Soul Snacks🧍‍♀️

3.5 minute read

Dear Snackers,

As cringey as it is for me to admit my vulnerabilities, for the sake of transparency and an honest conversation, I wanted to talk about walking past a mirror. For as long as I can remember, my midsection has been my “problem area”. Even as a little girl, my stomach always popped out, and it was not until high school, when I grew absolute cannons for breasts, that something on my body protruded further than my belly. Don’t get me wrong – I am not here crying out for compliments on my body, that would only perpetuate the problem – I am saying this intentionally to highlight deeply rooted bodily insecurities. I am embarrassed to admit the number of times I have let my stomach crush my confidence and, to this day, when I wake up in the morning, right after I pee of course, I stop in front of my bathroom mirror, lift my t-shirt up to my rib cage, turn to the side and examine the girth of my midsection. Why is it sometimes dented inwards at my belly button? Am I “thicker” than I was last week? And then, worst of all, probably around day 10 or 11 of my cycle, when I wake up and look in the mirror and my stomach is at its flattest, I feel like the worthiest version of myself. When I think I look bigger, I feel immediately more down on myself, like I haven’t been trying hard enough. 

I don’t know if this sounds crazy, or foreign, or totally familiar to other people, but my bodily insecurity is basically the very first thing I pay attention to in the morning and I’ve been doing it so long, I can’t even remember when it started. At a time where it just started to feel like looking strong was becoming glorified in the beauty/fashion/Hollywood industry, as I scrolled through photos of the red carpet at this year’s Oscars, it became increasingly obvious that “skinny” is still queen. I understand why GLP-1’s are lifesaving for some people. I also understand that it becomes harder to maintain your weight in midlife and that some intervention might be necessary to get your cardiovascular health, or your weight back to the right place, too. But what gets to me is the women who are already quite slender hitting the semaglutides (weight loss shots), further perpetuating the pressure that women are under to be skinny. For me, the most disappointing part of seeing the Oscars’ photos is that the women who are impossibly thin are not just the ones in their 20’s or 30’s – many of the women perpetuating the unrealistic bodily standards are in their 40’s and 50’s -- will it ever end? Are we really supposed to give that much of a fuck about our weight forever? 

I suppose I am telling you that I look at my stomach in the mirror every day because I want to normalize the pressure I have absorbed from societal messaging. I have gone through periods in my life when I have been very restrictive with my intake because I wanted to maintain a certain number on a scale – this was especially true when my kids were babies and toddlers and my oldest was going through Leukemia – not only did I like the feedback I received about my body when I was too anxious to eat, but even when we were going through a good treatment cycle and I did feel hungry, I leaned into the ability to feel in control over something, in this case, my body. In recent years, understanding the way that restrictive eating puts your body under stress, I have happily leaned into fueling myself better. I am still conscious about eating the right types of food and not overdoing it, and I love to move my body, but I no longer weigh myself and, when I am hungry, I just fucking eat. I love good food. 

Still, even when you know better, there is a lurking feeling of “failure” in comparison to Hollywood’s elite. Look, I don’t actually give a rat’s ass if the women in the spotlight eat or not, or what cosmetic enhancements they’ve undergone, I actually truly want women to feel their best, but if looking your best costs a lot of money, I just want them to be honest about it. If you are a person of status, I think it would be responsible to tell the world you’re taking an expensive weekly shot to suppress your appetite, and while you’re at it, maybe put out a press release acknowledging that the standard you’re setting contributes to making other women, especially of a certain age, feel irrelevant. A lack of transparency surrounding the time and money it takes to maintain a flawless appearance, in my opinion, is not in favor of women. Call me a nut bag, but I would be pumped if one day women were considered relevant for what cannot be seen in the fucking mirror. 

-Caitlin