Learning to Like the Girl in the Mirror

Body image and the unhealthy way Americans handle it is an issue I've been trying to figure out how to write about for quite a while. It's a touchy subject, one that we as a society often choose to ignore, although the havoc it's been wreaking for several generations is something that isn't going anywhere until we figure out how to deal with it.

Some people place the blame on the fashion industry with their tiny sample sizes and skin-and-bones teenage models. Some look at airbrushed Hollywood starlets with personal chefs specializing in fad diets and personal trainers on call. Both are part of the problem, but so are we, your average members of society. We've put the fashion and film industries on a pedestal and look at them as things everyone should aspire to, devoting our lives and our bank accounts to attaining the current definition of physical beauty.

It's an unhealthy outlook, and it's not okay.

I've struggled with my own body image for most of my life, whether because I grew up chubby in bikini-clad, Hollywood-obsessed Southern California or just because I'm a product of my generation, I'm not sure. I don't remember when or why my body started to bother me, but by the time I was in middle school it seemed like something that had always been.

I started my first diet - The Zone - when I was twelve, and although after a few months I was probably healthier and certainly skinnier than I had ever been, I didn't feel any better about my body. I look back at pictures from that time now and wonder why. Between dance and marching band, my weight stayed fairly stable through my first year of high school, but after that I started to gain weight, every pound feeling like another albatross around my neck, and my self-esteem began to plummet.

Sure, I was smart and articulate and mature for my age, a talented musician, a steadfast friend, a good daughter - a well-rounded, generally nice person. But my body was ugly, so what did it matter?

In class, I never sat with my feet on the floor, balancing just my toes on the ground to keep my legs from looking fat. After middle school, I stopped wearing shorts. Ever. Department store dressing rooms became my personal version of hell, and clothing sizes the demons that haunted me. I nearly broke down in tears two hours before my junior prom because my dress was beautiful, and my body was ruining it.

That was the year I'd started to hate my body with a desperate virulence that festered in the back of my mind, always whispering in my ear. If there was just some way to make that extra weight go away, I'd be so happy. If I could wear a bikini, all would be right in my world. The month before that junior prom, I ate as little as possible. Breakfast was a SlimFast shake. So was dinner, if I could get away with it. I ate the fruit and sometimes the string cheese my mom packed me for lunch, and handed everything else out to my friends - with teenage boys around, someone was always hungry. My caloric intake was probably less than 900 calories a day, a number that makes me cringe now, because I know how unhealthy it is. And still, I hated myself as I zipped up that beautiful dress.

In January of my senior year, I got on a scale. I don't remember why, because I usually avoided them like the plague. The number it registered, while nothing that would elicit more than a shrug and a recommendation for moderate exercise from pediatricians used to dealing with serious childhood obesity, finally pushed something home: wishing and starving myself were never going to make me either thin or comfortable with my body, and I was going to keep hating myself until I tried some other way to get there.

Not much of a revelation, but since I was done with marching band for the year and had some afternoons free, it got me to the gym a few times a week. At first, it was loathing for my body that drove me. Directing all of that frustration, disgust and anger at a machine was better than having nowhere to put it.

Still avoiding scales, I didn't notice a change in my body until I went - reluctantly, dreading what I might find - to try on my junior prom dress to see if I could wear it again to my senior prom. I couldn't - it all but fell off. I bought a new dress in a smaller size and felt pretty for the first time in years. Digging through my closet, I found that I fit into a lot of clothes from my freshman year - including the formal black dress my mom had made for my concert band's spring concert that year. I wore it again to my senior concert, and although I was still self-conscious, that desperate hatred had retreated.

When I went to the doctor for my pre-college physical in August, I'd lost 13 pounds since that awful day in January. The number on the scale was still frustrating, but after a few months away from the demons in my head ranting about sizes and weights and fat, I had the perspective to recognize it as a personal victory.

The next hurdle was college, and the dreaded freshman 15. I was terrified of that phrase, and vowed that I absolutely would not fall victim to it. I spent thirty to forty-five minutes at the gym three or four evenings a week, and by the time I went home for Homecoming in October, I'd lost another 10 pounds. By the middle of my sophomore year, I'd lost an additional 25 pounds and was wearing the clothes I wanted to, in sizes that were SoCal-acceptably small. My cardinal rules were a) that the number on the scale had to drop a fraction every time I went to the gym and b) strictly limiting myself to 1,000 calories per day (one of the most widely-accepted minimums for what it takes to keep a body more or less my size functioning is 1,200) was a good way to lose weight. I compared myself to everyone around me, and if I wasn't among the thinnest girls in the room, I was uncomfortable.

