body love (more reflections on Traveling Mercies)

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As you might have gleaned from my last post, this book really made me think. About a lot of different things. One of the most revolutionary things I took away from this book is that I should stop hating my body. In fact, I should downright love it. Anne Lamott clearly articulates that she – for the greater part of her life – was embarrassed by her kinky, curly hair and worried constantly about the weather and its affects on her head. And that she hated her flabby thighs. But at some point she realized what a colossal waste of time this all-consuming hatred was. Regarding her hair, she finally questioned, “How much longer am I going to think about my hair more often than about things in the world that really matter?” And she decided to think of her thighs “as if they were beloved, elderly auties, the kind who did embarrassing things at the beach, like roll their stockings into tubes around their ankles, but whom I was proud of because they were so great in every real and important way.”

The concept of loving my body is such a foreign one to me because I’ve spent most of my adult life at war with it. I started gaining weight in college, and it’s been a struggle ever since. I realized while reading this book that I’ve spent the last decade dieting, or thinking about how I should be dieting, punishing myself with negative thoughts about how I keep messing up, cursing myself for not exercising more, every day thinking “I’ll start tomorrow!” and then feeling depressed when I manage to “ruin the day” by eating a cookie off the breakroom table. When I tell myself I hate my body, what I’m really saying is that I’m not very happy with ME. Because, ultimately, I’m the one to blame. Not my body. And that’s just not very nice, now is it?

And the ironic thing is, if I would stop berating myself and start loving my body unconditionally, I would probably be in much better shape. Because if I loved my body, I would make sure to put the right kind of food into it. If I loved my body, I wouldn’t want to see it break down in coming years, so I would exercise more now. If I loved my body, I would never be tempted to touch another nasty cigarette again.

So. I’m going to work on this concept. It’s a really tough job to retrain your brain after years of a certain way of thinking, but I’m really going to make an effort to do just that so that I can stop wasting time on such stupid negative thoughts and start putting that energy into something much better.

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Filed under books, reflection and relaxation

Tags: Anne Lamott, body image, health, Traveling Mercies, weight