“Body positivity is a hot topic, but in truth, we like talking more about other people’s bodies and their struggles over our own. Our body in all its beauty and brokenness is a good place to start our journey towards self acceptance.”–Grace Barbers-Baja
By Alex Y. Vergara
We’ve all been through this before. After a month or so of almost nightly partying and pigging out during the Christmas season, we promise ourselves, even before January rolls in, to diet, spend long hours at the gym and lose weight, as part of our long list of New Year’s resolutions.
But we all know too well based on previous experiences that such promises are meant to be broken. We try to stick to them for a while, but without something or someone to constantly motivate us, we soon lose sight of our goals as the weeks and months wore on.
Don’t get us wrong. It always pays to eat right and engage in regular and moderate forms of exercises. But carried to the extreme in order to chase after what others deem as an “ideal” figure, such measures are bound to fail.
Perhaps, as Grace Barbers-Baja and her guests put it, it’s time to tune out all that chatter and start embracing ourselves and our bodies for what they truly are—unique, versatile and, despite their obvious imperfections, beautiful.
Our bodies as starting points
“Body positivity is a hot topic, but in truth, we like talking more about other people’s bodies and their struggles over our own. Our body in all its beauty and brokenness is a good place to start our journey towards self acceptance,” Grace, the woman behind the popular lifestyle blog “The Spoiled Mummy,” said.
Grace, an entrepreneur and foodie at heart who once dealt with her own body issues while growing up as a “fat child,” has morphed in recent years to become a social media star with her own food line.
These days, together with Game Changer PH and Raffles Makati, she has added host to the many hats she wears by organizing regular afternoon tea events dubbed as “Gatherings by Grace.”
One such gathering happened recently at Raffles Makati where Grace, together with guests Rajo Laurel, Amanda Griffin-Jacob, Katarina Rodriguez, Bubbles Paraiso and Rona Tai, talked about “body positivity” and the many struggles one goes through in her journey to fully accepting and celebrating the body she was born with.
Apart from their struggles, Grace and her guests bravely shared their respective insecurities about their bodies as well as the ideas and measures they’ve embraced and espoused along the way in order to overcome such seemingly superficial but legitimate issues.
“I call myself the ‘Goddess of Thunder Thighs,’” model, actress and yoga teacher Bubbles Paraiso shared. “When I run, it seems that my thighs are cheering for me because they’re huge and flabby. When I was modeling, no matter how skinny I get, those thighs have always been there.”
Bubbles even went on to share that the constant pressure to look ideal led her to become bulimic sometime during her teenage years. The timely intervention of her brother, who felt that something was amiss, her fear of her own mother and plain, old vanity saved Bubbles from a life of ruin and even perhaps an early death.
“I’d binge on stuff like bread and Nutella and then go to the bathroom and throw up. Thirty minutes later, I’d be back with my eyes all red and teary,” she said.
Such binging and eating went on for sometime until, at one point, Bubbles’ brother told her to stay put when she was about to stand up after a meal and go through the usual routine again. Her brother didn’t say a word, but Bubbles believed that he knew about her secret all along. To his credit, he never told their mother about it either.
“He’d just sit me down,” she added. “That was when it finally hit me. When I was throwing up, I had blood clots in my eyes. For reasons of vanity, I suddenly realized, oh my God, ang pangit ko! (I looked ugly!)”
As she matured, Bubbles eventually developed a healthy outlook with regards to food and exercise. She advised members of the audience to eat almost everything in moderation and never equate any form of physical activity as punishment for the times you overindulge a bit on your favorite food.
A time to be grateful
“I’m just quoting from ‘Legally Blond,’ but working out shouldn’t be viewed as a punishment. In fact, it makes us happy because it generates endorphins. You should be happy that you can do yoga, lift weights, run, walk, cycle. You should be grateful for doing those things. It’s not a punishment. It’s actually a gift.”
Even someone as seemingly perfect as beauty queen-turned-actress Katarina Rodriguez has her own body issues to deal with.
For lack of a better term, she calls those stubborn, impervious-to-workout areas in her upper arms extending all the way to her armpits and back as “kili-kili (armpit) boobs” and “back boobs.”
“There was a time I dropped to 110 pounds and they were still there,” she said. “It used to annoy me. I always asked my trainer why mine were so emphasized. It dawned on me that my body is just like that. Everyone’s body is different and we all have areas that are annoying.”
Being a designer, Rajo has had the privilege of being a doctor-slash-father confessor of sorts to women who wish to hide certain figure flaws and body issues under a beautifully draped dress. Having grown up as an “overweight” child, he also had certain issues about his body that he has learned to eventually embrace.
“Everyone has his or her own insecurities,” he continued. “My biggest insecurity is I have man boobs. As I age, I just learn to accept it and work with it. It is what is: I have man boobs and I love my man boobs.”
Even Rona, who, despite her rather unusual upbringing, which taught her to be confident early on in her own skin, has insecurities. When she was younger, for instance, she had the chutzpah of wanting to be the class muse. Since she was bigger than most other girls her age, she always ended up performing a different role.
“Why do I always have to end up as the sergeant at arms? Why can’t I be the muse? Am I not beautiful enough,” Rona recalled, eliciting laughter from the afternoon audience.
Having grown up on the heavy side, her issues, strangely enough, have nothing to do with her figure, but more about her toothy grin.
“My teeth-and-gum ratio back then was all gums,” she shared. “When I smiled, I had to control my smile. There was nothing wrong in changing it. (But) I won’t hate myself if I didn’t get it done.”