I panicked when I lived with a host family while studying abroad. If someone else was cooking, how could I keep track of how many calories I was consuming and keep the self-loathing monster in my head at bay? I mentioned my worries about gaining weight to some of my new friends. One of them said "Do your clothes still fit?" "Well, yes, but..." "Then what are you worried about?" Perfectly logical, but it took me by surprise and left me completely without a response. I had always avoided talking to anyone - with the occasional exception of my mom - about how I felt about my body. Now that the issue was at least partially out in the open, it suddenly didn't seem like quite the deep, dark secret I had always felt it to be.

That moment wasn't a magic bullet. It didn't make me see immediately that the way worries about my weight lurked behind my every thought was unhealthy. But it stayed in the back of my mind and when I was being so ridiculous about how I looked that even I was sick of myself, it helped me turn away from the mirror and go on with my day. It wasn't until I had been running seriously for several months and had to drastically overhaul my eating habits in order to not pass out that the way I thought about my body really began to change. Gradually, I was able to acknowledge that it was never going to be healthy for me to be rail-thin, because I'm just not built that way. And as I began to view my body more as a functional tool than a display window, I realized that what I looked like was secondary to how I felt.

I weigh more now than I did at my thinnest in college. I'll probably never be entirely comfortable with how I look in a bikini. I still sigh into the mirror sometimes, or fret over the fit of a piece of clothing. But I accept what I see when I face that mirror and a fair amount of the time, I like it. I understand my body better and rather than struggle against it, I listen to what it's telling me. I don't count every calorie I put in my mouth anymore, I don't skip meals and I don't obsess about the number on the scale (in fact, I generally don't even get on one except once a year at the doctor's office). I eat sensibly and stay active, and both my mind and body are stronger than they've ever been. I intend to keep them that way.

I've come a long way from despising that girl in the mirror because all I could see were her flaws. But I know there are too many women (and probably men, as well) out there who can't see anything else in their own mirrors. They starve themselves, exercise with nothing in their systems to burn and mentally compare themselves to cover models, thinking they should be able to look the same, even without professional photography and airbrushing.

The beginnings of an outcry for average-sized models are rattling around the fashion industry, and some actresses are asking magazines not to airbrush photos of them. But until we, as a society, can accept that health and Hollywood's version of it are not the same thing, we're going to continue raising generations of self-loathing women who spend their lives agonizing over numbers on a scale and scraps of cloth. Rather than what will make us healthy, we're told what will make us look better. Rather than seeing ourselves as we are, we're pressured into looking at ourselves through the lens of someone else's body and someone else's definition of what's attractive. Rather than being encouraged to be comfortable in our own skin, we're encouraged to be prettier, thinner, better. I don't know how we succeed in changing that, but I know we have to start by changing the conversation. I hope that sharing my own struggle with that girl in the mirror will move us just a little bit closer to being able to do so.

What happened to "Girl Power?"

I've been thinking about this since my Metro ride this morning. I averted my eyes from the girl standing across from me after one glance, because I didn't want her to think I was judging her. She was probably 16 or 17, was wearing more makeup than I used to wear on stage, had intentional bedhead hair - perfectly curled and carefully tousled - and wore a push-up bra that was beyond extreme and showcased by her shirt, which was unbuttoned to the top of her ribcage.

As I stared out the window, wondering why so many young women feel the need to call attention to themselves in such negative ways, I started to feel sorry for her, and then to feel sad. Teenage girls like her have a sense of self-worth that's obviously wrapped up in their looks, and I feel like they're in the majority these days.

I went to middle school and high school with some girls who dressed similarly to the young woman I saw on the Metro, but the majority of the girls I grew up with valued their minds and personalities above their perceived attractiveness or sexuality - at least most of the time. We came of age with The Babysitters' Club, the first wave of American Girl dolls and books, Jewel's first three albums and Martina McBride's powerhouse voice and feminist message.

Yes, we felt immense pressure to be thin, to be pretty, to fit in, but we were encouraged at least as often to be ourselves, whatever that looked like. We embraced female artists with individualist tendencies, like Natalie Imbruglia and Dido, and snickered at cookie-cutter pop divas like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson (even if we did sometimes sing their songs). We were still figuring out who we were, but we celebrated the parts of ourselves we knew and did our best to accept the aspects we knew were still changing.

