Embracing the Self

Are you a disembodied mind?

People don’t understand why I want to lose weight.

No, I’m not obese. No, I’m not anorexic. No, I’m not a professional athlete.

Over the last five years, I’ve worked to drop over 20 pounds (10 kg). Though I was overweight, my BMI has been within the normal range for a while, at 23 kg/cm2. But I have a stressful job, my blood pressure is still on the high side, and I can tell there’s extra fat around my waist, so I want to lose 7 more pounds to reach 22 kg/cm2.

But I’ve learned not to mention this at work.

The typical American is overweight, so odds are pretty good that they’ll relate to you if you talk to them about dieting. When I do this, though, people get uncomfortable. “Why do you want to lose weight?” For the same reason they do: To be healthy and look better. But there’s more—I always have the desire to be fitter and healthier at the back of my mind. After all, if something does happen, I want to be able to run faster, jump farther, lift more, fight harder, and climb more safely than I can now.

People seem to think this is a bizarre desire. Isn’t improving strength, endurance, and agility beyond average sheer vanity? There can’t possibly be any reason why I should want to be more physically fit than I already am, or at least, this is what plenty of people think.

But I definitely have good reason to be significantly stronger than I am now. Because my wife and I live in a two-story house with five children, including a toddler. And this is an X-ray of my wife’s foot from three days ago.

The doctor reset her dislocated toe, but you may notice something we all missed in the emergency room: there’s a fracture in her second metatarsal. See if you can tell from the image. (No, it isn’t the pair of floating sesamoid bones at the lower right; they came back into alignment when they reset her toe. It was excruciating, but I gave her a candy bar afterwards, and she promised I would rue the day I dismissed her suffering was happy.)

But there’s Much More to This

When I put it this way—I want to be fit and strong, because it’s useful—people have to admit that it’s at least logical. But why should the desire to be fit need to be logical? The real question is, why isn’t it emotional with most people? Why isn’t fitness an end in itself? Why don’t most people demand a body that’s fit? Why don’t they feel, deep down, that their bodies matter?

Yes, when sociologists try to explain rising obesity rates, they have many answers. We don’t work as many physical jobs as we used to. Food is cheap and plentiful. And I’ve mentioned several other issues, like air conditioning, pharmaceuticals, and assortative mating, that all contribute. But what about human agency? What about people choosing to be unfit?

There are some people who really do value fitness, people who make a sincere, earnest effort to achieve the best body that they can, and don’t succeed. When researchers explain obesity as a social phenomenon, I can see that they’ve explained this. Yet though they may have identified three, ten, or a hundred causes of rising obesity rates, none of them address the idea that millions of Americans, every day, choose the bodies they have.

We might say this framing is unfair. After all, it isn’t that people wake up, stretch, look out the window, and say “I think I’m going to put on another 3 pounds this month.” OK, some people have boyfriends who like that kind of thing. But seriously people, nine times out of ten this isn’t what’s going on. What’s really going on is that, over and over again, people don’t choose to be fit over choosing ease, convenience, and pleasure. They fail to value fitness enough to stay fit. They do value fitness for the sake of health, or looks, or ability, or even just being able to wear their current clothes. It’s just that, if they were to write down a long list of things they care about, their body would come last.

So sure, we can explain obesity sociologically. But isn’t it at least interesting the way most today people treat their bodies as mere vehicles for their heads—lumbering devices that carry them from restaurant to restaurant, bar to bar, theater to theater, from home to work to home? Then after decades of neglecting the needs of their bodies, they’ll ask for your help ignoring what’s become of them by publishing books about body positivity. This is the way it looks to me; we don’t care about our bodies, so let’s help each other forget about the whole thing so we don’t feel bad.

But what about our bodies? Don’t they matter to us? Don’t we connect with them?

To me, this failure to connect with our own bodies looks like death.

(Fair warning that the next part may really be more than you wanted to deal with right now. If so, just skip to the next section where it talks about how The Body is The Self. I’ll never know!)

Dream Saw

In my late teens and early twenties, I wanted to die.

This won’t come as a surprise to my longtime readers, given the amount of time I’ve spent writing about suicide on this blog. I’ve been close friends with three people who commit suicide, so, it should be no surprise that I was on the edge of suicidal for years.

(I have still have music, stories, and essays I wrote from that time, but I really never look at that stuff. Is it because it’s distressing to revisit? No, but seriously imagine—anyone who’s ever talked to a depressed person knows it’s a real slog.)

But I remember something interesting from that time, something I imagined while going to sleep. Something that, if you don’t already have the heebie jeebies, I’d like you to imagine for a moment yourself.

OK, so I want you to imagine that you are lying down in a room, relaxed.

Imagine there is a saw above you.

