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July 23, 2002 ~ Weighty Matters
"Melissa, are you going to have a baby?"
I stopped walking and shook my head. "No... Well, not now, anyway..." My voice trailed off in an implied question, Why would you think that?
"Oh... Someone said she thought you were..." She paused. "She said you had put on a little weight, and she assumed..."
What an awkward conversation that was, my friends, and a thoroughly new experience for me. I know that this is hard to believe coming from a contemporary female in our culture, but I have never before in my life worried about my weight. I came away from that conversation, however, wondering if the only reason that I had never had "weight issues" was because I hadn't had any weight to have issues about.
Throughout my life, the only sort of weight related conversations (about myself, that is) that I have ever been in were "Aren't you a little too thin? Maybe you should eat some meat." I have always been underweight, since before I became a vegan. It has always been nearly impossible for me to gain weight, and, when you put a less-than-normal diet on top of that, people assume that it is your fault, as if you have an eating disorder. Often times they use it as proof to confirm their opinion that veganism is unhealthy. So, indeed, that can be frustrating, but not usually embarrassing.
I did gain perhaps ten or fifteen pounds this winter, mostly in tummy, hips, and thighs. Which probably puts me right about at the medically recommended weight for my height. I haven't weighed myself in years, but I have felt my clothes becoming slightly tighter this winter. I hadn't thought all that much about it, though, until the woman said something. Until I wondered if other people, who are not so blunt and straightforward as this woman are thinking the same thing, are, perhaps, talking about it without my knowing. Until I decided that the last thing that I need floating around campus right now is that I'm pregnant. Until I realized, for the first time, the possibility that there are judgmental eyes on me thinking that I've "put on" another pound.
I gain a little every winter, but I always lose it all by the end of the summer. It's never worried me, even though this winter I seemed to gain a small amount more than usual. But the woman's question did get me thinking.
Why should my very slight weight gain that brings me up to my recommended weight be a topic of concern for the campus community? Granted, this "recommended weight" is the suggestion of doctors and is probably twenty or more pounds heavier than your average woman in the media (television, magazines, movies). Are we so fixated as a culture on the fashion of being underweight that when someone "lets herself go" and attains the doctor-recommended weight people fixate on it enough to gossip about it? There's something wrong with this picture.
I've had so many female friends starve themselves and develop serious mental disorders and eating disorders in order to keep up with fashion. I've met very, very, very few women who are genuinely happy with their bodies at a healthy weight. Even if they are small, they want to be smaller. I've always kept my mouth shut about it, because "how can you talk; you're naturally underweight." But, well, right now I'm not. And I'm starting to understand the obsession. I mean, if being a normal size provokes embarrassing situations and harsh judgments from others, then I can see why one would begin to think of such a size as unseemly.
Not that I can change the media's portrayal of women or our society's perceptions of what is a beautiful size. But, just for the record, I'm not pregnant, okay? I'm just healthy. Sheesh.
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