Body Image In Middle Age

Not what I See in the mirror

Forty or so years back I was a skinny teenager. I then spent several decades gaining roughly a pound and a half a year - barely worth mentioning, yes? - and still felt like a skinny ... non-teenager.

Body image unreality is most commonly associated with teenage girls, but a quick bit of mental arithmetic will demonstrate that I really wasn't skinny at age 54. At 13st 2lb my BMI was a little under 28: a good halfway up the overweight part of the scale. I wrote back then about the mismatch and my decision that I needed to do something about it.

I probably finally reached my '6 month target' (a stone lost ... three years behind schedule) late last year, but not for long enough to be convincing and I've bounced back a bit since. The trouble is that a year back I had a scan, for another reason, which found fatty changes to my liver, and the follow-up reckoned my cholesterol was borderline. Cue another push to get those final few pounds off to stabilise at or just under 12 stone.

It turns out that the strategies which lost the first half stone - basically a bit less food and a bit more exercise - don't work so well with the next half. Not that surprising really. It also turns out that feeling a bit hungry most days - but never a lot hungry, which just leads to trouble - is important to carrying on with weight loss once the early gains have consolidated. Which is a pity as I had started ramping up the 'have a good breakfast' route.

In terms of realigning my body image with reality, one helpful comment from the practice nurse described the pad of fat on my belly as a separate organ. At the proper size it performs a useful job, but as it expands it puts the body out of balance and gives grief to the liver, in particular. I'm finding I can see what my waistline is doing more realistically now, and there is a clear relationship between what I can see my belly doing and what the scales say.

Which is probably totally obvious to many of you, of course abdomen fat deposits and weight are related! But that's the thing about wonky body image: what you see in the mirror doesn't truly reflect what is actually going on.

So, what am I trying to say? I've not put 'rambling' in the title, so I should be trying to go somewhere.

What I'm not saying is that viewing the stomach as a separate organ would help anybody else but me - that could go horribly pear-shaped. You still have to get the balance bit right: it's a useful organ, in moderation.

I think part of what I'm trying to say is something obvious along the lines that teenage girls and middle-aged men are not two different creatures, totally alien to one another. To paraphrase Paul, writing to churchgoers in Galatia:

There is no longer Jew nor Greek, there is no longer slave nor free, there is no longer male and female, there is no longer teenager and middle-aged; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus.

It's not that the experience of a bulemic teenager is really anything like that of a man with middle-aged spread, it clearly isn't. But we are all human beings with all the beauty and brokenness which goes with that; we all have minds which can trick or inspire us and, most of all, we are all loved by God for who we are, not for how we look.

But there's another Galatians quote which I think is relevant:

For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery.

We are free to look at ourselves however we like: if in five years time I've lost five stone and still feel like that belly fat organ is too big it won't stop God loving me. Nevertheless it won't be the truth and it won't help me live how I want to live. I kind of reckon that matters.

We have been set free, so how do we stay free? If someone offers me crack cocaine I am free to accept or decline. Once I've accepted a few times, I have lost my freedom. My own free choices can either enhance my freedom or restrict it. Using freedom to enhance freedom is surely better.

If you have an eating disorder, whatever your age, please don't depend on the health advice of some random blogger from the Internet (like me). Get proper professional help and support.

If you can, and I know not all families are the same, try to have a good series of conversations with family and friends to get their support.

Oddly enough, a lot of church communities are actually quite good at helping people with real problems like this (although some, sadly, are not). So consider getting involved.

The NHS has a decent page on anorexia here, and the Beat page is here.

Grace, peace and truth for your week ahead, and enjoy God's love in Lent.

Losing Weight

I've been skinny and I've been plump; in my experience plump is warmer! But you can have too much of a good thing.

In quick succession back in January: I was told by my dentist that I was probably snoring more because my collar size had reached 16; I started getting a red and itchy line around my middle where my undies had become too tight; and I got a letter from my doctor's surgery suggesting I go for a late-middle-age checkup (not quite how they put it, of course), complete with questionnaire to fill in. The odd thing was that, although I had eaten a lot over the Christmas period without much exercise, my weight hadn't actually changed. Nevertheless, I did feel more tired; worst of all, after I measured my neck following the chat with my dentist I checked my waist as well: 39" ... I thought I was only just creeping above 36!

The trouble is that it is widely recognised these days that dieting makes you fat. So losing weight is a little more involved than the simplistic health messages would have you believe. There is a complicated mix of thermodynamics - energy in and energy out - along with appetite, digestive absorption and metabolic rate. If you just eat less it can, if you are not careful, simply make you hungrier and more efficient in the way your body processes food: lose/lose.

Luckily, I was starting 'clean' - no previous diets to mess my hormones about, and from a stable (if high-ish) weight. So I did a bit of research, applied a bit of common sense (ie no fads and don't believe a word that tabloids say), and started. It seemed to me that the easiest approach was to start with the energy balance - eat less and exercise more - but to try to make sure the side effects didn't undermine me. So I set myself a long-term target of losing half a pound a week, on average, over six months, taking me from 13 stone 2 (184lbs = 83.5kg) to around 12 stone (168lbs = 76kg) by August. As I write, I notice that my arithmetic was out: 16 pounds at half a pound a week will take seven months: so, to the end of August then (or aim for just over the weekly half pound - I'll see how that goes).

That needed me to eliminate around 250 'calories' (kcal, really) per day - basically cut down on between-meal snacks and reduce my portion sizes a little - and add a couple of brisk walks or cycle rides (of around a mile) each week. I found help in setting the target from a fascinating 'Body Weight Simulator' from NIH, which illustrates what changes are needed for a given long term target (NB it emphasises it is "for general research use only and is not intended to provide personal medical advice or substitute for the advice of a physician"). I also liked a simple webpage I found listing 50 Ways To Cut 250 Calories.

Not that it's quite that simple, of course. After a fortnight I had lost four pounds, without really trying hard; I wasn't naive enough to think it was all going to be that easy, but it seemed like a really good start. Two weeks later three of the pounds were back on. Two weeks later they were back off again. Three weeks after that I had reached the half-way weight mark, eight pounds down, at well short of half the time. Now, at around twelve weeks, I'm back up again to just five pounds down - but that is still close to my half a pound a week.

The biggest help I have found along the way is a good breakfast - there has long been research showing that skipping breakfast leads to weight gain, and my experience backs that up. I find a big bowl of luxury muesli (the sort with dried fruit and nuts) and milk fills me up, and keeps me full all morning. The biggest hindrance for me has been take-aways and eating out. Not only do I end up eating more, but I also find myself feeling hungrier over the next couple of days.

Is there a wider spiritual aspect to all this? Weight and body image have become so tied in these days with issues of self-respect and self-worth that I think there is. We need to feel good about who we are, whatever our body shape, and to be motivated by a desire to look after ourselves and look after our bodies. It shouldn't be that we feel bad about ourselves now, yet hope to suddenly feel good if only we can achieve some magic lower weight, but that we feel good and want to treat ourselves properly.

It's all part of a bigger picture that we need to love and respect ourselves as well as we can, whilst loving and respecting those we meet just as much.