Body Image and Elastic Pants

A woman stands in front of a mirror, considering her own body. She examines herself with a critical eye that she believes is neutral and honest one. "I know I'm not as attractive as other women," she thinks, with an internal sigh that insinuates she has internalized this as fact. She wonders if she will able to look at her reflection and think of it as beautiful, or if she will ever meet someone who will tell her that she is in such a way that she believes that they truly mean it. Instead she looks away.

This scene could easily be from a PSA on building self esteem, or an article in a magazine about the deteriorating state of body image, or a movie where the heroine eventually meets someone like Colin Firth in Bridget Jones' Diary who likes her just as she is. In reality, this is me, brushing my teeth before bed, letting my mind wander as I stand tethered to the bathroom sink for two minutes.

I remember the first time I had this revelation about myself: In the first grade, when I noticed the cute, popular girls in my class wore outfits I saw at the store but thought were for littler kids, because they were different than the ones I had from the "big girl" section. None of them wore the elastic waistband stirrup pants my mom bought for me, and they were glowingly tended to by classmates and grown-ups alike. At the ripe age of seven, I resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t look like them, and definitely wouldn’t get the kind of preferential treatment that I saw them get because of it, and leaned into being the smart girl instead.

—

This week TIME magazine reported that WW (formerly Weight Watchers) has announced Kurbo, "a free nutrition and weight-loss app for kids as young as 8." It's marketed as a way for kids and teens to build healthy habits while overseen by a health coach. "The fun app keeps you on track...your parent's don't!" the website boasts. "You'll like the videos, challenges and cool hacks, too." It uses a Traffic Light system to categorize foods and the dashboard prominently features a large number showing how many 'red' (read: bad) foods you've logged for the day.

I'm not a nutritionist, or a child psychologist, but I can imagine what sort of impact this would have had on my younger self. I can imagine that little girl in elastic pants, already sensing that her body set her apart from her peers, and adding to it the shame of having an adult she loved tell her that something about her was bad and needed fixing. She was a child who already got anxiety-induced stomach aches during gym class at the thought of publicly failing at a game because she wasn't as athletic as the other kids. She ate pretty well — I can vividly remember the pediatrician being surprised at how infrequently our family had pizza, fast food, or soda compared to other children in the 1990s — but that wouldn’t have mattered. Giving that little girl an app that told her food like the homemade pie her grandma made for her birthday or the chicken nuggets her dad splurged on as a Friday night surprise were bad and that she shouldn't be eating them would have made her miserable. She would have felt so guilty for eating 'yellow' foods even though that was what her family could afford put on the table. In trying to boost Little Wesleigh's self esteem by making her healthier this app would have have instead plummeted it in the opposite direction.

—

And the thing is, while I have been plus-sized for the majority of my life, I didn't have as tough a time with body issues as some. I never actively hated my body, or suffered from any sort of disordered eating. I was mostly indifferent to it. My dad would remind us that in the long run looks would fade and your character was the most important part of you. My mom never put me or my sister on a diet as children because she had also struggled with being a chubby little girl and didn't want to put the same pressures she had faced on her daughters' shoulders. We were encouraged to play and do physical activities but never pushed to as weight loss motivation. My relationship with my body and weight and food was a bit complicated but could have been a lot worse.

Don't get me wrong, it was still hard. It was hard to grow up in an era where women's fashion revolved around spaghetti strap tank tops and mini skirts and I had to shop in the Gloria Vanderbilt section at Macy's to find jeans that fit. It was hard going to a specialty store to look at the five prom dresses available in my size when my friends went on fun shopping excursions with their moms. It was hard enough being a teenage girl while overweight; it would have been a million times harder if I had also grown up constantly tracking my food and worrying if, somehow, I was responsible for the way other people saw and treated me, and was only making things worse.

—

This is why my heart breaks for the little girls who will be handed this WW app. Instead of seeing themselves through their own eyes, they will start to look at and judge themselves through the fun-house mirrors that are society's ideas of what their bodies should look like. Just like my seven year old self, they will look at themselves and determine that they won’t measure up.

I want them to be able to enjoy food and not resent it for what it has or hasn’t done for them. I want them to exercise because they found an activity they enjoy and not because they have to meet a move goal. I want them to never have that moment where they look around and think that they are not as worthy of attention or affection because of their size.

I want them to look at themselves in the mirror while brushing their teeth and not even wonder if they’re beautiful, because they already know it to be true.