Body Language

It may be cool to be a body positive millennial, but Cheryl-Ann Couto discovers the complicated reality of self-acceptance during her weight loss journey.

- Cheryl-Ann Couto

In late 2017, after decades of anxiously fluctuating between plump and plumper, I became thin. I had discovered running some months earlier, the first cardiovascular activity I actually enjoyed for its own sake, and had lost a bunch of weight as a result. Even by my hyper self-critical, mildly body-dysmorphic standards, I was now undeniably slim. This is all I’d ever dreamed of as a teenage girl—a body I could be proud of instead of the unruly, imperfect one I had that simply refused to behave like Kate Moss’s premium-quality model, no matter how much tough love I gave it. My pleasure should have been uncomplicated. And for a little while, it was.

The new room in my old clothes, the surfacing of bone structure, my mother worrying I wasn’t eating enough, baby abs, crop tops, pastel jeans!

They all lit a warm glow inside me. Goodness, I thought, is this what loving your body feels like? For once the hype was real. And wait, hadn’t I got here in a healthy, culturally relevant manner too? No crash diets or giving up cake—just a ragi-based paradigm shift, along with a 200 per cent jump in raw vegetable intake and crushing training schedules at the crack of dawn. I found myself increasingly soliloquising whenever my weight loss came up—and it came up all the time—about the pursuit of strength over skinniness and how enhanced mental health and self-confidence were the true and much more vital gifts of exercise.