Am I Allowed To Want to Lose Weight?

At Revellations, we want each and every one of you to feel confident, sexy, and comfortable in your own bodies. Whether it be when we go shopping (and nothing fits properly 🙄), on social media (with influencers selling us the latest “wellness” hacks), or in the supposed cesspool of modern dating (this writer wishes she never learned what the term “talking stage” means) — it seems that the odds are stacked against us feeling like our best selves at almost every turn. We hope that here, if nowhere else, you feel at home being yourself. Whatever that looks like today, this week, or even this minute.

But while we’re doing our damnedest to build a destination where you can feel amazing about who you are both as a person and in your own body…does that mean you’re never allowed to change?

I personally find myself at an interesting place. I’ve gained a not massive — but definitely noticeable (at least to me) — amount of weight in the past year. My mother was sick, so I was more focused on being there for her than on maintaining my workout routine. I’m genetically predestined to be a stress snacker (thanks, Dad!). Add on a breakup and it’s no wonder I’ve put on a little weight.

Most of my clothes don’t fit. Some are too tight, the ones that were baggy are now fitted, and certain parts of my closet are now strictly off limits. So what do I do?

It’s not that I think I look bad per se. But I’m certainly bigger than I was before. And no matter how small we are as women, society is always telling us that if we just lost a few more pounds we might finally find happiness. But truthfully, I don’t feel like myself.

And that’s where I want to focus. Not simply on us feeling confident and comfortable — but on us feeling like our true selves.

Now a lot of that work is going to be internal (insert plug for therapy here 💪). But does that mean that it can’t also be influenced by how we present ourselves to the outside world? I argue no, that it’s completely possible to want to change your body and still be a fierce advocate for every woman of every size, shape, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, and the like to be accepted as beautiful and worthy.

So if you, like me, consider yourself to be a champion of women, a modern feminist, an anti-diet culture hero…how do you reconcile that with a desire to lose weight?

I’ll walk you through my journey. Or at least where I’m at with my journey so far. First, I’ll go back to my core concept: I want to feel more like myself. I actually love who I am fundamentally — the values that I uphold, the way I (try to) make the people around me feel, and honestly a lot of things about the way that I look. But the “myself” that I think of as my favorite version of me is also someone who can comfortably fit into my favorite clothes and feel excited to get dressed every morning in something other than sweats or leggings (on a good day at least, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here…). So to accomplish that goal, I either need to invest in a new wardrobe at my current, bigger size — a wardrobe that makes me feel good about the person looking back at me in the mirror — or I need to lose weight to fit into the clothes currently hanging in my closet.

I choose to lose the weight. And here’s why.

First, all those old favorite clothes in my closet are a perfectly reasonable size for someone of my age and build. I’m not trying to become dangerously skinny (I’ve been down the crazy diet culture road before and hope to never return), and those clothes used to fit me when I was in a good place with my diet and lifestyle. I may be getting older (hellooooo mid-30s 👋), but I haven’t had kids or experienced any other major life change that would result in me revisiting what my “usual” body shape and size might look like. And finally — and most importantly — I was healthier when I fit into those old clothes. I gained this weight out of stress and grief. And as a result I’m now more lethargic, my skin breaks out more easily, my gut doesn’t feel balanced and I’m constantly fighting inexplicable bloat.

What’s important to realize is that I still love my body the way that it is, but I also want to make some changes. Changes that make me feel like the best version of myself — or maybe I’ll start using “favorite” version, which I said above and tbh it really struck a chord with me. I want to feel like my favorite version of myself.

And this leads me to the first major shift in how I’m going to approach losing this weight: instead of making my objective a specific number on the scale, I’m going to give myself objectives that aren’t based on my weight per se, but instead on how I want my overall lifestyle to look in support of my larger life goals.

So let’s start with these objectives:

Be excited about how I look in some (but maybe not all) of the clothes I used to wear regularly
Feel physically well — i.e. consistent energy levels, skin that only breaks out when it used to (if anyone can help me figure out that one massive zit I always get just before my period though, I’m all ears), and not consistently bloated

There. That seems attainable, right? And while yes, a part of this journey might involve lowering the number on the scale, it’s no longer the central focus. A little less toxic, I hope?

I’m still at the start of this new journey, so I’ll fill you in on the few key changes I’ve made thus far that seem to be working. Along with a promise to write a follow up as things change if I make major adjustments, provided you’re all interested.

So what’s felt good so far?

