It is 2024. I am two months postpartum, and I am the least thin I have ever been. I am soft and hollow after pregnancy, as shapeless and deflated as my stability ball which, once taut enough to support my growing belly, is now discarded on the garage floor in a pile of shiny blue rubber.
The algorithm knows that I’ve recently given birth. Facebook suggests I join weight loss groups for breastfeeding mothers and watch video clips touting 30-minute at-home dumbbell-only workouts that “helped me shed 75 lbs!!!” I know these memeified bits of advice are bullshit, but I click on them, intrigued, and the apps feed me even more. I begin to live in a haze of prescriptive taglines: Do this core circuit 5x a week to get rid of that mommy pooch! 3 high-protein recipes that helped me shed the baby weight! To change your body for good, try the 12-3-30 method! To change your body for good, try the 3-2-1 method! If I, a busy mom of 5, can look and feel THIS GREAT, so can you!
I neither look nor feel great. I perpetually need a shower. I live off of Bobo’s PB&J bars and pre-mixed protein shakes. 3 AM is a common mealtime for me; that’s when my daughter goes down after guzzling her middle-of-the-night milk. Each afternoon when I’m nap-trapped by the baby in my living room, I catch myself wistfully examining the portrait of me and my husband at our wedding that hangs above our fireplace, admiring not the loving expressions we wear as we gaze into each other’s eyes, but my toned shoulders; the delicate lace hugging my slender waist; the curve of my hip, glowing in white, stark against the earthy background. Mountain light clings me like silk. Look at her jawline, it screams. Her tits. Her ass. She’s fucking perfect.
I am a hormonal, sweaty, bloody mess. I crave that glow of perfection.
I decide that for the first time in four years, I will go on a diet. I resolve to keep my diet casual; I will not become obsessive. During diets past, I only had to worry about myself. Now, I’ve got a tiny daughter who is opening her eyes a little wider hour by hour.
I aim to exercise for thirty minutes per day – some lifting, some cardio, some yoga. I set a higher-than-usual calorie goal since I am breastfeeding, and decide I’ll even allow myself to eat a little extra if nursing has me feeling famished. In the past, I would have considered this mindset a failure. Historically, I have wanted to be not only thin but remarkably thin, and no remarkably thin woman I’ve heard of walks the world feeling satiated.
But despite my good intentions, weight-related chatter quickly occupies my mind. While my baby is sleeping in my lap, I Google how many calories lose weight while breastfeeding and did you lose weight quickly while breastfeeding and how much to exercise lose weight breastfeeding. I make my husband, who has taken up authentic Sichuan cooking as a hobby during his paternity leave, send me the recipes he plans on making for dinner. I scold him if they contain too much oil. I weigh every bite of food I eat. I consume little added sugar. Soon, I am thinking about macros, calories, and my next workout near-constantly. I find myself itching to rewatch an old favorite show, one that I thought I’d left behind me: Revenge Body with Khloè Kardashian.
The premise of Revenge Body is simple: Khloè Kardashian connects people who want to lose weight with celebrity trainers and nutritionists, who run them through grueling workouts and assign them to restrictive diets. After twelve weeks, cast members reveal their hard-earned “revenge bodies” to not only their friends and family, but any enemy who has fucked with them over the years. Markedly more svelte at their final Reveal, they confront friends and parents and ex-lovers who bullied them for their fatness. I did this to prove you wrong, they often say. Look at me now.
I first discovered Revenge Body in 2020, at the height of both the pandemic and my second or third foray into disordered eating. I was in decent shape, a long-time hiker and yogi, but I had recently purchased a wedding dress with a sheer, low-cut back, and I decided that in my current state, I was not worthy of the wedding dress.
I’d toyed with yo-yo diets my whole life, as it seems most women my age have done, but I tended to teeter into the realm of obsession. I’d spent days at a time subsisting on green tea and single spoonfuls of raw honey, thousands of dollars on protein powder, thousands of hours in yoga class, entire afternoons scrutinizing my reflection, noting my body’s shortcomings and daydreaming of starving them away. Inevitably, I’d tire myself out and go back to eating stone fruit or ice cream or butter-rich avocados — whatever foods I’d forbidden myself on my most recent diet. I’d gain a little weight back and resent myself with newfound vigor.
Now, with that vigor amplified by the goal of looking snatched in my wedding dress, I severely restricted my calories. I charged through 45-minute Peloton rides. I found a YouTube channel run by a slender, spandex-clad woman. Wielding 50-pound adjustable dumbbells, I followed along with her workouts from my unfurnished dining room in Nebraska.
