My Body Image Story, Part I
Well, I knew this day would come. Those of you who have never seen me are dying to know what I look like, with questions such as, “Is she tall? Is she short? Is she big? Is she small?” Of course by now you may have seen a headshot on my web site. (Okay, I’ll admit it – the picture is about four years old. Since then I got glasses, but they are so cute. Thanks, Costco! ) On a very good day, if I stretch out my neck and think “tall,” I am 5’3.” I’m praying that big hair and platform shoes come back because I’m 5’7” or 5’8” with those! I have a muscular, full-figured type of body so some people still think of me as petite, even when I am carrying extra weight. I am fairly solid because I have been exercising regularly for forty plus years.
I swam competitively for years, and love to kayak and hike, although my SLE lupus (an auto-immune disease which can affect any organ) and ankylosing spondylitis (a chronic form of arthritis) sometimes make me tired. I’ve been from a size 6 to a 12 or 14, so obviously struggle with body image myself. Who doesn’t? In our culture, we see 250,000 advertisements before the age of 17. Most of the images say, “To be thin is to be beautiful, and beauty is everything.” So we all have been deeply impacted. Fannies (the blog and the book, when it comes out) is an antidote to the tsunami of negative messages that shoot through our hearts every day. (And by the way, you may want to do yourself a favor and recycle your fashion and beauty magazines. Research shows that after you look at them, you feel more depressed. Maybe we should have a big magazine recycling party!)
Before I tell you my story of wrestling with the Body Image Bandit, I would like to say that I don’t have all the answers, and I am not an eating disorders specialist. But I have learned a lifetime of information about body image through helping women and men work process their own stories. If you get anything out of my Fannies blog, I hope you grasp that body image issues are about the heart. If you struggle with an eating disorder – including binge eating disorder – it is really about your life story. Obviously calories are calories, and fat grams are fat grams, but why do we binge, purge, diet, over-exercise, and beat ourselves up because of figure flaws? Because of our stories and because of living in a culture which teaches us that if we are not concentration camp thin, we are ugly. In many ways, we have been brainwashed.
And so I bring you my own story, which is an unusual story about how my heart broke in a place that is often called Paradise. In some ways I grew up everywhere, because my family moved so often. But when I was in sixth grade my family moved from Fall City, WA to Kihei, Maui, Hawaii. Fall City was a small logging town back in the day, years before the richest man in the world opened up Microsoft down the road. My dad supervised the updating of the sewer system in Kihei. So whenever you vacation in Kihei, you can thank my dad each time you flush!
I could not wait to move to Maui! My class threw a going-away party for me and collected $27.55 for me to buy a surfboard when I got there. They had wrapped the cash in this tiny little box, which they had placed in several consecutively larger boxes. The final box was about five feet by three feet, wrapped in sunny yellow paper. I felt very loved, and my heart smiled. And in the seventies, $27.55 was a lot of money for kids whose fathers logged for a living. Shortly after arriving on Maui, I wrote a thank you note directly on a coconut with a Sharpie marker, and mailed it back (without a box) to my teacher, Mr. Wright.
The first day of school on that rainy Monday in Kihei, I couldn’t wait to meet all my new friends. At the time I had a vivacious, bubbly personality and had been on student council and had other leadership positions. But that all changed when I first set foot in Kihei School. I watched whales breaching across the street in the Pacific as I walked to my first class, and could not believe I was living in Paradise. I knew the sun would always shine on my back, and that life would be perfect. Or so I thought. What I didn’t know was that I had just entered a shark zone, but it was inside Kihei School and not in the deep blue Pacific.
I walked through the door of my first class and everyone stared. It was as though an alien had landed in the classroom. Silence reverberated off the walls. Everyone was playing cards. I noticed I was the only white person in the room, but I was thrilled to learn about new cultures and make friends. I pictured myself surfing with my new friends and hanging out on the beach between catching waves. Dad had told me that there were only about 400 true Hawaiians still living, so I knew that most of the people would not be Hawaiian, but various Polynesian people.
After what seemed like twenty years later, the bell rang. I walked out, and a gang of girls approached me. “Get da hell offa dis island, haole. Go back to da mainland whea you belong,” the leader said. (Translation: Get the hell off of this island, white girl. Go back to the Mainland where you belong.) This was my first encounter with Pidgin English, and I had not realized that the language was so much different. The base of Pidgin is English, but many words from various other languages are mixed in. In the midst of dealing with a horrendous level of discrimination, I had to navigate myself through a new language because they had many different words and phrases. When Gwen and her pack cornered me on the playground that day, I started to think it was going to be a long two years. A cloud of fear and confusion grew within me, and began to take root in my heart. I was used to being popular and making friends easily. So what was the big deal? I just didn’t get it. After all, we were all people, but just wore different colors of skin.
