Unlearning to hate my body

The quiet revolution of the women's changing rooms

There’s something incredibly life affirming about the women’s changing room at my gym.

I’m not sure if it’s the location of the gym or the time of day that I go, but the demographic of my fellow members seems to be 90% over the age of 70. Swimming is my favourite activity, so I’m forced to get undressed in the changing room. There are, for reasons unknown, only two small cubicles in the huge open plan space, so I’m forced to mostly get undressed in front of everyone else. The first few times, this unnerved me, and I expended a lot of energy awkwardly trying to contort myself in and out of clothing without exposing too much flesh.

But then I noticed what was going on around me. The older ladies were happily letting it all hang out. They made no effort to hide their saggy boobs or varicose veins or C-section scars; they were perfectly comfortable in their own skin, with not a care for any wrinkles or blemishes upon it. And I thought, fuck yeah! That’s the kind of energy I want to come in here with!

How crazy that, at 41, half the age of some of these women, I should be so much more self-conscious about my body than them. They are my new heroes. I want to be like them when I’m grown up. And so, very slowly, I’m trying to unlearn all the societal conditioning that has taught me to feel ashamed of my saggy bits, my wobbly bits, my hairy bits, my less-than-perfect bits. I’m trying to unlearn how to hate my body.

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How I learned to hate my body

I’m not sure when I first started to see my body as something problematic.

The first time I was flirted with, if you can call it that, by an adult man, I was around ten years old. He was a teacher. I didn’t really know what was happening at the time, but I knew it was weird and creepy, and I ran away. Luckily, he left it at that. But from then on, I was aware that boys and men were objectifying my body. Boys would try to touch it, and, as I got older, men would shout things out about it as I tried to move through the world. It was scary and intimidating.

There has always been a sense in the media that rape and sexual assault is probably the victim’s fault - men just can’t be expected to control themselves around these flagrantly provacative female bodies - so, as girls, we get the message early on that we are walking around in a meat suit so dangerous and filthy that it could call down violence upon us at any moment. It doesn’t exactly inspire self-esteem.

Then there were the magazines. I came of age in the 90s, when Just Seventeen, Bliss and More (that was the racy one I used to borrow off my friends because my mum wouldn’t let me buy it!) were full of tips on how to pluck, tone and paint yourself so that you would be visually appealing. When I think about the diet and exercise advice they were dishing out to girls that had barely entered puberty, I can’t imagine how the editors weren’t in prison. But times were different then. Everyone was a bit “meh” on child protection.

I went on my first diet at 12. By the age of 14, I was getting up at 6am every morning to do an exercise routine before school. Honestly, it was madness. But I didn’t really think about it that much, because most girls I knew were doing similar things. You weren’t supposed to like your body - your body was something to change, to improve.

TV shows, from Friends to Sex and the City, were filled with young, beautiful women discussing the things they hated about themselves. “This is how it is,” we were being told, “women despise their bodies”. I mean, if even Jennifer Anniston’s Rachel didn’t like her legs, how could any of the rest of us mere mortals claim to be happy with ours?

So we repeated the words “I hate my thighs,” and ate standing up like Gwyneth Paltrow, and read the articles about how to sit “correctly,” and learned to despise the casing we were trapped in.

The joy of getting older

The great thing about being in my 40s is that men don’t look at me anymore.

I don’t want to sound up my own arse about it, but, when I was younger, I think I was fairly cute. I didn’t think that at the time, but when I look back I know that I used to attract a lot of interest, and I never had much trouble getting numbers on a night out. (Something that my chronically low self-esteem drove me to seek out regularly to make me feel a little less worthless.)

I mean, maybe everyone looks good on a rooftop terrace in Thailand, but I think I was pretty hot. This was circa 2010, and I was turning 27.

I can’t deny that I enjoyed the attention. I played up to it. I looked for it. It made me feel that maybe I wasn’t as hideous and unlovable as I suspected I was. I’d been taught that this, the male gaze, was where my value as a woman lay. So it felt important. It was a lot of pressure, though. I ended up in so many dodgy situations where men were trying to push me into something I didn’t want to do, or refusing to take no for an answer. I was put in sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes downright dangerous circumstances at work and even within friendship groups. I was constantly having to carefully manage and mitigate men’s responses to me, and sometimes I didn’t succeed and I got hurt - physically, mentally, emotionally, or all three. It was exhausting.

Men don’t shout things out at me in the street anymore. Men don’t follow me across a pub if I step away from my friends. Male colleagues don’t send me flirty emails. Male friends don’t get angry if I don’t sleep with them. I can walk around in the world without constant surveillance, without feeling (as much) under threat. It’s glorious.

