ARG! (Venting)
 

Hi everybody. I need to get this out or I'm going to snap.

Does anyone else HATE being a girl sometimes?

This may seem extreme, but hear me out.

Men lose weight faster.
Men lose weight easier.
Men's bodies are not geared towards having a higher proportion of fat.
Men do not lose approximately one week a month to insane emotions, absurd water retention, and cravings that never seem to go away, no matter how faithful one is to ones healthy lifestyle.

This for me is the crux of the issue. I have been eating healthy, exercising, etc. for the past 5 weeks now. I've lost between 8 and 10 lbs. I say between them because it changes every day. If I go over my daily calories for one day by as little as 100 calories, I gain 2lbs by the next morning. Now I know that this is largely water retention but...COME ON! It is so disheartening. I know that it is temporary but it is so difficult to feel positive when the scale does nothing but creep up during this week. I feel like I'm never going to lose this weight. All I want to do now is cry because regardless of how well I eat or how much I work out all my scale wants to do is creep up. How do y'all deal with your TOM without breaking down and crying, or running your scale over with your car?

Thanks ladies, all the love
Sidheag

i understand. since i have been counting calories and busting my arse daily on exercise videos, i have lost a couple of pounds, yeah, but my husband has lost even more by being an innocent bystander. no exercise. he's just eating what i cook and it's falling off of him.

BUT....

i never hate being a girl. those few days a month give me the gift of giving life and that's something men do not have. i could write an entire list of reasons on why i am glad i am not a dude. less anger and testosterone being number one, more emotions, nurture and estrogen number two.

and hey. if you've lost b/w 8 and 10 pounds in two weeks then that is great! that's awesome! you are right on track with the optimum loss for the given time. keep yer head up.

and when you're menstruating? f the scale man. don't let that hunk of junk play psychological games with you. you know why it goes up a little bit. just think--this too shall pass. remember that the scale plays a minor role in all of this--this lifestyle change. don't let it get center stage.

peace:)

Yeah, and to top it all off, women get slammed by society for being fat, if they are. And women have all the eating disorders (truly). And women have all the dieting junk. Women are the garbage plants of the world.

I'm ranting with you <3

I lose two weeks a month thanks to my horrendous, raging PMS. But I never get on the scale during TOM. It's just not worth the frustration.

I really love being female, so I never wish I were a man, BUT yeah, it is frustrating to watch a guy walk around the block once and have 15 french fries with lunch instead of 25 and still lose weight and look awesome while I'm sucking back water, working out like a crazy person and eating arugula salads and ... I FEEL BLOATED and my PANTS FEEL TIGHTER!! Argh!

Word up.

Don't waste time fretting about things you cannot change. It's true men can lose a pound just walking to the refrigerator for another beer. They also have to shave every day.

I love you ladies so much. Your responses not only make me feel better but make me laugh.

And I suppose I should clarify...I would never actually want to be a man. I love being a girl. But right now it is frustrating. Especially since I live with my bf and it is so easy for him. *grumbles* Anyway, I just worked out which always helps me feel less like a crazy person. I suppose that's a small NSV...it used to be that I would have just eaten those feelings rather than walked them off (or at least part of the way off). I'd love to hear how more people feel about this though. *HUGS*

Sidheag

Lol, thanks for that!

But seriously, life isn't fair. There is a wide variance in the difficulty individual women face in weight management too. But this isn't a race. We have to play the hand we are dealt, set our own goals, find our own strategies, and make progress on the basis of what is possible for each of us.

That said, my hubby loses weight by cutting back on his ice cream (grrr!!!) :)

I HAVE TO SHAVE EVERYDAY TOO!! And, because I'm a WOMAN, I have to shave my legs and my underarms and everywhere cos otherwise no one will touch me.

Men, on the other hand, forget to shave..oh a beard might get there...that won't be mocked.

Men, however, cannot carry the miracle of life. ;)

But men can provide sperm to produce life for years and years past when women hit the menopause. And you need a man as much as a woman to make a baby..

And is carrying a baby for nine months..lovely? Is life a miracle? Are bacteria?

