I Am Body Positive and I Want to Lose Weight
By: Katie Soussi
Tags: Spirituality, Positive Thinking, Health, Body Positive, Body Image

This seems like the ultimate contradiction. How can you love your body and want to change it? I have found a lot of the BoPo camp don’t seem to support this. It’s like you are betraying the movement if you want to create greater health in your body…I don’t know if that is what is really being said, but I hear it that way, I get stuck in the binary.

I have been grappling with this issue for a long time. I started dieting when I was about 10 years old. I remember my mother wanted us to be on diets. “Do you really need that cookie?” was a common phrase uttered to my sister and I. Interestingly, not ever uttered to my brothers…

I was doomed from the start. Whether you want to call it genetics or just inherited beliefs and habits, there was body-image stuff, overweight, using food as a coping mechanism, among other things, on both sides of my family. Society didn’t help either.

I am, what my mom used to call, “big-boned”. I am laughing because it is so familiar and such a term that I think others like me would have heard when they were young.

I mean, I guess you could say I am big-boned. I was always the tallest in the class, even taller than the boys. My mom is tall, my father was a football player and coach, and I came from them. I have broad shoulders. My mom even had said I was “solid”. Lol!

Anyway, if we fast forward, I was bulimic by the time I was 15 or so. I had a friend that I would hang out with and we would binge and purge together. We thought it was funny. There was an intimacy in it. We knew each others’ secrets and we would support each other in our appetites. We also had a shared level of self-hatred. Even in that there was comfort. We confided in each other in this. It was a deep bond, our pain and our remedy.

After college, I was a wreck. I had so much anxiety. All I really wanted was therapy. If I could identify one gift that I had at that time, it was this very clear sense that life was not supposed to be this hard. This knowing kept me striving for clarity and solutions. I found an eating disorder counselor who helped me change my life. I had found the book Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating by Geneen Roth. It was everything to me at that time.

Let’s fast forward again…I found a lot of peace with food and with my body. I had a reduced sense of anxiety. I loved therapy. I was really healing and growing. I stopped drinking too.

I loved learning about myself, my past and healing my wounds. I have now done that for 20 years, damn, actually, it is more like 24 years. It’s amazing. I have created a great life for myself.

Now, lately, in my 40’s particularly, I have gained some weight. Throughout my 30’s I went up and down the scale. Presently, and the past couple of years, I have found myself in a body that is bigger than I had wanted. Bigger than I had planned for. Bigger than is comfortable.

I have fully tuned into the Body Positive world in social media too. I love being in that space. I have come to learn that I think curvy, soft, bigger bodies are sexy and yummy. I think all types of women are beautiful and attractive. I am coming to really own that and reflect that admiration and acceptance of my own size.

I work on this. I notice when I am triggered. I practice self-love. I know I am worthy no matter what size I am. I have done and am doing that work. Trust me.

I also got blood work done recently and found I have a lot of inflammation in my body. My blood sugar was high. I get aches and pains and am experiencing a rocky perimenopause so far.

I am a research queen too. So, there is no loss of diagnoses, therapies, nutrition plans and gurus, diets and advice online. I have been toeing the line of self-love and acceptance and trying to fix the problems that are real and uncomfortable.

I have frequently found myself in the middle of a duality or some kind of contradiction. There is not a lot of information out there that says it is okay to want both.

I want a healthy, gorgeous, feel-good body. I want to love myself at any size. In fact, in order to find my way, my greatest life, my best life, I need to love and accept the here and now.

I am beautiful as I am and it’s okay to want even greater depths of freedom and satisfaction in this body, in this lifetime. This is my passion right now.

I can have it all. I gotta believe that or it doesn’t stand a chance of happening. Being okay in the middle is the hardest part for me. I haven’t found my crew. I haven’t found much support online for knowing I deserve both of these things.

Maybe I am that voice, the voice I have been looking for. That says, you are perfect where you are, and, yes, health and ease and comfort in your body is your birthright. Keep going mama, you got this. One day at a time. You deserve it.