I'm done with the shame

I have decided to stop body-shaming myself. I've made a concerted effort to love my body, no matter what it looks like, to get out of yo-yo dieting (and dieting all together) and just be...me.

Unfortunately, there is still a rather large world out there that has been brought up on body shaming, and they still look at me and think, "there goes someone who could stand to lose fifty pound."

Kate Middleton was scrutinized for days after the royal wedding for being too thin, but if she had been even a pound heavier, she would have been called "Weighty Katie" instead of getting everyone's sympathy. This is just the way the world works. Heck, Alicia Silverstone was called "Fat Girl" in a tabloid when she started looking like a normal person rather than an anorexic Hollywood actress. And now recently, Ursula from The Little Mermaid has been slimmed down. Because she needed it.

Poor unfortunate soul

So here's the thing: no diet works. Weight Watcher's criteria for what constitutes "successful" weight loss is so lax that all you have to do is lose five pounds and keep it off for a few months to be considered a success story by them. Even famous people like Rickie Lake and Carnie Wilson had great success after gastric bypass, but ended up gaining it all back. I was surprised when someone as thin as Gunnar Nelson decided to go on Biggest Loser to lose a few pounds, after already admitting to having liposuction, despite the fact that he was pretty much an ideal size. Heck, even Jared from Subway gained back quite a bit of weight.

Gunnar is the one on the right. Like you'd really kick him out of bed for eating crackers. (Hi, Matthew. I still have that crush on you.)

When gastric bypass came out, it was the miracle cure-all, which is one of the reasons why I think Al Roker, Rickie Lake and Carnie Wilson gaining their weight back was so upsetting to everyone. Here are famous people who have chefs at their disposal! How is a normal person who will rarely have anything like a normal schedule supposed to do this if these guys can't? Not to mention, there are huge, life-threatening consequences to the surgery.

What's a person supposed to do? The media tells us that we're less than human if we're not stick-figures and we are surrounded by fatophobes and body shamers, and a lot of those people are heavy themselves! We can't win.

So, I just stopped. I took The Fat Nutritionist's advice and just stopped dieting. I also stopped caring. Then I started looking at myself in the mirror and trying to love what I see. I stopped seeing myself through society's eyes, and started looking at myself as whole. Yes, my breasts are DDD-large and not some size C-cup perkyness. But they're actually really pretty and well-shaped and not flat and floppy. I've started not worrying about what I'm eating and found that it's actually helped me to eat better. I don't feel like I "have" to eat a treat when it's there because I don't know when I'll have another one. I was in the south and I ordered pecan pie because that's what you do, and I only ate a few bites and saved the rest for later. It lasted me three days. In my dieting phase, I probably would have eaten it all and then felt horrible about myself afterwards.

I do yoga when I get home from work (with Mr. Checkhov, who's idea of yoga is rubbing around me while I'm in various poses, trying to see if I can both balance and pet him at the same time) and I jog on the treadmill when I feel like it. Since I've stopped looking at exercise as a means to be thin and started looking at it as something I enjoy doing, I want to do it more often and for longer. I want to be healthy, I want to be me. That means giving up the idealization of what the media and you and everyone else in the world thinks I should be.