I would much much rather be a man, back to therapy I go

I'm sorry for ranting. I have massive issues

You might be onto something here. Buy cheapy scales. Once a month run them over. Might be the best $10 a month you ever spent :D :D

Keep a 5-7 day running average of your weight instead of depending on the scale to tell you how you are supposed to feel every day. Watch the trend of the average - is it going down, up, or staying the same? (more days doing this = more accurate results.) If it's going down, then keep it up. If it's staying the same, change up the workout. If it's going up, watch more carefully what you eat. I've found that since I did this, I'm much less affected at what today's scale number means. It's just a data point. The trend is more important.

And being a girl is way fun. We get better clothes than guys, and can wear hot pink or turquoise without people looking at us funny.

Yeah, I can SO sympathize with this... since the beginning of freshman year (2 years ago) I gained 20 pounds and my boyfriend lost 25 - basically with neither one of us even trying.

So of course I hate his guts for that once in a while, but now that I've taken off that same 20 pounds and then some, I'm feeling pretty proud of myself. I've come to look at his easy weight loss as a challenge. He can do it; can you??

Yes I CAN! So I have to work harder... but it just shows that I am, in fact, more disciplined than he is, in the long run. He doesn't have to do much to take off that weight, but I've become a master of self-control, and I think that's a pretty noble accomplishment.

You're on to something here... let's all buy cheap scales and a cheap hammer, and pull them out when we're feeling frustrated.... :devil:

I love being a girl! And, as a guy told me when I complained about men being able to lose weight quicker, he said, "Yeah, but you women live longer!"

Once I got familiar with my expected weight changes with my cycle, I stopped getting upset about them. The only thing that annoyed me was having to weigh in as "heavier" with my support group, when I knew it was just temporary water weight.

As long as I stay on track, it goes away pretty fast.

I was laying in bed complaining about my cramps (they're REALLY bad, like throw up for a few days heavy bleeding really pale really miserable stuff going on) and my boyfriend was studying for his architectural engineering final - and he was saying that at the beginning of the semester his professor had them look around the classroom, and notice that everyone enrolled in the class was male - and there's a theory that most scientists/inventors/engineers are men because of this deep seeded jealousy that they, as a gender, can't produce life. They're always competing to build bigger, better, more advantageous things because it's the closest they can come to giving birth and that feeling of creation and importance.

It gave me a finer respect for my uterus, and also helps me from getting annoyed whenever he gets really finicky about his blue prints not being good enough.

periods suck, but without that i would never have been able to carry a life inside me ( twice) , give birth, and have the bond of breastfeeding.. for the flip side, the only part im not real impressed with being female, is Pap smears... i dread em each and every time... but, it comes with the territory lol..

In my view, that's kind of bogus. I think that most scientists/inventors/engineers are men because (a) it's always been a boys' club, for several hundred years, so it's been hard for a woman to get into those fields (I'm a scientist so I speak from experience), and (b) they have someone else cleaning the house, buying and cooking the food, and giving birth and caring for their offspring, so they have a lot of time to sit around and study and think.

As a woman who has never been interested in having children, I don't feel that being able to "produce life" is a consolation prize! Besides, women can't "produce life" on their own... :chin:

With regard to weight loss, it may be frustrating to see men in general lose more quickly or what seems to be more easily, but it's really all individual, isn't it? It's not like there's a race and men are winning... ;)

Jay

this reminds me of something my friend (a male engineering student) said: "You women are going to take over the world. One day you wont even need us, you'll just clone yourselves in your own perfect image" :D

Losing weight slower does suck, but at least at the end we get to wear prettier things :D im so vain...

If you think about it, it's kinda the other way around... ;)

Jay

Amen sistah!!! ;) :D

Quote:

As a woman who has never been interested in having children, I don't feel that being able to "produce life" is a consolation prize!

