I tried a long time to lose weight in my earlier years. Nothing worked. It was my struggle. I struggled for more than 10 years. There's a part of me that is queasy about admitting that; it's a first-world-problems kind of struggle, and maybe, who cares?
But I want to tell this story because it illustrates the importance of elevating our little struggles into something more. Maybe our little struggles are a reflection of the larger gains we strive to make in our world. The betterment that blossoms as a result of these trials, whether emotional or physical, make for better people and a better world.
I wasn’t hugely obese, just over 200 pounds. A lot of people with my dress size in those years are happy and healthy at that weight. It’s right for them. It wasn’t right for me. I wasn’t happy in my body. My body felt sick.
I was a compulsive and secretive emotional overeater. I had an unhealthy attachment to food. I felt powerless and unable to change. I felt frustrated and hateful toward myself. I attempted a wide variety of diets and approaches, I tried to exercise though it gave me little enjoyment. I could not institute the changes I needed to make. Nothing would stick. I was a disordered eater.
I knew I needed to change. My excess bulk weighed on me like grief. My excess seemed to sit on my chest, inhibiting my breath. It cobbled on my bones and muscles, making it difficult for my structure to do its job. My flesh was cold, dry and rough, and hard to activate. I felt a depression that correlated with my body’s malfunction. Where to turn? My family and I tried doctors, nutritionists, trainers, books.
I tried everything, and felt miserable. Eventually, a surprising factor changed all of this: I got political. I became both educated and opinionated.
Shaming and blaming myself never worked. Battering myself over my lack of willpower never worked. How I eventually changed my life: I made the statement, “This isn’t right.”
It wasn’t right that most of the food choices in my culture weren’t good for me. It wasn’t right that processed food manufacturers seemingly engineered poor foods to be addictive and impossible to resist. It wasn’t right that these foods were marketed to me as a youngster. It wasn’t right that the traditional foods that nurtured my ancestors were scarcely available.
It was wrong that I felt inadequate because of my lack of “willpower.” It was wrong that I hated my body as a result of this mess. It was wrong that I expected a happy soul in a hated body. It was wrong that I left my personal happiness out of the equation, making this struggle about the scale and not about my boiling contempt.
Mind you, it took about 10 years to slowly melt off 50 pounds. Those years began with the spark of outrage. For a lot of years, I couldn’t imagine my life without my sweet and salty snack companions, in their shiny packages. How could I prohibit myself Doritos—that was the very food that brought to mind roller skating birthday parties and the happy memories of childhood? Could I really deny myself the yearly gorge of Halloween candy?
Eventually, yeah, I could. Because it’s crap food, and it was standing in the way of being happy, healthy, and secure in my body. With enough distance, I noticed that these foods didn't make me feel well at all. It didn’t happen overnight. I changed bitterly at times; I didn’t want to be deprived of the foods of my childhood. But the ignition of activism burned away any sentimentality for the trans-fatty doodles and glittering sugar bombs. I wanted to unearth the healthy person smothered by poor choices; visualizing that person inside of me was part of my process.
I learned to cook, deciding that while I related with the convenience of processed foods, I just didn’t find those choices trustworthy. I took yoga classes and to my delight, I could move my body in more emotive and investigative ways that were more interesting in pounding the pavement. I started to dance, determined to bust the myth that I didn’t actually like to sweat (or even know how!).
Dancing was a major turning point for me, getting to know my confused body better with pure, joyful movement. It was one of those beautiful little miracles. For years, I thought the only way I could tone and strengthen was by having a super fit person at a gym stand over me and force me to do my time on the stair master. I dreaded the sweat, felt embarrassed by my struggle to move, loathed the mirror-rimmed gym. But on the dance floor, I could move with freedom and inspiration. When I got tired, I could change my speed, or groove with a different part of my body. Dancing was instrumental in getting some self-love going, discovering the bliss of an elevated heart rate and the release of sweat.
What a revelation: Something good for you could also be fun. Now, I feel that if you can’t enjoy life improvement efforts, if you don’t find something fun or at least interesting about the process, it’s not going to stick. It has to be fun, in part, at least.
