As a Nigerian, this is a topic I’m never able to avoid;
“Did you add weight?” — No, I’ve weighed the same since I was 15.
“You’ve lost so much weight, I can see all your bones” — Again, same weight since 15.
The first time I really noticed my body, I was 7. Unlike my cousins and friends at the time, I had a “tummy”. In retrospect, I’ll chalk this down to the fact that I drank a whole bottle of nail polish remover around this time in my life, and all my innards got a little swollen. But at the time, I was really embarrassed by how I looked in the mirror — I thought I was fat and unkempt and just meh. This mindset took a toll on how I related to food as I got older, being in a boarding school with girls with “perfect” bodies didn’t help either.
I was 13 when my family and I found out my genotype was SC (don’t know how we missed it for so long). This scared everyone, and in turn, they pushed me to eat because I was too sickly, too skinny. But I didn’t want to eat because I didn’t want a “tummy” and I really wanted to look like the “perfect” bodied girls in my school. By the time I was 14, I had had 2 ulcers, and anemia was just a part of my identity.
The first time I heard a conversation about body image, I was a 15-year-old dipshit. I remember my first thought was that only “fat” people had to deal with it, so I thanked God I was in the “not skinny but not fat” category, and I didn’t bother to crack a book. By the time I realized that food and my perception of my body had influenced a significant portion of my life and my health, I was 18 and in university. I was counting each calorie that went into my body (Did you know that there was an online debate on how many calories are in a 60cl bottle of Nestle water?), and I don’t think I’ve ever been more self-conscious than I was at that point.
But like I’ve stated twice already in this article, I have weighed the same thing since I was 15, so why do I alternate between a size 6 and size 8 in clothes? How do I rationalize the distribution of my body fat? From my hips to my tummy to my arms and back again? I can’t. As a 23-year-old, I still struggle a lot with what I see in the mirror, sometimes my size 6 clothes hang from my body like I’m lifeless, other times I’m bursting through the seams of my size 8 clothes. I am never wholly able to identify what’s wrong because everything is wrong — I am not thick enough but not thin enough, I am not fat or skinny, so what am I?
I recently had a phone conversation with my auntie, and I brought this up because I had been feeling uncomfortable in my skin, and I was hoping she had a way to hack it. She didn’t, she said there’s simply nothing anyone can tell me about my body that will make me feel good in it. She asked me if there was something I wanted to hear that will change my opinion about my body, and the truth is, there isn’t.
I am always terrified of answering questions about my body — knowing what to expect when I step on a scale does nothing to decrease the level of anxiety I feel whenever I’m scheduled to be on one. Knowing that even though I now work out and try to take better care of myself, I’m never fully 100% comfortable in my body. Knowing that there are days when I skip meals because my mind is still unconsciously counting my calories and I’m still reminding myself that I’ve maxed out for the day.
There are some behaviors that you possess that may seem reasonable but are deeply rooted in your dysfunctional relationship with food and your body. And so even though I probably won’t take my own advice — be kinder to yourself.
