Body Image and Me: Accepting Myself Even Though The Dress Doesn’t Fit Anymore

The dress is navy blue. Navy blue with cream color trim around the neck and armholes. It is a size small. I bought it to wear for an Easter Sunday; I don’t remember the year. The dress is one of the few pieces of clothing in my closet that doesn’t fit anymore.

It will never fit again like it once did, and I am ok with that.

I remember how pretty and slim I felt in the dress. It was the first time I thought that I would be perfect if I could only lose two more pounds, not ten or fifteen or twenty more like I usually felt. When this dress fit me, I was working out all the time. I taught aerobics and yoga classes, and I was a personal trainer. I worked out with the same, and often a more intense workout plan than my clients.

I ran. I never liked running, so I only ran to lose weight. If I ate anything “bad,”I would make sure to run that day.

I can work out for hours each day, but I don’t lose weight if I don’t eat clean. They say that abs are made in the kitchen. During the time of the dress, I ate clean. I rarely cheated. If I ever did cheat, it was with melba toast, so it wasn’t much of a cheat. My eating was as possessed as my workouts.

My eating schedule:

• Breakfast – 80 calories, 15-gram protein drink
  One piece of string cheese
  One slice of 40 calorie bread
• Lunch – 80 calories, 15-gram protein drink
  3 oz. chicken
  Salad
  Balsamic vinegar for the dressing
  Small apple

• Dinner – The same as lunch
  8:30 pm 100 calories, 15-gram protein pudding

 

Notice I said 8:30p.m. for the pudding, not 8:25p.m. or 8:35p.m. but 8:30p.m. Some days I would be so hungry that I would watch the clock until 8:29 pm and start mixing up the protein pudding. I wouldn’t eat any until 8:30 pm.

Thinking back to that time in my life, I tried to control the only thing I could manage. My body. My weight. If I lost weight, my husband might be interested in me again. If I lost weight, I might like myself better.

The dress fit my body, but my mind had weight to lose. My mind has always been the problem.

I know the dress is still there, even though it is in the back of the closet. Sometimes I want to look at it and remember.

Remember how confident I felt about my body then. Remember how I took my children to the pool and didn’t worry about covering up my body.Remember going into stores, and most things I tried on looked good on me.

I wasn’t flaunty about it; I was just confident I looked good in clothes. I never believed I was at my perfect size, but I was close.

I have struggled with body image all my life. I was on my first diet in third grade, the KLB6 diet. I came home from school often that year and told my Mom that all the other girls were skinnier than I was. I look back at pictures now, and we all look about the same. My beautiful, thin Mom also never felt thin enough. She was upset that I was worried about my weight, so she let me do the KLB6 diet with her. We took kelp, lecithin, vitamin B6 pills, followed by a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar before every meal.

I didn’t lose any weight, but I felt in control of my body.

I did the banana diet with my Mom and sister when I was in junior high school. We ate four bananas three times a day for three days. Why? Who knows, but Mom had read it in a magazine, so we did.

When I was in eleventh grade, my Mom was going to school at Meharry University to get her dental hygiene degree. Meharry had a medical school, and Mom heard about a doctor that helped people with weight loss. She took me to see him. I was a size 9. I was not fat, but I thought I was. It was a quick appointment in a gray, fluorescent room. I walked out with packages of diet pills for the summer.

I went from about 135 pounds to 117 pounds that summer.

I felt great. I felt in control of my body. I felt like I looked like everyone else.

I always tried to be one of the petite girls. I have broad shoulders, a proportionate figure, and I am muscular. When I weighed 117 pounds, I was terribly thin. I stayed around this weight for almost a year. In college, I gained back the weight I lost. Mom had already graduated from college, so she didn’t have access to the weight loss doctor anymore. I didn’t go on diets during college, but I kept a ready supply of Dexatrim in my purse. I felt like if I wasn’t doing some crazy diet, at least I had diet pills.

I married when I was 23 years old. I wanted to lose weight for my wedding. Don’t all women? Why do we do that? We try to create this vision of perfection for that one big day. Having divorced parents, I knew my wedding was never going to be a stress-free event. It wasn’t. I didn’t gain weight before my wedding, but I didn’t lose weight.

After I married, I continued to sporadically diet. Slimfast, South Beach, Weight Watchers, Atkins. Then I found the Metabolic Research Center. Actually, they found me.

I was working at a gym teaching fitness classes, yoga classes, and personal training clients. The manager from the Metabolic Research Center reached out to the manager of the gym and offered a trade. We would allow their clients to come to our gym at a discount, and two people from the gym could come to Metabolic for their diet. I was one of the two that signed up. That is when I was on the diet that got me into the dress.

I preach about positive body image. I want all of my yogis to love themselves as they are. I want them to recognize that we are all different; no one has the perfect butt, belly, or boobs. We are beautiful in our uniqueness. We need to remember that our words are powerful. We believe what we say about ourselves to ourselves. I preach this and have for years, but I’m only now beginning to believe it. In the past, I wanted to believe it, so I tried to speak it into existence.

