"Your Summer Body Starts in The Winter."
A body for every season.
“Your summer body starts in the winter, so starting today, January 1st, no more excuses.” A thin blonde in my phone doesn’t tell me her credentials as much as show them, lifting a thin, stretchy tank top to show visibly defined abs.
Your summer body starts in the winter, so starting today, January 1st, no more excuses. You’ve always wanted to learn how to make your own icecream, so when your niece visits you, you can make her favorite flavor: pink peppermint with chocolate chips. Why don’t we pull out the mixer? Your summer body won’t be able to make this recipe if your winter body doesn’t know how to do it.
“Your summer body starts in the winter, so shut everything off, go ghost mode, and emerge from the season unrecognizable. If you follow my program, by June 1st, no one will recognize you, and everyone will be jealous.” This one is a muscled guy in his 30s. He has a supplement range of products, linked with his videos. They are, functionally, laxatives.
Your summer body starts in the winter, so shut the electronics off, and emerge from the season more recognizable to yourself, and those who care for you. If you follow this advice, by June 1st, you’ll be ever more at home in who you are, and the idea of what others think about who you are will be much quieter. Your body also won’t be as afraid of them. No product can give what you already have in you.
“Your summer body starts in the winter, so it’s time to get snatched and skinny. I used to run long distances and lift weights and play soccer with my little sister, but now all I do is the workouts I think have the best chance of making the pounds melt off. Your summer body could be perfect like mine, too, if you just do the work you don’t want to.”
Your summer body starts in the winter, so it’s time to get reconnected to what it used to be like to just play for the sake of joy. It’s time to wonder what type of sport or movement you’ve given up in adulthood, when it was no longer as easy of an option, and before every movement had to have an end product in mind. You once dreamed of climbing steep hills, running and jumping into swimming pools, riding bikes with your best friend when freedom was a new invention to your 12 year old self. Your summer body is perfect, too, if you just reconnect with the parts of yourself others don’t encourage you to.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones when it comes to my relationship to food and my body. I was raised with older brothers who ate a lot, and had a dad who enjoying jogging, so he did, and playing with us in the backyard, so he did, and being strong, so he lifted weights. I’ve internalized most of these ways of being in the world, and it is a lucky thing. It was when I was 13 years old, and grew 4 inches in a summer, and no one commented on my body. That was an additional privilege to the luck of how I was raised to know and be in my body.
When I was 16 years old, I remember my luck started to become more apparent to me, and that even with my luck, I wasn’t totally unshakable. My friend and I did have two workout sessions a week following Kim Kardashian Fit in Your Jeans By Friday Workout DVD’s. There were years I was more aware of my body, and had doubts around whether my body could be blamed for teenage anxiety, rejection for dances, and a whole slew of other things. Luck struck the third time: These feelings and workout plans didn’t stick, and they never felt very intense or important for too long.
At the same time in my life, I realized this was odd. I realized around me then and at every stage in the intervening 14 years that the water us girls and women swam in made a neutral attitude towards our bodies, our playing, and our food choices extremely difficult. It was at this time that I started hoping to work with people struggling with eating disorders some day in the future. 14 years later, and as of yesterday, I matched into fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry, with the hopes of finishing my training to be able to be in the team that treats eating disorders in my community.
If this time of year is hard for you as the messaging increases, know that you are not alone in it. While it isn’t hardwired (ie, it’s not biologically wired for women to feel this way), it is normative (common) for women to have “body dissatisfaction” in the West.
Even with what I know, even in being 30 and being comfortable with my body (which is still a body with privilege), I’m not unaffected if I see too much of this type of messaging. I’m not always aware when it’s attaching to something in me, and making me look sideways at my food choices or again become that 15 year old girl who wanted to look pretty at homecoming. The noticing, gently, and moving away from this type of content is the next step of self-care for me, and I’d encourage you to do the same.
One of the things that makes me the most angry at diet and wellness culture is that it takes two things from us, broadly: connection to our bodies and the awesome quality of our bodies to learn, change, and adapt. It’s become common knowledge that diet culture makes us more critical towards our bodies, more hyper-aware, more likely to self-objectify rather than to experience the incredible range of sensation and experience our bodies (…us) have. The other thing it takes away is the joy that we human creatures have like other living creatures: the ability to grow and adapt.
The hustle of the Wellness Industry Agenda insists upon fast transformation. The language of “becoming unrecognizable” is a language of disconnection from others, from our interiority, and of extremes. This makes us unkind to ourselves, and it also teaches us through inevitable failure that impossible, rigid change is the only type of change, and since we have never mastered that, we can never change at all.
But we can. We can learn how to run, even if we have always loathed running. We can pick up a new hobby or sport in adulthood, and play it well or badly, just for fun. We can make decisions through gentle nutrition or trying to go on a 15 minute walk with our partner each day to get moving more. Diet culture offers us a fantasy product of ourselves—an almost AI imagining of what a perfect version of us would look like, and then offers a robotic path. We fail, inevitably, and even if we don’t fail, we may have been so rigid with ourselves that the disconnect remains, even if we get the perfect transformation we were promised.
This winter, I hope you take the season as nature does. An invitation towards gradual, gentle, and values-centered change can be a beautiful thing. In nature, this is concentrating one’s energy and resting. It may be planting a small seed, that will take months to even become a small sprout above ground. It may be realizing that the field needs to lie fallow, as you’ve been misled to think that your body is more machine than it is another terrain where Nature rules. As I’ve said, and others have written: Growth at any cost is the philosophy of cancer.
I hope this winter, you do disconnect from the things and screens that disconnect you from what and who you care about. I hope you do work on your summer body this winter, by taking your future joy seriously. What would little you love to do this summer, and is there any preparation that needs to happen for that? What do you think 95 year old you would miss doing in the summer, when you might be more limited? Prepare for a summer with their wishes in mind, and remember that the online world doesn’t want you to remember you don’t need to buy or change anything to have a body that belongs to the seasons of the world around you.
Take care,
xx, Margaret of Bad Art Everyday