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The Truth Will Set You Free
Jun. 3rd, 2011 08:35 pm
I have a horrible, hideous, shameful secret. It's so fucking bad. It's absolutely blasphemous.
I like my body. I have the body of a Goddess, and She is beautiful.
Everything in my society is telling me that it's wrong for me to feel this way about myself - I'm fat, for Gods' sake. Look at all the popular, beautiful women on t.v. & in modeling and clothing ads & make-up ads & just walking down the street. They're all skinny. They work so hard to get that way & stay that way. Don't I feel like I'm cheating them out of all their hard work because I'm ok with being fat?
The truth is, when I step on the scale it reads about 240 lbs, give or take some pound-by-pound fluctuation. The clothes that fit me best are 2X or 22, depending on if they have numbers or letters. The downstairs employee restrooms at my job are a little narrow for my comfort. This isn't some distorted image I have of myself. My doctors all tell me (except, surprisingly enough, my cardiologist - my stress tests come back with the healthy functioning heart of an average middle-aged woman - and I opt for the treadmill stress tests, too) I'm morbidly obese & need to lose a lot of weight to be considered 'healthy'.
I think I can probably change my attitude about 'exercise', too. I've been reading the absolutely wonderful blog Dances With Fat & this chick has moves. A lot of why I don't exercise, or choose exercise that isn't exactly exercise, but is more like 'having fun', is because I have all the grace of a sickly wildebeest being downed by a cheetah. Maybe I'll actually join a dance class & see if I can improve that a little. I used to enjoy dancing at raves - everyone there is sort of flailing around aimlessly, anyway, no one notices one more goofy-looking girl on the floor. Mosh pits are the same way - I only stood out by virtue of being the single female in the pit, & the one most likely to jab you in the windpipe w/her elbow.
But I've never been graceful. It has nothing to do w/me being fat, either. I've got vision trouble (no depth perception) & horrible hand-eye coordination (I poke myself in the face a lot), I trip over invisible shit all the time, I fall up and down stairs (which is why I'm terrified of escalators. If you fall down an escalator that's going up, you never really stop falling). I spent most of my PE classes in school ducking & covering my head while screaming, "Not the face! Not the face!" no matter what sport we were playing at the time. I cannot see a badminton shuttlecock when it is in the air, let alone manage to hit it with a paddle. Golf balls are the same way. I can't see that thing & the stick they give you is very narrow. But tennis is ok - bigger balls, colored bright yellow, on a green or clay-red background. I'm thankful I'm not colorblind. Baseball/softball was ok, too, as long as I was pitching, hitting or stealing bases. I fouled a lot in basketball, mainly because of the whole elbow-to-the-windpipe tendency.
What it boils down to is that I feel like a fucktard whenever I try to do anything physical. Up til now, doing physical things has mainly been to lose weight, which takes the fun out of almost anything & makes it more frustrating because, well, if you've seen me on a treadmill it looks like I could be one of the first non-cardiac-related treadmill-induced fatalities in history. I don't have to lose weight - I can do physical things that I enjoy doing, and if I do enough of them I might not feel like such a graceless, uncoordinated baby giraffe.
I like my body. I have the body of a Goddess, and She is beautiful.
Everything in my society is telling me that it's wrong for me to feel this way about myself - I'm fat, for Gods' sake. Look at all the popular, beautiful women on t.v. & in modeling and clothing ads & make-up ads & just walking down the street. They're all skinny. They work so hard to get that way & stay that way. Don't I feel like I'm cheating them out of all their hard work because I'm ok with being fat?
The truth is, when I step on the scale it reads about 240 lbs, give or take some pound-by-pound fluctuation. The clothes that fit me best are 2X or 22, depending on if they have numbers or letters. The downstairs employee restrooms at my job are a little narrow for my comfort. This isn't some distorted image I have of myself. My doctors all tell me (except, surprisingly enough, my cardiologist - my stress tests come back with the healthy functioning heart of an average middle-aged woman - and I opt for the treadmill stress tests, too) I'm morbidly obese & need to lose a lot of weight to be considered 'healthy'.
I think I can probably change my attitude about 'exercise', too. I've been reading the absolutely wonderful blog Dances With Fat & this chick has moves. A lot of why I don't exercise, or choose exercise that isn't exactly exercise, but is more like 'having fun', is because I have all the grace of a sickly wildebeest being downed by a cheetah. Maybe I'll actually join a dance class & see if I can improve that a little. I used to enjoy dancing at raves - everyone there is sort of flailing around aimlessly, anyway, no one notices one more goofy-looking girl on the floor. Mosh pits are the same way - I only stood out by virtue of being the single female in the pit, & the one most likely to jab you in the windpipe w/her elbow.
But I've never been graceful. It has nothing to do w/me being fat, either. I've got vision trouble (no depth perception) & horrible hand-eye coordination (I poke myself in the face a lot), I trip over invisible shit all the time, I fall up and down stairs (which is why I'm terrified of escalators. If you fall down an escalator that's going up, you never really stop falling). I spent most of my PE classes in school ducking & covering my head while screaming, "Not the face! Not the face!" no matter what sport we were playing at the time. I cannot see a badminton shuttlecock when it is in the air, let alone manage to hit it with a paddle. Golf balls are the same way. I can't see that thing & the stick they give you is very narrow. But tennis is ok - bigger balls, colored bright yellow, on a green or clay-red background. I'm thankful I'm not colorblind. Baseball/softball was ok, too, as long as I was pitching, hitting or stealing bases. I fouled a lot in basketball, mainly because of the whole elbow-to-the-windpipe tendency.
What it boils down to is that I feel like a fucktard whenever I try to do anything physical. Up til now, doing physical things has mainly been to lose weight, which takes the fun out of almost anything & makes it more frustrating because, well, if you've seen me on a treadmill it looks like I could be one of the first non-cardiac-related treadmill-induced fatalities in history. I don't have to lose weight - I can do physical things that I enjoy doing, and if I do enough of them I might not feel like such a graceless, uncoordinated baby giraffe.