But as the pandemic began to close in on Lincoln from either coast, my fitness regime took on a manic tone. People on the internet were binge-drinking, binge-watching TV. New Yorkers in lockdown reported that they’d gained five, ten, twenty pounds due to their new sedentary state. My office was closed; the time that I spent eating lunch in the break room or walking to and from work was unoccupied. It seemed I had two choices: I could spend my empty hours imbibing, snacking, doomscrolling, handing myself over to what seemed like the literal dissolution of the world as I knew it. Or, I could work out. I could put those dark hours to good use by becoming fitter than I’d ever been before.
I began working out three times a day: the hardest cardio I could muster in the morning, yoga or HIIT at lunch, and strength training after work. Mid-morning, I left my ad-hoc desk at the kitchen table to walk three miles. Between workouts and walks, I clicked on Instagram posts and listened to podcasts about nutrition. I was consumed by thoughts of my BMR, my TDEE, whether the composition of each meal I ate was conducive to not just weight loss but to my body’s total optimization. Always, always, there was something else that I could be doing to lose weight. I could be eating more meat or eating vegan. I could cut out carbs altogether, or eat a sweet potato for breakfast every day. I could be lifting heavier. I could start up Pilates, which would stretch out my muscles til they were as delicate as a ballerina’s.
It was around this time that I watched my first episode of Revenge Body. I quickly realized that consuming a TV show which so unabashedly in shame compounded my desire to shrink myself, and was therefore a useful tool for me. Revenge Body invoked unfiltered images of pale, shirtless, untoned torsos for its greatest shock factor. Celebrity trainers subjected cast members to brutal workouts from the get-go, treating them to cruel one-liners when they failed to complete a set of burpees or vomited from overexertion. Trainers and nutritionists spoke to the cast members with open derision.
“One hundred and ninety-four pounds of twisted steel and naan,” Philip Goglia sighed when Mayank stepped on the scale.
“All I hear are excuses,” Gunnar Peterson said of Kelsey, who gained fifty pounds after being run over by a truck. “She could have gotten started earlier. She got herself to where she is.”
The first time I watched Revenge Body, these sentiments were reassuring to me; they placed distance between myself and the overweight, out-of-shape people filling up my television screen. I didn’t need Corey Calliet to scream at me as I hauled dumbbells up off the floor. On the spectrum of Fat to Beautiful, I was barrelling toward Beautiful. Plus, I was doing it all myself, excuse-free. I would never let myself get to the same point as the men and women on the television screen.
With the help of Revenge Body, I lost fat and gained muscle for my wedding. People told me I looked beautiful. I even felt beautiful day-of. But looking through my wedding photos for the first time, I saw only the chasm between the person the photographers had captured dancing and smiling and kissing her new husband, and the willowy woman I’d envisioned. I spent hours picking those pictures apart, zooming in on my waistline, the backs of my arms, my chin, devastated that I had put so much work into reshaping my body yet failed to achieve absolute perfection. I deleted hundreds of photos, including those of my first kiss with my husband. I cursed the genes that had landed me with stocky legs and a muscular torso. I cursed myself for not practicing more flattering poses with my husband in the months leading up to the event. I sent my sister a picture that the photographer had taken from a wide angle, which revealed the slight curve of my lower belly – a humiliation for me, given that my stomach should have been completely flat. How could they have taken such a terrible picture of me? I texted her. Why would they think I wanted to see myself like this? In retrospect, I wonder if she thought I was insane or if she saw what I do now, looking at the wedding picture hanging above my fireplace. I was well in line with the standards of conventional beauty: slender, with defined musculature, just enough curve to attract the gaze of a cis-het male. I was scrutinizing myself through an extraordinarily dysmorphic lens. My months and years and decades of self-hatred had distorted my ability to look at my body objectively.
My wedding photos depressed me; the winter after I got married, I determined that I’d intensify my diet. But after months of overexercising and undereating, my resolve became embattled with sheer exhaustion. I forced myself to slog through once-daily workouts and ten thousand steps on my walking pad, looking out of the window at my street’s neat row of dimly-lit houses, each one caked in snow. I felt guilty for not doing more, but physically, I could no longer handle more. I had developed bursitis on my hip and a sharp stabbing pain in both knees. My plantar fasciitis flared. My insomnia was worse than ever. I often woke up in the middle of the cold winter night, stomach growling, and retreated to the couch, shivering next to the uninsulated living room window while I deliberated over whether to eat a protein bar – food in my stomach would help me sleep, I knew, but it would also break my fast and spike my blood sugar, a ubiquitous dieting no-no.
