Earlier this year I woke up feeling a level of irritation that was unusual for me. Naturally, this freaked me out a little bit. And naturally, I jumped on the internet to look up my symptoms. Google led me down a  ‘hormone imbalance” rabbit hole which turned into a perimenopause rabbit hole. This felt like a pretty standard ‘searching medical conditions experience’ at first but it quickly evolved into something more frustrating. I was not prepared for how much bobbing and weaving I was going to have to do to avoid diet culture suggestions as ways to treat my symptoms. 

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Looking back, I’m a little surprised by how much that threw me off. Afterall we live in a world where doctor’s visits almost always include some discussion of changing your diet or losing weight (for folks in larger bodies, doctor’s appointments are frequently hijacked entirely by weight loss talk) even if you are coming in for something completely unrelated to weight, headaches. I should have known that a health problem, especially one that impacts female identifying people would have been riddled with fat phobia and diet culture rhetoric. 

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Like those hijacked doctor’s appointments my search was appropriated by diet culture.  I was googling things like “intense rage + perimenopause” or “how to not punch everyone in sight during perimenopause”. I was immediately bombarded with different diets to help me stave off weight gain. I was also suggested a variety of anti-inflammatory diets, teas, and hormone balancing seeds that I could simply add to my meals. 

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I wasn’t asking the internet about my body changing, but the search engine I used made it clear that maybe that’s something I SHOULD be thinking about and maybe even taking action on now. “But what about the weight gain that comes with menopause?” it asked me.  I guess my response is:  well…what about it?

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I know my body will change as I get older. It HAS been changing. It’s what bodies do. And of COURSE my body will look different at 40 than it did at 20. I mean my god, that’s 20 years of life. Twenty years of laughing, crying, playing, loving, eating, resting, and just plain old living. Acting as if my body changing as I age is a personal failure is a load of shit.

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But this is the type of message we are bombarded with day after day. The message is that you body can look the same at 40 as it did at 20. You just have to work hard enough. But what they gloss over is the cost of that “hard work”. Cutting out foods you enjoy, working for amounts of time that are at times unsafe and unhealthy, potentially triggering an old eating disorder or developing a new one, spending ungodly amounts of time planning, measuring, or obsessing about food. 

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But what would happen if we didn’t buy into this? What would happen if we continued to honor our bodies in the face of our bodies changing? What if we just let our bodies change? It feels radical. It can also feel scary. We’ve had a lifetime of messaging that we’ve internalized that tells us our bodies changing is “bad”. 

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There may be a part of you that really wants to be able to just let your body change but also at a loss of how to do that. If that’s you, here is a gentle reminder: you can know you can’t go back to a way of being in the world AND also be unsure what your path forward will look like. You don’t have to know what the next step is just yet. That will come with time and with building trust in your body. And like rebuilding trust in people, it takes time and it takes repetition but it is completely possible. 

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Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

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