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Browse published articles attributed to Ilene Leshinsky, with full-archive search.
I think that men have it easier than women. No, I’m not going to discuss the state of the feminist movement in 2013, nor the equal pay for equal work debate. However, I am going to state that men have more body acceptance than women – and we women can learn a lot about this from men.
Somewhere in the mid 1980’s, during that fifteen year stretch in between husband #1 and my second and forever husband, the song “The Greatest Love of All” came out. It was popularized by Whitney Houston but my favorite version is the one by George Benson. The song is about learning to love one’s self. I have this memory of trying to get to my office in downtow Boston, stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike with the song playing on the radio. Since I had nothing better to do (long before the days of smart phones and laptops), I really listened to the lyrics for the first time.
A couple of things happened this past August that made me wonder about beauty and what it means to be beautiful.
When I was twenty-four years old, I became a divorced woman. I had been married for four and a half years and in relationship with this man/ boy since I was eighteen. Getting divorced rocked my world, turned it upside down, pulled the rug out from under me, and knocked me on my tushy. All the old clichés applied. At the time, I was a middle school English teacher and I remember the head of the music department saying to me, "Look at you Ilene. You're pretty and smart.
This past winter I was watching a football game with my husband and the TV camera panned across the stadium. A whole section of fans raised large foam fists with extended index fingers and shouted “We’re #1!” That moment got me thinking about what it means to be number one. Regarding what? To whom? What are the criteria? I remember being #1 in a spelling bee when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. And I was the shortest (and heaviest) girl in my second grade class. I guess that counts as #1 (although it’s not on my resume).
Remember the Aesop’s fable “The Tortoise and the Hare”? It’s the story of a lightning-fast rabbit and a plod-along turtle that are seemingly mismatched in a race. It was the tortoise, annoyed with the hare’s boastful assertions of being faster than the wind, that challenged the hare. To the surprise of everyone but the tortoise, (s)he wins. Well I’m a tortoise. For most of my life, I’ve put one foot in front of the other, to get to the finish line, to achieve my goals. “Slow and steady wins the race”!
We’ve all gone through it – the dreaded plateau. We’ve been dieting and exercising for weeks, maybe months, and been exhilarated by our initial weight loss and energy surge. And then - nothing. No movement on the scale and we start to feel like failures. We must be doing something wrong. We should continue to be losing weight, we think, if our “calories in” (what we eat) continue to be less than our “calories out” (what we expend through exercise and just living our lives).
According to the countless weight management commercials and advertisements that we see on television and in print, hunger is our enemy. Hunger has to be controlled, managed, ignored, or tamed. And feeding our hunger will set off a cycle of frenzied, nonstop eating. Right? Wrong!
As I write this article in late December, the annual influx of television commercials and magazine ads for weight loss programs has begun. Supplements, frozen foods, points, meal cards, meal replacements, on-line calculators, exercise machines, videos, balls and bands. Some promote themselves using celebrities (You, too, can look like Mariah Carey, Jennifer Hudson, and Janet Jackson). Some just use us ordinary folk. All of them, however, send the same message - that our lives will be transformed by weight loss.
A hundred years ago, Renoir painted “La Toilette” (The Bather), a portrait of a young woman in the nude. She has long, aubu hair, full breasts and hips, a rounded belly, and, if the truth be told, thighs that look like mine. She’s voluptuous and she’s beautiful! One hundred years ago she was the ideal of feminine beauty. Today, she’d be one of my clients, struggling to accept herself in the face of an unattainable beauty ideal. When I show her to my clients, some of them are heartened by the resemblance they see to themselves. Some think, she has such a pretty face, but boy is she fat.
When I was a very little girl, the story goes, I didn’t eat very much. This made my mother anxious and insecure. In those days, babies were supposed to be plump. So with prompting from my grandmother, she found “creative” ways to get me to eat, what they considered “enough”. One strategy she used was dancing around the kitchen with a mop on her head. When I laughed, she shoved a spoonful of food in my mouth. Great plan to ease my mother’s anxieties. However, attuned eating proponents would argue, not a great way to support the innate wisdom of the body.
Do you believe in magic? “…In a young girl’s heart, how the music can free her whenever it starts?” as the song by the Lovin’ Spoonful goes. I do! I believe there is magic and mystery all around us. Some say coincidence. I say magic. That belief keeps me young and expecting great things for myself and for everyone else.
How do we know if we’re hungry? Have you ever had the experience of eating foods that you love when you are genuinely, physically hungry? When your body has signaled you that it is hungry? If you have, then you know that eating from hunger, from true physical hunger, is one of the most joyous experiences in the world. Food tastes wonderful and our bodies and brains are energized! But how do we know if we are truly? Women ask me this question all the time.
