“I really want to lose some weight” a client said to me.
“How much would you like to lose?”
“Probably 35 pounds, I’d like to weigh 125.”
“When was the last time you weighed 125?” I queried.
“When I was in college.”
“And how old are you now?”
“Fifty-five.”

Does this conversation resonate with you? You’ve put on some weight and you’d love more than anything to lose it and have the body you once had.

May I ever so gently remind you that you'll never be twenty again?

I don’t mean to sound defeatist. Not at all. I’m a realist and by that I mean, I accept the present moment with compassion. I allow that who and what I am in this moment is exactly the way I’m intended to be – a little rounder in the middle, gray hair, sagging breasts.

Sure, I’d like some things to be different. I too wouldn’t mind wearing some of the cute little outfits of my youth, but then again…

“No, we’re not eating lunch.” My friend Janet said. “We’re having hot fudge sundaes for dinner, remember?”

“What does that have to do with lunch?” I asked.

My stomach was hungry and I was getting a little shaky. We’d been water skiing all morning and I was ready to eat.

“A hot fudge sundae has a lot of calories,” Janet reminded me, “so if we don’t eat lunch we’ll stay within our calorie limit for the day.”

“Oh” was all I managed to say.

I didn’t get it. But Janet was the smart one in our teenage duo. We had become friends in ninth grade when I was put into an accelerated algebra class without ever knowing algebra and as Winnie the Pooh says, “that’s a long story and even longer when I tell it,” so I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say, because Janet was thin and I was not, I looked up to her and her theory on how to be thin.

I woke up the other night thinking about the body and how amazing it is. I mean, it’s so incredibly amazing that we don’t even know all the details of how it works. I love how we’re constantly learning new things about it.

And yet, we try to control and manipulate it.

I love it when I start thinking about the magnificence of the body. How, from one egg and one sperm, a body knows how to grow into form with an innate intelligence and the ability survive on planet earth.

In many of my blog posts, I’ve written about our relationship with our bodies and body image. For me, this topic comes naturally having lived in the body image world since the day when I was twelve years old and noticed that my girlfriend’s knees were bony and mine were, let’s say, not bony.

I notice these kinds of things and question them which can sometimes get me into trouble. In this case, it’s not that it got me into trouble exactly, but rather it put me onto a path of noticing body types and deciding which ones I preferred and wanted to have.

Because this attachment around body image has been with me for so long, I know how it feels to want what we naturally don’t have. To crave so intensely a body that is not mine. It’s painful and all encompassing. And that gets me wondering…

How well do you know your body? I have to admit that for forty years, I didn’t know my body at all. I totally dismissed what my body wanted as I tried to control it so I could be thin. If I felt hunger pangs, I’d ignore them. Actually, I was a bit meaner than that and told my body I didn't trust it because if I fed it, it would just go and get fat.

I was so stressed about food and controlling myself to be thin for so many years, I had sort of turned into a tightly wound person, someone who was totally focused on what I looked like. But let’s face it, trying to be something we’re not is a lot of work. It’s takes a lot of energy and quite frankly, it can make for a very ego-centric person.

Fortunately, the opportunity to learn about dieting and body image showed up in my life and I was able to see the mess I had created.

I like to eat and feel full which is why restrictive dieting never worked for me, even though I insisted on trying to control my weight for forty years.

A salad could only take me so far toward feeling satiated. And, if I’m being honest, I learned to really, really dislike salads, all low-cal foods, and dieting in general. Which begs the question, when you don’t like something, if it brings forward feelings of loathing, why are you continuing to engage? Well, for me, it boiled down to that size six dress in my closet. Or maybe it was the pants that absolutely needed me to eat salads for lunch and dinner in order to fit.

Truly, this is no way to eat nor is it any way to live.

It saddens me to see so many drugs on the market to assist with weight loss. Some of these drugs are FDA approved, but does that mean we should take them?

Weight loss drugs have a storied past for sure. In the 50’s and 60’s the weight loss drug of choice was amphetamines. According to an article written by Jacques Peretti in the Guardian, they were banned in the 70’s due to being highly addictive and causing heart attacks and strokes.

The door had been opened however and the pharmaceutical companies could not resist the opportunity to sell to women (and men) who were desperate to lose weight.

Diet culture. It exists and instead of being angry at it, I have a different approach.

Accepting it.

Sometimes, accepting something for what it is and softening around it can create an opportunity to see it in a different way.

Diet culture, as we know it, has been with us for decades. It has informed how we eat, think, and dress for several generations. In our desire to lose weight, we have prescribed to a system that has led us into restrictive behaviors creating a victim approach to life, one that is contracting in nature.

I’m a clothes person. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been attracted to clothes. In the summer when I was eight or nine, I taught myself to hand sew little tops using lacy handkerchiefs, which I proudly wore. Making my own clothes became a necessity when my arms and legs were too long for conventional clothes. I was forever perusing fashion magazines, keeping myself up-to-date on all the latest fashion trends. I took fashion seriously and working to stay thin was paramount. Any weight gain would ruin everything.

Restrictive dieting, meaning constantly being hungry and denying myself the pleasure of food, was a pattern I established. It never occurred to me that dieting for over 40 years was unnatural, it’s just what I did.

I had no idea what my natural body rhythms were or what my body really wanted me to eat.

Even though I gave up dieting eight years ago, I sometimes wonder if I should lose some weight. Why? Well, for starters it’s a concept that’s very ingrained in me.

I started my first official diet at the age of twenty-two, not because I needed to lose weight but because I was supporting a friend and losing a few pounds didn't sound half bad. We joined Weight Watchers and I ended up losing around 20 pounds. Man, did I look good, skinny with protruding hip bones – just like Twiggy who I had idolized in high school.

We all know the story though, lose weight, gain it back, lose it again, gain back more. Gosh, dieting became the thread that ran through the story of my life – for forty years.