So I watched half of More to Love on Saturday night. For those of you that don't know it's a Bachelor like dating show but with heavier people. Now I don't watch shows like The Bachelor as a general rule. I don't understand anyone who is content to be part of a herd chasing one person trying to get them to love you more than the rest of the group that is doing the exact same love ME dance.
My excuse for watching any of this one is that while I was waiting for Brent to get back in the room to start Robot Chicken (the sort of high minded intellectual show I usually watch) TiVo reverted back to normal TV and that happened to be the channel it was on. Okay, so yes, I could have changed the channel, but there was a little write up about one of the contestants who happened to be from Portland and how she was the only one to show much personality so I decided to watch while I was waiting for Brent to come back into the room.
And they were right, the girl from Portland was sassy and witty and all of the things you would expect including tattooed and pierced. I kind of love her myself, not sure why she is on a dating show. ANYWAY...every time they would show a woman on camera doing the "one on one" chatting, they would put up her name, occupation, hometown just like normal reality show stuff AND her height and her weight! We can all see that these are not your normal Barbie doll, lollipop heads, do we need to see their stats?
But here is my own shame. Every time they would pop that number up on screen I would do the math. How much of a difference was there in my weight and theirs? How about at my heaviest? How much of a difference then? What is our height difference? And if she happened to be my height then her weight was scrutinized even more. How does she carry her weight? Would I look like her at that weight? Or would I look like one of the other girls on the show? For a half hour I compared every woman on that screen based on her weight vs. mine.
For those of you that have known me for any length of time you know right now I am in the process of losing weight. Again. I have put on and taken off the same 30 pounds three times in ten years. I am currently down 20 pounds from my starting weight and trying to decide how much more I want to drop. As far as weight goes I won and lost that genetic lottery at the same time. The losing is that I can gain weight incredibly easy. In my family I really am the thin one, and only because I really work at it. The winning is that I gain weight evenly. I am not a pear nor an apple but a true hourglass. The only thing that changes is how much sand is in the glass!
I have looked like the same version of me since I was around 12 years old. Big boobs, big butt, small waist. And I flex in and out from there. But it's the same basic shape. What that means for me is that I can carry a few extra pounds without people really thinking I am that heavy, I am full figured for sure, but I am full figured even at my lightest. Which is where the complication of my shape hits me full force. I don't ever look significantly different. Smaller yes, but still I will never be a hard body. I am built for comfort not for speed.
When I was younger I really struggled with that. I was always trying to lose that last 5 pounds. I look at pictures of myself from when we lived in California before I had Christopher and I think, "Why in the world did you worry so much about your weight??" I can remember on my wedding day as the photographer took a picture of me sliding the garter on she told me, "You are going to look back on this picture in 3o years and think how much you wish your legs still looked like this!" I remember it because when she said it I thought, "Are you nuts? Look at the size of my thighs!" Now on my wedding day I was the skinniest I will ever be. I had been very ill and dropped so much weight in the months before the wedding that my dress (which had fit at the final fitting two weeks earlier) was gapping and too big.
My 2os were spent chasing an unrealistic body ideal. I tried every diet out there to try and get to an arbitrary weight and a body shape I could not have achieved with out major surgery. I ate cabbage soup, I fasted, I did diet shakes, I worked out in plastic suits. I was never happy with the results. By the end of my 20s I was genuinely unhappy with the way I looked. I dressed to hide every bit of myself that I could. My weight then? About 10 pounds heavier than I am right now. That's all. But you wouldn't be able to tell from the oversized sweatshirts and loose frumpy work clothes.
When I hit my 30s I started to find personal acceptance of my shape. I am built the way I am built, nothing is going to change that. I decided I could learn to love my curves or continue railing against them. I took stock in my body and got realistic about it. I stopped dressing to try and hide my body but chose to show it off instead. Brent's ring tone for me on his phone is "Brick House" and I am Mighty Mighty. And the amazing thing is that as soon as I stopped struggling with it I lost weight. This was the first time for that decade. I was working out, eating well all of the things your are supposed to do and the weight started coming off.
Then we moved. It took awhile, but the combination of really not liking living in Colorado and changes in routines I put back on the weight I had recently lost. But I was okay, still fine with what I was doing and how I looked. We moved back to Oregon and I put back on a few more pounds doing the fast food convenience thing as we settled back in. Then Brent decided he wanted to lose weight. I had been toying with the idea of Atkins for awhile and it really appealed to him so we did that. And within 4 months the weight was gone. Amazing! But two problems for me, first off I really really love bread and carbs as a whole. So yes, I liked being thinner, but I wasn't going to be able to maintain that way of eating for ever. It just felt too much like deprivation to me. The second was that the weight came off so quickly my body didn't really have time to adjust.
This one is hard for people to understand. I really didn't like the way I looked at the end of losing weight on Atkins. Yes, I was thinner. Yes, my basic shape was still the same, but I felt like I looked hollow. Like my skin was too big for my body. I just didn't feel I looked "right". My face seemed too bony, my clavicles were too sharp, my skin was too loose. I just didn't like it. So it wasn't a real heart breaker for me when I started to put it back on. I thought, just a little and then I will level out. Of course that's not what happened. I put on a little then a little more then went back to how I was eating before and put it all back on.
So this time around, looking in the mirror one day I decided that I had more sand in the glass than I was comfortable with and more than was healthy and I was adding sand at an alarming rate! So I looked around on the internet, trying to decide what to do (I went back to Atkins for a small amount of time, didn't lose a pinch) and Weight Watchers kept coming up. It's the slow and steady way to do it. It's the most successful program out there, blah blah blah...I wanted quick and easy. Then I thought...(beginning conversation in my brain) okay, wait, what are you doing this for? Health or vanity? Honest answer...a little of both. Okay, well, odds are you are still going to be vain in 10 years, so what does it matter if it takes you longer to lose the weight this time around? You are supposedly doing it mostly for your health so go get healthy. (ending the peek at the conversation in my brain)
And that's what I did. I have the time blocked out on my calendar every week to go to meetings. I track what I eat. I pay attention to making sure that for the most part what I use my limited number of points on each day is good for me. I am working out again. I am doing this the right way. I have lost 20 pounds but I don't look hollowed out. My body is tucking back in the way it's supposed to. No easy answers, no magic bullet, just following the plan. And the deal I made to post results every week good or bad, that's been huge. Accountability for the win!
So this brings us back to the rerun of More to Love on Saturday night. Watching and comparing my weight to that parade of women. I have to say at first I didn't really even notice I was doing it. It was like an automatic response. So then, of course, once I noticed it I had to analyze it. Why? Why am I still after all of this time measuring myself against everyone else? Why am I not just happy with my rate of weight loss? With how much better I look and feel? With the milestones I have been knocking down? With the lifestyle changes I have been implementing that are making me and the rest of the family healthier? Why?
And I don't have an answer. And that bothers me. So I will keep chasing that dream of total self acceptance. My 20s were the decade where I fought my shape, 30s were the decade where I started to appreciate it, let's see if the 40s can be the decade where I accept myself completely.
She's a brick----house....
she's mighty mighty just letting it all hang out
yeah she's a brick---house.
the lady's stacked and that's a fact
aint holding nothing back....
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