When you stop beating yourself up—when you stop reinjuring yourself —what happens is . . . you start to heal.
Self-criticism is an invasive weed in the garden, but too many of us have been taught to treat it like a treasured flower, even as it strangles the native plants of our sexuality. Far from motivating us to get better, self- criticism makes us sicker.
Later in the chapter, I’ll describe three evidence-based ways for changing patterns of self-criticism, but for right now let me just point out that you can’t stop criticizing yourself by beating yourself up when you criticize yourself. If you notice yourself thinking, “Ugh, I suck,” and then think, “Darn it all, Emily told me to stop doing that! I suck!” that’s not really helping, right? So when you notice yourself thinking, “Ugh, I suck,” or whatever it is you say to yourself when things don’t go your way, just notice that. Just notice that it’s a weed. You didn’t put it there—it snuck under the fence. And take that opportunity to plant a seed of something positive. For example, when you think, “Ugh, I suck,” plant the thought, “I’m okay.” As in, “I’m safe,” “I’m whole,” or “I’m home.” You’re okay.
And change happens—it happens all the time!
Let me tell you about my friend Ruth. We were sitting together one afternoon, talking about sex (an inevitable topic, if you talk to me long enough), and she told me, “You know, I’ve been through a lot of things, but my sexuality has really opened up and been so much better lately.”
“Awesome!” I said. “What changed?”
“I just feel a lot more confident in myself, in my body! I know now that I’m amazing to be with and I can revel in that.”
“That’s awesome! How did you make it happen?”
She said, “It’s like one day I just decided that it was all bullshit. Who are they to tell me I’m not amazing exactly as I am?”
Yep. That. health at every size Weight is just one of several things people (especially women) criticize themselves for, but it may be the most universal, with half of girls as young 12as three years old worrying that they might be “fat”—and it’s certainly among the most dangerous and needless.
People want to lose weight for two reasons: health and beauty. Whether 13 you can measure beauty on a scale, I don’t know,but I do know you
definitely can’t measure health that way, and I’m determined to bust that myth right now, once and for all.
Here’s the myth as plainly as I can state it: If I know how much you weigh, I also know something about your health.
And that’s wrong. The fact is, weight alone tells us almost nothing about health. The research is painfully clear, though plenty of people have a hard time accepting it—there’s been controversy about this research in the mainstream media, and even among academics, because it runs so contrary to what we’ve all been told, and it somehow feels dangerous to give people permission not to hate their bodies (despite the fact that the research I described in the previous section proves that people are healthier when they don’t hate themselves). But if you think about it logically for two seconds, you’ll see how obviously true it is that weight is nothing more than a measure of gravity. Look: • Want to lose ten pounds without diet or exercise? Cut off your leg at the knee! I guarantee, the next time you step on a scale, you’ll weigh less. • Or, hey, want to lose five pounds of fat? Have your brain removed—its mass is almost 100 percent fat! • You know who’s always thin? People who’ve been living in a prison camp! • Quick and easy weight loss! Fly in a plane! Better yet, go into space! They don’t call it “weightless” for nothing!
If that sounds glib, good. I think it’s stupid and destructive that “experts” have been telling us that we can measure our health by measuring something we can change by removing a limb, torturing ourselves, or going on a plane and measuring it up there instead. You can achieve your medically defined “ideal weight” without improving your health at all; it might even substantially impair your health!
In case that’s not compelling enough and you’d like a medical opinion, let me tell you this story. One evening during the conference where I learned about Health at Every Size (HAES), I actually went on a date with a cardiologist. I told him about the conference and asked him about this specific statistic that a speaker mentioned.
I said, “Dr. Date, is it true that it can be healthier to be seventy-five pounds over your medically defined ‘ideal weight’ than to be five pounds under it?”
And Dr. Date said, “I don’t know if I’d use those precise numbers, but that’s the right idea. For different reasons, being just slightly underweight carries greater risk than being obese.”
The date wasn’t very successful, and two years later I married a cartoonist and his two cats, but Dr. Date and I had a nice dinner and he verified that weight is not what matters, healthy behaviors are what matter.
My friend and personal trainer, Kelly Coffey, weighed more than three hundred pounds when she graduated from Smith College. She was completely miserable and thought her weight was to blame. So she had bariatric surgery and lost half her body weight.
And she says, “I felt happy for a few weeks, and then the depression, the self-hate, all of it came flooding back.”
So when did things change for her?
“When I realized it wasn’t about weight,” she says. “It was about learning to respect myself and my body and treat it with love.”
It’s not about weight or size or fat—weight is a measure of gravity and nothing else—it’s about living joyfully inside your body, as it is, today.
Which brings me to Health at Every Size. HAES is, as the name implies, an approach to living inside your body based on health rather than weight. Linda Bacon literally wrote the book on HAES—Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight—based on her decades of research on nutrition, exercise, and health. There are four major tenets, according to “The HAES Manifesto”: (1) accept your size, (2) trust yourself, (3) adopt healthy lifestyle habits including joyful physical activity 14and nutritious foods, and (4) embrace size diversity.
It’s almost too simple: Welcome your body just as it is, listen to your own internal needs, and make healthful choices around food and physical activity. You might lose weight (you probably won’t), but you’ll definitely be healthier and happier.
Can it be true? Happy and healthy without losing weight?
It can.
Do you want it to be true?
That’s another story.
What it comes down to is whether you’re willing to try on the possibility that you are already beautiful and whether you’re ready to prioritize real health over conforming to some cultural standard of how your body is “supposed” to look.
I know that intellectual awareness of the negative impact of self- criticism and about the lack of relationship between health and weight can’t instantly undo the decades of shaming that so many women have absorbed.