You Can Never Tell About Anyone Just By Looking

Today I’m proud to welcome my friend Diana, who has written a post for The Body Image Carnival about her journey to loving her body. Diana is a foodie-goddess-extraordinaire, writer and massage therapist. She has written the food column for Cottage Magazine, and contributed articles for Shambhala Sun, Chatelaine, Flare, Vancouver Magazine, and Western Living. On top of that she wrote a novel called Highways and Dancehalls, which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in Canada in 1995. She is currently working on novel number two. So far, she doesn’t have a blog.

Hello.  My name is Diana Atkinson.  I am forty-five years old,  and I love my body.   It is 5’4” and 112 lbs.  I have broad cheekbones, large, blue-grey eyes, long, wavy, dark brown hair.

I love the way my body is shaped.  At thirteen, I worried that my breasts would be flat, but they are a C-cup: rounded, full forcleavage, but not heavy enough to sag.  Below them, the muscles of my rib cage are clearly defined – and then my waist nips in to a tidy twenty-four inches.  My hips flair out to thirty-six inches at their widest point.  I am grateful that my body is well-proportioned.  But for one critical point, my parents provided me with good genes.  Also, my mother paid for me to have dance classes as a girl, and this has left me with the body awareness necessary for good posture and moving with grace.

That I am strong and flexible is due, I am certain, to maintenance.  I show up at the gym three or four times a week.  Woody Allen said, “Just showing up is ninety-seven percent of success.” I believe him.  I don’t do anything heroic at the gym: thirty minutes of cardio followed by ten minutes on the mat.  Sometimes I throw in a few sets each of two or three leg exercises on the machines; weeks pass when I don’t.  I go to yoga once a week on average.  This maintains me.  I don’t smoke, never have. I take a B multivitamin each morning.

I love that I am a size 4 petite.  (Size two in some things.)  I love the way my body “corners well,” as they say of sports cars and racing bikes.  I cherish the economy of my physical package: I occupy the space I need to and no more. Sometimes, when I am alone, I stroke and admire my muscles.

If I crane over my shoulder in the relentless, fluorescent light of the gym dressing room, I can see my cellulite. (Cartoonist Cathy Guisewhite once said, “If, in my lifetime, I influence just one shop to stop lighting their swimsuit changing room with fluorescents, I shall not have lived in vain.”)  So I don’t.  I do my donkey kicks and put the c-word out of my mind.  Or I remind myself that those bathing beauties in the sunscreen ads are photoshopped composites of prepubescent girls.  Every picnic has its ants.  I just don’t wear short shorts. No doubt my diet could be pared to a model of fat-free decorum: No more triple-cream brie, mayonnaise, or chocolate cake.  Then –who knows? — I might be perfect. But boy, I’d be crabby.

Another thing about my body: It’s been through a lot. Starting four inches below my left breast, and dropping down into my pubis, a scar tells of eight surgeries.  When I was four, I was diagnosed with acute, chronic, ulcerative colitis.  I spent much of the next eight years in hospital, including a long-term care hospital. At twelve, fearing the ends of my bones would close and I’d stay 4’10” forever, surgeons removed my colon, several feet above it of ileum, and the rectal tissue below my colon.  Because an opening directly into the body cavity invites peritonitis, they sewed up my anus.  The cut end of my ileum they led through a hole cut in my lower right abdomen, sewed it down, and clapped a bag over it.  Voila: An external ileostomy.  Even when it works well, it’s a disfigurement.  But they botched it by placing the hole (“stoma”) too close to my hipbone.  The bag would not stay on. Every day I was twelve and thirteen, I considered suicide.

At fourteen, I became the youngest person to receive the Koch pouch, an internal ileostomy in which a fecal reservoir is created from my own tissue.  Hidden inside me, it does not leak, and the hole, unlike the previous stoma, is tiny, flat, and flush with the surface of my skin.  I drain it through a tube I carry in my purse.  Insert; drain into toilet; remove; pat stoma dry and bandage it with a folded square of toilet tissue; rinse tube – I’m done.

It’s wonderful.  It allows me to be sleek and sexy.  To slink through the gym in my black spandex cat suit. To wear French lingerie, preen in high heels.

Unfortunately, the Koch pouch valve has a high failure rate.  I had it redone at fifteen.  Then, after eighteen years of good function, it failed serially throughout my thirties. Each time, they cut open that nine-inch incision again, through both layers of abdominal muscle.  Each time, I hit rehab Pilates immediately on release from hospital, on the theory that Pilates, targeting the core muscles, would bring blood, oxygen, strength to the wounded place, and that its gentle twists would help prevent the formation of adhesions.  Apparently, I was right: My frame is not yanked out of alignment by internal scarring, as you would expect it to be.

Repeated surgeries in my thirties derailed my life, which had already been substantially impacted by the trauma of incarceration and treatment in the draconian children’s hospitals of the 1970s.  (Before parents were allowed round-the-clock access.  Before clowns and child psychologists.)  I was jobless, unable to date, and, at times, homeless.

At seventeen, scarred and sporting my revised internal ileostomy, I hit British Columbia’s strip circuit, anxious to see if I was ruined for life, if men would find me attractive, if I could “pass” as beautiful if I hid my scar with stage makeup.  (See my novel, Highways and Dancehalls.)

Over time, though, it has turned out that many elements contribute to beauty, that a scar need not feel ruinous. Physical fitness determines your appearance in clothes.  And playing up your best features distracts peoples’ eyes from where you don’t want them.  Then, too, just as you insist others like and accept your face without makeup, self-love consists in ensuring that others appreciate who you are from the inside out.

Perhaps because I’m missing thirty percent of my intestines, I sleep ten to twelve hours a night, and nap one-two hours most afternoons. Because my system is so short, I go to the bathroom shortly after eating, and am hungry again.  So I eat frequently, and cannot work a job where frequent bathroom breaks are a problem.

I grew up on intravenous – in effect, starving.  (I.v. solution was salt, sugar, and water.)  Now that I can eat everything, I do.  I’ve always been very aware of food’s nutritive value, preferring organics before it was fashionable, wanting whole grains, brine-fermented vegetables, yogurt – the best of everything.  I seek cheese made from the raw milk of animals grazed in high alpine; I buy Scharffen-Berger or Valrhona chocolate.  I make my own crackers, pie crust, pickles, jams, and candy because handling fine foodstuffs comforts me, and because I revel in feeding myself well.

Now and then, a woman approaches me to ask, “How do you stay so slim?”  I can hardly tell her the story of my life, so I tell her a few things I’ve found true: “Eat a big breakfast.  Don’t eat after seven o’clock at night.  And never deny yourself a treat, as long as it’s high quality.”  She thanks me, smiling, and I go home to nap.  What I really wanted to say? Don’t do it my way.  That, and you never can tell about anyone, just by looking.

If you still have a moment please head on over to my other post The Skinny on Being Skinny: A collection of posts from The Body Image Carnival participants on how being thin has affected their lives. And not in the way you’d expect.

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