Reconnecting with my body

Freed from this dance with male attention, I am free to view my body more objectively. And I feel really sorry for it. I feel bad about how much I put it through and what I allowed to be done to it. I feel bad about how little I cared for it, about how willing I was to see it as an enemy when it has been so very dependable for me, doing so much and taking me so far, despite all my very cruel treatment of it.

From a young age, partly because of the behaviour of men and boys, and partly because of my consumption of this media obsession with “fixing” female bodies, I think I detached from my physical self. As an avid reader and a writer, who spent a significant portion of my life in fictional worlds, I saw myself as a creature of the mind. The “I” was my brain - that was where my sense of self was located - and my body was this box that it had been placed inside that I was required to deal with. I started to view my body as something separate, not the real me.

I’m not alone here. For hundreds of years, ever since the so-called Enlightenment, we’ve been venerating rational thought above all else, and seeing the brain as the important bit of us. This school of thought taught us to see the body as something base and grubby. Our physical needs were to be overcome in order to focus on more pure and worthy mental pursuits.

It’s utter bullshit. Our brains are just a part of our bodies. There are actually neurons all over our bodies, not just in our brains, and the second largest concentration is in our gut - so when we talk about gut knowing, it’s not just a figure of speech. We know things and understand things with our whole bodies. Our brains are part of a complex network and ecosystem that makes up us. Our mental health and our physical health, which we’ve also long (and erroneously) treated as separate, are deeply entwined. If an issue occurs with one, it usually leads to an issue with the other.

So in order to know, to understand, to learn, to grow and to be happy and healthy, we need to care for our bodies and minds equally and in harmony. Which brings me back to the gym changing room. Until last year, I hadn’t done any organised exercise since I was pregnant with my first child - who is now six. But I am making efforts to care for my all-round health more, so I joined the gym. I ended up at this one because it’s one that my husband and I used to go to on day passes for occasional treats on special occasions. We’d spend a few hours in the pool and the jacuzzi and the sauna for some chill-out time. Then one day we thought, we should do this more often. Rather than rationing our enjoyment, we should make this time that nurtures our mind and body a regular part of our lives.

So now I’m paying £75 a month, that I don’t completely feel like I can afford, but that probably is worth it because it is helping me in a holistic, and much needed, way.

Me aged 40 - still sexy.

It made me realise how I used to think of exercise as something to punish my body, rather than to care for it. I would make myself go to the gym or go for a run, and I would hate it, and afterwards I would feel good about the fact that I had suffered, because wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that how you got fit?

When I first joined this gym, I had a rule about the “nice bits” that had drawn me to it in the first place. I wasn’t allowed to use the steam room until I’d done at least 10 lengths in the pool. I wasn’t allowed to use the jacuzzi until I’d done 20 lengths. That was my reward for putting in the hard work. So I would swim 10 lengths, then go in the steam room. Come back, 10 more lengths, go in the jacuzzi. If I did 10 more lengths, I could have another go in the jacuzzi. Then I noticed that the lengths I swam after time in the steam room or jacuzzi went much quicker and felt much easier than the first set that I swam cold. My muscles were more relaxed and warmer, and I felt more comfortable. So I wondered, could I use the jacuzzi first?

It seemed so totally trangressive, the idea of doing something fun before I’d suffered to earn it. Then I realised something important - no one but me gives a fuck. No one else cares whether I’ve “earned” my time in the jacuzzi. There are no guards measuring your output before they let you in. Hell, there are some older gentlemen who seem to spend their entire gym session hanging out in there. I’m paying £75 a month of my hard-earned money to go to this place, I can use it how I damn well like.

So now I go in the jacuzzi whenever I flipping well please. (As long as it’s not being taken up by large and obnoxious old white dudes.) I enjoy my swim afterwards much more for it. I get properly undressed in the changing room without putting my neck out trying to get in to my swimsuit at the same time. I’m not quite at the standing around naked having a chat while I fold my towel stage yet, but I hope to get there one day.

And every time I go in there, I glance at the older ladies with their wrinkles and blotches and floppy breasts and wobbly tummies and I think how bloody beautiful they look. I feel an ache in my heart for the occasional young woman I see who gets changed as quickly as she can with a towel wrapped around her, and I feel compassion both for her and for myself. We’ll get there, I think. We’re still learning.

One day, with luck and conscious effort, we’ll get to be one of them.

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Traditional advice is designed designed by and for neurotypical, able-bodied people who don’t have health challenges and don’t have to look after their own children. Fuck their advice.

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