I like it or not, our bodies are the first thing people notice about us, and they inform how people treat us as we move about the world. I know this is stating the obvious, but the appearance of our bodies greatly influences how we experience life in ways we cannot control. Not to mention the hold our bodies have over our mental health.

Look, I’m not here to advocate for weight loss. I don’t want to add to the chorus of fatphobia on the Internet. Hell, I didn’t even set out to lose the weight. I was content with my body; I had long ago accepted that I was a fat person and was fine with that. Being fat didn’t limit me. I trekked to Everest Base Camp. I ran a 10K around Angkor Wat. I out-swam everybody in my Divemaster training. People assume that fat people are lazy and can barely make it up a flight of stairs; I’m here to tell you that fat people are the strongest people on the planet. I’d like to see you run a 10K with an extra 100 pounds on your frame!

Now I do think it’s important to point out that within the fat community, I would not have been considered large. I wore a size 16, which technically isn’t even plus-sized (that starts at size 18). I just want to acknowledge that existing in the world as a “small fat,” as I would have been “fategorized,” still has a lot more privilege than others on the fatness spectrum.

But yes, I’m going to talk about my weight loss and body in a series of posts anyway, because I have never thought more about my body since losing the weight. This might be atypical — or maybe it’s because I had the privilege of being a “small fat” — but I actually never thought much about my body when it was larger. I simply accepted that being fat was part of who I was.

Once I lost weight, my entire relationship with my body changed. I thought about my body constantly. All of a sudden, I felt this pressure to maintain thinness. I had miraculously achieved American society’s ideal body type; I couldn’t just throw that away! But at the same time, I became more aware than ever of how my body wasn’t quite the societal standard. I became more critical of my body than I ever was when I was fat. I was embarrassed about my excessive loose skin, particularly the crepey drapes hanging off my triceps that gave me the wrinkly arms of a 70-year-old woman. The voluptuous DD boobs of my large body used to make me feel sexy; now, the deflated balloons on my chest make me self-conscious.

It was as if, when I was fat, the societal standard was so far away from my reality that I did not feel obliged to abide by its rules. Thinness did not, and seemingly never would, apply to me, so why waste time thinking about something so irrelevant? But now that my body was so close to meeting the beauty ideal, the ideal felt potentially attainable, and even expected of me.

So I spent a lot of time on the Internet reading (a) how to maintain a significant weight loss and (b) what to do about loose skin in your 30s. The answer to both? Build muscle. (a) Increasing muscle mass increases your resting metabolism, so you’re burning more calories even when you’re sitting on your couch doing nothing. (b) Loose skin is not going away so quickly after your 20s — your skin simply isn’t as elastic — so your best option is to fill it in with muscle.

And how do you build muscle? Lift. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I initially got into lifting for the aesthetics. I set out to replace my old lady arms with the tone of Michelle Obama.

(What do you do about the areas of your body where you can’t build muscle? I still have empty sacks of skin where my breasts used to be. The only solution is surgery: either a breast lift to remove the excess skin or implants to fill it in. And yes, I went through a period where I considered a surgical solution, but I chickened out. It just feels too high-risk for me to go through a completely optional, cosmetic surgery.)

It has not escaped me that my body type went from one extreme to another. I ended up surpassing the light muscle tone of a Pilates queen and instead built myself into a video game heroine. The biggest reason was that I fell in love with how my body feels when it’s strong. I loved what my body was suddenly capable of doing; I will never forget the rush of my first-ever pull-up! So I continued building more strength and abilities, and as a result my body became more muscular. Now I care much more about what my body can do instead of how it looks.

But if I’m really honest with myself, I do think that, subconsciously, I feel more comfortable when my body doesn’t sit close to societal ideals. Being muscular, like being fat, excuses me from having to play by the beauty rules. Lifting liberated me again.

It has also not escaped me that these two extremes are not conventionally desirable to men (or at least, our media tells us fat and muscular women are less desirable). I often felt that being fat, in some ways, protected me from harm. My fatness made me feel both invisible and invincible.

When I lived in India, the invisibility cloak of my fatness was a superpower. All the time, people asked me, “aren’t you afraid to be living alone as a woman in Delhi?” Hell no. All those stories you hear about foreign women getting harassed? Almost never happened to me. Several times a week, my thin roommate would come home, visibly shaken by all the catcalling, staring, maybe even groping she had experienced during her commute from work. I had walked down the same streets, without a word uttered to me. We were both white-passing Jewish Americans with brown hair and dark eyes. We both wore salwar kameez to work. I knew the difference between her and me was that she was thin and seen as beautiful, and I was fat and not seen at all.

Sometimes I wonder if my subconscious missed this feeling of protection.

I remember the first time a man noticed my new, smaller (but not yet lean) body. I was about halfway through my weight loss, so 50 pounds down and probably a size 8 or 10. I had to renew my TSA Pre-check/Global Entry and went to the airport for the in-person interview. It was fall of 2020, before any COVID vaccine, so I was still limiting my contact with other people and covered my face with a mask. And yet, despite being unable to see my face, this customs agent was clearly flirting with me the entire interview. It was an experience I had never had when I was fat. I felt oddly exposed, even in a mask.

As a muscular woman, I’m not invisible — in fact, since strangers comment on my body all the time, it seems that being muscular makes me extra visible — but I do think it makes me less of a target. A man is less likely to fuck with a strong woman. I replaced my shield of fat with an armor of muscle. That wasn’t what I intentionally set out to do, but I can’t deny I feel more comfortable in a body that is, at least superficially, less vulnerable.

I’m almost 4 years into my accidental body transformation journey (or whatever the wellness gurus would call it), and I honestly hate how much I think about my body. But at the same time, I believe it’s important to share my experiences, because frankly weight loss is glorified in public media. Though there are incredible leaders in the fat acceptance movement and powerful voices criticizing the thin beauty ideal, I haven’t seen that many people openly discuss their lived experiences of the ongoing mental and physical toll that ‘successful’ weight loss takes on your body.

So even though I hate talking about my body, I’m going to keep doing it anyway. You can expect future posts about the side effects of my evolution from plump to pumped, because we need to develop a more realistic understanding of what it means to completely overhaul your body. A major body change can be like an earthquake to your system, and we shouldn’t underestimate all the aftershocks.

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PS: A few more things to acknowledge…

• I know I didn’t actually tell you how I lost the weight. But rest assured, it wasn’t from some illness (I appreciate the genuine concern, but thank goodness I was fine!). The pandemic hit and forced drastic changes to my lifestyle overnight. An abrupt pause to office and social life meant I slept more, stopped eating out, stopped drinking, and exercised more. There’s no magic formula that you don’t already know.

• My ability to lose and keep the weight off is, by and large, a genetic blessing. So many people who lose weight might not be able to keep it off for a whole host of reasons related to genetics, hormones, underlying disorders, a metabolism wrecked by yo-yo starvation, etc. Just because building muscle worked for me to maintain thinness doesn’t mean that would work for everybody so easily. I got extremely lucky.

• Though I said not many are publicly discussing the negative impacts of weight loss, I’m by no means the first person to do so. Check out the work of Jameela Jamil’s iWeigh community, Roxane Gay’s Hunger and essays, Casey Johnston’s She’s a Beast newsletter, among others. Google it and learn more!