RIP jeans

Lost my first pair of jeans to inner-thigh hole due to chub rub activity. Moral? Beware the sale rack. The jeans, not my thighs, are the problem.

I deserve “wow.”

When I was a chubby fifteen-year-old and my mother took me clothes shopping, she wouldn’t allow me to buy things that just looked okay on me. “You need something that makes you say ‘wow’ when you see it on you,” she told me. At the time, I resented the advice for a couple of reasons: firstly, it meant I didn’t get as many new clothes as I would have liked, and secondly, I thought it implied that I needed “wow” to be pretty enough. Those thinner girls could wear anything and still look good, but I had to dress myself extra carefully in order to fool the world into thinking I was pretty. (My mother never implied this whatsoever; it was all my brain talking.)

Fast-forward through several years in which I could, and did, buy random articles of clothes in various “average” sizes correlating with my intensity of dieting. I bought jeans I didn’t particularly like, because they were a size 29, and fuck it, I needed to own them because they were a size 29 and I could fit into them. I can’t recall actually buying clothes that didn’t look good at all, but I definitely bought clothes that were just so-so, because it was easy and I could do it. Some of the clothes I bought were deliberately temporary, just to hold me over until I dropped another size, as I was constantly planning to do.

Fast-forward a couple more years, and my weight now stands where it was when I was fifteen (though my shape has changed). I still wear straight sizes, and I know I have a huge degree of thin privilege as a size 12/14. However, I have become more discerning in the clothes I buy, partly because I’m damn poor, but partly because I have a renewed attitude toward how my body deserves to be dressed.

I’m not wearing designer brands. My style hasn’t changed much. I still dress like a student most of the time. But I’m no longer settling for so-so, even on the basic items. Case in point: today, I spontaneously stopped into Old Navy in search of some workout clothes. I tried on a pair of capri-length running pants and a tank top. The top was just so-so; it was fine, but I can do better, so I left it. The first pair of pants I tried on didn’t fit, so I changed sizes. And WOW! These running capris hug my legs without being uncomfortably tight, sit at a perfect height on my waist and don’t dig into my hips, and make me look like a real runner. Of course I snapped them up. I wore them to the gym tonight with a regular t-shirt, and I felt fabulous (due in large part to their sheer comfort: goodbye, upper-thigh rub in baggy shorts!).

Could I have bought workout clothes that were just so-so on me? Of course. Workout clothes don’t need to make a fashion statement. If they had been insanely comfy but unflattering, I might still have gone for them. Still, the power of the WOW factor caught me every time I passed a mirror in the weight room. Vanity? Sure, a little. But I damn well deserve it. My body is beautiful just as it is, and dressing it with clothes that look great on it is one of the things it deserves.

So, in today’s news.

One of the women I regularly swim with but haven’t seen in a few weeks (she’s been away) told me today, “you’ve lost weight!”
I shook my head, bewildered. It wasn’t feigned. I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. She said maybe it’s because she’s getting bigger (she’s pregnant) so I look smaller by comparison, and I said she SHOULD be getting bigger, and she agreed, and we chatted about her pregnancy and how excited she is and how I work at a baby store. End of that.
But the comment has stuck with me a bit. I mean, I know she meant it as a compliment, despite the fact that it’s untrue. Maybe I looked particularly good in general tonight. Maybe the swimming and ab workouts I’ve been doing have changed my shape slightly (I don’t think so, though). I wish I could completely ignore this, but it has me wondering what she saw that made her think I’d lost weight. And I’m pissed at myself for putting any stock into this at all because IT DOESN’T MATTER.

Password-blocked.

As you may have gathered if you have wandered by my blog, there is a password-protected post up. If you’d like to see it, leave me a comment or send me an email, and if I know who you are, I’ll send you the password. If you leave a comment, make sure you give me your email address or tell me where I can find it.

Just some pre-emptive action against trolling on this one.

Protected: Trigger-happy.

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I own my body.

I own my body. It belongs to me, and it is me.

I’ve never truly had a symbiotic relationship with my body before. I’ve had periods of harmony in which I thought I appreciated my body, but always, always, always in the back of my mind was the desire to lose more weight. In the past, I’ve pushed myself to my physical limits as a competitive swimmer, achieving personal goals and going beyond what I’d thought myself capable of. Even then, I always wondered how much more weight I could lose. Could I manage to diet during the swim season? Could I balance it so that I could eat just enough so as to fuel my training needs, but no more?

I’ve pushed my body in a completely different way. Watching the numbers drop, setting a new goal each time, always sure I could be “better.” I see now that that’s sick. That signifies an unhealthy relationship with my body. It signifies my former view of my body as an enemy, as something to be beaten into submission, to be squeezed into a mold shaped like size-eight jeans.

I’m through with fighting my body. It’s so much nicer to cooperate with it.

Tonight, after an aerobics/running class, standing in the shower at the gym, I realized that for the first time,  I am truly owning my body. My weight is about the highest it’s ever been, proving that while it took a while to happen, all my diets did fail – almost eight years after I first started dieting. I’m at least a size, maybe two, smaller than I was when I was sixteen, so obviously my body has changed shape. Still, it’s been a bit challenging to see that number on the scale (I weigh myself at the gym sometimes, mostly out of curiosity, wondering how my fluctuations work). I won’t post the number – it’s an estimate anyway, changes daily, and certainly doesn’t define my body.

I define my body. We’re a team. I feed it, try to give it enough sleep, move it, and challenge it in positive ways. In return, it does amazing things for me like run 5km and stand for hours at a trade show and walk long distances and bend into yoga positions and dance and make love.

It’s not the shape I always dreamed it would be, but it’s the shape it should be. It’s curvy (in the true sense, not just the euphemistic one, of the word; I’ve settled into an hourglass shape). It’s soft. It has dimples and stretch marks and even rolls. My thighs rub together when I walk. All of these things are just fine.

My body doesn’t exactly define me, but I can’t forget that it is me. That I owe it to myself to love my body and to co-exist peacefully with it. We can do great things together, my body and I, and we’ve come a long way in proving it to ourselves.

Public Service Announcement.

I’m in a Public Service Announcement created by Michelle for her nutrition class. I am honoured.

I know I have something to say.

 

I’m a graduate student in publishing, learning more than I can absorb, every day. I’m a feminist, figuring out what that means to me and to what extent I can define my feminism. I’m staunchly pro-choice, and I want everyone to know what they need to know about barriers to abortion access. I’m very proudly Canadian but am not exactly sure what defines us. I am pro-Israel, but not unquestioningly. I’m a proponent of fat acceptance, but struggling daily to chase my own weight issues. I am Jewish, which in itself carries a million choices and discussions, and I want to expand my knowledge and understanding of Judaism.

I’d be glad to have you read what I hope to write.