A Body-Positive Manifesto

Lately, I've been pretty much eating and wearing whatever I feel like, and let me tell you, it's pretty glorious. It's also somewhat unprecedented in my life. For almost as long as I can remember, I've spent a lot of my time thinking about what I'm eating and mentally counting calories, or worrying about how to 'make up' for things I ate.

In the past year or so, though, I feel like those thoughts have finally begun to wither away, replaced by thoughts of 'is this good for my body? Am I eating nutritious things? Will this behavior/food help me live well?' And when I decide to eat things purely because they're delicious, I don't feel the terrible remorse that used to ruin the act of indulgence.

I like to eat things like this!

I also like to eat things like this!

…a lot!

Cherries are good for you and an indulgence, since they cost so darn much.

It's a liberating thing to make peace with your body: to realize that your shape, size, and general appearance has absolutely no bearing on your value as a person, and act accordingly. It's a magical feeling when you hit that point where things like 'all bodies are good bodies' and 'you are beautiful' starts to ring true instead of sounding like well-intentioned bullshit.

It's a little hard to believe how much mental energy I used to waste being preoccupied about my body flaws, as I'd come to see parts of myself. While I knew, on a rational level, that resenting parts of my body as though they weren't actually me was symptomatic of a weirdly dualistic approach to the mind-body problem that I rejected as a philosophical position, I didn't know how to stop.

For the first time in forever, I feel like the choices I make about food and exercise are truly choices I make for me. I've found that it's an odd positive-feedback loop. I'm happier because I'm not constantly worrying about my weight, which means that when I do choose delicious unhealthiness, I enjoy it more, which makes me feel more positive about my life in general and thus more excited to do things that will help me live longer (e.g. eat kale and quinoa salad and lift weights). To put it another way, without the artificial superego of body shame, it feels more worthwhile to try to live a long life.

In other words, I can go out and do a 5k run/walk with my parents right after my wedding hair trial, just for fun

I won't apologize for eating whatever the heck I want. Food is fun and gives me so much enjoyment; why demonize something so joyful? I work out to have strong arms and muscles that people don't expect on a petite, chubby woman, not to shrink and take up less space. I enjoy the sense of accomplishment whenever I up the weight I use for a particular exercise. I like feeling strong -- no, I love feeling strong!

#beastmode

Everything is more fun with neon sneakers!

I feel weird about how many of these sentences start with "I." It reminds me of a passage from A Room of One's Own that talks about the way that the letter "I" dominates the pages of male-authored texts. But I also feel like it's important for me to train myself to become comfortable with taking up space, even if it's digital space. Part of self-acceptance, I think, is realizing that your thoughts, opinions, and right to stake out a piece of the public sphere are on the same level as everyone else's, and deserve to occupy the same amount of space and attention. This is something women are socialized in many ways to shy away from, and so that's something I'm consciously working on.

I think that the only way to get to the world I want to live in -- a world where women aren't literally murdered for rejecting men, or subjected to unthinkable campaigns of online harassment and hate speech for daring to engage in critical thinking -- is for a hell of a lot of women to stop apologizing for who they are and what they think. And I want to be one of those women.

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