Jadeybaby, you are adorable with your punk-y black 'do and piercings. I love your look.
Taylor, I started gaining weight at 19 after being thin with a body that guys gawked at. I would party every night, get drunk everyday. And that contributed to a lot of weight gain. I stopped drinking for the most part towards the end of 2006 and I found that the weight I had gained from the drinking and binge-eating was incredibly hard to get off. In 2007 I became pregnant at 21 and gained even more weight, gave birth to my son in January 2008 at age 22 and lost all of my pregnancy weight and then some, which was a huge motivator. Now I'm struggling to take off the rest I put on in the past couple of years to regain my old self and I understand how friggin' hard it is, believe me. I'm on the SBD, and I keep going off of it to 'binge' on crap and it makes me feel like a failure and like I'll never get this weight off, like I'm doomed to be in this 'bigger' body. I have been losing weight, definitely, but it's a lot slower than I would like BECAUSE I keep going off plan to eat junk and that is hindering my efforts. Believe me, I think about food constantly and worry about how I look all of the time.
It's not just you! In fact I think it's most women. Have you read"Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters" by Courtney Martin? It's a really good book about women and their relationships with food and how they let it control their lives (or not as the case may be).
The diet industry doesn't spend million and millions of dollar every year so you can feel good about yourself and not think about what you're eating.
When I was growing up, my older sister was one of those thin, gorgeous girls who looked good in ANYTHING. She was voted most attractive and most athletic her senior year. She was a ballet dancer with the Junior National Ballet Company. She was a teenage model. Talk about something to look up to! I ALWAYS felt klutzy and big next to her. Then, her second year away at college, she came home for Christmas weighing 93 pounds at 5'7". She wasn't gorgeous anymore -- she looked like a corpse. Anorexia is a terrible, terrible disease. My parents kept her home that next semester and fed her and put her into a school closer to home and slowly, slowly she got better. But even though she has never had another episode like that one, her relationship with food is still a terrible, horrible thing. She thinks about food all the time. She bakes beautiful, scrumpious desserts and then gives them away--never eating them. She frets that her husband has put on a few pounds since they got married. She talks to me all the time about eating, exercise, how she looks, etc. She now weighs 125 lbs and has 13.2% body fat -- and she still worries about how she looks ALL THE TIME. Yet people who meet her, always talk about how "together" she seems. How fun and athletic she is, and how "lucky" she is to be so thin.
She is one of the sweetest, kindest most giving people I know. Smart. A wonderful mother. Constantly volunteering in her community...but still, she defines herself by her scale and what she puts in her mouth -- all the time. Everyday.
As an adult, I now know the truth. I would not trade places with her for anything!
There is absolutely no such thing as normal. We all just try to do the best we can.
It's true. And the best I can do it stay within my calorie count and make it to the gym.....I am also going to try and smile more. And get the word normal out of my vocabulary.
Taylor..... I'm totally with you on this and know how you feel 100%. I know you're into theatre......have you ever read Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke? It's all about being an artist and everything that that means... anyway. There's a section where Rilke writes that we should always choose the most difficult thing to do, because that gives us the most fuel for art and passion.....and that's how I look at this whole thing. Eating whatever and looking like crap was easy....this business is hard!! But EVERYTHING that's hard is worth it -- really!!
Awww thank you arts! I am a theater/english major and I will give it a read. Right now I am reading Hot L Baltimore for auditions coming up this winter...but I will most def. give this a read! Loosing weight is the HARDEST thing I will have to do in my life. I know that loosing weight will give me the passion, the happiness and the motive to take on anything else that the world throws at me. I mean, ****...I have lived through my moms death....what else can be that hard? Nothing. All I have to do is count calories, get my butt to the gym and talk to you beautiful people.