I will never be a runway model. At five feet, I’m too short and as an Aging Goddess, I’m too old. Being height and size challenged for much of my life, body acceptance has been an on-going challenge for me.
Go get a piece of paper and a pen, right now, please. And do a little exercise with me. Without any editing, write down all of the negative thoughts you had about your body yesterday. That’s right, all of them! Your list might include: I’m fat. I feel fat. My belly is huge. My thighs jiggle. My upper arms keep waving long after my hand has stopped. I’m the biggest woman in the room. My body is ugly. My breasts hang down to my knees.
I am 63 years old! Have I ever told you that? I realized that I seldom reveal my actual age these days. Not because of the stereotypical female thing – we lie about our age and our weight. And I never was that way when I was younger. In fact, I threw myself a fortieth birthday party and proudly announced when I turned fifty. I think lately it’s been more about worrying that my younger clients and my students won’t think I’m “cool” or “hip” or have anything relevant to share with them.
Remember in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy, the scarecrow, the tin man, and the lion were walking through the forest with arms linked, afraid of lions and tigers and bears? Are we women fearful that our bodies will burst forth with womanly parts like Dorothy and her companions were scared of the wild animals lurking behind trees and bushes? Where did they go? Where are they – our bellies and buttocks and breasts?
Ever hear of Oxytocin? No, not the painkiller, oxycontin, but the hormone that is released in childbirth and assists in the bonding experience between mother and child. Well, more and more research is demonstrating that oxytocin is also the female prosperity hormone, and responsible for not only feelings of love and well being, but of increased collaboration and altruism in women - and in men. Interesting, don’t you think?
One of the reasons I love my husband so much is that he thinks most of the models in the Victoria Secret catalogues are “too skinny”. Yes, that’s a direct quote and boy, am I glad, since at five feet tall and a size 8 petite, I’ll never make the front cover – nor the inside pages for that matter. I’m blessed with a man who has loved my curves and my aging self for over 20 years.
When I was a little girl and my mother didn’t want my family to know what she was saying, she spoke in French. I have memories of her and my aunts looking at me, and laughingly saying “grosse fesse”. For the non-French Canadian readers of Jill, it loosely translates to “fat ass”.
I’ve been doing this for many, many years – following the philosophy of attuned eating, practicing what I preach in my BodySense groups. And yet every now and again, I find myself eating when I’m not hungry. And when that happens, I don’t select healthy, nutritious foods, I go right for the mind-numbing, high sugar, high fat varieties.
The last time that I participated in an organized weight loss program was about thirty years ago, but I remember the experience as if it was yesterday. “What number do you want as your goal weight?” asked the receptionist at my first visit. I chose a number that I had weighed after my divorce when I was too miserable to eat and very skinny, by the way.
Wow, it’s 2010! Is anyone besides me wondering what happened to 2009? Do any of us remember the resolutions we made at the beginning of last year? If you’re like most people, by January 1st you had a list of resolutions that revolved around weight loss and exercise habits. And… if you’re like most of us, by the end of the month, you probably gave up on them. (Raise your hand if you are one of us.) So rather than waste time and energy on things we’re not going to do anyway, I thought I’d offer a new look at New Year’s Resolutions.
I’m getting a Ph. D.! According to Dr. Christiane Northrup, any woman who looks at her naked body in a full-length mirror, every day, is in a Body Image Ph.D. program. You may have see Dr. Northrup during Mountain Lake PBS fundraisers and she’s written several books including “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom” and “The Wisdom of Menopause”. She’s an OB-GYN and dispenser of important wisdom to women regarding our physical and mental health. I love her spirit and her energy.
In my office waiting room, I have an oil painting of a small rowboat adrift on the sea. The boat is empty, about to go under and the sea is turbulent. It was painted by a former client, a young woman who I met when she had been struggling with bulimia for seven years. She gave me that painting right before she successfully ended treatment.
I have a client who says to me every now and again, “I wish I had your life. You always seem so happy.” I smile and think about some of the “discussion” I have had with my husband or that the cost of medical attention for our animals is putting my vet in a higher tax bracket or how irritated I get with littlest of things. But I think I know what she means. I have an open face. I smile a lot, and I tend to have a positive, optimistic view of life. I wasn’t always like this, however. Childhood set the stage for unhappiness and obesity.
March is my birthday month. As you are reading this I am now 42 years old. Okay, I’m using the new math – that 60 is the new 40. On every birthday, I take time to reflect on my life. Am I happy with my work? Yes! Am I happy in my marriage? Yes! Do I like getting older? Yes… and no. It’s challenging at best to be “women of a particular age” in a youth and size 2 obsessed culture. More often than not, when I look in the mirror I like what I see – a woman who has laugh lines and compassion written on her face and a body that is strong and healthy, although sprinkled with signs of aging.
