Feel weird about your pandemic body? Read this
I hear rumors that some people are vaccinated and back out in the world. (Not me, yet! Fingers crossed for August.) Chances are you look a little different than you did before, or at least you feel like you do. Personally I kind of stopped looking in the mirror months ago, without even realizing it. Any information it could give me started to seem irrelevant. I doubt I’ll ever go back to daily make-up or hard pants for sitting in my home office. But presumably, one day, I’ll return to thinking about what I look like from the shoulders down (i.e. what I’m not forced to stare at during video calls). I’m not looking forward to it. Not because of any changes I might find, but because I know the insidious forces of fatphobia and diet culture will be there, ready to make me feel bad about having a body at all.
If you are also feeling weird about your pandemic body, and/or your emotions about your pandemic body, and/or returning to society in your pandemic body, I can’t recommend enough the work of Virginia Sole-Smith. She’s a journalist who, broadly speaking, writes from a feminist, science-based perspective about our relationship to food, eating, our bodies, and ourselves. I’ve never met her, but I’ve followed her work for the last eight years, after I found a blog post she wrote about her freelance business spreadsheet and promptly copied it. (I still use it!) Since then, she’s become an absolutely vital voice on diet culture and all the ways it keeps us down. And recently it seems like more and more people have been joining me in the Virginia Sole-Smith fan club, as the pandemic has invited us to think about our bodies and our relationships to them in new ways.
A good place to start with her recent work is this piece in Good Housekeeping titled “No, You Don’t Need to Get Your ‘Pre-Pandemic Body’ Back,” which made me cry:
Imagine, for a second, if you didn’t judge yourself and your body so harshly for changing during this time. You can then start to reframe your understanding of the way your lifestyle has changed and find compassion for these choices.
Instead of “I’m so bad for eating all this ice cream,” you might think, “This ice cream is delicious and it’s so nice to have a treat after another long day in lockdown.” Instead of, “It’s been a year since I set foot in the gym,” maybe it’s, “I’m glad we got the pandemic puppy so I get outside for a walk every day.” Or even, “I’m glad I’m getting more rest this year because wow, this is exhausting.”
She also recently leveled up her newsletter Burnt Toast, which I always open the instant I see it in my inbox. We all know Substack and the newsletter model have their issues, but I completely agree with what Virginia says here:
I write Burnt Toast because I think we also need a place where to critique diet culture and combat fatphobia, without the continual compromise required by corporate media. Where I don’t have to worry that a sidebar ad for flat tummy tea will run alongside my explanation of why the ob*sity epidemic is over-hyped.
That’s about the best reason to start a paid newsletter I’ve ever heard. I’ve always admired how Virginia combines rigorous journalism with a strong point of view, and I’m excited to see what she’ll be able to do with a reader-supported space. I subscribed, and if you like what you read, I hope you will too! There’s never been a better time to say goodbye to diet culture, but it’s so hard, and we all need some help finding our way out.