This is me, too. I don't *love* my uterus because it's caused me a whole lotta pain thru-out my girly life. And if "giving birth" is the reason it's *good* to be a woman, then I'm in the Uh-Oh Club! Cause it ain't nevuh gonna happen! Yet, I've never wanted to be a man. And yeah, my husband can lose weight faster/easier than I can, & yeah, sometimes I get jealous about that. I would LOVE to be able to drop 20 pounds just because I gave up soda & junk food.... But he doesn't seem to care about that as much as I do. If he did, maybe he'd quit scarfing Oreos & enjoy some baked fish once in a while, and try out my Pilates DVD! :carrot:

The fact is, society looks at fat men differently than they do fat women. It's just the way it is. What's acceptable for men is not-so-much-acceptable for women. Such as grey hair. When men go grey, they're "Dapper"... when women go grey, they're "old".

And this is why 93% of the dieting market is geared toward women. And no wonder it's a billion dollar industry! ~Everything else is just "fluff". ;) :D

And men die first - so I'd much rather be a woman.

I have never wanted to be a man, at least I did not spend any time fantasizing about what it would be like to be one, but I think if I had a choice and was born again, I would like to be a man, just for comparison. The whole thing about the gift of producing life is totally lost on me and as somebody who had extremely heavy and extremely long periods for most of my life, I would gladly pass. Let somebody else deal with that. I have never had any issues with PMS per se, but the bleeding was enough on its own.
So yes, in my next life, I would rather have the Y chromosome. Now the challenge would be how to handle the dangly bits ......

Not touching that one ... err ... not commenting on that one.

Late to the thread, but I don't weigh myself the week before my period. I usually gain 1-4 lbs and while intellectually I understand I have not gained FAT I just don't like to see it on the scale.

I also really enjoy being a girl - I have the cutest toenails right now, dark red with white/pink flowers painted on the big toes. Mmmmm girly goodness :)

It's always easy to find "unfairness" in the world and get gripey about it. Frustration and envy are normal emotions, and as long as it's an occasional vent/rant, relatively no harm done.

But, weight loss is one of those things that you have to keep your head down, with the blinders on, to a degree (I don't mean that literally). I'm a member of TOPS, and we've got mostly women, and two men. My hubby is NOT losing "like a man," he's losing more like a woman. He's also disabled, and unable at this point, to do a lot of exercise (I remember when I couldn't even keep up to his walking stride, now I'm the one that has to slow down for him - and we've only been together 6 years).

Every week, the weight recorder announces the total losses, the total gains, and the best loser for the week, and we all go around and say whether we lost, gained, or turtled (but not the amounts, unless for some reason you wanted to say). There are people who lose very consistently. There are people who lose weight in large spurts (nothing for several weeks and then boom, a big drop). There are some people who struggle for every 1/4 lb.

In the 90's when I joined my first TOPS group after a herniated disk (and lost 60 lbs) I was routinely the "biggest loser" for the week. I was young, swimming three times a day, and had a lot of weight to lose. Some of the women who were older or thinner would grumble it wasn't "fair." At the time, if it were possible, I would gladdly have traded my 200 lbs to lose, for their 25 lbs to lose, even if it meant never again "winning" biggest loser.

You just can't compare your loss to anyone else's. Even within the same age, gender, and "weight class," there are too many variables to make it a fair comparison.

Hmm, interesting reading. I don't mind the weight loss differences between men and women, but I hate my period. I do. I have two wonderful children and I love them to death and I'm so glad I have them, but my period is really brutal.

I think it's getting worse with age. I have a terrible headache for days before that does not stop, I can't control my emotions, I'm a clutz, I have cramps that almost make me fall down from pain sometimes, I'm exhausted, and I'm bloated. I almost think that if men had to go through this, everyone would get an extra five days off work a month so they can just stay home and rest.

I put mine in a bra. OH! THOSE dangly bits! never mind :lol:

Dang it - that's twice in one thread that I almost sprayed out my iced tea onto my keyboard!!!!:rofl:

Pap smears are nothing for me. Wait until you have a mammogram! OMG! I wish a man had to endure that for his dangly bits! :o

Ahhh, multiple orgasms.

Personally, I don't see gray hair on a woman (or a man) as being unattractive. Society is me, too. It's us.