So many women I know say something like this: I don’t know when to stop eating. I need a zipper on my mouth and someone to pull it shut because I don’t know how to stop. I’m out of control around food. I’m an addict and food is my drug of choice. These thoughts and feelings make us feel bad about ourselves. We’re bright, accomplished women. We’re good wives, mothers, employees, business owners, and we feel out of control around food.
The very next day after I submitted last month’s Jill article, in which I complained about feeling like a lone salmon, swimming in a sea of diet messages, trying to convey the innate wisdom of the body, I received my monthly issue of Psychotherapy Networker. The cover read Diets and Our Demons. Does Anything Really Work? To my delight, the whole magazine was filled with research- based articles about, eating, dieting, body image, and how our struggles with our lives often get played out in our relationship with food. Suddenly I felt was swimming with a sisterhood of salmon.
Sometimes I feel like a salmon, swimming upstream to fulfill its biological imperative, getting bloodied and battered in the process. Although my spawning days are long gone, I do feel pushed, compelled, called, however, to send the message to any woman (or man) willing to listen: Our bodies, your body and mine, have innate wisdom. Among many things, they will tell us when to eat, what to eat, and when to stop.
Hot flashes. Night sweats. Vaginal dryness. Thinning pubic hair. Mental confusion. Increased depression, anxiety, and irritability. Slower metabolism. Thickening waistline. Weight gain. Thinning bones. Wrinkling skin. Decreased sex drive. Painful intercourse. Yes, these and more are the many “gifts” of menopause and I experienced most of them, all because of changing levels of the hormones estrogen, progesterone, androgen, and testosterone.
This summer, I did one of the most courageous things a woman can do – I tried on bathing suits – and actually purchased two! We were going on vacation in August, renting a house for a week on the Atlantic and I wanted to go to the beach in a bathing suit that flattered my body type and felt comfortable. The last time I bought a swimsuit was about six years ago when I walked into Sam’s Club, pulled a $15.00 Speedo tankini off the rack and brought it home. The pattern was cute, but the cut, well, not so comfortable. In those six years, I’d worn it twice.
So did you make your list? Your list of triggers? Last month I asked us to explore the emotions, situations, and foods that propel us down the path to unconscious, mindless eating. Regardless of what they are, how long-standing and deep-seated, we no longer have to respond to our discomfort by eating when we are not hungry. What a novel idea! I have control over what I put in my mouth and when I do it!
A while ago, one of my clients gave birth and decided to breastfeed her infant so she often brought her baby to therapy. Sometimes in the middle of session, it was time to eat. I’d watch the baby start to cry, curl her fists, scrunch up her face, and make rigid her little body. She was hungry and she knew it. As her mother attended to that need, I’d watch the baby melt with pleasure into her mother, face and body relaxed, eyes closed as her needs were met, both physically and emotionally. Witnessing this, I could not doubt the powerful connection between food and emotions.
In her 1985 book, entitled “Making Peace with Food”, Susan Kano chronicles her decision to feed her body, rather than starving it and to no longer focus on weight, size, and body obsessions. The book is part autobiography and part practical guide and is as relevant today as it was when she wrote it. She purports that most women in our culture have at least some traits of eating disorders, chronic preoccupations with food and weight, and behaviors that range from bingeing to semi-starvation.
“I’m addicted to food.” “I’m a foodacholic”. I hear many of my clients express these beliefs and if the truth be told, I used to say the same things about myself. I remember planning binges that consisted of high fat, high sugar, and high salt foods. One of my favorite “meals” after a long, hard week in the retail industry (many years ago) was two huge chocolate chip cookies, an extra large bag of Doritos, and a two-liter bottle of Tab (I said it was a long time ago). Can anyone find any protein in those choices?
I was in a car accident recently. It wasn’t a big one and thank God no one was hurt. However, accidents are jolting and can make us feel very vulnerable. After the initial shock, I wanted to eat. For me and for many of us, food calms and soothes. It transports us from our fears, our anxieties, our angers, our discontentments, to a place where nothing bad can touch us – at least for a few moments – or so we believe. (I forgot to tell you, I didn’t eat.)
My Story By Ilene Leshinsky, MSW I wrote this article in January of 2012 when I was a monthly contributor to a woman’s magazine (Jill Magazine) in Plattsburgh, NY. It’s as true today as it was then. What you see in italics are new thoughts and feelings about My Story, as my evolution continues to unfold.r