body peace is not one-size-fits-all
and other wisdom from Mikala Jamison
Hello, dear reader! I hope you’ve been taking care of yourself this month, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with Mikala as much as I did. She is whip-smart, witty, honest, and a pleasure to chat with. And while you’re here, consider tapping the ❤️ above — it helps this newsletter more than you know.
As humans, we are all owners of bodies.
This can be tricky when our society doesn’t exactly teach us how to relate to our bodies with love and kindness, or at the very least appreciation.
Sometimes, owning a body can feel more like navigating a minefield of diets and detox teas and fitness influencers and flu season and that one ache in your lower back and swimsuit ads and getting older and dressing rooms and all of the millions of other things we body-owners face on a daily basis.
The thing is, we all want and deserve to feel good in our bodies.
But so much stuff gets in the way.
Part of what complicates ‘body stuff,’ as
calls it, is that what’s true for each of us will vary greatly between each other and throughout our lives. It can be tempting to adopt black-and-white thinking — strong vs. weak, good vs. bad, healthy vs. not — but the truth is more often found in the messy middle, in the shades of gray. Our bodies fluctuate as they carry us through childhood and parenthood, illness and health, times for rest and times for play.Anyway, that’s why I love Mikala’s newsletter: she holds up a mirror to ourselves, our bodies, and the many ways in which society subtly — or not-so-subtly — shapes the relationship between the two.
By exploring the nuances of ‘body stuff,’
helps unshackle readers from all the — for lack of a better word — crazy sh*t out there dictating how we move and eat, spend our time and money, and ultimately relate to our miraculous (…and exasperating) mortal coils.
If you don’t already know Mikala, I’m thrilled to introduce you! Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Magazine's The Cut, The Washington Post's The Lily, and several D.C.-local publications. She’s currently writing her first book, and in this interview, we chat about:
why most of us are so f*cked up about our bodies…and how to change that
her #1 tip for creative success (and climbing the ‘mountain of cringe’ to get there)
questions to ask ourselves to cultivate lasting body peace
Hi, Mikala! Body Type explores “the tricky business of the physical self.” Can you tell us about what led you to start the newsletter on Substack?
I worked in journalism and newsrooms for years, eventually pivoting to a different field because journalism was so unstable. I still wanted to write, though, so I started freelancing — but as any freelancer knows, it can be a miserable grind. Editors are overloaded and often unresponsive, outlets close every day, budgets are slashed.
I eventually realized my niche was writing about body image and my experiences with exercise, eating disorder recovery, and the like, so I took the leap to publishing about those things on my own on Substack. I just wanted to write about what I cared about, when I wanted to, how I wanted to, and what I care about most is ‘body stuff.’
Starting my newsletter is among the best career decisions I’ve ever made.
Why do you think most of us are so f*cked up about our bodies?!
I don’t think there’s any answer other than exposure. So many of us have been exposed to unkind or critical things other people said to us, to body shaming and fat jokes in our media, and those things f*cked us up.
I just saw a blurb from Kelly Osbourne in People where she said she “went a little too far” trying to lose weight after she had her son — that she felt pressured and became obsessed. My first thought was: Well, yeah, being fat-shamed for the entirety of your public life will do that to you!
Ultimately, I think we’re f*cked up about our bodies because we’re taught from as early as we can remember that our bodies are f*cked up.
The body positivity movement has helped so many people, but it’s recently drawn criticism for creating a sort of “tyranny” around self-love.
Last year, you wrote: “What could be more fraught or complicated than loving yourself in a culture that demands you don’t?” It’s kind of a double bind. What does a truly healthy relationship to ourselves and our bodies look like? How can we cultivate one?
I think it comes down to values. We have to think seriously about what we want, what we care about, what we’re trying to do, and why.
The why is huge — when I spoke to Jessica DeFino about celebrity cosmetic transparency last year, she suggested that people think of themselves as “eternal toddlers” and always ask themselves “why?” over and over. I love that.
