Body

The baby is now over a year old, and I’ve been a little frustrated in my (lack of) weight loss. By the time my first baby was a year old, I had lost all the baby weight + twenty-some pounds. I was the skinniest I’d been since puberty, and as someone who’d always felt more than a smidge wider than I wanted, it was amazing. And I lost very nearly that much weight again with my second baby. Breastfeeding was like some kind of magical elixir that gave me the body I’d always imagined (not to mention the fabulous boobs!).

Third baby is different. I lost exactly the baby-related weight over the first nine months (which is to say, down to the weight I was before I got pregnant with my oldest child), and then stopped. I’m over thirty now, which probably has something to do with it, but it’s disappointing.

So the other day I started thinking—maybe I should go about being a little more on-purpose about losing weight? Like, make some kind of plan, set some goals? I know that BMI is a flawed metric, but I figured it would give me some kind of ballpark idea as to what I should be aiming for.

And here’s what it gave me.

Turns out there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my weight. Which seemed odd. So I redid the numbers for my weight this time six years ago, when I had felt so amazing.

Oh.

Knowing that my weight is technically fine doesn’t change my feelings about lumpy squishiness, or my fond memories of that short-lived thigh gap. It does change how I should probably try to deal with it, though. It’s easier for me to give up bedtime snacks, or beer with dinner, or whatever, than it is for me to do something that causes me to sweat or be out of breath, to strengthen and de-squish the muscles in my middle.

And it’s even harder to unlearn that lesson summed up Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” to allow myself to take up space on my couch or in my clothes.