By Sarah Geringer
This summer, I’ve rediscovered a joy from my childhood: swimming. My children bought me an above-ground pool for Mother’s Day. I knew I would like it, but I didn’t realize how much delight it would bring me. I have also been surprised by how it has helped me make peace with my middle-aged body.
My teen daughter and I have spent many late afternoons floating in the pool and sharing stories. She’s heard my stories about being fat-shamed as a child. In my troubled childhood, I overate for comfort. Beginning in fourth grade, I often got bullied about my overweight frame.
She says Gen X kids would have greatly benefited from the body-positive talk Gen Z seems to do more naturally. Mean words about their bodies are far less “acceptable” than they were in my generation. As I’ve floated in my pool this summer, I’ve reflected on the full journey that has been required to make peace with my middle-aged body.
Growing up, I felt hatred toward my overweight body. I reached my highest weight my senior year of high school but lost 30 pounds before college by under-nourishing and overexercising. I just wanted to shed the extra weight quickly and become thinner like my peers.
This plan worked with the metabolism of my 20s. I exercised daily and ate balanced meals, yet I wasn’t eating enough. By age 22, I was too thin for my frame, but I was so happy to fit into smaller clothes.
Then I married and had three children before I turned 31. With each pregnancy, I drifted further away from my thinnest years. I was never athletic, but I wanted to stay active. So, I got up early in the morning to walk on the treadmill and often took my children to the park to play while I walked.
During those years, I learned to enjoy exercise for its own sake. It wasn’t necessarily making me drop pants sizes. But walking every day kept my weight from rising. It also produced the endorphins I needed to feel more peaceful despite my stressors.
In 2017, I began working from home and bought a walking desk. It became easy for me to log more than 10,000 steps per day between walking at my desk during work and walking outdoors afterward.
Walking inside is convenient, yet walking outside provides even more peace because I can enjoy the added benefits of being in nature. It’s also a natural form of EMDR therapy, because the eyes move back and forth to navigate outdoor paths. All of the walking helped me after a highly traumatic divorce in 2022.
Post-divorce, I knew I needed to care gently for myself. While using products from The Body Shop, I spoke their motto over myself repeatedly: love my body. I started doing this even when looking at myself in a full-length mirror after showering. By declaring “I love my body,” I began making peace with my middle-aged body and healed the bullied young girl inside.
As I’ve swum in my pool this summer, I’ve dropped more weight. However, that was never the point. I swim because I love how it feels. It’s a great way to get stronger due to the water resistance, and it leaves no impact on my joints. Combined with walking and lifting weights, it’s the best way for me to care for my middle-aged body.
Sometimes when I’m swimming, I imagine the 80-year-old version of me. I know she’ll be so thankful for all of the time I spent exercising. Not because it got me closer to the thin 20s version of me, but because it paid strength, health and joy forward to her.
She has lessons to teach me now, just like my daughter does. I simply need to absorb body-positive lessons, speak loving words over myself and exercise daily to find the peace I want for my middle-aged body.
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