What if we just... stopped talking about bodies?

Have we made progress?

I had a conversation with a friend my age recently, and we were agreeing that the 1990s and early 2000s were pretty wonderful years to come of age: we had plenty of television for entertainment, the Internet was available for research help and messaging with friends but did not dominate life like it does now, and cell phones were simple flip phones that primarily were used for emergencies. We had stripped-down versions of many of today’s conveniences without many of the downsides. One thing my friend noted that was not so idyllic about this time, however, was body culture.

I remember. The waif supermodel look was in, and extremely thin actors like Calista Flockhart on Ally McBeal filled our screens. We saw visible transformations in the Friends cast over the seasons as they got skinnier and skinnier. Headlines on magazine and tabloid covers almost always had something to say about a celebrity’s weight and whether they had lost or gained too much.

We have a name for this now: diet culture. I think our society has become better at recognizing when preoccupation with body sizes and shapes and food consumption and exercise exertion has become obsessive, although those trends are still present. I see shifts towards greater body acceptance, with the body positivity and body neutrality movements. It seems to me that young tween and teen girls are not too caught up in diet trends, but of course I don’t really know—I’m just basing my assumption off of my observations of my 13-year-old daughter and limited encounters I have with high school and college students in passing.

I read a book several years ago called Fat Talk that challenged many of my beliefs about body size and health. Virginia Sole-Smith has big fans and harsh critics, and she has a journalism background, not a science or medical background, so I question her credentials for making some of the assertions she does. Yet I appreciate the work she and others are doing to decouple body appearance from health. I am a firm believer in eating well and exercising regularly, and both of those practices do not necessarily produce uniform results.

I would like our culture’s focus to shift from appearance to habit formation, and based on some stories I have heard from friends (and anecdotes that I can think of from my past), I am not sure that we are there yet. I have heard extended family members make unwelcome comments about others’ weight (“Wow, she blew up when she went to college!”) and I know doctor’s offices can be quick to push drugs rather than have conversations about lifestyle tweaks. I hope my children remember seeing me, along with their dad, work out each morning because we like to feel strong and energized. That when I am no longer cooking their dinner, they look to add foods that are not just brown and beige to their plates (and no, Skittles don’t count). That they internalize that how we treat our bodies consistently over time matters more than what we do once in a while. But is that what will stick?

I have heard “fat” come out of at least one of my kid’s mouths to refer to someone else. We had a long talk about it, saying that we do not comment on other people’s bodies. My husband Dan and I talked afterwards, wondering how and why the incident happened. Yes, “kids will be kids,” but where are they hearing this? From each other? Media? I also know that some people choose to refer to themselves as “fat” and not in a pejorative way; they have reclaimed the word. So I do not even want to tell my kids that “fat” is a bad word. I keep coming back to how it is best not to comment on other people’s bodies.

And that should be simple, right? Yet somehow it’s not.

Over the years, I have heard all sorts of comments about my body shape and size, some expressing envy, some expressing concern, and some expressing comparison, and rarely do these comments make me feel better about myself. They make me feel more self-conscious, as though I have to explain why I am taking up the space that I am at this current moment, or that I need to attend to the other person’s dissatisfaction about their body. Maybe we should just stick with general comments along the lines of: “Wow, you look great!” “What a fantastic shirt!”

Parenting books nowadays tell you to remark on the kid’s effort, not the results. Instead of saying: “What a good job you did on that picture!” you might say: “I saw how much you concentrated while drawing that turtle.” I understand the spirit of the advice, and I’ve tried to apply it to my kids’ physical feats, noting how they looked like they felt strong or fast.

Because that is the thing about bodies—to some extent we have control over them, and to some extent we don’t. We can lift weights and eat a certain way and go under the knife and apply makeup and squeeze into shapewear, but to some extent, we are who we are. It is the actions that we take every day, the ways in which we care for our bodies, that are within our control. So instead of wishing that my tricep looked different or that the lines were not setting in between my eyebrows, perhaps I would be better off remembering that my triceps can do push-ups (and more now at age 37 than ten years ago) and that the lines come as a marker that I have had the privilege of circling the sun a few decades.