I Don’t Love My ‘Flaws’ but Weight Lifting Helps Me Stop Thinking About Them

For me, forgetting is easier than embracing.

I wrap my hands around the loaded barbell, letting the weight settle into my palms. I stand up, lifting the bar from the weight rack. It presses against my collarbones. It feels heavy. It feels good. I check my stance, fixing my gaze on an arbitrary spot on the wall in front of me. I drop into a front squat: chest up, knees tracking over toes, pressing through the outsides of my feet, every damn muscle in my thighs engaged. My mind and body work together easily, fluidly. My thighs become motors to power me through. And for a moment, while I’m straining and heaving, I couldn't care less what I look like.

Each and every day, as I move through my life, I assess my appearance to see how I come up short. My body, even at its softest and heaviest, fits comfortably into the socially-determined confines of what a woman’s body should look like. As a white, cisgender, conventionally attractive woman, I move through the world with an immense amount of privilege, including the kind I have because I'm thin. And yet.

When I pass a reflective surface, I can’t help but look, if only to check my suspicions against reality. Will today be a day when I look at myself and think “lithe” or a day when I think “doughy"? It's exhausting.

It’s hard to remember a time when I wasn’t worried about how I looked.

When I got chickenpox at age 6, I was more upset by how ugly the spots made me than by how badly they itched. Puberty intensified my self-scrutiny.

The first time I remember thinking my thighs were too big, I was in middle school, riding in the back seat of a car with one of my friends. The windows were down, Destiny’s Child was blaring from the radio, and both of us were wearing terry cloth short-shorts. I glanced down at our legs side-by-side. Hers looked like two perfect popsicle sticks. Mine? They seemed to spill out everywhere, gobbling up space.

For the first time, but certainly not the last, I rearranged myself so that my legs rested more lightly on the seat. They looked smaller that way.

I admire the fervent body-positive movement. But for some of us, loving our bodies is easier said than done.

Millions of people take to Instagram to post selfies with hashtags like #mermaidthighs and #effyourbeautystandards, selfies that celebrate what society tells us to hate. Cellulite. Jiggling flesh. Even "hip dips," which, no, you can’t “fill in.” It’s powerful to see women challenge the definition of what’s beautiful. But for many women, myself included, body positivity also functions as yet another standard of which to fall short.

In a 2016 SELF survey of over 3,100 women, 85 percent of respondents worried that they should feel more “body-positive” than they do. So basically, in addition to not loving their bodies, about four out of every five women feel guilt for failing to do so in the first place.

I love the idea of loving my body. Some days, I do even manage to love the reality of my body. But the world still tells me I could be smaller, I could train my waist, I could have various kinds of lasers and shock waves sent through my flesh to destroy the fat cells that cause the skin on the backs of my thighs to dimple. And I’m still surrounded by images filtered through Photoshop and FaceTune.

The body-positivity movement is a necessary antidote to the constant stream of messages telling us all the ways we’re flawed. But some days, viewing my own body positively can feel like yet another unattainable goal, as realistic as waking up to find my legs look exactly like Kendall Jenner’s.

Lifting has offered me a feasible alternative to "loving" my flaws: forgetting them.

Up until two years ago, when I moved to an apartment with a CrossFit gym just around the corner, I had never lifted weights heavier than the little neoprene-coated dumbbells they sometimes hand out in yoga classes. I thought I’d make the most of the one-month unlimited classes trial membership the CrossFit offered, and then move on. That’s not what happened.

What kept me coming back was the way the workouts helped me forget about my appearance. Part of it is how hard you work—just try worrying whether your sports bra’s creating a little croissant of fat under your arm while also muscling through a long set of ring dips. Part of it is that the only mirrors are located in the bathrooms. The biggest part of it, though, is how weight lifting gives me a different kind of ideal body to aspire to: a body defined not by how it looks, but by what it can do.

The truth is, the freedom I feel in the heat of a workout, when I pull my shirt off without thinking twice about how my stomach looks—even when I bend in half to snatch the barbell off the floor—evaporates as soon as my sweat dries and my heart rate settles. But the strength I've gained through these workouts, both physically and mentally, helps me feel something enduring after I'm done exercising.

If I do happen to catch a glimpse of my reflection post-workout, I may wonder what could have made me think it was a good idea to leave the house in shorts that reveal so much of my thighs. Then I remind myself what my thighs just made possible. I don’t always love how they look, but now, I don’t always care, either. Lifting weights lets me forget my “flaws,” and for me, for now, that’s more important than attempting to love them.

Sophie Ouellette-Howitz is a writer and editor whose work spans a variety of genres, including essays, short stories, and online horoscopes. Her favorite Olympic lift is the snatch. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and two adoring yet temperamental cats. You can find more of her work at ouellettehowitz.com and in 140-character form @ohphiesay.

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