If you spend some quiet time alone thinking about what a healthy relationship to yourself and your body looks like, you can drill down on your own values by constantly questioning them.
If you write, I want to lose weight, OK, why? I want to eat healthier — why? I want to stop binge eating — why? It might feel like you have an obvious answer until you sit down and really, really think about it. Your “why” might be shades different from other people’s or what you initially expected, so you need to proceed differently.
Asking these kinds of questions of yourself can help you understand your motivations, and you might realize some of them come from somewhere other than yourself and your values.
The bodily relationship is so personal, contextual, and specific…we have to go into the quiet corners of our minds to figure out how a healthy bodily relationship based on our values looks.
Also, values change: maybe a “truly healthy relationship” to your body looks one way in your twenties — maybe you want to tap into your athletic potential and run marathons, and you have the time/resources/access to prepare for that without killing yourself and it brings you a ton of joy. Fifteen years later, that healthy relationship might look like directing your energy toward other things that matter to you more and simply walking for exercise.
Ultimately, I think the bodily relationship is so personal, contextual, and specific that it’s almost a disservice to have so much content about it (I say that as someone producing such content!). I think this content can guide us, but we have to sponge some of it in, and then go into the quiet corners of our minds to figure out how a healthy bodily relationship based on our values looks.
I’ve said it before and will say it always: A “healthy” relationship to the body might look different for everyone, one person’s healthy is not another’s, and none of us really knows what’s going on with someone else’s body, so I don’t believe there’s one obvious ‘look’ of a healthy bodily relationship.
Cultural attitudes towards food and exercise can trend towards self-punishing: think eating “clean,” or #NoDaysOff.
As we course-correct to adopt gentler behaviors, you’ve written that we risk over-correcting. How can we differentiate pushing ourselves from punishing ourselves?
No one’s going to like this answer, but I think it just takes time. I’ve been working out, lifting weights, and in binge eating recovery for like a decade; a lot of the balance I’ve found, the “correct” way for me to be, just comes with figuring it out over the years.
That’s why writing about this stuff can be so hard, for me and probably for the reader, because there’s often not a tidy little answer. A lot of this stuff lives in the “messy middle” between extremes, a lot of it is a matter of “it depends.”
I do think if we tune out the noise of social media and other people’s behaviors and opinions, if we just sit with ourselves and ask, “Is my behavior making me happy? Do I feel better? Is this sustainable, really? Is this checking the boxes I need to be checked?”, we can find some self-understanding.
If we tune out the noise of social media and other people’s behaviors and opinions…we can find self-understanding.
That’s why it comes back to values: one person’s pushing might be another person’s punishing, right? I know people who are professional bodybuilders, powerlifting competitors, die-hard CrossFitters, ultra-marathoners, the kinds of people that plenty of other people would look at and think, Whoa, you are insane and totally punishing yourself and your body! I honestly believe that’s not for anyone else to say.
We all have different capacities for exertion, pressure, stress, even pain, and just movement in general. We all have different abilities and tolerances for what’s required to do our chosen activities.
If you value the experience of an activity that requires you to push yourself and you don’t feel miserable and spiritually depleted by it, who am I to say that’s a punishing experience for you, even if it’s one that might feel punishing for me? We’ve got to be brutally honest with ourselves, and just try to happily ignore what anyone else has to say about it.
I think many women can relate to Body Type — but this stuff affects men, too. How do you see ‘body stuff’ show up for a male audience?
I had some men reach out to me after I published my “gym bros” piece, including Marcus Kain, who invited me on his podcast to discuss it. The essay touched on a couple things:
The idea that men’s body image issues aren’t taken as seriously. For example: if a man is hyper-obsessed with every calorie he puts into his body and spends two hours a day at the gym, people are much more likely to stitch a TikTok to make fun of him for being a lunkhead who is too dumb to realize he has an eating disorder than they are to do such a thing to a woman.
The body image pressures that are unique to men but that we perhaps don’t talk about as much, like how the image of male fitness in recent years in popular culture is insanely swole/ripped/shredded/muscular, but we’re not as likely to talk about how damaging that can be for guys.
