When I began my journey as a weight-inclusive dietitian, I was most excited to reclaim the functions of my body that had been languishing under the oppression of the thin ideal. For so long, my relationship to movement had been spoiled by the idea that “exercise” could lead to weight loss or calorie burning. I spent years believing that my body wasn’t thin enough to participate in activities like hiking and swimming.  As a childhood ballerina, I was always told that I was too large for pas de deux, and coveted the petite frames of my peers. More than anything, I dreamed of reclaiming the identity of “dancer” as an adult—assuming that once I was enrolled in dance classes multiple times a week, if not daily, that my body would shrink back down to its “rightful” 14-year old ballerina weight.

But when I first discovered HAES, the idea of “body as instrument” rather than “body as ornament” was really powerful to me. I loved to think that it wasn’t what my body looked like that made it valuable, but what it could do. To an able-bodied 28 year old, the idea felt wonderfully inclusive. All of a sudden, I could set aside any hang-ups I had about whether I had a place in any particular activity, and allow myself to participate for the same reasons I thought thin people did—fun—not weight loss. (I even had a slogan I kept in the back of my mind: “I’m going to live like a thin person,”  which to me, meant live like my body was fine as it was, and eat and move in whatever way felt good without pressure to change). I experienced some of the happiest years of my life in my body after that. A whole world of activities opened up to me: I took a gymnastics class, learned to paddleboard, tried backpacking, signed up for kickball, bought a kayak, and went to the gym when I felt like it for as long as I felt like it—sometimes just ten minutes, to use the sauna and shower.

I even allowed myself to own the label “dancer” again—I began to see dance classes as a right and privilege, not a responsibility, and to cast my net wide in the hopes of finding something fun. I tried Zumba, Nia, modern, tap, swing, and square dancing classes in addition to old-fashioned ballet, and allowed myself to participate as much or as long as I wanted in these classes—which sometimes meant walking out early if a class was boring or stressful. I made my own dance playlists, and lifted into the joy of dancing at least every few days. I was even starting to imagine reclaiming the final functional banner of being “a dancer”—not thinness but performance—with plans to audition for community dance productions at our local studio.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Very quickly, my world of activity shrunk to a pebble. Sequestered in my small townhouse, I tried to lean on yoga videos, online dance classes, buying a ping-pong table, pickle ball. My husband and I, fortunate to live at the edge of nature, made (and achieved) a plan to hike every trail on our island. But it wasn’t the same. The sense of freedom and possibility I had gotten used to when choosing activities faded away. Even though there were at least 50 different ways I could have elected to move my body without encountering other humans, it turns out that when choosing activity for fun, humans are sometimes a critical piece.  The landslide of traumatic stress associated with everything else Covid-19 introduced was an added difficulty: primarily protection from a deadly airborne pathogen, but also financial uncertainty, loneliness, family schisms, and spending every day looking at the same white walls. My body began to shift from instrument to vulnerability. Instead of focusing on possibility, I had to focus on protection.

As the pandemic dragged on over the next 5 years, my body’s opportunity to hone its functions, to become a tool of my joy, narrowed ever further. I was moving less, sleeping worse, and feeling crappier. My joints ached, my pace slowed, I struggled more often to breathe walking up stairs. I’m assuming my physical body aged two or three times quicker than it would have not under the pandemic’s hardships. Although I had continued trying to use and identify with my body as instrument, and never stopped doing the activities I could, the hard reality was that now, approaching 40 and exhausted by global trauma, I was no longer as able-bodied.

Before the pandemic, I was blind to my privilege to use my body in pretty much whatever way I wanted. I didn’t have to worry that an aerial yoga class would dislocate my pelvis, or that breathing shared air would immobilize my asthmatic lungs with dangerous virus. But over the last few years, I’ve realized that as helpful as the idea of “body as instrument” is, it just doesn’t go far enough. There’s an inherent ableism embedded in the idea that we get to use our bodies to “do” anything we want. Health and physical ability are not, in fact, under our control, and aging naturally decreases physical ability for all of us. I had been reveling in the joy of all kinds of movement, but how was someone with a paralyzed spine, or a heart condition, or chronic arthritis, or even just getting older, supposed to find a meaningful alternative to body-as-ornament in a world of more limited options?

Ability and disability exist on a spectrum—we are all on there somewhere and constantly shifting place–but wherever we are on that spectrum, we all deserve acknowledgement of our physical limitations, and options to embrace our body home without impossible expectations of function. Because of the pandemic, I now live in a more disabled body than I did. I started my HAES journey expecting “Health at Every Size” meant “Everyone at Every Size Can Be Healthy,” but it doesn’t. Healthcare is a human right, and while we all deserve equal access to it, health won’t look the same for all of us. It can’t. Nature, genetics, socioeconomic factors —all will shape our health destiny in ways we can’t control. We will all age, and one day, we will all die. The fact that health is a privilege too, one that we didn’t earn but simply lucked into, is a difficult concept to grapple with. There is grief here, the grief of losing not just the thin ideal but the health ideal—wellness culture’s fiction that even if we don’t lose weight, if we just try hard enough, our bodies will work perfectly and live forever. But the health ideal is a lie. Before moving forward, I had to acknowledge my disability, acknowledge my past privilege, acknowledge my lack of control, and most importantly, acknowledge my grief.

in the midst of a heat wave, where I had an experience that encapsulates another way to embody the physical self, beyond appearance or function. Before the pandemic, I had been swimming laps weekly at the local aquatic center, safely monitored by lifeguards and free of fishy ocean distractions. I was excited to be always improving my time and distance and counted each lap on the provided abacus. When indoor public spaces became too dangerous, I raged against the expectation of a decline in swimming ability and strength. I loved both the feel of being in the water and the feeling of getting more “fit.” For a few months, I was so blinded by my wrath about the latter that the joys of the former were lost to me completely. But that summer, as the sweaty stagnation of indoors became interminable, I decided to journey to a local beach.

