Protecting your future self without hating your current body

When my dad was terminally ill, I saw him lying in bed looking frail and as though he did not particularly want to be in this life anymore.

Seeing somebody you love that much become so ill puts an ugly spotlight on your own health.

It is difficult to keep pretending that the future is a vague administrative matter you will deal with eventually. Suddenly, the body is not just about mirrors, clothes or whether you avoided being photographed at somebody’s birthday. It is the thing that has to carry you through whatever years you are lucky enough to get.

I started thinking seriously about protecting my future self.

Some of it was health. Some of it was age. And some of it was considerably more vain.

The creaking and cracking had begun. I could see the signs that I was getting older, despite my face remaining diplomatically vague about the precise date. I realised I had spent most of my life trapped behind fat noise, worrying about how I looked, avoiding things and waiting to feel free in my body.

I do not want to spend the rest of it doing the same.

I still want to be young enough to wear a sensible miniskirt with tights before the opportunity passes and it becomes less “confident woman” and more “local council investigation”.

I want photographs I can look back on one day and show the other women in the old-age home without having to explain why I spent forty years hiding behind the nearest available person.

I would like to go to the beach in a sarong rather than full-length jeans and a baggy jumper, dressed for a sudden cold front while everybody else is applying sunscreen.

I want to live some of the life I kept postponing before it is too late.

I thought cruelty would get me there faster

The problem was that while I was worrying about the woman I might become, I was being vicious to the woman who had to get her there.

I spoke to myself as though I were useless. I told myself I was no good at anything. I had failed too many times. I could never lose the weight and keep it off. Every previous attempt was apparently evidence for the prosecution.

Even at the beginning of this weight-loss attempt, the one that is actually working, I was harsh with myself.

I accepted no excuses. I swore at myself when I had a bad day. I treated every mistake like a character witness confirming what I already believed.

I thought I was being disciplined. Some of it probably was discipline. Some of it was simply bullying with a calorie app.

I believed that if I could be relentless enough, I would eventually reach the end and a brand-new woman would appear. She would be thinner, happier, healthier and apparently entirely unrelated to the miserable person I had dragged there by the hair.

But she is not a different person. The woman I am trying to protect is the same woman I have been battering with unkind words.

Why did I think the thinner version of me deserved better treatment?

Why was kindness a prize she would receive only after I had changed enough to earn it?

I was expecting my future self to be grateful to the woman who had insulted and punished her all the way there.

I am not entirely sure she would forgive me.

Care is not the same as letting myself off

I do not believe gentleness means pretending my weight does not matter to me.

It matters. My health matters. My comfort matters. The life I still want to live matters.

I am not interested in using self-acceptance as a decorative excuse to stop. I am still trying to lose weight, and I am still honest with myself when my choices are not helping.

The difference is that I no longer think disgust is the only fuel powerful enough to produce change.

It is powerful, certainly. So is petrol thrown through a letterbox. That does not make it a sensible heating system.

Now I praise myself for small things. I trust my decisions more. I know that a bad day or weekend does not mean I have become incapable of carrying on.

I eat healthier food instead of simply trying to eat as little food as possible. I listen to my body. I take better care of it while I am asking it to change.

I even wear sunscreen now, which I used to scoff at. I am looking after my skin as an investment for the future, because nobody wants to finally achieve the beach body and discover the face has gone into early retirement.

Nothing is too late.

The investment has to include the person

Losing weight cannot only be an investment in a smaller body.

The mind and soul arriving there belong to the same person. Every cruel thing I say now travels with me. The wounds do not disappear because the number on the scale changes.

I would never tell a struggling friend she was worthless, weak and destined to fail, then claim I was only doing it for her health.

Yet I accepted that language from myself because I believed I was worth less.

Perhaps I had started seeing myself through other people’s eyes, or through the eyes I imagined they had. I assigned myself the role of the fat woman who could not get it together, then lived inside the stereotype as though it were a factual biography.

It is only now, after losing some weight, that I can see how cruel I was.

That is uncomfortable, because I cannot blame all of it on strangers, society or an unflattering changing-room mirror. No one has been more consistently cruel to me than I have.

Those are wounds I still have to heal.

Protecting my future self now means making difficult choices for her health, but it also means refusing to destroy her on the journey.

She is not waiting at the finish line.

She is already here, doing the work.