Grandma, if you could see me now...

I've talked about my grandmother on here before. In my Open Letter to Food, and on the anniversary of her death last year. If you know me IRL, you know that she was among the most important and influential people in my life and my upbringing, and losing her has wrecked my heart.

I don't always share this, but Grandma was perpetually concerned about my health. Admittedly, she wasn't subtle about her worry (or anything, really). She tried to drop embarrassing hints, about the article she read in the newspaper about how to lose weight. She cried when I joined the gym in a previous attempt to right the ship (cried!!). Of course, I internalized all of the hints, as Grandma was plagued by fatphobia. I assumed that her comments were out of embarrassment for my appearance rather than concern about my health.

While I'm not excusing Grandma's fatphobia per se, I understand why it happened. She was far from the only woman of her generation who worried, tirelessly, about her weight (spoiler alert: Grandma was never even a little overweight, forget about full-on fat). The beauty standards for women were, at the time, toxic and relentless -- if you watch even one episode of I Love Lucy, you'll most likely catch a reference to women trying to diet. If it wasn't Lucy trying a diet herself, it was Fred telling Ethel how fat he thought she was (GROSS). If it wasn't Fred, it was Lucy or Ethel gossiping about other friends who were trying new diets or had gained or lost a few pounds.

Diet culture in the 1950s was so pervading, even the sitcoms captured it. Women could never escape the ads -- in magazines, on billboards, and on TV. It was ingrained in Grandma's brain -- and probably more as it applied to her own weight than to anyone else's. In hindsight, I feel for all of the women of the 1950s who were around my grandmother's age. How could any woman come out of that time period not feeling even a little bit fatphobic? It wasn't their fault; it was the fault of unrealistic, absurd beauty standards. While even today, we have a long way to go on the societal fatphobia front... we have far more education on the subject now than women like Grandma had access to.

In the 1950s, no one spoke out against fatphobia. Today, visit the right corner of TikTok and you'll hear the voices of activists slamming fatphobia, calling for an end to beauty standards and more accommodating seating on airplanes. We have so much more work to do, but based on the ad below from Grandma's era, we've definitely made some headway. This ad encourages women to smoke cigarettes when feeling "tempted" to "over-indulge." There's nothing healthy about such an endorsement -- and we wouldn't see an ad like this one today.

Ad copy courtesy of Skinney Med Spa

All of that said, I don't think Grandma was sounding the alarm for me because of her fatphobia -- though I didn't realize that fact at the time. She's no longer with us to confirm or deny, but I believe, in my heart, that her number-one concern was my health. While she did drop the hints, and they were humiliating, they came from a place of wanting me to have a healthier life than the one I was on the road toward. Obesity does run in our family, and she was watching it overtake me before her eyes. I don't necessarily agree with her method of expressing her aforementioned concern, but if there's one thing I know about my grandmother, it's that she loved me like very few people have. And that love was unconditional. The love side of the metaphorical scale far outweighed the not-so-subtle side with my grandmother. My appearance was never, ever cause for her to show me any less love than the enormous amount that she gave. And I later realized that she wasn't embarrassed by that appearance.

Now that I'm finally in a much healthier place, I wish Grandma was here to witness what I'm becoming. No, I'm not "doing it for her," I'm still "doing it for me," but I can't help but hope she'd be proud (and relieved). To clarify -- I don't hope she'd be proud of my size or my "figure," as the women of the 1950s called it. I hope she'd be proud that I am heading down a road that will lend itself to a longer life and more self-esteem. I hope she'd be proud that I'm doing the hard thing that I was never able to do before, a mission I couldn't complete while she was still alive. That I'm one less person she'd have to worry about (though, knowing her, she'd find other reasons to worry... if you knew her, you know!). And while this mission is not about "size" or "figure," I hope she'd be happy that I'm happier with my appearance than I used to be.

Knowing how much my health and my life meant to her, I wish that Grandma could see me now. And I hope that somehow, somewhere, she does.