I’ve been actively trying to lose weight for over a year and one of the tools I use to keep me motivated is being part of weight loss communities on social media. It’s not uncommon for someone there to share the weight tracking graph to show their progress or post their “stats” of starting weight, progress thus far, and goal weight.
One thing that I can’t help but notice: everyone is sitting at someone else’s goal weight.
Except for the extreme conditions (my 600-pound life), everyone is someone else’s goal weight. “Yay! I’m almost out of the 200’s!” is posted while a few scrolls later is someone looking forward to being under 250. Someone posts their graphic and their starting weight is someone else’s after-5-months-of-progress weight. “Look at how good I look now!” a photo boasts of someone who is sitting at the weight I am now where I mutter at myself in the mirror “oh gag! *jiggle jiggle*”
I want to cry sometimes and vow to never touch a grain of sugar ever again when my precious daughter is grabbing and jiggling my belly roll while standing next to me brushing our teeth. But I remember the actual tears I sobbed for years when that waistline was slim and taught. This belly is now stretched and soft from carrying her and her brother within it.
For years I struggled with infertility and wanted more than anything to have a child. I wanted it more than any money in the world and definitely more than six-pack abs. I would look at those round bellies of expectant mothers that contained a child and would long for the bulge myself. The post-partum mush was gorgeous to me because the precious creature that snuggled in the arms above it. The wide hips that delivered a child through them. The full then drooping breasts which nourished a baby. The round “Mom Bod” that chased a kid around a playground or dragged a screaming toddler through a store. I wanted it all. I longed for it all. It was perfection in my eyes.
It’s so easy to be critical of that image in the mirror. But no matter what is standing there, it is already someone’s idea of the perfect body.
Perfectly perfect