Day after day, week after week I was told I was worthless and shameful because of my white skin. I felt like an apple in a pile of papayas. They threw rocks at me, called me names, spit on me, and despised me before I even uttered a sound. All because I was white. One day, a native girl handed me a new, unsharpened white pencil. She said, “Hea. Take dis. It’s white like your &*#% haole face.” (Translation: Here. Take this. It’s white like your %^&* white face.) The pencil dropped to the old wooden floor of the beat-up classroom, and my heart dropped to another level on the elevator of despair. It felt like it was bleeding. I began to wonder how long I could take the pain, the loneliness, and the fact that almost everyone hated me because of my white skin. On the weekends all of the workers’ families hung out at the beach together, and we all had similar experiences at different schools in the area because we had all come from Washington state. A friend of mine who survived an even worse fate has a blog you may want to check out: http://bowlingjoe.blogspot.com/
The depression became unbearable. I despised my white skin, and wanted to have beautiful brown skin and dark hair. But each day I swam, surfed, or played tennis after school, and the tropical Hawaiian sun kissed my hair again and again until it turned white-blonde. My skin was a beautiful bronze, but I still paid the price for my light blonde hair and blue eyes. If I would have been even a little darker complected, it wouldn’t have been quite as bad. I could have looked half Polynesian and blended in. But with the blue eyes and white-blonde hair, I just didn’t fit in. I cried myself to sleep many nights. Sleep was my drug of choice.
One morning I noticed almost everyone wearing white bands on their upper arms. I didn’t know until it was too late that it was Kill Haole Day. They would be “choosing” one of the handful of white kids that attended the K-8 school to beat up. That was it. I needed to move back, so I told mom and dad that I had to move back to Washington, or go to a Catholic school where most people were not prejudiced. If not, I would drop out of school, although I was a great student. I knew that would never fly with my parents. The problem was that we didn’t have the money, as St. Anthony’s was very expensive. I had heard from kids on the swim team that the student at St. Anthony’s actually treated people based on their personalities and not their skin color. Finally my parents agreed to enroll my sister and I in St. Anthony’s. They weren’t excited about it because of the expense and the fact that we were not Catholic. (We weren’t anything, as far as religion was concerned.) But I am thankful that they decided to let me attend St. Anthony’s because the truth is that I had a date picked out. If mom and dad did not let me return to the Mainland or go to St. Anthony’s, I had planned to end my life by a certain date. (And thankfully, I was not “chosen” on Kill Haole Day. But someone else was.)
Years later, I am awed by the fact that God used my Maui experience in so many ways. Several years ago, I did an internship at Union Gospel Mission Women and Family Shelter in Seattle. I had the honor of working with many women of color, and sometimes they came in for counseling with stories involving race. They would sigh and tell me I would not understand because I just didn’t know what it was like. And I would say, “I have never experienced your story, but let me tell you a bit about my story.” Their eyes got big, and they looked confused. How could a blonde, blue-eyed, pale woman know anything about being a minority, they wondered. Once I told them about moving to Maui, we began to enter into their stories with truth and grace.
After getting my teaching degree, I taught public school in several places in which most of the population consisted of Mexican Americans. One time I asked the students to write about three things they would like to change about themselves. I cried after school as I read the papers and many had written,” I would like to be white.” So of course I shared about my years on Maui, and continued to tell them that they were beautiful just as they were. One time a girl was going to buy blue contacts, and I was able to convince her that her brown eyes were beautiful and encouraged her to embrace her heritage. Now I understand how it is that God can create beauty from ashes. I have lived it.
I imagine this is not what you were expecting on a blog about body image. After all, what does skin color have to do with body image? And my response is “everything,” I understand through and through what it is like to live in a body in which you are immensely uncomfortable. Although I am sorry if I disappointed you, stay tuned as I reveal my deepest moments of struggle as I fought (and still fight) the Body Image Bandit. I will also address eating disorders, weight issues, whether or not there are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods, and how to get off of the sick cycle of bingeing, dieting, over-exercising, and/or purging. More importantly, I will offer a set of tools you can use to fight the Body Image Bandit and win. And above all else – how to be comfortable in your own skin, embracing the body God gave you. Although I must admit – to fight the Bandit is to enter into the zone of struggling with your own story, because body image and food issues are more about the heart than they are about food. And please feel free to tell of your own struggle with the Body Image Bandit. After all, we’re all in this together.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28
Like this:
Like Loading...
![Scary Scale [ Explored:) ] by Chelsea3883](http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5285/5215503755_3c08b22a3f_m.jpg)
Twiggy
Those are great steps in the right directions. Even so, Barbie, you’ve had almost 52 years to get it right. Enough is enough.
There is no denying that American ice dancer 
Great news! I just learned that chocolate has superb anti-aging properties. I read a short article about this while waiting for my kitty’s appointment. If I keep drinking mochas at the same rate, I should reclaim my 29th birthday by Labor Day! I guess I will keep feeding the chocolate monster within. Maybe I should get back into the habit of making chocolate chip cookie dough. I used to mix it up every few weeks, but hardly any of it made it into the oven because it would take a detour and end up in my tummy. Then it would immediately slide down due to gravity, but for some reason the gravity would stop kicking in when the cookie dough got to my rear end. Weird, huh?
