Last year, I stood up in two weddings and attended four. I was invited to four bachelorette parties and went to three. It was a busy year! I know there are women out there who have had much busier summers with many more weddings and bachelorette parties than I did in 2023, but for me, it was a significant summer.
My bachelorette summer kicked off with my college friend Imogene’s party. Imogene is a wonderful woman. She is smart, driven, funny, and kind. She started working as a physician’s assistant a few years ago. She loves to work out, read, and play Just Dance. She isn’t much of a partier (anymore), so her sister (the MOH) planned a weekend at a lake house in West Michigan for her bachelorette party.
Imogene’s guest list was as fun and smart as she is. Her sister is a pharmacist. Her soon-to-be sister-in-law’s were new mothers who also have thriving careers. Her friends work in marketing, finance, and the healthcare field. Many of them had played collegiate-level sports and love traveling the world. In short, these women are interesting.
Like any group of people, outside of maybe men’s sports teams, we all had different body shapes and sizes. Some of us had little body fat, and some of us had more. I was, and always am, on the side of having more. Throughout my life, this has been a sticking point for me. I have struggled to love myself and accept myself as I am. But I’ve worked on it. I go to therapy weekly, and body image is a topic of conversation with the goal of maybe one day achieving true body neutrality. The end of the road looks like appreciating my body for what it can do, all that it does for me, without that appreciation hinging on how small my waist is.
So imagine my disappointment when the conversations at Imogene’s bachelorette party almost immediately turned to body size and dieting
It started with Imogene’s cousin, Lily. Lily is a tall woman, close to or maybe even six feet tall. She is stunning, with dark, shiny hair and gorgeous eyes. She had gained weight since I last saw her at a Wrigleyville bar back when we were still college students. And so had I. But unlike me, she felt the need to address her changes in body. As we sipped our margaritas, she assured me she was doing everything she could to lose the weight. Like so many women, she explained to me, her weight gain was caused by PCOS, which also made it difficult for her to shed it.
I understood. As a PCOS sufferer myself, I know firsthand how hard you can diet and work out only to see the scale barely move.
So I nodded along and found myself lamenting alongside Lily. I found myself explaining my own weight gain. It felt like an apology and a disclaimer to the smaller girls in the room. “Don’t worry! I know I’m fat! And I AM doing something about it! I am not clueless about my own shortcomings here!”
The weekend progressed, and at a winery, I found myself in the same conversation again with Lily and Imogene’s sister, Francesca.
Francesca was about six months pregnant at that time, but she still felt the pull of the weight conversation. She expressed guilt over her body, particularly in relation to her husband. By this time, I had had enough of the conversation. I no longer wanted to apologize over and over again for how my body simply is. I was fed up.
“I’ve gained weight, but my husband still loves me for exactly how I am,” I said, hoping to reassure her.
“You don’t get it,” she said. “I was a lot skinnier when I met my husband. Like a lot skinnier. It’s not the same situation as yours.”
Yikes! Double yikes! Not only did she brush off my attempt at turning the ship toward sunnier skies, but she also threw me overboard into a sea of body shame. Her words stung. She basically said, “It’s okay that you’re fat! You always have been! But not me. Never me.”
I left that bachelorette party feeling more discouraged than ever before. We are all interesting women. We all had so much to bring to the conversation outside of our physical appearances. And yet we couldn’t escape the trap of diet talk.
It was not lost on me that the women who always started the conversations around weight that weekend were the women who exist in larger bodies. The thin women did not engage and were largely left out of the discussions. Because these are the ties that bind us as fat women. We are bound together by the stigma that people in fat bodies face every day. We are bound by the incessant need to apologize for our bodies, to be doing something about them. We are bound by diet culture, misogyny, and fatphobia.
And sure, maybe in some ways these obstacles can appear to bring us together. But this is not bonding. Diet talk and promises of changing our bodies are not kinship. It’s not empowering. I don’t feel comforted by these conversations. I feel angry. Because the least interesting thing about me is what percent body fat I have.
I am not ignorant, so I don’t believe I will ever see a change in my lifetime in which women can remove themselves from these thoughts or behaviors. They’re honestly too deeply rooted in our subconscious
I was reading “The Millennial Body Image Curse” by Miakala Jamison in her publication Body Type in which she talks about the challenging dichotomy of being a millennial woman who simultaneously deeply desires weight loss and also feels shame for that desire. I felt seen reading her words. Jamison goes on to ask an interesting question:
“What if it isn’t such a terrible thing to have this nasty little want?” She asks, “What if it’s OK to accept that it exists, as long as we don’t align our entire lives around the struggle for thinness or our self-hatred for not being thin? What if we accept that this desire that was implanted in us is simply a personality quirk?”
It’s an interesting thing to think about as I try my darndest to combat my own internalized fatphobia. What if it’s not so terrible to desire weight loss, especially in a society that continuously bombards us with diet messaging? (See: my Instagram and TikTok feeds that serve me before-and-afters despite my best efforts to mark this content as undesirable.) What if my yearning for a thinner body could be laughed at in the same way I do about my anxious need to show up at the airport three hours early for a domestic flight? What if it was no different than my acceptance that I have the impulse to say “Hell yeah, brother” to every yes or no question to which I am answering in the affirmative?
Maybe we can all accept that these thoughts will exist in the back of our minds. But also maybe we can be better then about keeping those thoughts there. Maybe I won’t have to have the weight conversation with every fat woman in a group of thin women. Maybe I can be like “Hell yeah, brother, it would be nice to have thin privilege,” while also saying “Oh well! What a weird little thought!” and merely letting it go.
In a world where medications such as Ozempic and Monjourno are becoming mainstream, this fantasy seems less and less possible for all of my peers. But a girl can hope! All I can do is maintain my boundaries around weight talk (which I started putting up after Imogene’s bachelorette party) and work on myself. But I have hope that with conversations like the one Jamison is having on Body Type, we can move closer to neutrality toward our physical bodies and toward the unkind, fatphobic thoughts that exist in all of us. The work is worth doing.
Hell yeah, brother! This was so honest and real. Loved the read.