Divorcing my eating and exercise habits — I’m putting this first because it’s honestly something I still majorly struggle with. In fact, it wasn’t until I had a friend read this article that I even realized I was still falling into the trap of thinking about diet & exercise as a bonded pair, not as two important but disparate parts of an overall healthy lifestyle. Have you ever thought to yourself, “I didn’t work out today, so I might as well order pizza for dinner?” or “I had a super unhealthy lunch so I’m not going to even bother working out tonight?”…Yeah, me too. I used to do this mental tapdance with myself literally all the time. I would designate days as “healthy” or not and if even one of my actions didn’t support that label, I simply gave up. I’ll start fresh tomorrow, I figured. And sometimes I would! But this binary thinking isn’t just unhelpful (having a single cookie isn’t unhealthy, ladies!). It’s toxic. The objective of moving your body isn’t solely to burn off the calories of the slice of pizza you “let” yourself eat. And the sooner you can separate these activities from one another the sooner you can realize how f*cking incredible it feels to move your body simply because it makes you feel awesome (I know, the hot girl walkers are right, I’m sorry to report).
Eating more calories — we as women were so consistently fed the trope (::cough::lie::cough::) that the only thing that matters is calories, and fewer is always better. In fact, until quite recently I still held on to the belief that the only way for me to lose weight was to stick as close as humanly possible to 1200 calories a day. 1200?!! What was I thinking! Learning about how much energy my body naturally expends every day has made a monumental difference in how I think about not just how many calories I eat, but what kind of calories. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I get easily caught up (read: obsessive about) metrics, so I try to avoid too many apps and calculators in my fitness journey, but this handy site will help you figure out roughly how many calories you naturally burn per day if you want a baseline. You use your own judgment from there to figure out what your own daily calorie goal might be (or if you, like me, want to think more in general ballparks vs explicit numbers). But I’ll just end this with one caution: 1200 calories is NOT enough.
Eating more protein — protein is having a moment rn, and I gotta say I feel like girls were done really dirty here. We were so focused on the calories (see above) that even people who supposedly “tracked their macros” were still often keeping their protein levels too low. Because let’s face it, protein has a lot of calories! But do you want to know why? Because it gives us energy. It makes us feel full. And it’s critical to feeling your best. There are all sorts of different targets here. Some people say shoot for 1 gram per pound of body weight, but I personally find that to feel totally unattainable where I’m at currently. So I simply target as much as possible, specifically by making sure all of my meals actually have protein in them. Gone are the days of having the smallest salad possible and eliminating calories by removing the chicken and just having balsamic vinegar pretend it’s dressing on the side (wow, what a sad life I led…). I make sure that every meal has some sort of protein source — I’ve even started making myself a protein rich smoothie in the morning. If enough people are interested I can pop the recipe in the comments 😉
Moving my body — I used to have a really solid workout routine, but this is one where I really did find myself needing to revisit a bit after the longest break I’d ever taken. My personal philosophy is that the absolute best workout is the one that you actually enjoy enough to keep doing. So what my body craves might be different than yours. I even started running (ok, maybe we should just call it “jogging” at my current pace…) last year because I was in such a dark place that I was dying to know if the mythical runners’ high was actually real. I’m devastated to report that it is, in fact, a thing and that the endorphins after even a short jog feel awesome. But truthfully I’ve always been more of a strength girlie than a cardio junkie. So I’ll go for a little jog when the mood strikes me, which is often the day after one too many cocktails when I want to literally sweat out some toxins. But the base of my workout routine tends to be strength training, pilates, and just walking everywhere I possibly can. I don’t get hung up on exactly how many days a week I do what, I just make sure I stick to a habit of moving my body in some way each day, even if just for a long walk as an excuse to call my bestie (you know who you are boo 😘)
Taking vitamins & minerals — here’s one that I honestly never thought I would explore, and I have to give my ex a little credit here for encouraging me to explore what vitamins and supplements make me feel better on the daily. I’m still at the very beginning of this phase of exploration. But I’ve already found that adding a teaspoon of psyllium husk to my daily smoothies does WONDERS for my gut health. Some extra vitamin C any time I feel a little bug coming on will ward is off ~80% of the time. And magnesium has been a game changer both for my muscle recovery and my sleep (who knew! Melatonin never did it for me, but magnesium has been fantastic)
Managing my stress — my life has been a veritable sh*t show lately, so lowering my stress levels has been a key focus, especially with my sleep so out of whack (see below). Truthfully, all of the different elements on this list work together to help manage my stress levels — moving my body, eating in a way that makes my energy feel consistent rather than volatile, (trying to) sleep enough. But I also aim to meditate every morning and have even started dabbling in acupuncture in an effort to find extra tools to add to my overall arsenal of stress relievers.
Sleeping as much as possible — I’m adding this on the end here because we alllll know not getting enough rest puts stress on our body and makes it harder to feel like our best selves. But I’m not going to lie to you all, I’m not sleeping well atm, so this item is an aspirational one on my list. The recent study showing that women’s bodies actually need more sleep than men’s made me lol because, like, of course all the old studies were done on men and no one gave it a second thought. But in all seriousness, sleep is the secret ingredient to so much of our mental health, so if your body is telling you that you need to rest — please do it.

So that’s the latest on the beginning of my current journey to get back to feeling more like myself. What do we think? Does it feel a little too adjacent to the diet-culture rhetoric that defined our early adolescence? Or is it possible to strive for changes in our bodies while still advocating for people to never need to change — and most importantly, for others to never feel entitled to comment on what kind of changes we should make?

I think so, but as this is a journey and I’m still learning, I’d love to hear what you all think too ❤️