Dear Body,
You really are a piece of work, ya know.
I mean, I starve you—you get smaller. I feed you—you get bigger. I try to get you to move—you get pissed. But then again this inner fat girl is dying to come out. Why can’t you just accept you for you and stop trying to make yourself as close to perfection as YOU think perfection is? I look at my fingernails and think—ew—I need a manicure or take this polish off. I look at my arms and think—FLOPPY JOES!!!! (How’s that for body image?)
But when I move my body for the first time like an old Victrola (member those?) It moves like a dizzy drunk girl on a merry go round. It’s brutal. I’m in this weird place with me and the skin I’m in. I find it absolutely fascinating that I obsess about you still at thirty-nine years old. I mean, I understand that you started making me crazy at an early age but seriously?
I lost fifty pounds but twenty of them were from the summer stress. It took me losing my mind and my husband this summer to drop them—but then again all I hear in my head is how shitty the summer was and to eat my way through the fall! Maybe I’m a pessimist. Maybe I’m the asshole in the house that can’t find that happiness. Maybe I just pigged out on a box of fabricated chocolate donuts last night and this morning I’m cussing myself for my eating disorder.
I got one of those too. At least that’s what the ladies at a house on a lake in Tennessee told me back in 2009. My core disorder is food. I can’t find a happy medium. And I’m so tired of looking everywhere for it. It’s insanity, I tell ya. I guess I woke up bloated and the thought of food popped in my mind. I made a chalky diet shake instead. Really. This body image crap is a perpetual hamster wheel that I just want to get off of. I love myself. I give me plenty of “me” time. I am gentle on me but that doesn’t mean that every single day I don’t think about the bad side of me! I don’t know. I want to do, see & be more than what I am and when the scale goes up after it goes down I know that I’m self-medicating. AGAIN.
You know what else I’m tired of being. A mental case. Pfft. Go to Wikipedia. Even they make you feel like a loon with their description: “Eating disorders are mental disorders defined by abnormal eating habits that negatively affect a person’s physical or mental health.” Wait. That’s not loony. That’s just factual.
The great Elle Woods (Legally Blonde) once said “Exercise releases endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don’t shoot their husbands. They just don’t.” I AGREE WHOLEHEARTEDLY. And every damn time our #RealityMoms Cabana Boy Ed (my trainer) made me release endorphins—I would say that quote loud and proud.
I don’t know. The big 4-0 is looming. Every one of my friends tell me forty will be the best time of my life. Me? I feel like the fat is right around the corner. I have hovered on the last twenty for over six months now. I started taking a barre class only to get a giant back spasm that took me out for a whole month. And now I have no interest in the soreness that came with that class. How is it that one bad thing that happens sends me into this downward spiral of self pity?
What sucks the most is when someone tells me how ‘skinny’ I look. I mean, are you kidding me? How about “You look healthy Joey,” or “I love your new body, how does it make you feel?”
But as a “happy” society we want nothing more than to be freaking skinny. I hate that word almost as much as I hate the word shame. Speaking of shame… every single time someone says I look skinny my insides quiver because I have yo-yo’d this body more times that I have ever played with a yo-yo. I know someone thinks “oh-she’ll just get fat again.”
I just don’t want to feel this way about me anymore. Please. For the love of ice cream can I please make peace with my J-Lo butt after forty?