SELF-ESTEEM
My personal activism around food and my body was just a part of my activist life in my early 20s. I was a political columnist for my college paper, I was active in protest scenes in my town and nationally. The work illuminated the stranglehold of rampant capitalism on democracy, and the difficulty of thriving in a system that protects capitalist values over the welfare of the vast majority of people in this country and in the world. I was often painfully attached to my ideals, as a lot of young, expressive people are. It was difficult to be so passionate, but also necessary. Developing and defending these values was core to my self-esteem, another necessary component to my life-change regimen that informed my new habits and choices.
The concept of self-esteem comes up a lot in our culture. Many people don’t have it; in the confessional annals of media, sometimes you wonder, does anybody have it?
The poor lack the self-esteem of prosperity, leading to miserable cycles of tangles with the law, health care snafus, and much more. Self-esteem is a multi-faceted value that centers around the capability of caring for the self, and feeling healthy in the mechanisms that make such care possible. How difficult it is not to feel lowly when one can only afford food that makes the body feel unwell? How to have self-esteem when one must work so hard to make ends meet that there is little time for self-care, much less fun and enjoyment and dancing?
The rich lack self-esteem, too, we can see that. There’s no shortage of therapies and treatments and surgeries available to the super-fortunate. The flashy accoutrements of many rich lifestyles don’t exactly scream, “I’m secure and happy with myself, I have self-esteem!” Instead, there often seems to be threads of guilt and uncertainty in the material expression of the rich. Indeed, just look at our political system and you will see that the rich as a whole seem to feel they will never have enough, or never be adequately protected. No matter how lopsided our economic system is in their favor, it’s never enough.
In my own struggles with self-esteem, and seeing it in so many others, I know this is a crisis. Feeling good about ourselves is the pathway to making positive and sober choices. Why do people hate their bodies? Why do people numb themselves with food and drugs and alcohol in order to stuff their feelings and disappointments? Why do people make choices that undermine their well-being, often knowing of their oversight in the process of making these decisions?
People are guided in food and lifestyle choices by corporate entities, instead of ancestral wisdom. These choices are the foundations for a positive experience in one’s body; it’s no wonder that people feel less than esteemed by their bodily—by all measurements, the standard American diet is a wasteful failure.
It’s hard to have pride about your life when you can’t even live up to it. So many people are chronically depleted from the ever-increasing chaos of American life. Americans compete about who is busiest, who is most exhausted—a singsongy caffeinated mania competition that conceals the underbelly of our stressful lives. Waking up with no energy and heaps of dread, being unkind to others in moments of stress, being rough and ungentle with ourselves in frustrated secrecy—this side of America’s chronic fatigue is shared only by our intimates. These outbursts and shortcomings inform a poor self-image. Yeah, life is supposed to be hard, but do we really have to be chronically inflamed jerks for the world to feel our pain? Yeah, life should be easier than this, but how to make it that way when again, there’s seemingly only crappy choices?
And how about all of these reports of human-spurred climate change? Watching nature morph and unravel in dizzying developments? Does that make humans want to whistle “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and fire off a few random acts of kindness? For the vast majority of us, we are scared, we are confounded by a lack of meaningful choices to make things better, and likely, there’s a sinking suspicion of our own shittiness. How could we have let this happen? And how or why should we feel good about ourselves in the midst of this mess?
While political and social life these days seems like a blur of outrages, protests, controversies, triggers, and misunderstandings, somehow I am inspired to find self-esteem in the eye of the storm. I see this messy, coming-to-terms work as very similar to my personal work around my weight, self-love, and changing my body. Granted, my personal work carried much, much less collective importance. But for me, the pathway to being an informed and opinionated citizen was via my personal struggles.
The fires of rage had to come up to jar me from the rut of self-blaming and low self-esteem. If I never found a way to love myself, would I have ever expressed my gifts, or put my heart into fighting for what's right? The fires of rage illuminate a problem that grows in the darkness.
It’s heartbreaking and infuriating to witness the failures and tragedies that are the fuel for these sparks of change, but racist, sexist, homophobic, classist domination can no longer be closeted. While it can be difficult to collectively digest and make sense of what’s happening, the metabolic impetus must be honored.
