The Truth Will Set You Free
Jun. 3rd, 2011 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
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.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-05 09:29 am (UTC)I definitely think if you can find a sport that you enjoy, and not make it about losing weight (even if other people try to), you can definitely find your grace. If it's not going to be treadmills and sports with hand-eye coordination, there's the possibility of things like swimming (which are amazing for those of us with junk in the trunk anyway), and then there's bellydancing and other forms of ethnic dancing (like African) which just seem made for people who aren't waifish. I'm sure you'll find something though!
African Diasporatic
Date: 2011-06-05 02:43 pm (UTC)Reminds me of a few years back - I caught an African women's dance troupe on one of our public tv stations. I watched them for a couple of sets, and one kept reminding me of something. They were so evocative, but it took me a day or so to figure it out - they were enacting an elephant herd at a watering hole. They stomped, swayed, moved their arms as though pulling water up through trunks & spraying it over themselves & the other dancers. I was utterly wowed - and I could probably do that!