While I had this delectable news about chocolate on my mind, the vet assistant called us in. Prissy, my kitty, had to get her booster shots. It’s still hard to believe I have a cat because I thought of myself as a dog-only type of person. But my husband kept wanting a kitty, so what could I say? She is very loving most of the time, very low-maintenance, and makes an excellent heating pad.
So when Prissy and I got called for her appointment, they weighed her in. The last time we did this, the vet scolded me because she had plumped up to eighteen pounds. He said he was concerned about her health at that weight, so asked me to cut back on her food. Let me tell you, Prissy got nasty and angry. Even worse than me when I used to believe in diets and was irritable because I felt so deprived. She spent a lot of time hanging out by the pantry door where the cat food is kept, making noises like she was in labor of birthing sixteen kittens. So I cut her back very gradually, a little each week. Today we got the good news that she has lost a little over two pounds. The vet now wants her to lose about two more pounds, then she will be at her so-called “ideal weight.”
The advantage that Prissy has over you and me is she has no psychological hang-ups about her weight. She doesn’t compare herself with other kitties, thinking, “Is that cat’s butt bigger or smaller than mine?” Or, “When I turn so you can see my profile, do I look like a pregnant mongoose?” She has no concerns about her appearance because she is preoccupied with more important things like pouncing on our dog or looking for bugs on the ceiling. I have seen no evidence that she obsesses about her waist or the appearance of any other body parts. She doesn’t care about her size or shape, but is more concerned about keeping herself clean. Oh, to be a kitty!
What kind of freedom would you have if you were more like Prissy? I don’t mean having claws and a mousie toy, but what if you could be totally without knowledge or concern about your appearance? Maybe that gives you shudders, and you picture yourself as a sloth rolling out of bed with bad breath, putting on a little pit juice (deodorant), and going about your day. Your hair is uncombed and your clothes are wrinkled, but you don’t really care. You’re on a mission to hunt down breakfast – and the bigger, the better.
If you are like the majority of teen girls and women, you frequently compare your body with other people. Many – not all, but many – of those you compare yourself with - have eating disorders that you can’t see. Other times women and girls compare themselves with the pictures they see in magazines and usually get depressed because they feel they don’t measure up. We have already discussed the statistics on this, which reveals that females feel bad about themselves the more they look at magazines. So why torture yourself with magazine-induced depression?
And so I say it again – let’s have a beauty/fashion/celebrity magazine recycling party. Imagine this: You get together all of your friends and their friends as well. Each person brings all of her beauty magazines, all of her fashion magazines, and all of her celebrity magazines. Each person adds her magazines to the pile. A microphone is provided where anyone can talk about what the magazines have done to their hearts. You may want to have a cake to celebrate the day that you decided to give the Body Image Power a kick in the rear-end. Maybe you could even find a speaker to discuss all the ways you can kick the Body Image Bandit out of your life.
I rarely look at such magazines. I really don’t need that kind of negative influence in my thinking. I am reminded of the passage in Philippians 4:8, although it was not written with body image issues in mind, Paul attests: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, think about such things.”
It is not healthy to stuff our feelings, as I often tell my clients. In fact I tell them that stuffing is for turkeys and teddy bears, and they are neither one! Neither are you. So it is important to get your feelings out in a safe venue, perhaps with a trusted friend who is not shaming or even on paper because paper doesn’t judge. (If you are concerned about someone finding it, no worries because you can type it and then delete it. Believe it or not, the act of the purging your feelings is what is important.) King David called out to God again and again, and often expressed his feelings. Had he been born today, he would have received just about every diagnosis in the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders.
Even though it is healthy to express your feelings to safe people. That is why I like to express my feelings with friends or on paper and to God, and then focus on the positive : …”whatever is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.”
Focusing on other peoples’ bodies and shaming ourselves for our own looks is not true, noble, right, pure, lovely, or admirable. In fact, it is false (when we look at magazines which are photoshopped and airbrushed), shaming, wrong, and despicable. It brings us down and is another form of “stinkin’ thinkin’” as Al-Anon and the 12-step programs say.
You will notice that Scripture does not say, “Look at the woman (or teenager) in front of you in line at the store. Notice if her thighs, waist, bust, ankles, and/or fanny is bigger or smaller than yours. Then mope around for the next four months because you feel fat and ugly compared to her.” Thank goodness it doesn’t say that! We are not supposed to compare ourselves to the world’s standards, because we are actually citizens of heaven. That is why Scripture emphasizes, “Man looks at outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7b). How I wish we could saturate the hearts and minds of girls and women with this profound truth. You probably noticed the verse says nothing about evaluating ourselves on the basis of our body fat percentage, or on the shapeliness of our figures. What a sigh of relief. Since we’ve seen over 250,000 ads by the age of seventeen, we may not be able to completely erase their effects from our minds and be like a kitty. But with practice of stopping negative thinking and focusing on more pleasant thoughts, we can reclaim the plunder of the Body Image Bandit.
Share this
Like this:
2 Comments
Posted in Body Image Exercises, How to Develop a Healthy Body Image, Humor | Tags: Body Image, Christian Body Image, God, Humor, i wish i was a model, Philippians 4 commentary, why am i overweight