On Fitness and Weight

I want to address my feelings on weight in relation to fitness. Similar to my post about how exercise should bring you joy, I feel that your body should be respected and that you should try to live as healthfully as you can. This means doing my best to eat healthful foods and to not ingest things which are harmful for my body. I believe very strongly that when we love ourselves, we do not harm ourselves, either physically or mentally.

As a person who struggles, and has struggled for years, with depression, I know that whenever I start doing unhealthy things (drinking too much alcohol, eating poorly, being sedentary, etc.) it is because I am not feeling very good about myself mentally. And consequentially, doing these unhealthy things makes my feel worse about myself, so it becomes a vicious circle of self-hate. I try very hard not to go down that path and to be mindful of my choices every day.

As a result of this, I also choose not to focus much of my attention on how much I weigh, because frankly the number on the scale says nothing about who I am as a person and what I am capable of.

I find it very disturbing how much focus people put on weight and looks and particularly the weight of other people. Without a healthy state of mind to evaluate this, a girl could easily let all the societal judgments slung around ruin her self-esteem. On comments sections, every day I see overweight people regularly called “gross”, “fatty”, "disgusting”, underweight girls called “skeletor” or “anorexic” and muscular girls labelled as “manly”, “beasts” or "unsexy". You really can’t win if you try to live up to other people’s standards.

In addition, I don't go in for fad diets, cleanses or any sort of short-term thinking. The idea of measuring exercise in terms of how many calories I burn doing it, how much weight it will cause me to lose or how it will make look are just not ideas which resonate with me at all.

 

If you were simply to judge me based upon my weight and how I look, you would easily see that I have extra fat on me (approximately 30 pounds worth.) From a health perspective, however, aside from BMI I have “good” numbers. I have a small waist to hip ratio, good cholesterol numbers, normal blood pressure and my blood sugar is normal. My body fat percentage, taken by itself, does not make me “unhealthy.”

I am not ashamed of my weight. Why should I be? My weight has little to do with how good a person I am, how I perform in life or what I am capable of. A person can be overweight and an Olympic athlete. These things are not mutually exclusive, as some people like to believe.

It has never been a goal of mine to “be skinny” or to be “good looking”, and frankly, I don’t understand these goals. There are plenty of skinny people who eat horribly, smoke, do drugs or who starve themselves. Thin, just for the sake of thin, is not something to strive for, in my opinion, nor is it a good idea to try and conform to society's idea of "good looks", particularly since this ideal changes over time. You could make your body over into today's beauty only to find that tomorrow you look out-of-date like an 80s kitchen. We all have seen plastic surgery horror stories and people who have ruined their natural beauty by trying to do this. Neither of these goals are healthy and done out of self-love.

My only concern about my weight is in relation to how it effects my performance. It is not mere speculation that if I lost the extra fat, I would be able to run faster or that I would be able to do pull-ups easier. This is just science and is similar the circumstance in my last post about bicycles, that if you have a lighter bicycle you can go faster. A lighter body is easier to move around. However, while it would be better to not have the extra weight slowing me down, I am not willing to get to there through unhealthy means.

If you asked me “Would you starve yourself for $250,000?” the answer would be a resounding “No.” This would be like asking me “Would you smoke for a movie?” or to be more extreme “Would you drink this poison if I paid you enough?” Hell-to-the-no. The Machinist is a great move, but what Christian Bale did to his body for that film is insane, in my opinion. No amount of money would persuade me to do that to myself.

Some people say that if you eat healthy and workout, you will naturally drop any extra weight, but I have not found this to be true personally. When I don’t count calories and simply eat healthy, I stay the same weight. My body has a natural intuition about how much it wants to weigh. I need to actively count calories in order to lose weight. Unfortunately, when I do so, I tend become more than a little compulsive. So, for my mental health, I find it better to avoid doing so, even if it means being overweight and a little slower.

As for looking good, I think we all want to look our personal best, but honestly, I don’t really think about this on a daily basis. (This is obvious to anyone who knows me from the fact that I never wear makeup, always wear my hair in a ponytail and wear yoga pants daily!) I like the way that I look most of the time and my husband still finds me sexy after 15 years of marriage. I'm not trying to please anyone else, or to attract a mate, so why worry about it? I’ll never look like anyone else, nor do I want to. Healthy happy people look the best to me no matter their shape or size and that is what I strive to be and what I strive to help others find in themselves. This is not to say I am perfect, or that I live every day perfectly. In fact, I struggle with depression and I have to take every day one day at a time. Some days I eat poorly and some days I sleep all day. But on whole, I try not to make it a habit to do so. I also try very hard not to beat myself up when I do or get mired in negative self-talk.

Every one is worthy of love and everyone should be loving of themselves. Taking care of your body, in my opinion, is one of the greatest acts of self-love that you can do.