The drawer moment

The summer is here and with it swimwear time. A painful moment for some of you. I know it, it was for so long also a difficult one for me. I was looking in my swimming suits drawer and at the bottom found some I wore before I lost 25kg. One piece, black, overstretched. It’s in the trash now. No recycling possible.

And it hit me: just looking at that piece of Lycra made me ashamed and angry. So I went looking for why.

I grew up in a patriarchal, body-shaming society, where the colaless was invented (a name coined in Argentina, from cola, meaning butt, literally “butt-less,” referring to a bikini bottom cut down to almost nothing in the back). My father forbade me from wearing one, and I could never have pulled it off anyway. Already at 14 I was more jelly than muscle, and it hit my self-esteem hard enough that I can still summon the awkwardness today, probably behind my own drawer reaction.

Scientifically speaking, in 1998, researchers at Michigan and Duke ran a simple experiment. Women went into a dressing room alone, in front of a mirror, and tried on either a swimsuit or a sweater, then evaluated it like they would before buying it.

The women in swimsuits reported far more shame than the women in sweaters, even alone, even unwatched. The garment alone produced it.

That shame changed what happened next, and it explains a lot about how women relate to their bodies. The swimsuit group ate less of the cookies offered afterward and scored worse on a math test given right after. Trying on the swimsuit pulled their attention away from what their bodies could do and onto how they looked, and that pull cost them.

Men who did the same test felt awkward, a little silly. Their eating and their test scores stayed the same in both test groups.

This is exactly the moment I see play out with clients every June. Four weeks before a holiday, the drawer moment happens, and the instinct is to fix it fast: cut carbs hard, skip meals, add an extra workout on top of an already full week. All well meant and aimed at surviving two weeks in a swimsuit, not a long term solution.

There’s a name for the pattern that follows: weight cycling, the jojo effect. Losing weight fast, regaining it after, repeating the cycle at the next trigger.

Each time you enter this cycle of hard, fast cuts, your body responds to the severe restriction by taking fat and muscle both, especially without enough protein intake and resistance training.

For women 40 and over, the shortcut costs more. Muscle mass is already declining with age and with the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause. Losing more of it, then rebuilding from a lower baseline each time, is expensive in a way it wasn’t at twenty-five.

The real choice every June is whether you’re building something that holds, or creating a worse situation to survive the next two weeks.

Building routines that hold takes more time, more mental and physical work than anything done in two weeks.

Start making the changes needed in nutrition and movement at a pace you can sustain, and build a new life around those habits.

Zip into that size S, or whatever size you feel great in, because of this new you, and let yourself feel good about it. That happiness is earned through months of training, choices that put yourself and your health first, and the woman you want to show up as next summer, and the one after that.

This is the whole idea behind DEBs WAY: eating, training, and other healthy habits built to hold, holiday after holiday, year after year.