Tag: ‘body image’
May 6, 2011 at 8:31 am
Possible FitBloggin’ sponsor? Um, not:
Photo by Chuck Coker / by CC BY-ND 2.0
There is a part of me that wishes I could lose 50 pounds before the FitBloggin’ conference in two weeks. I can’t deny that. I’m not as thin as I used to be, but I’m not as fat as I used to be either. I could get into all the reasons for that, blah, blah, blah, excuses, defensiveness, marshmallows. But that’s not really important. What’s important is that I’m going anyway.
One of the things I learned from my weight loss is that your body isn’t holding you back in all the ways you think it is. Most of the problems you had before you lose weight will still be there after you lose weight unless you do work on your inner self as well as your outer self. And while the fat me from 6 years ago (dear me, has it been 6 years?) probably would have been too self-conscious to attend a conference all about health and fitness, the less-fat-but-still-undeniably-fat me of [...]
November 18, 2008 at 7:59 am
The worst thing about weight loss is that I created a more perfect version of myself. When I reached my lowest weight of 170 pounds and looked in the mirror, my reflection spun herself off into her own world of possibilities where she still exists today. No matter how much I weigh for the rest of my life, I will always know that on one day in November of 2007 I was that thin.
I was never a skinny child. I never had a thin version of me to compare myself too. I only had the morbidly obese Jennette who spun herself into her own world of possibilities, one that exists in a parallel dimension from the skinny version. When I was losing weight, I would compare my current body to the fatter version of me. I could hang out with this fatter friend of mine in my mind where she made me feel skinny in her shadow. Even at 230 pounds I was 140 pounds lighter than the fattest me.
This year I’ve been dealing with [...]
September 10, 2008 at 9:40 am
I think it’s odd that I have a PO box. When I was a kid, PO boxes were only mentioned at the end of commercials for Topsy Tail or Picture Pages. They didn’t seem like things real people had. Yet, now I have one and I’m pretty sure I’m a real person. It was really easy too. Last year I went to the postal counter, asked for a PO box, and they gave me a key and an address after I handed them my credit card. Credit cards are like magic wands.
It’s kind of fun to check my PO box because I never know what will be in there. Sometimes it’s a bait and tackle catalog addressed to the previous owner. Sometimes it’s a nice letter from a reader. And sometimes its an ad for a retouching service that promises that you’ll “look great in your summer pics,” though by “great” they mean “less like Porky the Pig.”
I’ve blurred out the company’s name because I’m not sure what to think about their service. I don’t [...]
December 20, 2007 at 7:53 am
Back in high school, Deirdre Barnes poked my belly on the school bus and giggled. I giggled too because I am ticklish everywhere I have skin.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked, confused.
“You’re so jiggly,” she said. It had never occurred to me that a thin person might not know what rolls of belly flab felt like. I didn’t like being poked. I hadn’t given her permission to feel me up. But I understand her curiosity now. I didn’t know what a thin person’s body felt like either. The closest I’d come to feeling up a six-pack was when I’d grab a Mountain Dew from the fridge.
I still haven’t felt up six-pack abs, but I’m sometimes surprised by how firm my body is becoming. When I but my hands on my sides I can feel solid muscle beneath my thin layer of fat. If I squeeze my thighs, there is extra skin and adipose tissue, but I also feel the ungiving firmness of muscle. My scale says I’m about 30% fat now, which means 70% of [...]
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"What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams and what we do to make them come about." - Joseph Epstein
