Embracing your body.

I was 4.2 Kgs when I was born. Yep! That’s how I landed in this world. All fat and screaming. I know that that isn’t a big deal now, but this was in the late ‘80s and 4.2 Kg baby, that was news!

My mother, Mary, was in Form Four then and being pregnant at that time carried with it a sense of shame, to herself and her family.

If this same fate befell you, your life would never be the same. You would be the talk of the village and Daughters were told not to hang out with you because you had performed a sinful act of getting pregnant (having sex) before marriage. Your parents would be seen as failures and your father would not talk amongst the “wazee” and his dreams of you becoming a pilot would have “drank water”

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She was just about to sit for her exams when she went into labour. However, she still did her exams in that condition because her mother, at that moment, was a single mother who couldn’t take any excuse.

Whenever my mom narrates this story to me, she reminds me that it’s still the single most courageous thing she has ever had to do; after all, she had the option to abort.

 Her entire class, the entire village as well, came to see me on the day I was brought home from the hospital. Let us say, I was already famous: a 4.2 Kg baby! All these redmeat and mukimo…lifestyle concerns were a scam back then.

And, thus, my struggle with weight started as soon as I was born.

Throughout early primary, I had a name in reference to my body; Esther Kanono, as if fat was my second name.  When I was in class three, I changed school.  Because my parents thought a girls’ only school was more appropriate for me. My new school was the best girls’ school around but it was almost three kilometers away which meant I had to walk each day to and fro. There was no other option back then, school buses were an unheard of luxury. Weight issues and I parted ways at that point because I had to walk six kilometers each day and handle school work too on githeri for lunch only. So weight and I ended up separating. We walked on different lanes.

The issues with weight re-emerged when I got to high school. I wasn’t in the “fat” category, per se, but I had gained some weight and, so, I struggled to get back to where I previously was. There was one time when, after we closed school, I came home having gained so much weight. In four weeks, I didn’t eat, only tasting food as I cooked it because I really wanted to bring down my weight (The struggle was real!). That’s how I achieved losing more than five Kgs in four weeks.

Then I joined university. Again, I was a bit overweight according to my own measures. Here, too, I had to find a way to handle, to tackle, this “problem”. By the time I got to second year, I had lost much weight through exercising in the morning. On most days, 6 am would find me on the school track: that way I got to 50 Kgs – the weight I desired.

But I wasn’t happy. Not at all. Though my outside was what I could have termed as the “right” size and body weight, I was, nevertheless, unhappy. I had changed the outside but the inside remained the same.

Truth is, I have never been overweight in the real sense of it in my adulthood. This I can only speak boldly about years later and in retrospect. Even with my pregnancy, the highest I attained was 80 Kgs, a weight which, thereafter, I managed to bring down to my current weight: 65 Kgs.

My issues with weight were conditioned from childhood. The negative sentiments that followed the name Kanono were deeply embedded into my subconscious. The child in me, then, was bothered, and, as an adult, the sentiments still stand. This is because who we are taught to be, and who we are, in the first three years of life acts as a control center to our lives thereafter.

Scientists are now proving that negative experiences encountered within the first five years of life do cause more damage than those in subsequent years; because these years are crucial in the formation of the sense of self for the individual child.

Rarely, do we take into account the effects that words have on us, or the consequence of the names we give ourselves and our children. We forget that naming something also empowers it. A name creates. We forget that God spoke this world into existence, and thereafter man was requested to name the things in the world.

And, so, when I started studying myself as an adult, I started, for the first time, noticing how these subconscious beliefs controlled my life. I understood that for every effect there must be a cause and, when I finally found the cause, I was able to fix myself.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate

-Carl Jung.

I no longer obsess over my body. When I work out, it’s without a certain goal in mind. I simply shifted my focus from that “idea of perfection” in my head, to who I am right now. I decided to focus on who I am in the present moment, not what I believed was the “perfect me”. This change in perspective has brought such a huge sense of relief in my life. I no longer struggle with my body, it is what it is. I am who I am. After all the body yields to the vagaries of time and nature in spite of our costly care for it. Why then should I waste my energies disciplining and shaping it into a perfect figure instead of enjoying the time I have with and in it? The body is what it is, even against our wills and desires.  

When you take a moment and sit, all by yourself, and contemplate long enough, enough to shed light in into the dark corners of your mind, you will notice the things that control you without your own awareness. Truth is, you are always controlled by your strongest emotions.

You just don’t wake up and find yourself in a place of acceptance: you have to work yourself through it.  You get to a place of total love and acceptance by accepting your flaws, one by one and understanding that you are not in competition with anyone but yourself, and that you are not, and can’t be, anyone else other than you – and your body is no one’s but your own. When you get to a point where you love yourself whole, you rest easy; you stop struggling with yourself and enjoy each moment of you, each moment with you.

Everyone is judging you, but of all people you yourself are the harshest. You suffer most in your own hands. You can begin, now, to treat yourself with the kindness you would accord a child because deep inside you are still a child, it is not too late. It never is. We give to others freely the love and affection that we don’t give ourselves. It’s about time, to create a new way of life by loving ourselves whole.

You are whole with your imperfections, in spite of the imperfections.

Breathe.