A Meditation on Body Fat
How to embrace my changing body?
Content note: This is not about weight loss, but I do explore complicated feelings relating to gaining weight.
I’ve always been a small, lightweight person. My height is barely above five feet, and my skeleton is narrow, which once caused my maternal grandmother to note that I looked more like a southern Chinese person than a northern Chinese person. (My mother is northern, while my father hails from a province that is as southern as Maryland or Virginia is in the United States. Stereotypically, southern Chinese are smaller than northern Chinese.)
I am frequently mistaken to be a teenager. My hands and feet are even smaller in proportion to the rest of my body, which means I can’t reach tenths on the piano and often look in the boys section for shoes. I even carry myself in an airy manner, having trained myself since childhood to walk almost silently and land on the balls of my feet when I leap.
Yet my body is changing. I’ve gained a significant amount of weight since graduating from college, not enough to be considered “fat” by other people (especially since I prefer looser clothing), but enough that I am quickly growing out of my collection of pants. And I’m not sure how to feel about it. I suppose that I don’t have to feel anything about it, but I certainly do. I feel — too many — conflicted.
There are so many different messages that I receive about my body. My father, who rarely is home with the rest of us, actually pretty recently believed that I had grown thinner, when I did not believe that to be the case. Chinese culture traditionally warns women against being too thin, as that suggests undernourishment, but Westernization has brought in the fear of being fat as well. One time when I was in college, my mother told me that I was too thin. Several months after, she told me that I was too fat. There is no winning against my mother, who feels compelled to protect her children from the world by enforcing all its oppressive rules.
How to piece these together. How to pull them apart. I can try thinking over it all, but ultimately, I need to feel it in my body.
There is a traditional Buddhist meditation on 32 parts of the body. These include commonly discussed parts like skin, the heart, bones, and the brain, but they also include parts that many of us would prefer to ignore in the everyday, like phlegm, feces, and fat. The traditional practice is to go through all the 32 parts one by one as an exercise of mindfulness over what is evoked physically, mentally, and emotionally within you regarding these parts. I have not done the entire 32 part practice, but it did inspire me to try meditating upon my body fat:
What and where is my body fat? It is adipose tissue that is distributed throughout my body, though I have particularly noticed it expanding around my stomach and hips.
What is the purpose of my body fat? To store energy, to cushion my body, to keep me warm. (This reminds me of an incident in a high school maths class, in which I mentioned that eating ice cream made me feel shivery afterwards. The teacher said something to the effect of, “You need to grow more fat on your skinny body!” The implication being that I did not have enough fat to keep myself warm while eating ice cream.)
How do I feel when I consider my body fat? Conflicted, as I have received and thus must process conflicting messages about it. I wish to be fat-positive, but it is hard to shake off society’s value of thinness and the medical profession’s fixation on BMI as a measure of health. It also is simply hard to adjust to a changing body. I get annoyed at my clothes not fitting as they did before, as that means I need to purchase more clothes, which means spending money and quarreling with my mother — or just submitting to her gendered judgments — regarding my clothing preferences. Additionally, I am afraid of feeling heavy, as someone who was always small and light. Yet there is also part of me that takes a bit of joy in my tendency to store fat at my abdomen, as it neutralizes the stereotypically feminine “hourglass” shape that I would otherwise have.
Now that I have identified the thoughts and feelings that come up for me in relation to body fat, can I let them go? Temporarily, yes, especially if my concentration is good during a particular day’s meditation. But often I feel like I am fighting myself over and over. I am fighting change, when change is the only constant.
There is a good reason for my growing adiposity, actually. One of my bipolar medications, Seroquel, can cause weight gain, by impacting your metabolism and your appetite. Prior to the past few months, it hadn’t affected my body weight very much, but my dosage has greatly increased since the start of the new year, and I can tell that I am craving food more frequently than before. I don’t think it’s mentally healthy to avoid eating when I am craving to, but I also have a sense that I am sometimes eating when I am not physically hungry.
Besides the medication side effects, I also have long had a tendency to stress eat. Given that I’ve been quite stressed in the past few months due to the political situation in the United States, it makes sense that I would eat more. Even as a vegan, it is quite easy to gravitate towards calorie-rich foods — such as peanut butter and nuts — when I seek a dose of pleasure to ward off my fears. Eating vegan does not inherently lead to a low-calorie diet.
Given all this, my body fat is a mark of my survival. I’m heavily medicated and would rather not be — I mean, who would want to take high doses of antipsychotic unless they needed to — but my meds protect me from entering a crisis again. My larger body accommodates an expansive ocean of peace. My changing bodymind does not abide by social nor medical norms, yet it carries my being and becoming. I only get one body in which to experience this life. How boring if it didn’t change. The so-called fountain of youth, in reality rigid ice.