Don’t eat all day, because you keep forgetting to, or you don’t have time, or you’re struggling financially.
Stave off your hunger and discouraging fatigue with multiple cups of coffee.
Eat Paleo at home. Stop eating or drinking sugar, because you’re almost panicking about having a heart attack, or a stroke, or diabetes, every day.
Do 45-minute high-intensity strength-training workouts five days a week for a year.
Walk or bike to work exclusively.
Beat yourself up when you’re usually too tired to wake up early enough to walk or bike to work.
Hit 7,000 steps daily no matter what.
Fill all your watch rings; if you haven’t, work out some more when you get home from another 11-hour day gone at work.
Eat more protein! Protein with everything!
Track your calories. Don’t track your calories; eat intuitively. Try to eat pro-metabolic. No don’t; they eat too many carbs. Try to eat intuitively. Try to add protein and fiber to each meal. Try. . . .
“You might get some weird dreams,” she says, with her trademark soft smile. “Nothing crazy. And if you get any unexpected insights, jot them down.”
I nod at my therapist—obediently, as if I plan on having the strange dreams and insights just because she said I might. And whether it’s because of my people-pleasing, my first EMDR session, or pure coincidence, there are too many insights that come to me in the next few days.
They come after I spend the rest of my Thursday watching the first part of Bridgerton season 3, and then spend Sunday rewatching it, and then sit on the couch on Monday evening watching PMDD’s ugly claws reach for me.
(I’ll bet you thought I was joking with the title of this post. I wasn’t.)
Watching Bridgerton at all always feels like I’m giving a giant middle finger to conservative Christianity; it is, after all, notoriously full of adult content. So how did such a slap in the face to purity culture teach me just how deeply my body image issues went?
Season 3 focuses on Penelope and Colin’s love story. Unlike the leading ladies of the last two seasons—Phoebe Dynevor’s diamond-like Daphne and Simone Ashley’s tall, graceful Kate Sharma—Nicola Coughlan, Penelope’s actress, is short and usually called “a plus-size queen,” even though she is, for the record, a US size 6. 1(To put that in perspective, the average size of a US woman is a size 16.2) Nicola plays Penelope to perfection: the unseen wallflower with round cheeks who is a secret gossip columnist, mocked because of her weight, awkwardness, and association with her ridiculous family, the Featheringtons. Nicola has also faced a horrific amount of castigation for her body size since being on the show.
Colin, on the other hand, has obtained the complimentary phrase “sexy pirate” for this season, due to the “glow-up” that, as a rule, all Bridgerton leading men get before their starring season. He is tall and classically handsome, and unlike the other two Bridgerton male leads in previous seasons (Simon in season 1, Anthony in season 2), he doesn’t look at Penelope with eyes full of lust, but with such love and friendship on top of his attraction to her.
And seeing this couple together on screen, when I don’t think I’ve ever seen any mid-size woman in a romantic film or TV series who doesn’t serve as comedic relief, was achingly activating.
Reading the opening of this post, would you read those sentences and think the writer was fit, petite, and disciplined? And then, after finding out she was actually tall, thick, and plus-sized, would you think she was, in fact, lying about her dedication?
My battle with PCOS and a host of related conditions, including PMDD, has made weight loss seem an insurmountable obstacle that will only be achieved with, if I am able to save enough money, the help of a GLP-1 agonist. And maybe, after all, the depressive feelings and the desire I got to crawl inside myself on Monday are just the PMDD. Or maybe, even, it’s just that I seem to hear my biological clock ticking a little louder these days.
Or maybe it’s my part that does battle with my health walks alongside my part that remembers abuse and being told I didn’t deserve to have anything good in my life. They walk together, with the part that protects me from men. And those parts, in conjunction, see a story like Bridgerton unfold and weep, because together they protect me while I think of how I could never deserve a tall, kind, thoughtful partner who looks at me with a deep love—and that, in fact, such a man could never exist without being with me out of pity or intimidation or narcissism or cruelty.
Am I the only one who saw her father compliment other women for how hardworking they were and noticed those other women were skinny? Am I the only one who heard how he would say “Hannah didn’t look like she was working very hard” and think, “I should just starve myself; he’d like me so much better”?
It hurts that there has to be so much and such deep pain. I have compared the trauma before to a hot pitchfork cutting my soul, the wounds only half-healing and crusting over before another trigger—Bridgerton or PMDD or the exhaustion after an EMDR therapy session—rips the scabs off. I think this is where I would ordinarily try to end my post with something hopeful: “Someday the soul will heal,” “Maybe with enough EMDR,” . . . but maybe Frodo was right all along: maybe some wounds can never be wholly cured3.4
Enjoy a song from Billie as my send-off.
Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan asks fans not to comment on her body: ‘I am just one real life human being’. Entertainment Weekly. https://ew.com/tv/nicola-coughlan-fans-comments-body/
The ‘Average’ Woman is Now Size 16 or 18. Why Do Retailers Keep Failing Her? Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/didemtali/2016/09/30/the-average-woman-size/?sh=3ffde76f2791
From The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien.
The subtitle from today’s post comes from the heart-wrenching “TV” by Billie Eilish.