It emerges from the wall at your left on a sleek, metal arm, smooth and shining in the light. The saw is running, but its motion is whisper silent, only a gentle hum in the background. You know that the blade is thin—so thin, and so rapidly spinning, that its cuts would be absolutely painless.

Now imagine this saw smoothly descends toward your body, its motion carrying it slowly downward toward your legs. It’s about to reach you now. How does this make you feel? Does it feel soothing, or horrifying?

Now imagine the saw is instead positioned higher up on your body? Does the thought of this saw slicing silently and painlessly across your arms, your chest, your neck—does that feel relaxing? Or is your instinct to jerk away from it as fast as you can?

In my early twenties, this was a calming half-dream, a reassuring scenario I often thought about on the way to sleep. That’s how I experienced it.

But I don’t imagine this when I’m falling asleep anymore. Now I want to live. And coincidentally, I now find it alarming even to imagine something like this happening to me. Now the thought of this painless saw blade approaching is accompanied by a sharp, electrifying imperative to jerk myself away, now! To escape! That’s the way it feels—the dream saw no longer feels as though it’s just threatening to cut something I don’t want or need; it feels as though it’s threatening to cut me.

The Body is the Self

Psychologists create scales for measuring body connection and body satisfaction, like the Dresden Body Image Questionnaire.¹ They do this because when people are depressed, their attitudes toward their bodies are poor; as depression improves, so do patients’ attitudes to their bodies.²

This body image questionnaire turns out to be a good predictor of psychological well being. Very simple questions pick out people who suffered childhood trauma—questions like, “Are you physically fit?” “Do you like people touching you?” or “Do you wish you had a different body?”³

So really, ultimately, I’m not lifting weights and dieting simply because its healthy, or because it’s useful. I’m doing it for its own sake. I’m doing it for me.

Image by Anna Terazovich

It’s only on account of those who don’t understand this that I need to justify exercise and weight loss on practical grounds. But if that’s you, if you think that I, too, should regard my body as a meaningless tool, then I can absolutely say that it’s very, very useful to be physically fit, because otherwise there’s no way my wife could be here with me at home. I wouldn’t have had the strength to take care of her.

The Night She Fell

The way my wife hurt herself to begin with is a bit of a story.

It’s the middle of July, and too hot to take a walk during the day, so we waited until nighttime to go walking with the kids.⁴ There were no cars out, but the lonely country roads aren’t always in good repair. I had been carrying our youngest child, who started fussing and asking for mom. It was after she started carrying him that she dislocated her toe on a pothole. Guided by maternal instincts, she twisted to take the fall on her hip—even as she lay sprawled on the asphalt, her first thought was for the welfare of her baby.

After I got the kids home safely, I drove my wife over to the nearby emergency room. It was late, and the parking lot was dark and silent. She waited in the car alone for a moment while I went inside to find the woman in charge of security, who brought out a wheelchair. As we wheeled my wife into the hospital building through the gloom of that foggy summer night, pain filled her thoughts. But at the back of her mind was always the awareness that the hospital staff would have to reset her toe. Even if they were able to give her an analgesic, that would involve a needle—or as it turned out, four needles. They weren’t easy. After the first one, she held me and screamed.

But the pain didn’t last long. It’s been almost a week now, and things are much better for her lately. Although recovery will take another month, and the health care system is running us around pretty badly, she’s off her pain medication and having a grand time reading every novel she can get her hands on, leaving housework and childcare to her husband.

At least now she’s much better able to move herself around on her own. That’s very good, not only for her but for me. Because helping her around the house, and up and down our not-up-to-code staircase, wasn’t just a question of lifting and moving her, but of getting her slowly and gently where she wanted to go without hurting her tender toes, and I’m pretty well exhausted—too exhausted to say any more than no, no, we are not just disembodied minds. And it is absolutely not sheer vanity to want to be more physically fit.

Image by Nikita Korchagin

1. Pöhlmann, K., Thiel, P., Joraschky, P., 2008. Development and validation of the Dresden Body Image Questionnaire. In: Joraschky, P., Lausberg, H., Pöhlmann, K. (Eds.), Body oriented Diagnostics and Psychotherapy in Patients With Eating Disorders. Gießen, Psychosozial-Verlag, pp. 57–72

2. Scheffers, M., Van Duijn, M. A. J., Beldman, M., Bosscher, R. J., Van Busschbach, J. T., & Schoevers, R. A. (2019). Body attitude, body satisfaction and body awareness in a clinical group of depressed patients: An observational study on the associations with depression severity and the influence of treatment. Journal of Affective Disorders, 242, 22-28.

3. Scheffers, M., Hoek, M., Bosscher, R. J., van Duijn, M. A., Schoevers, R. A., & van Busschbach, J. T. (2017). Negative body experience in women with early childhood trauma: associations with trauma severity and dissociation. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 8(1), 1322892.

4. Also to be fair, I really, really love night time.