Reading 'Beauty' by Bri Lee

Beauty - Bri Lee

On a dark and stormy day, in a small but classy hotel room, I pull the book, Beauty, by Bri Lee, from my suitcase.

I begin reading. The book captures me immediately. Yes! I too want to control my body. I want to provide an image of myself to the world that I am strong, confident and successful. Even more so, I want to convince myself through my body that I am strong, confident and successful. Because most of the time I feel anything but.

As I read Bri Lee’s description of how she sought to take control of her body via a detailed plan and bloody determination, I want to follow the same course. I skim read the parts about starvation leading to tiredness and headaches. I simultaneously condemn her, empathise with her and desire to be like her. I perpetually make new plans to make myself weigh less, be thinner and be, well, glorious. I wish I could find a way to vomit after eating, to purge myself of my bouts of greed. Since I can’t do that, I wish I could embrace hunger pains and a rumbling tummy. Since I fail at that, I wish I could become a gym bunny or a runner or both. Bri Lee describes experiencing these things, her scales dropping with figures I haven’t seen since I was around 20 years old and I am insanely jealous. I want to be her.

At this point I realise this is not a healthy reaction and against the book’s whole concept. I am angry and curse the author for illustrating a path I want to take, even though intellectually I know it’s not something I should do. I resist the urge to follow the Instagram accounts mentioned that could inspire me to be skinny. Knowing this is not the intent of the book, I read on.

I sigh over the intellectual arguments presented against the obsessive thinking towards body control. I have heard most of them before. I feel superior because I read Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’ when it was first published, before Bri Lee was born, as if this make me more enlightened than this amazingly brilliant author changing the world through her writing and tackling unfair laws across Australia. Yes, I’m jealous. Jealous of the fame, the talent, the success and the person who weighs at least 20kg less than I do. She reminds me of Maddison in ‘This is Us’ who attends a weight loss group even though she is far from being overweight. I feel guilty about all these feelings I’m having but persist with reading.

The essay moves on to Bri Lee learning to accept her body for what it is, to reject the dual image of what it is and the ideal body her brain identifies as being her true self. This dual image resonates strongly with me. I was a super skinny child and teenager and that’s the body I associate with my self-identity. When I inform doctors of what I weighed back then, they say I must have been malnourished. I wasn’t though. Glandular fever the year after I finished school kicked me into the normal range and later a lifestyle of work, study, food and alcohol with not much else to round it out pushed me towards the overweight zone. Then, in a period of six months, I leapt well into the overweight range with a 15kg gain. I blamed my job where no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make everything right for the customers in my care. I knew this was due to systemic issues in the company and a hopeless manager, but still I strived for perfection. I fuelled my attempt to work every possible moment with pizza and lollies because this was an age before MenuLog and UberEats. Also, every time I ate a salad from the local salad bar I felt strangely ill. Years later I learn I have an intolerance for coriander and hypothesise that all their salads must have been laced with this poison. I escaped the world of work misery by falling pregnant and lose weight with ‘morning’ sickness. My first obstetrician was nasty about the rate at which my weight gained once I began feeling better, five months into the pregnancy. After two wonderful babies and a more balanced lifestyle I scraped back into the normal weight range but still felt fat and ugly, since it was still 20kg more than who I considered I really was. When I returned to full-time work I bobbled up and down with my weight but more up than down. My new career was as a high school teacher which was incredibly more emotionally taxing than being an accountant in the banking industry. This does not help someone who is an emotional eater and can afford fine restaurants, cheeses and wine. I currently weigh 40kg more than who I think I really am.

Bri Lee ends her book by killing off the dual body image she held. I know I need to do this too. I also know I need to lose weight for health reasons but the sense that a skinnier body would make me more attractive, more desirable, feels like a stronger motivator. The irony is that this motivator probably actually serves to feed the guilt and the emotional eating it’s supposed to be fighting. Somehow my mental attitude is improving though. I feel physically stronger through many years of personal training and more recently through the ’28 By Sam Wood’ program that I periodically follow. I am quite an emotional person and I am not ashamed of that. However, I am ashamed that sometimes I let my emotions make me feel like a failure when I see before and after photos of people who have successfully lost a lot of weight. I am ashamed that sometimes my self-talk can send me into downward spirals of depression and associated eating habits due to the lack of self-worth.

When my desire for inner strength instead of outward attractiveness acts as a motivator, that’s when I feel good about myself and I accept myself, body and all, as who I am. Even though this is also what Bri Lee is advocating, I can’t quite identify with her position since she sits so nicely in the so-called healthy BMI range. Then I have that ‘duh’ moment, the epiphany, the moment of enlightenment, that the whole point is that I shouldn’t be identifying with Bri Lee or anyone else. I just need to be me.

Thanks Bri Lee.