I own my body.

I own my body. It belongs to me, and it is me.

I’ve never truly had a symbiotic relationship with my body before. I’ve had periods of harmony in which I thought I appreciated my body, but always, always, always in the back of my mind was the desire to lose more weight. In the past, I’ve pushed myself to my physical limits as a competitive swimmer, achieving personal goals and going beyond what I’d thought myself capable of. Even then, I always wondered how much more weight I could lose. Could I manage to diet during the swim season? Could I balance it so that I could eat just enough so as to fuel my training needs, but no more?

I’ve pushed my body in a completely different way. Watching the numbers drop, setting a new goal each time, always sure I could be “better.” I see now that that’s sick. That signifies an unhealthy relationship with my body. It signifies my former view of my body as an enemy, as something to be beaten into submission, to be squeezed into a mold shaped like size-eight jeans.

I’m through with fighting my body. It’s so much nicer to cooperate with it.

Tonight, after an aerobics/running class, standing in the shower at the gym, I realized that for the first time,  I am truly owning my body. My weight is about the highest it’s ever been, proving that while it took a while to happen, all my diets did fail – almost eight years after I first started dieting. I’m at least a size, maybe two, smaller than I was when I was sixteen, so obviously my body has changed shape. Still, it’s been a bit challenging to see that number on the scale (I weigh myself at the gym sometimes, mostly out of curiosity, wondering how my fluctuations work). I won’t post the number – it’s an estimate anyway, changes daily, and certainly doesn’t define my body.

I define my body. We’re a team. I feed it, try to give it enough sleep, move it, and challenge it in positive ways. In return, it does amazing things for me like run 5km and stand for hours at a trade show and walk long distances and bend into yoga positions and dance and make love.

It’s not the shape I always dreamed it would be, but it’s the shape it should be. It’s curvy (in the true sense, not just the euphemistic one, of the word; I’ve settled into an hourglass shape). It’s soft. It has dimples and stretch marks and even rolls. My thighs rub together when I walk. All of these things are just fine.

My body doesn’t exactly define me, but I can’t forget that it is me. That I owe it to myself to love my body and to co-exist peacefully with it. We can do great things together, my body and I, and we’ve come a long way in proving it to ourselves.