Despite being considered the “smallest” in a family known for its members’ huge proportions, Grace, like Bubbles, was also bothered by her thunder thighs. Although the photogenic mother of two has successfully shed off unwanted pounds to emerge as a curvy adult, she still had to overcome her old hangups about her figure.
No to shorts, even trousers
“That’s why you would never see me wear shorts,” Grace revealed. “You won’t see me in short skirts either. I hardly wear pants because I feel that it further emphasizes my thunder thighs.”
Her wardrobe staple and silhouette of choice are dresses with long skirts and fitted bodices that she usually cinches with a belt around the waist.
“I grew up in a family where it was normal to be big. Both sides. In fact, I’m the thinnest already. And we love to eat. You do your best by dieting and exercising later on, but there are certain things that you really can’t change anymore. Like Rajo said, you just learn to live with it,” Grace said.
At 5’6”, Amanda has never had any weight or figure issues, especially when she was a model and VJ in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But like most women, the mother of four isn’t immune to gaining weight, one time up to 70 pounds, whenever she was pregnant.
Although she tends to shed off weight quickly through exercise and her vegan diet, Amanda still had to deal with her expanding puson (stomach area) brought about by pregnancy, weight gain and child birth.
“I got my curves after I gave birth to my first child,” she related. “When you’re used to a certain body type and it changes, it does take a lot of work to accept and love that body you’re now in. With maturity, it gets easier. You find certain things don’t matter as much anymore.”
Dealing with bashers
With society’s impossible expectations, the advent of social media and the ability of not a few people to anonymously engage in online bashing, the situation hasn’t become any easier for many of these public figures. In fact, it has become harder and more exacting.
In Amanda’s case, this led her to live an unhealthy lifestyle back in her modeling days. Although she was naturally skinny, if she had to lose weight back then, say, for a forthcoming swimsuit shoot, “I’d live on a diet of cigarettes and Diet Coke for three days” in order to slip confidently into a bikini.
“When one of my good friends passed away, I lost a lot of weight. When I flew to Malaysia for Channel V, the producers told me to keep that weight because I looked fantastic. What? I weighed 99 pounds! I told them I can’t. This is like my grieving weight,” she said.
She was 27 back then. When she was 15, she dealt with a different problem. After shedding off baby fat, the once chubby Amanda morphed into a skinny young thing that was considered ideal for modeling.
But after debuting as a ramp and commercial model, Amanda soon gained 40 pounds just when she was about to enter college.
“That was when I started hearing people say sayang (what a waste), what’s going to happen to her career,” said Amanda. “My mom’s friends in Manila were even calling her in Australia telling her that I needed to lose weight. That I should try HerbaLife. My mom would then call me and tell me that she was so embarrassed that her friends had been calling her. It has always been based on my looks.”
Lose weight in your face
More recently, Katarina, soon after doing a look test for a forthcoming teleserye she was to star in, was also asked by the director to do the impossible: “Katarina, can you lose weight in your face?”
The poor girl didn’t even know what the director meant, but like any newbie, she just nodded her head in agreement.
“She’s a bit scary,” said Katarina, referring to the director. “So, I just said yes. People constantly tell you to lose weight. That you can’t eat this and that. But when I’m with, say, my cousins, they’d ask me whenever we are in a fast-food restaurant why I can’t eat certain things. Do people want me to gain weight or to lose weight? It can get frustrating.”
Gym time is me time
When Rona was just dating the very fit Eric “Eruption” Tai, girls would swarm around her boyfriend telling him they’re much sexier than the “fat” Rona.
Eric, to his credit, would shoo them away, said Rona, with these words: “You’re not even half of who she is.”
Indeed, it was enough to make any girl, even one as confident as Rona, stroke her long hair and beam with pride. With regards to the prevailing stigma of “fat girls” not worthy enough to date fit boyfriends, she blames it partly on Filipino culture. She considers herself blessed that, apart from having grown partly abroad, she was surrounded by brothers who considered her hefty physique normal.
“I do spend time in the gym,” she shared. “But it’s not motivated by insecurity because my husband is a famous athlete. It’s because I love myself. I want to live longer for myself, which would mean more time with my husband and my son.”
Confidence also springs forth from the fact that, like Rajo and his partner Nix Alañon, some of them are in partnerships that have withstood the test of time.
“I’m very fortunate,” Rajo said. “Nix and I have been together for 15 years. I may not have the abs, I may have man boobs, but he makes me 100 percent sure that he really loves me. And to be honest, kanya-kanya lang tayo ng market (we each appeal to our respective markets).”
But as Grace lamented, despite most people’s best intentions to promote body positivity, there are those, especially on social media, who seem oblivious to the real meaning of the word “kindness.”
Well, that’s simply the nature of the beast. If you put yourself out there on social media, don’t expect only likes to come your way. That would be the height of naiveté. Especially if you’re a celebrity or one who’s married to or identified with an attractive public figure, you better brace yourself for some form of fallout.
Don’t give them the “consent”
Apart from blocking them, there’s nothing really much you can do if certain misguided souls make fun of you. But Rona, again plumbing through life lessons she acquired while growing up, offers this piece of useful and practical advice.
“I don’t compare myself with anybody,” she said. “My parents often told me that you have something good to offer others. What matters is you have a good heart and you mean well to other people.”
She ended her reflection with a quote from the late US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of wartime President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which still rings true (more so, in fact) today: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
