On accepting my body as it is

It's a journey

Me at 30, naked. Photo by Kristine Larsen

When I turned 30, a photographer friend, Kristine, gave me a portrait session as a gift.

“We can either go to Central Park and take pictures there,” she suggested, “or you can come to my studio and we’ll do some nudes.”

I’m a kind of embarrassingly modest person, and immediately bridled at the latter suggestion.

“Oh you should think about it,” she said. “Imagine being able to show your daughters how hot you were at 30 when you’re 60.” She assured me the photos would be tasteful, and only seen by whoever I chose to share them with.

I surprised myself by agreeing to it. And as the years have passed, I have grown increasingly impressed with exactly how hot that 30 year-old body was—not that I really believed that at the time, of course.

Aside from most of the decade I spent at Lucky, I’ve never been an especially skinny person. I’ve not been particularly big either—a size 8 for most of my adult life, sometimes a 10. For the most part, I was fine enough with my body’s shape. When pressed, I’d probably admit to wishing I was a size smaller, with a flatter stomach, but by and large I was at something approaching peace with it.

Then, right around the time my perimenopause turned to menopause, my body started to shift, quite literally shift, with weight settling in areas it never had before. And then quarantine happened, and then I was prescribed a necessary medication that can change your metabolism, and before I knew it I was meaningfully bigger. Only a fraction of my clothes fit anymore, and even fewer fit comfortably. Fewer still actually looked good.

I’d had a bit of a belly even at my skinniest, but now it expanded and mutated into a rather sizable one, which—if I stared in the mirror naked and in profile—resembled a capital letter B. I was hugely self-conscious about it, and annoyed that all of these changes had happened when I hadn’t altered how I ate or exercised much at all.

In the old days, if I noticed, say, that my jeans were fitting slightly differently, I’d watch what I ate for a week or two and the weight dropped off pretty fast. Today, alas, that is not the case: these pounds are stubbornly devoted to remaining on my body. So I’ve been working to accept what that looks like. Here are a few tips I’ve found helpful.