On those nights, I wanted more than anything to rest. I wanted to be able to eat occasionally without worrying about whether the number on the scale would increase by an ounce or two the next day. I never stopped yearning for a different body, but I’d allowed that yearning to consume all other aspects of my well-being. Breaking down joint by joint, system by system, my body urged me to realize that my habits were unsustainable. I could no longer afford to focus so intently on how thin I wasn’t, how thin I might one day be.
One of Revenge Body’s key schticks is the Reveal, an opportunity for cast members to show off their upgraded selves to their friends, family, and most importantly, their enemies. Some cast members confront mothers who have fat-shamed them or lovers who have promised them a ring once they lose a hundred pounds. Sometimes, they reveal not only their bodies, but regrets, traumas, or aspirations they’ve held close to their chest for years. One man comes out to his parents as gay; others take up dancing or declare that they’ve left a toxic ex once and for all. The implication of pairing these emotional reveals with a physical one seems to be that we do not deserve to live as our true selves if our true selves are not devoted to thinness. “I’ve lost so much more than weight,” one woman told the cameras during her reveal. “My heart is finally full.”
I sometimes think about a Revenge Body cast member named Kevin. Kevin wanted to lose weight and gain the confidence to ask out Julie, a childhood friend and the only girl he’d ever loved. At Kevin’s Reveal, Julie indifferently received the news that Kevin had lost forty pounds for her. Kevin took her rejection in stride; now fit and self-assured, he said, he was equipped to find his true person, his perfect partner.
Kevin, who turned twenty-one during the show’s filming, reminds me of myself at that age. In my early twenties, I wanted more than anything to be attractive. I pursued a career that I thought would make me seem smart and important. I woke up at five in the morning to go to spin class and did power yoga almost every night. I liked these activities. Yoga was meditative; spinning spiked my adrenaline, waking me up, making me feel alive. But I also believed that pushing myself to extremes – logging more miles on the stationary bike than anyone else in class, or nailing a difficult inversion in yoga – would bring me closer to a body that was worthy of attention. Until I achieved that body, I couldn’t reveal my true self. I harbored the private dream of becoming a writer, but didn’t tell anyone about it. I guarded my crushes as secrets, sure that in my current state, I was too unattractive for a boy to want to kiss or squeeze or hold hands with in public.
My wedding was the closest I got to a Revenge Body-style reveal – 20ish of my close friends and family at my mountain venue, admiring the wildflower centerpieces, the graceful arch of the black walnut tree that oversaw our ceremony, the delicate lace of my dress, but most of all, admiring me. I had the idea that after my wedding, once pictures of me at my lifelong peak of beauty had been posted on Instagram and hundreds of notifications had flooded in, I’d have done it. I’d have transformed into the version of myself that I wanted the world to finally see.
But it didn’t work that way. Aside from being tired, I was miserable. I was caught up in a career that drained me. Longstanding issues in my relationship went unaddressed; I hadn’t paid them any attention because I was too busy with my endless pursuit of the perfect physique. I wrote in my journal almost every day about how I yearned for a different life, the kind of life with which I thought I’d be able to reward myself once I was skinny – a life in which I shared my writing and my innermost thoughts, had sex without self-consciousness, took off my sweaty t-shirt in hot yoga class. Much like the Revenge Body contestants, I believed that weight loss had to come before I pursued or even admitted to wanting any of those things. I still lived in fear that, with any show of vulnerability, I’d be judged for daring to exist in a state that I viewed as deeply flawed. I still thought a perfect body was a prerequisite for starting my real life.
After my wedding, as my crash diet became more crash than diet, I wrote a novel. It was not very good, and it will never see the light of day. But I labored over it morning and evening and on weekend afternoons for a year. I cut some scenes and I rewrote others, experimenting with how I might manipulate language to invoke romance or regret or tragedy.