Bottom line: One in three people who has an eating disorder is male, so I think we can safely assume that many men have issues with their ‘body stuff,’ and I hope some of what I write is applicable to their lives, too.
I love that your writing is full of hot takes (see here and here). What’s a recent hot take of yours — what are not enough people talking about, or getting right, right now?
I’m sick of hearing the phrase “diets don’t work.”
Wait! Let me explain!
Most of the “diets” we hear about — the ultra low-carb, the cleanses, the super-calorie restrictive ones, whatever some hack influencer is shilling — are indeed very likely to be a terrible experience for most people and not work in the sense that they’ll gain any weight they lost back pretty soon. I’m totally on board there.
But I think people are increasingly using this phrase to prove the imagined point that nothing we can do with regard to our food intake will have any long-term, non-harmful effects on our body composition — that long-term weight loss, or body recomposition, is impossible.
As someone who lost a lot of weight many years ago in a sane, safe, sustainable way, I disagree. It’s not that changing your diet doesn’t work — it’s that insane, super-restrictive, almost necessarily short-term diets don’t.
So, yeah, most “diets” don’t work, but changing your diet probably will, and they’re not the same thing, and “changing your diet” isn’t necessarily a euphemism for “dieting.”
Phew.
I wonder…what could society look like if we weren’t all so preoccupied with our own, and other people’s, appearance/eating habits/bodies/[fill in the blank]?1
Oh, god. It would be like that “The World If” meme.
I think a little bit of preoccupation when it comes to yourself is fine. (When you start worrying about other people’s, sh*t gets messy and awful.)
If you’re trying to make significant positive changes to your lifestyle or habits, you’ll be a little preoccupied. When I was trying to pull myself out of the depths of binge eating disorder, I was intensely preoccupied with thoughts of creating new habits and going to therapy. When I was training for my first powerlifting competition, or becoming a certified fitness instructor, I spent so much time thinking about my training and education. That was fine and good for me, because those things were positive for me.
We can’t have any peace, calm, or mental relaxation when we’re too preoccupied with our weight, bodies, or appearance.
It’s all a matter of when something feels disordered, which is when it causes you distress, dysfunction, and deviance — and those things happen on a spectrum, too.
But so many of us are way too far on the spectrum of preoccupation with these things, which is so peace-robbing. We can’t have any peace, calm, or mental relaxation when we’re too preoccupied with our weight, bodies, or appearance.
I think bodily preoccupations keep us in this state of hypervigilance: What’s going on with my body? Did I get enough steps today? Did I gain weight? Did I eat too many calories? Why did my mom say that thing about my body? Did that person lose weight? Are they judging what I’m eating for lunch? We’re just in this lowkey, very normalized panic.
I really, really want us all — myself included — to have more peace here. If we were better able to release these preoccupations, I think we’d all feel more peaceful. We could relax a little.
You are a fitness coach, an author, a performer — which part of your work excites you most? Who in the space is making you feel inspired right now?
I can’t express how much I loved producing a live storytelling show about body image for the DC Fringe Festival last summer. Here’s a review of The Body Show.
Writing is so solitary; I’m locked into my own brain for long stretches of time. With live storytelling — especially with this show, I hosted it and told a short story to warm up the crowds, but it was really about the other storytellers — I get to feel like I’m out in the world, receiving immediate feedback and connecting with an audience. Connection is what it’s all about. It’s why I write.
Connection is what it’s all about. It’s why I write.
Right now, I’m inspired by anything that I can tell took a lot of work. It’s that simple. I’m incredibly moved seeing the publication of books by authors I know from connecting with them online (like Alicia Kennedy, Elise Hu, Annabelle Tometich, and Minda Honey), because it’s insane how much work writing a book takes and I’m just so proud of anyone who does it.
