A while back I read a quote somewhere that said something like, “the body you have in your twenties is the body you were born with. The body you have in your forties is the body you deserve.”

When I read this, I was in my early twenties, I was not yet a mother, I taught pole and trained for hours almost every single day. I was so sure I was going to have a banging body in my forties. I would look at these older women, tired-looking women, and dare I say – gasp – fat women, and I would think, “No! That would never be me, no, I would never let myself go like that…“

Truly, the Lord knows how to humble you doesn’t He?

First, I would like to apologize to all the women I ever thought that about. I don’t know who you were and what you were going through. How horrible a thought it was. To think that a person’s outside appearance can tell us all we need to know about them, their situation, and their so-called excuses. I was young, fit, and full of myself. You’ll never know I thought this about you, because I never said them out loud. I don’t even think I knew I was thinking them; this is all in hindsight as I now struggle with the thing I so haughtily declared I never would. The biases we have that are buried so deeply in our minds can often jump out and surprise us. We think we would never think something so awful because we are “good” people who accept everyone as they are! I could never think such horrible things! SURPRISE!! YOU’RE WRONG! HA!

Second, the phrase “letting yourself go” is kind of a misnomer. It implies that you’ve willingly thrown all caution to the wind and woke up that day and thought, “today I will not care about my body, my health, or my appearance. Everyone can suck eggs!” But I would posit that most people don’t even know how they got to where they are. And since they don’t know how they got there, they don’t know how to get out either.

Take me, for example. Uh-oh, here come Kris’ excuses for being fat! If you hate fat people with excuses you might want to stop reading right here and go pick up a tire to flip over or whatever. HAHA

After I gave birth to my firstborn, I barely gained any weight. Found myself softer in places because I am a woman who created a person in her womb, so that’s a given. But also I was younger and my mental load was a lot lighter – I had one child, a small home I was running, and practically no worries. In less than two years I was teaching pole again, the abs were showing again, and I could do flips on a pole again. I’d look at myself and say, see, I knew it! I knew I’d be a hot mom!

And then five years after my first, I got pregnant, miscarried, got pregnant again, and then gave birth to my little girl. She was worth all the pain. She was chubby and beautiful and perfect. And that was when my body decided it had had enough.

At first it wasn’t too bad. We were back on a groove and I was moving again, my clothes still fit and I felt strong, was dancing soon after I gave birth. But you know what else happened?

Oh, just this small thing called a pandemic.

And those years inside our home ravaged my body and my mind and everything spun out of control, and I just didn’t know how to get back on track. In 2020 I had five severe bouts of vertigo which stopped me from moving altogether – even house chores had to be done gently because one bad overexertion could trigger it and I would spend another 3-5 days in bed, vomiting and hating life. And so I gained weight. Food became a comfort in a time when nothing was certain. Nothing was certain except the joy that food brought us – the dalgona coffee, all the ube pan de sal, black kutsinta with dulce de leche, sourdough bread, the endless Grab and Food Panda deliveries that disturbed the silence of the car-less roads. I didn’t notice I had gained so much weight because there was no one around to tell me I had! No judging eyes, no one to compare myself to – it was just my cozy family of four trying to do the most during a dark time.

But then the world that was halted slowly started spinning again. Its creaking hinges and joints bringing us back into a reality that would never feel normal, or in sync with what we felt on the inside. We were changed on a molecular level and the size of not only our bodies, but our souls, our minds, were being forced to fit into a mold that no longer made any sense. I still feel this chaos today.

In the last couple of years I have been diagnosed with two things – adenomysosis and beta thalassemia minor. Adenomyosis is a condition of the uterus, wherein the uterine lining grows into the muscle wall of the uterus instead of leaving my body every month. Thalassemia is a blood disorder where my red blood cells are teeny tiny and very pale. I won’t go into either of these right now because then I’d have to stay here much longer than I already have, but just know that while I’ve felt these two things affecting me almost my entire life, they only started to disrupt daily life in recent years. And one of those disruptions is my weight and overall health.

Which brings me to my last point. I am going to turn forty in six months, and I am currently occupying a body I do not love. A body I do not recognize. A face that isn’t mine. And I often wonder – is it true? Do I deserve this? Did I do this to myself? On the days when I find it so hard to move, when I am filled with self-loathing and body negativity, is it because I deserve it?

While I don’t have a true answer to that question, I do propose a revision of the quote:

“The body you have in your twenties is the body you were born with. The body you have in your forties is the body you decide.”

Every person has a different physical makeup, different circumstances, different mental issues, different access, capabilities, and capacities. So I don’t think it’s accurate or fair to say that where you find yourself in your forties is something that was your fault, necessarily. It shouldn’t even be viewed as a reward or punishment for something – sometimes it just is. We can’t let ourselves think that we are here because it’s what we deserve and therefore we need to stay here because we are terrible, and lazy, and selfish, and boring.

If you want to think about how you got to where you are now, it should be in the context of the next step – which is to decide on it. Is this the body you want to keep living in, or are you going to try and change it because it isn’t making you happy? What about it isn’t making you happy? What are the things you did that brought you here? If there are a lot of bad habits that was behind it, which one should we tackle first?

We can’t think of life in terms of deadlines, simply because we can’t really control everything that happens, and when they happen. I’m sure a worldwide pandemic wasn’t in anyone’s bingo card (except for those scientists that tried to warn us in 2019, but that’s a different blog post altogether). But I suppose we can think of life as a big picture with daily steps. Sure I’d like to be strong and fit again in my forties, but it’s not a deadline, and if I don’t get to there by that time, then I will keep trying and maybe I’ll be fit in my fifties instead.

Whether we deserve or don’t deserve something is none of our business, because it’s not ours to decide. What we can decide on is what we’re going to do about it now. That removes blame, shame, and self-loathing from the picture and replaces it with actionable steps. We take out arbitrary deadlines and think about life as a full picture and not a job with quarterly quotas. A life to be lived, enjoyed, experienced, and decided on, deserving it or not be damned.