Fifty-five Years Old and Still Looks Good in a Bikini!
Life Sentence: Diets and Zooming Self Esteem
A couple of decades ago my riding buddies and I were playing cards by a tiny pool at the DeLuxe Motel in Fredericksburg, Texas. When our horse trainer stepped out of her room and headed our way, the woman next to me said, “Just look at her! Fifty-five and still a great body! If I can reach just one goal in my life, it would be to still look good in a bikini when I’m fifty-five.”
My stomach hit the cement. Life was about jean size? That was it?
I was in my psychology internship at the time and deeply into figuring out why some people were depressed even when their lives looked ideal from the outside. I’d recently read the results of a social psychology study that showed that when a couple passes another couple on the sidewalk, the man and the woman both looked at the woman as she walks away. (Sorry guys.) Interviews revealed that the men checked out the woman for the obvious reason. The women looked to compare the size of the stranger’s rear end with her own—though not said exactly in those words.
Ouch! No wonder many of the beautiful young women I was seeing at the free clinic (remember, you get what you pay for) were fighting sadness and hopelessness. Was making this ‘thing’, this package—smaller–our most important project for 
life? I’d been thinking that maybe in those years when we’re on the lookout for a partner and father of our children, maybe the insanity of magazines with a new diet every month were like combat training to grab that guy. But obsession for life?
Perhaps I was shocked that my friend’s number one goal in life was to look good in a bikini when she was a grandmother because I’ve never looked good in a bikini and I have never owned a set of scales. My family’s the boxy type. Early on I didn’t have scales because I was poor and moved around a lot. Then after working in later years with women with eating disorders at an exclusive spa/treatment center I saw no point in paying for a live-in instrument of torture.
I already had enough ways to torture myself. I figured I’d know all I needed to know by whether or not my clothes fit. I had mirrors. That was close enough.
**Watch out here for dualistic thinking. I did not say maintaining a healthy weight is not a good idea. I suggested we have learned a deeply held obsession with judging ourselves according to jean size.
I don’t have a solution here. The women’s body craziness is a big chunk of the economy and a big chunk of what it is to grow up female. What a business. An industry based on the failure of their own product. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing to have that weight loss promise on your New Year’s Resolutions.
Maybe I am hoping that changing jean sizes is not the top goal for women in 2016. Not the goal directing who we are. What we think. What we talk about.
I’m hoping the top goal isn’t anything to do with impressing other people, with struggling to accept ourselves.
