Your ideal weight and size are not about numbers…it’s how you feel in your skin.
Weight can be a useful metric, but today it has become a contentious issue. On one hand, there is too much weight (pun intended) placed on this one measure as an indicator of health and fitness. One the other hand, it is a useful tool to observe our health as a population, such as the growing epidemic of obesity which is linked to a whole range of chronic diseases from diabetes and cancer to depression.
I used to think being slim was ideal, but that was coloured by my experience as a chubby kid who endured comments from family and friends. I also grew up in the late 90s when the skinny model culture was rife; magazines and movie stars were often rake thin and surviving on salads. I remember being envious of the ‘gap between the thighs’ as a marker of being thin enough. Ironically, when I lost weight in my late teens, the comments about my weight shifted to how I had become ‘too thin’ and should eat more. You can’t win - if you intend to please everyone rather than focus on how YOU feel.
When I came to Ayurveda, I learnt about prakruti, the unique constitution of the individual which also determines how weight sits on each of us. Until that point, I had followed all the standard healthy food advice, like eating salads, having less carbs, avoiding fat/oil/sugar, etc. While I was not heavy, I was slightly bottom heavy and more importantly, was often constipated and bloated after meals. I was shocked to learn that I needed to eat more rather than less for my constitution, and set about making changes that opposed most of the magazine articles and trends I had read about and tried before. I was just over it, and really ready to change.
When I studied Ayurveda, I began to understand how vaidyas (Ayurvedic doctors) sized their clients up without weighing scales or BMI. My teacher taught me a simple and practical way to assess shape and size from a health perspective: we should fill our individual frames. Our skeletal structure is nature’s indication of the space we need to fill with good quality tissue, muscle and fat. What does that look like? Stand in front of the mirror and use your imagination to sketch the lines between:
your cheeks and jaw with a relaxed face,
your shoulder tips and outer elbows (palms facing outwards),
the widest past of your chest and and your waist (where the navel sits),
your waist and the widest point of your hip bone,
your hip and the outer part of the knees.
These lines should be smooth and gently filled, neither protruding outwards nor receding inwards. There will be some variation by prakruti, but each of the doshas will accomodate the skeletal frame as much as the flesh on it. Cellulite is a product of weak agni, loose skin indicates excess vata and a lack of muscle tone and red spots or bruising on the skin is aggravated pitta.
Weight as a measure is important to assess gut health because an efficient digestive system will take what it needs to build a healthy shape and size, and discard what it doesn’t. When gut health is impaired, we either gain or lose weight depending on our constitution, and no amount of crash dieting and intense exercise will give you the healthy shape you seek. When we carry excess weight, we also feel more heavy in the mind with a tendency towards fatigue, sluggishness and being lazy. When we are too light, we tend to feel dry, scattered and over sensitised. No matter what your constitution, your natural state is strong, light and peaceful. That is all of our natural baseline.
Think of yourself as a piece of art; the body as a frame that holds all your beauty in space together. Too large, and the beauty is lost and flat. Too small, and the art seems bare, at risk of fraying at the edges. Keep the frame in line with the art, and the true Self shines through in all things.
