The Quiet Radicalism of Looking After Your Body

In part 1 of this series, I introduced the simple idea of making a list of “Ways I look after my body”. In this part, I offer some thoughts on why focusing on “looking after” is more radical an idea, when applied to our own bodies, than it might at first seem.

When I tried it out, one simple effect that this list-making had right away was that I felt pleased: pleased by how many things I am already doing (25 at the last count) that involve respecting and being kind to my body.

I’ve grown up in overlapping cultures that encourage 1) intellectualized ways of life that ignore the body and 2) aestheticized ways of life that objectify the body. In such contexts, it’s easy for the default mode to be more or less ignoring the body except when it’s perceived as either of the following:

1. A source of demands (in the form of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, bowel movements, sexual desire, injury, etc) that get met only when they get strong enough to interfere with us rushing around getting the next thing crossed off an endlessly self-replenishing list of to-dos.
2. A comparator to the bodies we’re supposed to want ours to be like (small and big in just the right places, smooth and pore-free all over, etc) prompting either fitful improvement efforts or precarious satisfaction depending on mirror angle or mood or time of year.

With these kinds of value systems in place, it’s easy for our ways of relating to our physical selves to become narrow, congealed, and punishing—whether or not as extremely as happens in an eating disorder or exercise compulsion. “Taking care of my body” often gets automatically funneled into “keeping my body healthy”, which gets equally unwittingly funneled into “keeping my weight down and my cardiovascular fitness up”.

The idea of “looking after” going broader than slim and fit is thus perhaps an unfamiliar one. Or maybe not—after all, concepts like “self-care” have been drifting around for a while, and have now infiltrated as far as the language of bureaucracy-lite: you’ll find them in university “wellness” programs and lifestyle tip emails from your bank. But it’s easy to find self-care and its corporatized companions a turn-off, yet another way for western individuals to be conned into believing we can down-dog and chia-seed our way out of the devastation being wreaked by massive social and economic inequities and by all the air, water, land, and noise pollution that we are contributing to and that are happening to us.

Is there anything left, then, that late capitalism hasn’t already wrecked? Well, maybe looking after something as vital to us as the cells and fibres that constitute us? Maybe it’s a bit harder to roll a cynical eye at that.

Of course, the idea of that “something so vital” gets us into problems: It’s predicated on the dualisms of possession in which “I” own “my body” and am separate from it. I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of understanding that I am my body, given that once it stops existing, so—in almost all senses—do I. But there’s maybe also an upside to the dualism: It encourages a sociable way of understanding how “mind” and “body” interact.

I often think of something my mother told me about growing up. Nasty girls at the boarding school she hated called her “short fat hairy legs”, and that made her legs feel wrong to her for a long time. But eventually she was able to come to feel friendly towards these legs that have worked so well all her life, that have been injured and have healed, that take her around on them for gardening and kayaking and moorland walks, that have kept on patiently keeping going into her eighth decade. Of course, she understands “her” legs as fundamentally part of herself, not a possession separate from her. But these little linguistic kinds of distance we take up on our bodily selves aren’t always part of bodily self-objectification and alienation. Sometimes, they can have the paradoxical upside of actually encouraging connection, even friendliness.

And maybe, if we do still want to get away from the dualism, we can have it both ways: lose the obvious linguistic separation and keep the friendliness. I’ve been finding myself toying with variants like “how does this mind/body system look after itself” or even just “how does this look after itself?” I can even almost imagine a big friendly collection of parts of myself all taking care of each other.

Anyway, if it appeals, I encourage you to try out some simple list-making with friendliness and looking-after at the heart of it. You’ll probably only need 10 minutes for the initial “brain dump”, and my guess is that as for me, more will keep occurring to you as you go about your day and week after making a solid start. It doesn’t really matter which words and phrases you use to head up your lists: You might be drawn to “look after” or “be kind to” or “take care of” for the first one, and to “push too hard” or “neglect” or even “mistreat” or “punish” for the second.

Eating Disorders Essential Reads

When an Eating Disorder Isn't Just About Body Image

Hope and Hesitation in the Journey of Anorexia Recovery

And even if it doesn’t appeal, or maybe especially if it doesn’t (and definitely especially if you strongly object!) I still encourage you to give it a go. Arguments in favour: 1) It’s 10 minutes! 2) You’ll probably learn something. (It may not be something comfortable, but if not, worst case you ignore it and you’ll probably soon forget all about it; best case you inquire into the discomfort and do something constructive about it.)

In the final part of this series, I’ll give a few suggestions for how to analyse and use your data once you have them.