I am amazed when I see body confident women. I know several of them. How did they get that way? How was their life different from mine? I had a wonderful childhood. I had great parents. I was loved and given plenty of opportunities to shine. I watched my movie-starbeautiful mother constantly diet and cut herself down. I learned this behavior. I think I would have learned it from magazines or television even if my mother had been more positive about herself.

Everyone believes their Mom is beautiful and perfect; mine really was. My mother was the Mom, that caused everyone to stop and stare. She was and still is beautiful. And yet, she seemed to be uncomfortable in her own skin. She always dieted, always tried to look good for my dad. Maybe her poor self-image was because of his lack of positive reinforcement. I know he thought she was stunning – perhaps he just didn’t tell her enough. Maybe her poor body image came from her parents. My mother’s father had a wandering eye. She watched her mother cry over my grandfather’s cheating ways; this could have caused her to feel that she always had to look a certain way to keep a man from straying.

My grandparents were fun for me growing up, but they would have been hard people to have as parents. My grandfather had several affairs when Mom was a teenager. My grandmother turned to tears and wine when she caught him in his affairs. The tears, the wine, and the affairs had a massive effect on my mother. She never knew how it felt to be put first. She was just a girlto my grandfather. Mom always tried to get my grandfather’s approval, even if she didn’t approve of how he acted and treated her mother.

Mom married my dad when she was nineteen years old. She had me eighteen months later. There was not much time for them to figure out who they were as a couple before I was born. Mom never felt good enough for dad. She always tried to measure up to some ideal she had set for what he needed in a wife. I look back and wonder if dad could have done anything differently. I don’t know if it would have made a difference. She had to be happy with herself first.

I spent years working hard to look good enough for someone to love me. It became a part of me. Since I met my second husband, I have changed. We can believe in ourselves more when there is acceptance of who we are, as we are. I always felt like I needed to change my body to be loved. I had to look better and be thinner to be loved. You shouldn’t have to earn someone’s love. You shouldn’t have to look a certain way to be loved. I had to learn this before I could love myself as I am. I had to accept myself as I am.

When I look in the mirror now, I see a strong, confident, intelligent, pretty, and happy woman. I may always wish my belly was flatter, but I’m happy that I can look at my naked body and not cringe and obsess about the flaws that are there.

I talked with my yoga class about being able to look at ourselves naked in the mirror and not focus on the flaws, but the beauty. Several people said they had not seen themselves naked in years. That didn’t surprise me at all. None of us look like Victoria Secret models, but we thinkwe want to. That would not make us happy. To be happy with our bodies, we have to like ourselves first. I will always believe we should strive to be the best version of ourselves, but we can still love and respect ourselves. We have to love and respect ourselves before we can love our bodies.

The dress is all that I have left of that time in my life. When I wore the dress, I felt good on the outside.

 

On the inside, I was a mess.

I was insecure.

I was sad.

I was lonely.

I was broken.

The outside was pretty close to perfect for me. The inside was the furthest away from perfect I have ever been. The outside was pretty. The inside was ugly.

I don’t think I can ever have that outside without having that inside. I always try to be healthy, but I had to starve myself for me to maintain that outside. I never want my daughter to see that part of me again. I tried to teach my daughter to love herself as she is. I told her she was beautiful. My actions told her something different. I want to show my daughter that I love, respect, and appreciate my body. I have to show her so that she will believe it about herself.

As I started writing about the dress, I felt like I should try it on. I was scared to, though. I couldn’t pull it out of my closet. I grabbed the hanger twice, but it weighed a ton, not the dress, but the doubts the judgments in my mind.

What if it won’t fit at all? What if it does, but the dress laughs at me.

It has been 12 years. I am 12 years older, but I am happier. I am more confident. Will the dress be able to see that?

This morning

I woke

I had coffee

I showered

I put on makeup

I went to the closet to grab a dress to wear to the hair salon.

 

My hand went to the dress.

It wasn’t heavy anymore. The dress seemed to beg me to try it on.

I didn’t grab a slip, or Spanx or saran wrap to change my body for the dress to accept me.

I took the dress off the hanger.

I put my arms in; first, you know how you can access how something will fit by the feel of it before it goes over your head?

I gently pulled the dress down my body.

I put on heels.

I ran my fingers through my curly, red hair.

I was stalling.

I started to put on jewelry.

I stopped.

I walked to the mirror and slowly looked up to see a woman standing there in a dress.

I didn’t move.

I just looked.

The dress is still in style. It will always be in style.

There was a change, though. The dress gently hugged my belly, my butt, and my breasts. The dress accepted my body as it is now;

after breast cancer

after divorce

after moving to a new State

after becoming an empty nester

after learning who I am alone

after starting to date again

after getting remarried.

The dress accepted me.

I accepted the dress, as it is now.

I finally accept me.

Photo Credit: yandzho Flickr via Compfight cc