Some people really have to work harder.

Wow, some ppl do get more breaks.

Image: Clothing the Naked, Michiel Sweerts, ca. 1661, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1984. Used with permission.

Hello friends! This is about weight, and also about how people vary. 

For women in a culture with one rigid beauty ideal, it is a very inconvenient truth that People Vary. That is, it's inconvenient for us as don't meet the standard. It works out well for anyone wanting to sell us services and products that will "help" us get there.

(Asterisk, obviously! Do these services get us there? Hahahahaha NO. Do they "help" in any way? Often, they harm.)

No beauty standard is more important than thinness, as we've talked about before. Some women can meet the weight standard pretty easily. Some bodies just don't want to hang onto weight. For others, it's hard work to be thin. Really hard work. 

I'm not saying you can't do anything to shift your weight. You can! But as I've been talking about with a number of Body of Knowledge folks, there are limits to what you can expect. Ease is one of those limits. 

If we look at people who are effortlessly thin, like people who "forget" to eat when they're anxious, people whose bodies don't want to hang onto weight as much as ours do, it might look easy. 

Or if we look at people who work very hard at being thin, who can afford private chefs and private trainers and surgical modifications and can cover their tracks, or at people whose systems overflow with testosterone and who have knees built for running, thinness might look inevitable. Normal.

But extreme thinness is not effortless or natural for everyone. It's SO IMPORTANT TO SEE THIS. Many don't. A lot of people think being very thin should be easy, because it's the "correct" way for humans to be. 

If we don't leave room for people to vary, if we believe that that every step we take should be a trap door leading to a chute that drops us straight onto a scale reading some "natural" very low number: just, wow. Hopelessness. 

Better: Acknowledge that we're all playing different hands. Some people have more money. Some people have more stress. Some people have more time. Some people have more goddam trauma. Some people have bodies that have really been through a lot. 

Some people are naturally thin, some people are not.

So before you go to blaming, name-calling, self-hatred, post a reminder for yourself that People Vary. Understand that the effort it takes to get and stay thin varies accordingly, and then decide if you want to make the effort it takes to EVEN FIGURE OUT WHAT EFFORT IT WILL TAKE.

See what I'm saying? There will be work, and it's better to know that up front.

Do not look at the folks around you who are not up against what you are up against, and whose bodies aren't so UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME at searching for, seizing and clutching onto extra weight.

Note: Havi Brooks is the beautiful genius person that I first heard "People Vary" from. Thank Heaven, there was a time when she said this a lot a lot, because I needed to hear it on repeat.

There's a full discussion of frustrated expectations and assessing efforts toward a goal in Emily and Amelia Nagoski's ESSENTIAL book Burnout. My strongest encouragement: Get yourself a copy of this book today.