An Act of Self Love

The other day I had an epiphany on Medium while having a conversation with a fellow reader. Weight loss is an act of self-love and it sticks only when your reason to lose weight…is you. Many of us engage in this journey for a myriad of reasons: Health, the upcoming wedding, the doctor telling us to lose it, an emergency room scare. The list is almost endless.

Health is the closest to self-love on this list. Because if you love yourself, you want your body to work as best as it can, no matter your age or underlying disease processes. I speak as a post-menopausal woman with very bad knees, and diabetes that I keep under tight control.

Yes, my knees at times hurt enough for me to take a day off from my almost daily exercise. So when my knees scream, and I have seen the x-rays, they are indeed pretty bad, I listen to them. However, these days I am very fit, with fairly good endurance. I enjoy a good fast walk…at this point, it’s almost a trot. Just listen to a good book on the iPhone.

I have added resistance. Somebody recommended to me Caroline Girvan on YouTube. I am working my way through her no equipment videos and realizing just how much I have missed doing honest-to-goodness resistance training. I have not been a regular at the gym since the pandemic started. While I have done some resistance, clearly it has not been enough.

But I love my body enough to want it to work at peak performance, or as close as it can, given my age and circumstances. I want to lengthen my health years. This is also why I keep in contact with my provider and we work together to make sure the medications I need are tuned up, and why I take my blood pressure twice a day, and my glucose readings often.

This brings me to the toxicity that is the Health at Any Size, HAES for short, movement. The movement started from a good place. Yes, there is obvious bias from medical providers, many of who are also overweight to obese, when treating overweight to obese patients. This comes from the puritan strain of American culture going all the way to New England early in the colonial period. Calories In- Calories Out was tailor-made for this. Sloth and gluttony are encoded in this. That research is increasingly showing this is a hormone dysfunction is true. What is also true is that your body, and your health years, with…