I Am Body Beautiful
I recently overheard a very detailed conversation in my office about weight loss between two women. One woman was frustrated that she just couldnât lose five pounds. The other, a personal trainer and nutritionist, was giving her careful instructions on how to properly measure her portions and count her calories, down to the last almond. The whole conversation didnât sit well with me. I couldnât imagine spending so much of my energy and time carefully counting every single calorie I consumed in a day. That was when I realized that it would be safe for me to go on a diet.
Let me backtrack. Since high school Iâve always been on the larger side of average. Not quite plus size, but Iâm definitely not gonna fit into most of the clothes in a regular store in the mall. Iâve always been jealous of thinner girls, constantly comparing my body to that of every other womanâs in any vicinity. Almost all of my friends are smaller than me. My sister is smaller than me. Itâs made me self-conscious for over a decade. But the thought of cutting out sugar, the substance that brought me joy in my hours of pain, the taste that put a smile on my face, seemed downright ridiculous. I have a mouth full of sweet teeth. And besides, how would that make me feel better about my body anyway? Iâm built bigger by genetics. My legs are all muscle; cutting out sugar would never get my steel-solid calves to fit into knee-high boots.
Plus, there was always the worry that counting calories could unleash something much darker in me. There were always the stories of girls who starved themselves to death, who hid bags of vomit under their beds. I was terrified of developing an eating disorder and decided that being plump and alive was better than being thin and dead. I never wanted to suffer like so many other women had suffered.
So it was the moment that I thought to myself âwhat a waste of timeâ while hearing this conversation about obsessive calorie counting that I realized dieting wasnât going to be dangerous for me. I do not have the brain chemistry of someone who suffers from eating disorders. So I decided to give it a try.
Thankfully technology has made pretty much everything I once thought to be tedious much easier, and I downloaded a weight loss app to help track my meals. Iâve tried to stick to my daily allowance of calories, but I havenât been sweating about a meal out with friends or a bowl of ice cream for fun. I will never let myself starve to lose weight. And Iâm happy with that. I might not end up looking like a mainstream model, but after all the time Iâve spent coordinating my wardrobe around my body shape thatâs just fine with me.
Iâve had to combat a lot of things Iâve believed about exercise as well. Iâve been working out regularly since I was 20 (Iâm turning 27 in a month), and there are a lot of âyou need toâs that Iâve shoved into my own brain. A lot of my friends run, so I thought I should too. I tried it for a few years. In the end I learned that I hate running. It hurts my shins and I get a headache and feel like my lungs are going to shrivel up. So I stopped. You donât have to run. Itâs one exercise in a sea of thousands. My body isnât lean and elven like my friendsâ bodies. Itâs short and stocky â like a dwarf. Iâm built for strength, not speed.
Realizing that I donât have to love the same exercises as other people helped me discover a regimen that I actually enjoy, even look forward to doing. 20-minute intervals of hard cardio kickboxing a few days a week in my basement has really helped me feel stronger (and more dangerous) than an hour and a half at the gym in the same number of days. I love doing it. I love using my own body to perform the exercises instead of relying on equipment. And thatâs just me! Some people swear by yoga, I have two (two!!) friends who do circus, a friend who found herself in crossfit â you can have fun exercising if you do something you enjoy. Personally I vastly prefer punching and kicking to tramping my poor feet on hard pavement and wheezing for a mile.
So my approach to overall fitness has been pretty casual and I gotta say, I feel really good about it. We put so much pressure on ourselves to try and fit an ideal thatâs shoved at us daily that we forget how fitness really is just like brushing your teeth â if you make it a simple, daily habit it doesnât feel like much work at all. My dadâs favorite saying is âthe way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.â Going too hard too fast is always a disaster.
No two people should have exactly the same approach. Yes all of my friends love running, but all my friends also love cats â and Iâm allergic to cats. Our bodies react differently to many things. We canât expect ourselves to perfectly match each other. Just because my beefy male friend can lift 250 pounds doesnât mean I should expect myself to be able to do the same.
Honestly, Iâm probably not gonna notice much of a difference in my appearance. But the point is, thatâs okay. As long as my body feels strong, as long as Iâm feeding it things to energize it and keeping it moving so I donât ache at the end of the day, thatâs what matters. A body is a precious thing, not matter what beauty standards itâs held against, and it should be respected.
