I need to go swimming to ease my mind from the fear of losing all of the muscle I have gained in the past few months. I need to go swimming to ease my mind from the fear of getting ever fatter. But my body is only now waking up at 10:30am and wants to stay at home where WQXR is on the radio and hot chocolate is available a few steps away in the kitchen. My body is likely to win this one just like it won the request for more sleep instead of getting up at 7:30 and logging into work by 8. I feel like it’s the right thing to do for myself in spite of my fears of getting fat and my reluctance to work until 8pm. (The swimming may still happen in the afternoon, because I love, love, love gliding through the water and miss it.)
I have had this nagging, constant fear of getting fat since my teen years when a couple of extended family members used every occasion of seeing me for the first time in months (or years) to comment on how “fat” I had gotten since they last saw me. I remember frantically doing sit ups before my senior class trip to a water park, because I “saw rolls” on my abdomen when I sat down and didn’t want to be teased for being fat when I put on my bathing suit. (For the record, my peers teased me for being “ugly”, not fat. And guess what: everyone has rolls on their abdomen when they sit down, no matter what size they are.)
One of these days I need to find and post a photo of myself from high school. (Oh look, I found one! See the end of this post.) I was cute as a button, slender, and shapely. There was nothing fat or ugly about me. Furthermore, I had fat classmates who were absolutely beautiful. Yet I feared being fat and was convinced I was both fat and ugly.
Now at 47 I am still fighting that demonic fear of fatness. At my age society feeds that fear by reminding me in commentary and scientific articles of the dangers of diabetes and high blood pressure. Society regularly points out how much harder it is for me to lose weight now than it would have been when I was 20 years younger. According to the (wildly unrealistic) height/weight charts I weigh about 35lb more than I “should”. But unlike my teen years I have enough life experience to question the fear and act in my own best interests in spite of it. I am also surrounded by people who call me beautiful and who praise what my body can do at whatever size she is. So today I am resting, because that is what my body wants to do.
And because I have the whole weekend to dance or swim off the fat my demons swear I will develop by not working out today.
