chapter 38
your weight is morally neutral
feeding your body is a care task. Resting your body is a care task.
Taking medication to control health symptoms is a care task. Moving your body is a care task. Physical therapy and other healing activities are care tasks. It’s a wonderful thing to investigate what foods and nutrients help your body function and feel best. But making or keeping yourself thin is not a care task.
There are lots of ways to make your body smaller that will not produce better health. I’m neither a doctor nor a dietician, but I’ve listened to tons of these providers who practice from a Health at Every Size standpoint. These providers can help you introduce healthy habits into your life that will make you feel better and function better without focusing on making your body smaller. When we begin to care for our body with those types of care tasks, sometimes we lose weight, sometimes we gain weight, and sometimes our weight doesn’t change at all. Your weight is morally neutral. The weight you are after you adopt healthy habits into your life is the weight you are supposed to be.
I recently had someone comment on a video of mine saying, “You’d look better if you lost weight.” My first thought was, “Look better to who?” because I don’t feel any obligation to produce sexual attractiveness for some rando on the internet. The comment stayed with me for days though, not because it hurt my feelings but because I was surprised that it didn’t.
One night I was lying in bed and cuddling my eighteen-month-old.
She was asleep in my arms with her angelic face resting in the crook of my elbow. We were lying next to my husband, a man whom I love
deeply and who loves me. On the floor on a little pallet was my three- year-old, a spitfire little sprite who brightens my world. I realized that I only ever wanted to be skinny because I wanted to be loved and happy. But I already have that. Skinny hasn’t seemed very important to me since then.
OceanofPDF.com