People are finally able to unstuff their rage, their disillusionment, their low self-esteem, and come together to make big, complicated, messily human statements. These statements are about current events, but are also about the scar tissue that has frozen epic historical happenings like Native American extermination, slavery and racism, the oppression of women, the violence toward queer people, and more. When these issues are frozen and removed from context, those who don’t count themselves in the category of minority or oppressed seem to have an impossible time understanding why it’s important to reconcile our past and root out the social poisons.
A lot of people have been angry for a long time. The income disparities between rich and poor that I lamented in my newspaper columns in the late ’90s are worse than ever. Ever walk into a Wal-Mart? You don’t really get the impression that thriving people work there; people are sick on the job, in ill-fitting clothes, complaining of having no time to sleep—I mean, work ins’t glamorous for most, but you get the impression these folks are barely breaking even. Because they are. And that’s a real reason to be angry.
We need to move this anger through the collective body, or else it corrodes and eats away at the collective whole. Justice just isn’t a flimsy PC word to be toyed with; justice means thriving creatures in a thriving world. Justice is the essence of a liveable democracy. Justice is social medicine.
Because spoiled human awfulness is bad for both the tortured and the torturer. Cops that lose their cool and kill suffer forever for their haunting deeds. The rich people that don't want to share hoard profits in a paranoid secrecy. The soured and cynical believe that life is made of pain and torture, and they say it is understandable and biologically wired in us to inflict pain in order to protect our own.
My response: Try some self-esteem! Haven’t you ever seen a kitten kiss a dolphin, or a dog tuck in an infant? Even the most casual YouTube viewer knows that sweet, proud creatures are defying our ideas of dog-eat-dogness all around us.
And maybe we can all do a little of this work by being kind to ourselves. Maybe we can ditch the myth that peace is a scam by promoting peace in our own lives. Slowing down in order to be better to ourselves is one way to start. Voicing our personal needs in the professional sphere instead of sucking it up. Choosing self-care one night per week instead of the usual TV and brews. Being strong and calling out bad actors in our microcosms and little communities, helping people to reform and rehabilitate in intimate clusters. Making a stand against drama and violence in families and relationships. These important changes on a personal level are a big part of the good work of our nation.
Having some self-compassion for wacky choices we’ve made, or self-damaging things that we couldn’t stop doing; being kind and forgiving is a good place to start for some.
I honor those who find the great energy to be in the streets, expressing themselves, being strong in the face of violence. For those who aren’t at home in that kind of expression, I want to say from personal experience, that affecting change on a personal level is also important work. It's not a substitute for the work of those on the streets or in the courtrooms. But it's good work that ripples into other areas of life, with surprising developments and results.
Promoting self-respect and self-care in your life can improve relationships that seemed forever glued and stagnant, can reverse negative behaviors that lead to disease, can highlight a kind of love and service that many families, friendship groups, and communities need.
Yeah, I lost 50 pounds, and at the time, it seemed like the biggest, most impossible thing I could ever do. Now, it doesn’t seem like that big of a story, maybe it’s vain even, but then I remember how that awakening sits at the core of who I have become. Self-esteem: Could I have ever made it anywhere without you? Just as I type this, its political intensity seems ever-more vital. Health, prosperity, family, the tools for change, happiness—self-esteem is everything.
Our struggles for self-esteem are the struggles for rooting out evil in our world; when we have the esteem to ask questions and make demands around respect for ourselves and other humans, we are elevating our status as protectors of freedom, guardians of all individuals regardless of differences. I believe that this is a human mission and that informs my self-esteem, as well as this work in Ayurveda.
Eva Saelens is a professional member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association, with over 1500 hours of training in Ayurveda, massage therapy, and Ayurvedic treatments. She graduated from the California College of Ayurveda in 2013. Subsequently, Eva spent a year interning and studying Ayurveda, Tibetan medicine, whole foods nutrition, aromatherapy, and pancha karma at the dhyana Center in Sebastopol, Calif., and in India.