I built a Spotify playlist that reflected various moods or tones that I wanted my novel to contain. When I was stuck – when a nameless emotion tightened my chest and I failed to put that emotion down on the page – I put my headphones in, turned on the playlist, and walked a quarter mile to the city park near my DC apartment. When I reached the park, I walked lap after lap, breathing in the cool evening air, allowing music to flood my ears and saturate my bloodstream. Joggers and walkers and chatty Hill staffers joined me for asynchronous loops around the park. Most nights, a group of men played soccer on the green, hooting with joy when they scored or blocked a goal. Paying my fellow city-dwellers little attention, I let my mind spin; occasionally I tapped out notes on my phone about a scene I could write to make clearer my character’s motivations, or a solution to a foggy aspect of the story’s plot. I was walking not to burn calories after an indulgent dinner or to increase my Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, but to tap into and understand the stuff that comprised my insides. I don’t think I realized it even then, but it was that stuff – curiosity and passion and wit and regret – that made me who I was, not any measurement of my body.
My new creative endeavor overlapped with my step back from what I now see was a combination of orthorexia and compulsive exercise. As I wrote my novel, I gained some weight. It wasn’t a huge amount of weight, not yet, but the clothes I wore the year I got married no longer fit. I once again turned to extreme measures in a desperate attempt to preserve my body – while I still hated it, I knew I’d only hate it more if I backslid. I paid hundreds of dollars for week-long cleanses that promised to target visceral fat. I sent pictures of the food I ate to a personal trainer, not because I was uninformed about nutrition, but because I was exhausted of calorie counting, and I thought that paying for this form of accountability was a surefire way yet lower-effort way to avoid ever eating ice cream or air-fried chicken nuggets.
None of it worked; I went up a pants size, and I resented myself more than ever for my many failures of willpower. But I also couldn’t go back to my pandemic routine. I had allowed a little breathing room in my life for my novel, for my walks, and to my surprise, though I was no longer the smallest or fittest version of myself, I’d taken steps toward becoming the person I’d always envisioned, the person who I’d want to ceremoniously reveal after twelve grueling weeks of transformation – not just a Very Fit Person, but a creative. A hopeful writer. Somebody deserving of desires and aspirations. Somebody who could let herself be seen.
When I got pregnant with my daughter, I had not weighed myself since early 2021, when I moved from Nebraska to Washington, DC, ceremoniously dumping my scale into the garbage before driving 1,200 miles away from it. By my first prenatal appointment, I knew I had gained weight. I didn’t realize that I had gained more than fifty pounds, putting me at my highest weight ever, most certainly in Revenge Body-worthy territory. I was shocked when I saw the number on the OB/GYN’s scale, and then resigned, and then ashamed. For the rest of my pregnancy, whenever my husband attended prenatal appointments with me, I made him turn his back when they weighed me, terrified that he’d realize how much bigger I’d grown, sure that if he saw that number, he’d think less of me.
After I birthed my baby, I felt weak, floppy, and short of breath. I hated myself for starting my pregnancy at such an “unfit” state; surely if I’d been thinner from the get-go, I’d get to be thin postpartum, like my mom friends who claimed to feel foreign in their own bodies but looked the same as ever to me. As I cut calories, I started rewatching Revenge Body with the unstated hope that it would reinforce my desire to lose weight just as it had during the pandemic. The show would flip that switch within me, trigger me to morph back into the person I’d been in 2020.
While my daughter snoozed on my chest, I watched a widowed cast member step onto the scale for her initial weigh-in and read off the exact same weight that had popped up at my first prenatal appointment. The widow stared with tears in her eyes at the number, announcing that she had hit rock bottom. A small, predictable, fatphobic part of me was embarrassed that I was as big as a person who’d turned to reality TV to lose weight. I felt the familiar pull to ramp up my cardio and start skipping breakfast or lunch or both. But to my surprise, I also found myself thinking that Khloè Kardashian and the show producers had failed this woman. They should have treated her with more gentleness. They should not have allowed her to believe that this — having retreated from her routines after the death of her husband, having eaten food for comfort rather than fuel — was rock bottom.
For the rest of the episode, I watched the widow throttle herself into something sleek and hard. All the while, I felt sad for her and for myself. I was sad that we both harbored so much disdain for our bodies. My body was the only thing that kept me grounded in my particular life, one in which I snuggled my brand-new baby and wrote poems in the Notes app on my phone and ate my husband’s oily mapa tofu and watched Revenge Body. I was the same weight as this woman, but I was beginning to see that a high weight was not rock-bottom for me. Rock-bottom had been four years ago, when my every waking moment had been dedicated to hating myself for not already being smaller. It was right now, barely two months postpartum, wishing I still had the willpower to over-exercise and starve myself, because if I didn’t “snap back,” I’d be worthless. Rock-bottom was teaching my little girl, even inadvertently, that if she one day had a body that looked like mine, she’d be worthless, too.