One of my strongest memories that evokes the positive message I remember growing up with is from my 14th birthday party. My girlfriends and I were at my house and, having pushed the dining room table and chairs out of the way, were taking turns lip-synching/singing and dancing to our favorite songs, blasted on my parents' boom box. Five of us got up to do a Spice Girls favorite (I don't remember which one, but best bets are "Wannabe," "Spice Up Your Life," or "Stop"), arms around each other, singing at the top of our lungs into plastic spoon "microphones," grinning and laughing the whole time. Someone snapped a picture and every time I look at it, I remember how strong and happy and loved I felt at that moment.

The Spice Girls' motto was "Girl Power!" It's a pretty good expression of society's attitude toward young women in the 90s, and the women I know who grew up during that time took it to heart and remember it fondly. I haven't been a teenager in a while, nor do I know many anymore, but that positive, affirming outlook doesn't seem to be as evident in today's society. Gender equality was never in question for me, and I think that holds true across most of my generation; the idea that being women meant we had to look or dress or act a certain way never occurred to us. Our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers had fought to be fully-functioning, completely equal members of society and had won (back then, I didn't hear much about women earning less than men). We were lucky enough to live in a time when all we had to do was enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Now I wonder if we're forgetting, as a society, what those women fought for and why. Women's suffrage and women's lib aren't subjects that are often covered in history classes. In fact, I only learned about the history of the women's rights movement in a classroom twice: when I selected women's suffrage in the U.S. as my topic for a history project in eighth grade, and when I studied Roe v. Wade in American Government in high school. Combine that lack of attention with the number of Americans who identify as anti-choice actually increasing and girls being inundated with air-brushed images of chemically and surgically altered models and performers, and I'm not sure how we can expect being a woman to continue to carry a positive message of independence and strength.

What happened to girl power, and why does it feel like we're slipping back to a time when a woman's face was more important than what went on behind it?

"Of course it's all about me!"

This general attitude had me spending most of yesterday alternately lecturing myself on the importance of positivity and wanting to scream not-so-nice things at anyone who crossed my path.

It was one of those days when every cyclist on the trail zoomed past three inches from my elbow with nary a "Left!" to be heard, I got knocked around by people on the Metro twice my size whose mothers certainly taught them better and, about the time I was trying to eat lunch, half a dozen things suddenly appeared in my inbox that had to be done five minutes ago. (At least this time my case of the Mondays fell on the right day of the week.) Some passive-aggressive tendencies and blind-siding rounded out the day, and I arrived home frustrated and cranky. I reminded myself that it was just Monday, and that if I relaxed and got a good night's sleep, things would look better in the morning.

And they did! I ran with great weather and a beautiful sunrise glinting off the Potomac this morning, regardless of the Mercedes turning left that wanted to play chicken with me while I was obeying the little green man in the crosswalk signal at a major intersection. I even got to work a little early, despite exiting the Metro being its usual exercise in being jostled by briefcases on all sides. And I had time before work to respond to a friend's email about her frustration with the total lack of consideration she's been getting during the last few months, from companies of which she's a customer, colleagues and her state government.

Our frustrations, I think, have the same root: people just don't care about people anymore. (Which has the secondary effect of making me want to, in turn, elbow my way to the front of the line and shout at the top of my lungs until I get what I want. So far I'm well-behaved enough not to give in to temptation. Barely.)

Sure, most people still have a small inner circle of family members and friends for whom they would do just about anything, although we probably spend less time with, talking to or thinking about one another than we used to. Outside of that circle, the general public seems to care not one iota about anyone else they may come into contact with beyond the minimum it takes to get what they need for either personal or professional reasons. Everyone wants to feed starving children in India, prevent malaria in Africa and help educate women and children worldwide, but they couldn't care less about the next 30 seconds in the life of the person waiting in line next to them.

As I put it to my beleaguered friend this morning, "Yay, good, let's make sure people around the world aren't starving or dying of preventable/curable diseases, but for crying out loud, let's not step on everyone we walk past on the street while we're doing it!"

Not everyone acts this way - some of my colleagues and many of my friends are drop-everything-and-help-anyone-in-need types. I try to be one too, but I know I'm sometimes guilty of tuning out the people around me. We're all a little narcissistic; it's human nature to be at least slightly more concerned with yourself and your immediate family and/or friends than with individual people you don't know.

My concern (/rant...) is that it seems to have become not only acceptable but, in some places, standard operating procedure in society to run roughshod over everyone you've decided you don't have to care about. And that's not a good lifestyle choice for society, in general, to make. I've always been of the "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" school (thanks, Mom!), but it seems like it just doesn't work anymore, as far as having any noticeable effect on society goes.

What do you think, is this actually a trend, or am I crazy? If it is a trend, is it a bad one (...and if I'm just crazy, do you know any good therapists?), or is it just the new normal and not an issue? My opinion on this one is obvious, but I'd like to hear yours.