Beneath the Skyline

My Two Cents on a Flat Stomach

Deborah Good

I begin this column with a brief disclaimer: As a society and as individuals, our relationships with our bodies, with food, and with physical activity are fascinating and complicated—relationships I am in no way qualified to address in just 1,500 words. So please, read with the understanding that this is not a comprehensive treatment of the subject but a somewhat feisty response to my day-to-day experience as a woman in the world.

Those “flat stomach” ads have been getting on my nerves recently. You know the ones I mean. They occasionally show up alongside the news story I’m reading online, or they line up ubiquitously beside me at the grocery store checkout, trying to sell this or that “key” to weight loss and abs-glory.

If I think about it too much, I actually get downright pissed off. This is in part because of the amount of time, energy, and synaptic activity that women spend on stomachs instead of on more creative or interesting or world-bettering causes.

It is also because I like myself. And I am tired of being told not to.

In the preface to her play, The Good Body (Villard, 2004), Eve Ensler writes, “When a group of ethnically diverse, economically disadvantaged women in the United States was recently asked about the one thing they would change in their lives if they could, the majority of these women said they would lose weight.”

Really? What if the majority instead said they wanted to read more, or to be more thoughtful neighbors, or to join the fight to end hunger? What if they said they hoped to climb mountains and try out skydiving, or to go back to school for astrophysics? I personally think the world would be a far more interesting place.

“Maybe I identify with these women,” Ensler goes on, “because I have bought into the idea that if my stomach were flat, then I would be good, and I would be safe. I would be protected. I would be accepted, admired, important, loved.”

From Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia to Carole Pateman’s “Sexual Contract,” this topic has been addressed again and again; I don’t pretend I have anything particularly new to tell you. Countless voices, particularly in the past forty years, have analyzed, narrated, argued, and screamed it out: Women face undue societal pressure to look a certain way. The power and recognition we do receive is much more tied up in our physical appearance than it is for men. The dieting and exercise industries have made their multi-billion-dollar riches by encouraging women to (a) look in the mirror and then (b) decide that they do not measure up. 

Perhaps the reason I can still get so worked up about the magazines in the checkout line is because the problem still persists to such astounding degrees in spite of these critical voices.

To women I say this: If you love going to the gym, by all means, go. If the elliptical machine makes your face light up and your heart go pitter-patter, do not let me stop you. Vigorous exercise is good for us for many reasons. (The soccer field is my preferred venue.) But if your gym membership is motivated by self-dislike and is part of an ongoing quest for abs-glory, I suggest you pack it into the bottom of your dresser drawer and find something else to do.

Even Time magazine is onboard with this. Their August 17, 2009 issue reported on research that suggests vigorous exercise (like the kind we get at the gym) is actually more likely to gain us a few pounds than trim them off because, well, we get hungry afterwards and tend to eat more than we would have otherwise. According to the article, some researchers believe that we would more likely lose weight if we worked to increase our activity levels overall, in the small, hour-to-hour kind of way.

In other words, we should be taking the stairs, not the elevator. (It’s also amazing how much low-intensity exercise I get simply by running—sometimes literally running—late so often.)

Let’s face it. It is a little absurd when we walk right out our front steps into our cars and drive 20 minutes to the gym, only to run in place for 45 minutes, and then repeat the drill in reverse. Here’s an idea: Start a garden instead. The digging and weeding will give you the low-level exercise researchers are now promoting, and the produce will complement a healthy diet.

Another idea: Walk or bike to get around. That way you’ll be increasing your physical activity while getting wherever it is you’re going, and saving the environment while you’re at it. What better way to help us feel good about ourselves than by lifting one hand from our handlebars to give global warming the proverbial middle finger? P

Please do not misread this column as “Deborah’s secret to a flat stomach.” My purpose is definitely not to suggest whether and how we should exercise in order to lose weight. Nor is my point that we should care less about our health; indeed we should all strive to eat well and be active.

The point is that we would be better off to care less about being perfect and thin. The point is that women do not need flat stomachs—a goal that is pretty ridiculous considering that we come in such different shapes and body types. The point is that men—and I will not be gentle about this—need to stop @!#$-ing making comments about women’s bodies. And the real point, of course, is that life is more enjoyable and more fun when we accept ourselves as we are, including our flabby bits and imperfect pieces.

Many people groups have had to learn self-love against forces much greater than my middle-class, white self will probably ever experience. In one of my very favorite passages—an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Beloved—an elderly African American woman whom people called “Baby Suggs, holy” sat on a rock in the middle of a clearing, and, speaking like a preacher to her people, urged them amid all who “despise” their flesh to love their hands, flesh, and faces. “You got to love it,” Baby Suggs preaches, “you!” (p. 88).

A friend recently told me a story. “I went to a baseball game the other week,” she said and paused. “Where I almost cried!” 

It was an independent professional league game, relatively small and intimate. “At one point,” she went on, “they invited all the kids in the stadium down onto the field to run around the bases. And for like ten straight minutes, we watched these kids run around those bases for all they were worth. All kinds of kids, different sizes and shapes, all smiling and just running. And I just kept watching their faces and thinking about how beautiful it was, and I almost cried.”

She laughed, a little amazed at herself. And I laughed too because I could picture the scene: sun beaming down on toothy grins, little arms pumping, a crowd of happy children, small, medium, and large, just tearing around the baseball diamond—not because they wanted to be thin and perfect but because for them, in that moment, there was absolutely nothing else in the world that mattered except for running around those bases.

I have decided to carry this image with me—of children running, fully present in themselves and in love with what their bodies are capable of. I wish we could all learn to love our bodies with this same carefree vigor. You got to love it, preaches Baby Suggs. You!

A postscript: I print this column well-aware that the topic of women and body image is probably over-played, over-discussed, and over-done. But I print it anyway, because the statistics are so staggering (figures vary, but some researchers, for instance, have found that 78 percent of girls are unhappy with their bodies by the time they reach 18).

I print it anyway, convinced that what Mary Pipher calls “lookism” is still so pervasive in our society that it is worth another thousand words of critique. Evidence: Several years ago, I wrote a column on a topic not very different from this one, and the column generated more feedback from readers than any column of mine before or since—a chorus of frustrated women calling for a different kind of world. May we all strive for it. And, men, yes, we really, really need you in this fight too.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a research assistant at Research for Action (www.researchfor action.org) and author of Long After I’m Gone: A Father Daughter Memoir (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2009). She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.