If you listened to us on the Average Swingers podcast (episode 139), you heard that I took part in a boudoir photo shoot. It was a complicated emotional experience. Before I write about that experience, I thought I should give some background about me and my psychological/emotional state leading to that photo shoot. At this point, you’ve all been given a front-row seat to the inner “workings” of Shane’s brain, so I guess it’s my turn. I have been going through a major shift in mentality with regards to dieting, health, and exercise. While I’m not sure how realistic it is to hope for body positivity, I am at least hoping for body neutrality.
For most of my adult life, I have been putting off various experiences until I lost weight. The boudoir photos were one such experience. I figured I would do it eventually. When I was finally happy with my body size.
This year, I decided to finally go for it. Not because I had reached some nebulous goal weight or dress size but rather as part of an ongoing effort to accept myself the way that I am.
This was a difficult post to write. I feel very vulnerable not only because I’m revealing some of my own inner demons but also one of the biggest areas of conflict between Shane and myself.
But that’s the point of this blog…or so Shane tells me.
The Background: It’s My Parents’ Fault
My family is weird.
I know, I know. All families have their quirks. But wait until you hear about mine.
I am the oldest of nine, and I was an unusually mature kid. I was given a lot of responsibility for caring for my younger siblings at a pretty young age. Not a surprising thing in a family that size.
I was taught to put the needs and wants of my parents and my siblings above my own. I internalized that to an extreme degree. Pleasing my parents was very important to me, and I did this by taking care of the house and kids. They came to depend on me in ways that were unreasonable for a child my age. I never made any waves or caused any trouble. By the time I was 10 years old, I was one of the “adults” in the family.
Except I didn’t have any say in the matter.
Puberty Is a Bitch
When I started to gain weight as I hit puberty around 11 or 12, I lost that parental approval that seemed so important. I was very aware of their disappointment in me, and that despite the fact that my behavior hadn’t changed, I was now viewed as a problem. Through no fault of my own, I went from looking like a kid to like I was 17 in the span of about six months.
My parents policed and restricted my food intake and enforced exercise. I started down the diet path like so many other young women, dooming myself to the cycle of restricting and then binging. I’d feel horrible about binging and then launch myself back into a super-restricted diet. Which I couldn’t maintain, and then I’d binge…. I just kept repeating the whole thing over and over again.
It’s frustrating now to look at old pictures of myself and realize that there was nothing wrong with my body. I was tall for my age. But my body was normal for someone who had developed hips and breasts as a young teen. I was in no way obese or unhealthy. Just mature looking.
What I didn’t realize at the time (not that I really had a choice) was how much damage I was doing to my metabolism by weight cycling, not to mention the impact on my mental and emotional health. I developed a hatred of physical activity and learned to hide my eating habits.
I had always loved food and had taught myself to cook, but now my relationship with food was distorted by the shame of disappointing my parents because of my weight. Food was both a source of comfort for me and the very center of negativity.
So How Did I End Up Married to Shane, the Fitness Nut?
If you have read this blog, you know that Shane and I have been together since high school. He developed his zeal for fitness in his early twenties towards the end of college, and it was a profound switch. Before that, his attitude around weight was basically the opposite of my parents, which was a huge relief to me. He ate whatever he wanted and disliked exercise. He had his own issues with food and body positivity, but that’s his story to tell.
Shane had always been a safe place for me, outside of the judgement from my family. His sudden and drastic shift toward fitness and healthy eating was a major point of tension for us.
Because fitness became such a big deal to him, he wanted me to be in it too.
He assumed that my experience would be similar to his. After all, he used to dislike exercise too. And I tried, off and on, for a long time. Because “everyone knows” that to be thin is to be happy and healthy, right? And if you just try hard enough, you’ll lose weight. It’s just a matter of willpower. Right?
Continuing the Cycle
And I resented it. It took me right back to those feelings of shame and of being a disappointment. Of being a problem.
I fell into the diet trap over and over again because diets get results at first, and the feedback that I would get from everyone around me was very seductive. The most positive attention that I have ever gotten from my parents was when I lost weight. None of my achievements or milestones in life really seemed to register to them.
But if I lost 20 pounds, I was worthy of their attention.
So poor Shane stumbled into an area that was very triggering for me, and we have struggled with it ever since. We experience the idea of “fitness” so differently that it is like we are speaking different languages. He was trying to be a supportive partner, and I was experiencing it similarly to the way it felt when my parents pressured me to lose weight. I think we both felt that I should change my attitude to align with his, because of “health” and so that we wouldn’t have this major point of incompatibility.
Up until very recently, we were both working under the assumption that he was objectively “right” in his approach to diet and exercise, and I was “wrong.” It often felt to me like he had converted to some extreme religion, and I tried to make myself fit into that mold but ultimately couldn’t buy into it.
It just never felt right to me that I had to devote nearly every ounce of mental and emotional energy to deprive myself of food and force myself to do workouts that I hated, but I didn’t trust my own instincts.
The Shift Toward Health and Body Positivity
Recently, I started listening to the Christy Harrison’s Food Psych podcast and reading about Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size (HAES). Diets do not work long-term for most people.
That has certainly been true for me.
Instead of continuing the cycle of yo-yo dieting, I have decided to focus on health and developing body positivity without trying to shrink my body size.
The fact that this is possible had never really occurred to me. Being thin is often seen as healthy and being fat as unhealthy, but there are increasing numbers of people pushing back against these false equivalencies.
Trying so hard to be thinner has done major damage to my well-being, both physically and emotionally. It is time for the pursuit of a smaller body not to be the driving force of my existence.
Mental health is just as important, if not more so, as physical health. I am working on healing my relationship with food and my body, and I’m trying to embrace physical activities that I actually enjoy such as bike rides and hiking.
The boudoir photo shoot was part of my effort to appreciate my body and believe that I can be sexy the way I am. Being in the lifestyle has been a huge boon in that area. It became apparent that people find all different shapes and sizes attractive and that you do not have to be thin to be desired.
So What Now?
There are ongoing conversations in the Fringe household about what adopting this way of thinking will mean. Shane is supportive. While pursuing his own interest in fitness he had already discovered the same research about how diets fail.
Still, it is and will continue to be a challenge for us.
People are always asking Shane for diet and fitness advice. He became a certified personal trainer last year and is working on a nutritionist certification at the moment. He loves talking about that stuff, and people often seek out his advice. It’s a near constant topic of conversation at family gatherings and when we hang out with friends.
At times it feels like a collective obsession even though most people seeking this advice have had similar experiences to mine, the constant fight against their own bodies.
Of course, everyone gets to decide for themselves about their relationship with food and exercise, and whether or not to restrict or diet. But it gets exhausting to hear about it all the time.
COVID has basically shut down lifestyle activities this year, but there might be some issues in the future in that area of our life as well. Shane tends to connect with people who prioritize fitness and enjoy talking about it. That sort of conversation is difficult for me to be around right now, and might always be, so I don’t know where that will leave us.
Hence the Photo Shoot
So, all of that was to give you a glimpse inside my head as I went into this photo shoot.
I was scared. But hopeful.
I felt like I was taking some power back and owning my body and how I perceive it. Pushing myself toward body positivity.
I felt proud of myself for doing the scary thing.
There was some apprehension and self-doubt as well.
If you made it through all of this, we’ll tackle the photo shoot in part two!