As we kick off a new year, people all over will be flocking to gyms, starting weight loss programs, partaking in Dry January.

Weight has always been a complicated issue for me. I feel the same pressure every other woman does to have a certain body type, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Because of my muscular dystrophy, I have considerably less muscle mass than other people, so I was very very thin for a long time. So thin, that I was accused of being anorexic on more than one occasion (one was a doctor and one was a female neighbor in college).

Those kinds of comments and seeing myself in photos made me very self-conscious. I never watched what I ate. I tried to actually load up on calories so people would stop making comments about how thin I was.

When I turned 30, everything changed. I certainly didn’t get any more muscle mass, but my metabolism slowed way down. My eating habits quickly caught up with me. It wasn’t until I saw a photo of me at a friends birthday that I realized I had gained weight. I was still thin by all accounts, but my protruding stomach (a product of the curve in my spine) had started to protrude way more.

I started to get more self-conscious about my weight gain and my stomach. It didn’t help that I had been asked by more than one person (all women btw) if I was pregnant. My stomach always stuck out, even when I was thin because of my spinal curvature, but it became really top of mind even as the rest of me filled out a little.

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As I’m writing this, I weigh the most I ever have—the result of eating entire bags of gummy bears and drinking a lot of sugar over the last couple of months. Weight gain isn’t just a vanity thing for me, or any of us with neuromuscular conditions or physical disabilities. The more weight I have on me, the harder it is for me to move around or get out of bed or off of a chair. My arms can only get so much stronger (I haven’t been lifting weights at all either), so I have to try to mitigate how much weight I have on the rest of my body.

We live in a culture that is so incredibly obsessed with appearance and with weight. The pressure on women to look a certain way has only gotten greater with the onset of social media, filters, face tune, PhotoShop and now Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs. On most of my regularly watched TV shows, the women are literally shrinking. I watched a reality show on Hulu where one of the women was an already thin model who continued to take a GLP-1 drug to stay that way, even though it made her super sick.

For the most part, in my later years, I don’t worry about my appearance or nearly as much. I don’t want to weigh 90lbs like I did for a long time. But I still have to acknowledge that it’s important for me to keep a handle on my weight so I don’t make getting around even more difficult on myself than it already is. The more I have to strain to lift myself, the more likely it is I’m going to put myself in more pain too. It’s a vicious cycle.

Thankfully, I know exactly what I need to do to shed the holiday weight. Not because of any ridiculous societal standard or New Year’s resolution, but because it will make things easier for me, and I am all about making things easier for myself however I can.

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