Now, if you are a fellow Northwesterner, you understand how freezing cold, kelp-and-creature-infested and current-tide-scary our oceans and rivers are—a place for ice-loving plungers and intrepid divers in wetsuits, not casual beginner swimmers who freak out when a (flipper?!?) touches their legs. But I was so sick of being hot and dry that I was willing to let go of the idea that I might actually swim, and decided to be flexible. I researched the places with clearest water in Kitsap County, and found a spot on the Hood Canal with a broad, sandy tideland. The day my husband and I arrived was blue-sky perfect, and the sun poured down on a wide shallows of knee-high crystalline water stretching 100 yards out from shore. It was an amazing place and felt safer that the typical Puget Sound shoreline, a natural kiddie pool for a kid at heart. I don’t know if those clear shallows were a rare tidal phenomenon, lucky timing, or a gift from the universe just for me, but as soon as I saw them my skin ached with the desire to feel water all over my body. I rushed in, splashing and yelling, and immediately dropped to my knees to roll about in the cool ocean. The water felt so wonderful on my skin, on my face, running through my hair. I was ecstatic with the pleasure of cold on hot, of being (at least partially) submerged in water so clean I could relax. I had been craving a swim for so many months, deprived of the joys of water. Now, here I was, luxuriating in the somatic experience of the fluid world—even unable to fully float or kick, I could still lay claim to such intense physical pleasure in my sweaty, sensual human body.

different from body as pure instrument. In those remarkable moments, I was experiencing body as sense organ, the ability to use the body as a vessel to soak up sense pleasure: in this case, mostly touch (water on skin), as well as some sight (natural beach beauty). As our bodies age and fade, our ability to function may fade also, but the body retains the ability for (profound) sense pleasure.

We don’t talk often enough in our culture about the ability of the body to function as an instrument panel—able to absorb visual delights, memory-activating scents, enthralling sounds, luscious tastes and pleasing touch. Bodiless, none of these things would be possible. In moments of extreme disconnect from or hatred for our bodies, it is often leaning into sensual pleasure that can bring us home. Our culture demonizes pleasure, but pleasure is the gateway to joy, and we are so much more able to experience the kaleidoscope of available pleasures when our bodies are liberated from expectation to look a certain way. When we realize that the purpose of the body is to be a vessel for our experiences: not just highly active ones, but all somatic experience, we are more able to respect the power of having any body at all.

Like our functional capacity, our senses do have the power to shift with age as well, or to be lost to disability. This is painful, and for many of us, the scariest possible thing that can happen to our bodies. How easily weight gain is put into perspective at the thought of blindness. Given the choice to miss out on size 6 jeans or a sunset, I think I know what most of us would choose. But even with changes to our sensory instrument panel, I believe that beautiful possibility can always remain in the democratic world of the senses. One of my favorite books of the past year was An Immense World by journalist Ed Yong. In it, Yong describes the concept of an Umwelt: a “sensory bubble” unique to each creature in nature. While most humans see colors from a limited visual range, birds see the fantastical ultra-purples of the UV spectrum, for example. The fascinating thing is that human Umwelts vary too, and can change significantly in the face of disability. I had a boyfriend once with synesthesia—a condition where two senses activate simultaneously—and his Umwelt delightfully contained a color hallucination each time we made love. Yong’s book profiles amazing visually-impaired people who learned echolocation (like a bat!), their bodies gaining a cool new sense feature even as another blinked out.

The truth is, our bodies are so much more than what they look like. Reducing ourselves to the paper-doll façade of our weight and shape cheapens and flattens us. Our bodies are a complex instrument and instrument panel—an amazing tool for not only running, jumping, and dancing, but also hugging, feeling, tasting, seeing, and loving. It is natural to experience deep grief at the idea of an aging physical body, but as long as we are alive on this earth, we still own a tool capable of bringing so many diverse physical pleasures.

into my own body again in the face of pain and disability. I don’t feel the need to identify with being a “dancer” in the same way I used to—I’ve accepted that aching knees are not keeping me from my highest purpose—but I still know how to feel music deep inside me, and how to let myself sway. I never forgot the pleasure of that ocean plunge, and last year, I started swimming again at the outdoor pool. I no longer track my laps, or worry if one day’s swim is shorter than the last. My rotator cuff injuries limit my reach, and a low hum of back pain follows me under the water. But now, I let the stream of pleasure run right alongside the current of pain. I have reclaimed the fluid world and all its sensual joys—in moments splashing at a cool beach or spraying myself with the hose as well as luxurious lucky days at the pool where I get four lanes all to myself. I’m never again going to be able to do the splits in the air leaping across a stage, but when I turn on my favorite morning dance playlist, I know now that my sore, disabled, beautiful, glorious body is capable of so much more than I ever imagined.