Sad and curious, I asked Google where the widow had landed. Then I Googled other Revenge Body contestants. I saw a clear trend: people who’d once been on the show were either apparently fixated on the maintenance of their new body, posting thirst traps and recipes for their favorite high-protein meals on Instagram, or they had gained back at least some of the weight they’d lost, often stepping back from their online presence. In the shadow of my own disordered eating habits, both of these outcomes seemed equally tragic to me, perhaps because I intuited that no matter which camp they landed in, these people were not at peace with their bodies.
I related to this dilemma and felt a deep camaraderie with the Revenge Body contestants. I wished for a world in which our aesthetic goals were not so deeply intertwined with our self-worth or our perceived ability to be loved by others. I wished for a pathway to end the cycle I was – we were – stuck in. We had dieted, built new confidence in our shiny new bodies, and subsequently gained back weight. We had exhausted ourselves with the constant vigilance required to maintain the elusive results of unsustainable restriction. When we reneged on that vigilance, we despised ourselves. Maybe we’d been angry with the people who taught us to see ourselves as less-than, but we had never really wanted revenge on anybody. All we’d wanted was for someone to see that we were miserable and tell us to just go ahead and do what we wanted to do. That we were thin enough to deserve full hearts now. That all along, we’d been fine the way we were.
I stopped counting calories shortly after watching that episode of Revenge Body. It was ridiculous, I decided, to prioritize dieting as the mother of a newborn, barely sleeping, feeding my child from my very body, tasked with learning to care for a whole new human. It was ridiculous to define the value of my body according to its shape and composition when it had, for the entirety of the last year, grown and nourished that new human.
I have not weighed myself, either – not since before I gave birth. A year later, I fit into the clothes I wore just before I got pregnant; I seem to be about the same size as I used to be, though I feel different from before. I exercise, and I tell myself it’s with strength in mind, not necessarily becoming skinnier, or more snatched. On the days I don’t quite believe myself, I remind myself that this body carried my daughter and delivered her into the world. In this body, I quit a job that I dreaded going to in favor of one that delights and even fulfils me. In this body, I have published my writing. A few months ago, a stranger emailed me to say that they thought a poem I wrote was beautiful. I put that beauty into the world; it had nothing to do with my subcutaneous fat or the visibility of my abs.
I still glance with sick yearning at the wedding portrait hanging above my fireplace. I often trace the stretch marks on the soft underside of my belly, scars from not only pregnancy but weight loss and gain, wondering if they’ll ever go away. Instagram and Facebook still target me with weight loss-related reels, and I often watch them. Screenshotting online workouts that promise to remedy my still-too-round postpartum belly feels like saying hello to an ex-lover who aggrieved me: irritating, shameful, but a little exciting, too.
Occasionally, I have the sudden urge to watch Revenge Body, like inhaling all that toxicity could flip a switch in my brain and once again turn me into a person committed to thinness. Most days – most hours – I still wish to be remarkably thin. Often, I remember how small I used to be and I hate myself for giving up on that smallness. Looking at recent photographs of myself, I see arm flab and belly rolls and hamstrings that could be more toned. But I’m beginning to also see a friend wearing a poppy red bridesmaid dress, a mom smiling at her kid.
Some evenings, in search of a bit of quiet, I dip out of the house for a walk after my daughter goes to sleep. Though tracking my mileage is second nature to me, I try not to focus on how far I’ve walked or how many calories I’ve burned. I take a leisurely pace; sometimes I write down ideas or messy lines that will one day become an essay or a poem. Sometimes I find myself missing the dopamine of dieting – these steady walks of today are a far reach from the constant pulse of desire I once felt to shed myself and bloom anew. But I am learning to steep myself in consistency. For a few minutes each night, on my shadowy neighborhood block at dusk, I practice forgetting about the extra fat on my stomach or my untoned thighs. As the sky cools to black, my mind quiets, giving my heart space to reveal itself to me. I inhale the nascent night. I put one foot in front of the other, over and over again.
Jen Hallaman lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband, daughter, and two twenty-pound(!) cats. She works at a local independent bookstore, where she spends her lunch break writing poems. Her writing appears in Pithead Chapel, DIAGRAM, Little Patuxent Review, Appalachian Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Shore, and other publications. Find her at www.jenhallaman.com
