Body Grief Isn’t About Weight Loss

“I’ll be so much happier once I lose weight.” “I’ll plan a beach vacation with my girlfriends as soon as I feel sexy in a bikini.” “I’ll finally be able to start dating once I’m thinner.”

There’s a lot of waiting around that we do when we have plans to lose weight and those plans include an emotional element beyond “I want to feel healthier,” as they so often do. 

Body grief isn’t about the grief of being a fat girl, it’s also not about “healing” yourself into thinness. But weight fluctuations, both gain and loss, incur their own related grief. I outline a few below but frankly there isn’t an ocean large enough to encapsulate the experience of being a woman in a human body so, let’s scratch the surface together, shall we?  

Feeling like people treat you differently

After I lost weight, I noticed men were nicer to me and women weren’t as nice to me. Were women only nice to me because I wasn’t a threat? Were men not as nice to me because they didn’t think I was worth the energy expenditure of being nice to when I was heavier? Are men only nice to thin women? Do women only want friends they don’t think are as pretty as them? Do women only think thin people are pretty? You can see how this can spiral…

Receiving unsolicited encouragement 

As well intended as it may have been, I didn’t need or ask for family members (let alone people I barely know) to comment on how much weight I’d lost. It’s not encouraging, and frankly it makes me uncomfortable to know you’re sizing me up and making a statement about how my weight loss makes you feel. It’s inappropriate to comment on other people’s bodies at all, especially when we don’t have full information. We never know what someone is going through that is driving their body changes and it isn’t anyone else’s business. 

The exhaustion of seeking out an ever-moving goal post

When I started my weight loss journey, I knew that I wanted to feel less encumbered by my body. The mental and physical extra weight felt so unmanageable and I was exhausted by it. I knew that I wanted to move, ride, walk, run, and shake my ass with more freedom. Over the past 3 years, I have lost over 100 lbs. Most days, I feel so much more comfortable in my body and have significantly fewer thoughts about my body. This doesn’t mean that I don’t still struggle with body image from time to time! Living in a human body is fraught and I have learned to ride the wave with less resistance. 

The attempt to answer the question “Is my body broken?” begins by believing it, even to some tiny degree (which, by the way, is really sad, particularly for a kid!) 

From a very young age, attention was drawn to my body as being “wrong” because I was a bigger kid. My body was often the topic of family discussions, and I was made to assume that my body was a problem that needed to be solved. Eventually, I internalized this negativity about my body and came to the conclusion that there was something “broken” about my body because it didn’t look like everyone else’s. Cut to many years of trying every diet imaginable and lots of weight cycling- Whole30, Keto, Vegan, Vegetarian (I tried each!)–having temporary “success” but never being able to sustain the unsustainable. Enter: more shame!

There’s grief in knowing that people who you truly love and admire and know to be good people have an unconscious reaction to your body and there’s grief in feeling like a certain life experience isn’t in the cards for you because of your body. It’s your body and your grief, and here at Grief Into Gold we are all-in on helping you make sense of it.