I’ll also confess to the two pieces of work I revisit when I want to be enveloped in the feeling of “This person worked so damn hard to make this piece of media”: Beyonce’s Homecoming, and Bo Burnham’s Inside. Lol.
As a writer, what does your process look like?
Right now, my process hinges on being a reader and an observer. I follow so many ‘body stuff’ content creators, subreddits, mentions, keywords, publications…I just want to take in as much as possible.
When I feel inspired to write about or respond to something, I write a shitty first draft. Then I start hacking away at it for hours, days, weeks — whatever it needs. I have a very weird process where I start like 10 new Google Docs for every essay. Once one Doc feels “too full” of my shitty first draft notes and rewritings, I start a new doc that’s “cleaner.” It’s bizarre and disorganized, but whatev.
I think when people ask about the writing process, they’re looking for some nuggets of writing advice. (I usually am.) So here’s mine: Be a reader/observer first and foremost, and then just start writing. Start the Substack.
You’re going to write shitty first drafts, you’re going to have like three subscribers at first and one of them will be your mom, you’re going to feel like you’re going nowhere and have no audience — please, please don’t worry about that or stop because of it.
Be a reader/observer first and foremost, and then just start writing.
If you look at many Substack writers who now have several thousands of subscribers, their earliest posts have almost no likes or comments. Everyone has to climb cringe mountain to get to the land of cool.
Writers will sometimes ask, “How do you keep the ideas coming? If I start a Substack, how will I come up with enough stuff to write about?”
Listen to me: once you start, and keep writing and producing stuff no one reads for a while, you’ll get into the flow and the ideas will just come to you. You’ll find your niche, you’ll establish your voice and perspective, readers will find you, and then you won’t stop having ideas.
Everyone has to climb cringe mountain to get to the land of cool.
Now that I’ve been doing Body Type for almost two years, I have a huge backlog of stuff I want to write about and I just don’t have the time. That’s not such a bad problem! The work itself begets more work, and begets your improvement as a writer. Start the Substack!!!
I’ve heard you’re working on an essay collection about body image. What can you share with us?!
Yes! I’m working on my first book, a collection of essays.
You know how exercise was always positioned as this thing that was primarily for the general but vague idea of “health,” or for losing weight/looking different? My book argues that exercise is for things much more meaningful than that: self-actualization, repairing your body image, battling your demons, and fixing your whole life.
In these essays, I offer actionable advice that meets readers where they are, and tell my story of how exercise changed my life and my body image.
I just signed with a literary agent and am getting ready to send my book proposal out on submission (which means trying to get a book deal from a publisher). I hope to share more soon!
Bonus round! What’s your favorite…
Netflix show: I loved the show Easy, which I randomly started rewatching along with its spiritual twin, High Maintenance on Max. I’m a sucker for a quirky little anthology series.
Way to spend a Sunday: Starts with a perfect coffee, ends with a perfect movie, with as much dopamine derived from non-screen sources as possible in the middle.
Author (current or all-time): I’ve been obsessed with Meg Mason lately (Sorrow and Bliss, You Be Mother). Some stone-cold emotional gut punches in those books, but with cozy British witticisms.
Trader Joe’s snack: Dark Chocolate Roasted Pistachio Toffee. Sprinkle it over my gravesite.
D.C. hang-out spot: I have never had a bad time sitting at the bar at Chaplin’s with a book, a drink, and some shumai. I always end up chatting with someone. I like reading in bars, sue me!
Body Type blog post: This one was the hardest to write, probably my most brutally honest, and the one my husband once described as “perfect.”
Mikala Jamison is a body image essayist and the creator of the Body Type newsletter on Substack. She’s also a live storyteller and produced The Body Show, a “Best of Fringe” pick in 2022, for the DC Capital Fringe Festival. You can follow her work at bodytype.substack.com.
Editor’s note: I love this poem from Eduardo Galeano:
“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.”
LOVED doing this Q&A with you, xoxo
Wonderful interview, Eden...glad to be introduced to Mikala! That messy middle, as she puts it, (vs the far extremes) is often where the meat is at.