A Song About Body Acceptance

Last week I released a song called “Rocky Mountains” about body acceptance, and I wanted to share some of the backstory.

I survived an eating disorder in my early 20s. I’d been to outpatient treatment, and I got better, but something was keeping me from fully recovering. My relationship with food and my body was still fraught for many years. 

The missing piece? Fully accepting my body no matter what it looked like. I dug deeper into my internalized fatphobia and my fears about my body changing if I allowed myself true freedom with food. I was afraid that I’d be treated differently – negatively – if I gained weight. Unfortunately, this is a reality for many people in larger bodies. 

Ultimately, I couldn’t live like that anymore, with so much anxiety around what/when/how I ate, and my appearance. Making peace with food and my body became more important than fitting into conventional beauty standards and getting outside approval. But it’s easier for me to say this as an “average” sized person. There is much collective work that needs to be done so that people in larger bodies or those who don’t fit oppressive beauty standards are treated with respect. We need to expand the standards to include all bodies, not shrink ourselves to fit into them. 

Doing all of this internal work helped me finally reached a new level of recovery in early 2021. That June, I was on a songwriting retreat with some of my closest friends. We got an artsy, funky Airbnb near Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, built by a woman in her 60s and managed by her family. I felt totally in my element: mountain views, good friends, creativity. 

The morning after we arrived, I was feeling really relaxed and cozy in the master bedroom as the sun poured in through the windows. I got out of bed and looked in the mirror. The word “zaftig” (Yiddish for curvy, voluptuous) came into my head. It’s a word with a positive connotation, reminding me of some of the pictures I’ve seen of my great-grandmothers who came from the shtetls (pre-Holocaust Jewish villages in Eastern Europe). An old boyfriend of mine once told me a story about how his grandfather put an ad in the personals in the newspaper, using the word “zaftig” to describe the kind of shape he preferred.

I wrote down “zaftig,” and then started to free-write. Looking at the mountains outside, it occurred to me that my body shared some similar features. 

I wrote this, which quickly evolved into the song.