One of the most common New Year resolutions that people make is to lose weight, diet, exercise more, and/or “be healthier,” and that doesn’t surprise me at all, but it does concern me a bit. The conflation of weight and health concerns me. Personally, I do not really think we have to be particularly worried about losing weight. Despite what you’ve probably been told your entire life, healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes. Fat is not a bad thing. Being fat is not a bad thing, either. You’re probably just fine how you are.
“Getting healthier” is extremely subjective, and the thing about goals is that they usually need to be measurable (and realistic) in order to be achievable. Do you want to exercise more, be happier, and/or sleep more? Health is so much more than just what we eat or how often we exercise, and performing “healthy” eating and working out a lot are not necessarily going to make you, in the sense of you your whole person, truly healthy.
Our culture tends to moralize both health and weight quite a bit. We often associate fat with laziness. We talk about “excess” fat, or about being “over”weight, as if bodies are only acceptable up to a certain point and then need to be disciplined so that they never expand into space that we don’t think we deserve to occupy.
We even utilize religious language to talk about food and weight. We talk about certain foods being “sinful,” and having to “make up” for foods that we ate, as if we’re performing some kind of atonement for sins. We say things like “I gotta run to work off that dessert I ate last night,” or “I really let myself go over the holidays; I haven’t been exercising or eating right and now I need to make up for it.” It’s something that is so normalized that we think that it’s the healthy thing to do. (Thinking in terms of needing to “compensate” for eating certain foods is heavily associated with disordered eating patterns, by the way.) But you really don’t have to atone for every bit of food you ate that wasn’t strictly necessary to keep you alive. Indulging yourself throughout your life and during the holidays and eating food just because it tastes good are normal parts of being a person.
Don’t feel bad if you break this resolution, HCUBC cuties. You’re perfect just as you are. I promise.