37.2 Trillion Cells

My mother didn’t like her body very much. Sometimes, as a small girl, I’d lie on her bed and watch her get dressed. She’d scowl in front of the full length mirror on her closet door, turning this way and that as she declared war on her hips and thighs. They were disproportionately large, she thought, and too dimply.

My mother loved clothes, so we made frequent pilgrimages to the mall. I’d sit on the bench in the dressing room while she tried on outfits. She would bemoan the pleats and tucks that added volume to her figure where she didn’t want it and extol the shoulder pads that – in her view – supplied the structural balance that nature had failed to provide. For my mother, clothing was firstly a means of correcting anatomical deficiencies, and only secondarily a display of personal style.

Maybe she was just born in the wrong decade. Her heroine was Twiggy, but Shakira would have served her better.

I had my own share of body loathing, like most of us – male and female– who live in the world today. Like a puppy’s paws, my feet grew faster than the rest of me, so I was dubbed “Sasquatch” in middle school. In high school, I developed into a taller version of my mother, with those same hips and thighs. And in college, a guy who offered me a massage mocked my lack of muscle tone, calling me “Linguine Back.” We all have our vulnerabilities.

As a teen and young adult, I related to my body largely in terms of its appearance, which I often found lacking. It wasn’t until I got pregnant at the age of 29 that I began to appreciate my body for what it could do. Somehow, over the next decade, it birthed and breastfed three babies. Kudos, meat sack! Who cares about long toes, comfy thighs, and soft lats?

Procreation is all kinds of miraculous, but you don’t have to gestate a baby to appreciate the marvel that is your body. The odds that you exist at all are greater than one in four hundred trillion. You are a living, breathing symphony of 37.2 trillion cooperative cells. Your heart pumps 8,000 liters of blood every day, your eyes can differentiate more than a million colors, and your brain stores as much data as 20 million dictionaries. Full stop, all caps WOW.

If that isn’t enough, and you want to revere your body even more, try resistance training. I started as a 40-year-old with three little kids, a full-time job, and minimal musculature. As the weeks, months, and years passed, I was able to lift more weight for more reps. I increased the capacity of my own personal assemblage of cells, and I felt stronger and more capable. I could open the pickle jar, give a toddler a shoulder ride, move the dresser, carry all the groceries in one trip. And muscular strength translated into general physical confidence: I could tackle a dance class, a kayak trip, a long hike – all without worry that my body would fail me.

Sure, my feet are still big, and my hips and thighs haven’t changed. But when I don’t like what I see in the mirror, I remind myself that Linguine Back can now knock out a solid set of pullups any old day. No shoulder pads needed.